It's Still Life

Part 13: Liturgy for the Beaucaire Fair
(for those who buy and those who are bought)

I. The Commerce of Crowds
The fairground swallows them whole.
Brigid and Felreil, two more bodies
in the great migration of need and greed.

Trestle tables groan under linen and lace,
under knives that promise to never dull,
under potions that promise to never fail.
Merchants cry their wares like music.

Quick fingers dance through open purses,
lifting coins and leaving them with nothing
but the memory of weight.

This is Beaucaire.
This is everyone selling,
everyone buying,
stealing,
praying to not be caught.

II. The Coat That Hides
Felreil moves through the crowd
like a blade through water.
His long black frock coat
a disguise of respectability,
the foreign angles of him
softened by merchants’ cloth.

Here, he is just another dealer,
another man with something to sell.
No one sees the creature beneath.
No one asks what wings he folds
against the wool.

He buys a pamphlet,
folds it into his pocket,
and for a moment,
he could be anyone.
He could be no one at all.

III. The Bones That Cannot Hide
But poverty
has no coat long enough.

In the noise between stalls,
in the spaces where crowds thins,
the poor stand visible as wounds.

Wrists too narrow for cuffs.
Bones tightened by hunger.

They do not buy.
They do not sell.
They only watch.
Waiting for the day’s end,
for the bruised fruit that falls,
for the charity that comes
with a sermon attached.

IV. The Shepherd’s Hands
A boy finds Brigid.
He’s young, hollow-eyed,
his hands extended
as if in prayer or plea.

Sores cover his palms,
the mark of infected sheep,
of work that does not stop
for pain or pus or fever.

She kneels in the dust
and tends him,
washing, salving, wrapping,
her hands gentler than any mother
he has known.

He does not thank her.
He does not know how.
He only stares at his bandaged palms
as if they belong to someone else.

V. The Pamphlet’s Promise
Felreil unfolds his purchase.
A single sheet, cheaply printed,
declaring
the absolute
rights of man:

Security.
Liberty.
Property.

He reads it aloud, part to himself,
part to the air,
part to the boy
whose bandaged hands
now hang at his sides.

At the word right,
the boy’s eyes widen.

With recognition,

as if the word itself were bread,
as if it could be eaten,
as if it might fill the hollow
where his next meal should be.

VI. The Distance Between Word and World
Brigid sees it too,
that moment of translation.
When a promise becomes a prayer
in a stomach that has never known
the taste of either.

She looks at Felreil.
Felreil looks at the boy.
The boy looks at his hands,
then at the pamphlet,
then at the space between
where right and bread
have never met.

And in that space,
the whole world lives.
Its commerce,
Its poverty,
all its impossible promises
and beautiful, broken believers.

VII. For Them All
For the merchants and their knives.
For the thieves with quick fingers.
For the coat that hides a stranger.
For the hands that cannot hide.

For the pamphlet and its promises,
the words that sound like bread.

For the love of a shepherd boy
and his bandaged hands,
may he one day hold more
than infected wool and empty air.

For the witnesses at the fair,
who see the distance
between word and world
and do not look away,

may they tend the wound.
Tend the promise.
Watched a boy
learn the shape of a word
that might, one day,
become his own.