The Cleric

The cleric was perched atop a tufted Ottoman.

It was a fussy piece — circular, deep-green leather studded with buttons, festooned with thick, scratchy strands of tan yarn cascading from beneath the thin cushion to the floor — carrying the weight of genteel pretense and an air of chaotic frivolity.

He shifted — a nearly imperceptible motion — and one hand rose to his furrowed brow, contemplating something vast, of either deep profundity or dire existential concern. His ancient order had fractured, bending under the tension between modernity and tradition. Rooted in a strange and communal mysticism, they had become lost, estranged from a world that prized efficiency and brutal realism over the slow, storied unfolding of cryptic revelation.

It was not that the cleric was confused — he had never seen the truths of his creed more clearly. Yet the burden of leadership in a fragmented age pressed heavily upon him, and in these years, he found himself contemplating fracture on that fussy Ottoman far more often than his preference would allow.

The Ottoman, long-suffering accomplice to his meditations, answered his weight with a faint, petulant creak, as though protesting that it had been upholstered for lighter burdens—tea, gossip, the temporary anchoring of hats—and not for the moral density of an age in decline. The cleric did not heed it. His gaze had settled instead upon a point some inches above the opposite wall, where the plaster bore a hairline crack resembling, with unfortunate fidelity, the schism itself: a branching, indecisive fault, each path defensible, none without loss. It struck him then, with a sort of rueful clarity, that the world had not rejected mystery so much as it had grown impatient with its manners; revelation, once allowed to unfold like a long letter written by a careful hand, was now expected to arrive as a memorandum—bullet-pointed, actionable, and promptly forgotten.

He exhaled, slowly, the breath passing through him like a ritual no longer observed by the congregation but stubbornly maintained by the priest, and considered whether leadership in such a moment was truly a matter of repair, or merely of bearing witness with sufficient dignity. To hold the fragments together might require not doctrine but posture: the willingness to sit, absurdly and conspicuously, upon a ridiculous piece of furniture and refuse to pretend that the yarn-tassels were not there, or that the weight was anything but real. There were days—this among them—when he suspected that survival itself had become a kind of liturgy, performed without audience, its only sacrament the refusal to simplify what had been earned through centuries of complication.