The school bell rang, signaling the start of mass. It wasn’t Sunday, but we always had mass after a Fsh for a blessing. After wandering out of the Radio room I had gone to check on my charges, who were mostly crying and scared and still naked in the basement of the school.
Uncle Nathan says that the scrubbing protocol doesn’t really help with fshes. He says that the exposure to whatever it is that causes them is bone deep and that scraping off a few yers of skin cells won’t help. He says that it’s a leftover protocol from the days when the governments were still fighting back with weapons of mass destruction, but that the gods’ power is different from that.
Everyone else tells Nathan to shut the fuck up.
Anyway, Nathan takes his turn in the shower just like everyone else, so I’m pretty sure he’s not too sure of that.
The kids were being loud and shouting, some crying and some just making asses of themselves in the post-Fsh excitement. I looked around for an adult.
Then I realized suddenly that I was the adult in the room and that it was my job to get these kids ready for their blessings.
“Alright you little pricks, listen up,” I shouted, and the room quickly fell silent. Everyone here knew that I was one of the overseers now and nobody questioned my raised voice. “If you haven’t found your clothes yet, tough shit. We’re not keeping the priests waiting, and you don’t have anything they haven’t said before. Get in line. Youngest up front, same as always, and follow after me. Get your asses moving! Come on, come on, go!”
Once they were all lined up, I marched them upstairs to the auditorium, where the priests were waiting for us. We knelt before the stage in three lines and Father Phillip began slowly making his way through the kids, one by one, pcing his hand on their foreheads briefly and whispering their benediction.
“By the Grace of Archangel Michael, may you live,” he was saying to each of them, touching their forehead only briefly. His voice would be sore by the time he finished blessing everyone in town, but the blessings always started with the youngest first.
They needed it the most. And we needed them to live the most as well.
Once Father Phillip had finished with the rest of the kids, he turned to me, and I too knelt before him to receive my blessing. And just like it always did, the ring on his thumb-and it was slightly too big even for that, fshed crimson briefly when he touched my scalp.
It wasn’t any big deal. I was just an Ashford, that’s all. The ring was a token from the Archangel and it recognized me as being part of the Ashford bloodline. It fshed for all of my brothers, sisters, and cousins as well.
Once he’d finished blessing us, I moved my gaggle of kids into the back of the room and did my best to keep them quiet to witness the rest of the blessings. The older kids were marched in by other wranglers, and they were blessed, and then they were marched off to wait in front of us, and so on.
Before long the auditorium was completely full, with about five hundred people waiting. Father Phillip stood on the stage and spoke briefly.
I tuned him out. I’d heard it all before. It’s not our pce to question the gods. They are the saviors of humanity; without them the earth would have been utterly destroyed; they deserve our faith and devotion by the right of their power, etc.
It’s not that I didn’t believe. It’s pretty hard to not believe in a power that can destroy your life the way that I could drown an ant-colony just by pissing on a patch of dirt. But I wasn’t gearing up to spend the rest of my life in the priesthood, either.
“May the light and grace of the Archangel remain always in your heart,” Father Phillip finished.
“And also with you,” the congregation concluded, and we broke up. I started shouting at my kids to get them back to the basement so that they could find their clothes and stuff while the next line of citizens began filing in for their blessings and sermon.
