Following the Summer by Lise Bissonnette

in the time it took to identify the yellow ribbon licking at the frieze above the staircase in the choir loft, the wall had suddenly burst into flames. She had always said it was unwise to decorate a church as if it were a living room, with frescoes painted on cardboard, flammable glue. For her, churches must be white as surplices, with plaster that would tolerate nothing but gold leaf. On her native island, which she never should have left, they had been made in that manner for three hundred years, and only the uneducated would decorate walls between stained-glass windows already crammed full of errors, secular intrusions like those poppies side by side with fleurs-de-lis on the rose windows. She knew the church better than anyone, knew its smallest nooks and crannies, hated it in its entirety. And it was her possession that was burning.
    Children were clustered on the sidewalk across the street, between the two hoses with inadequate pressure, the church having been built on the only hill in town. Now it is being consumed from above, a pyre in reverse, a witch whose brain would burn before her possessed body. One after the other the trompe-l’oeil gave way because their wood was dry. The arrow painted to look like silver, the first cornice painted to look like stone, the underpinning of the roof that had been painted like copper. Flickering fireworks blown towards the back, charred hunks of wood invisible in daylight. Now they’re beginning to gnaw at the slates, false as well, that people always talk about replacing because their grey colour doesn’t harmonize with the pale lemon siding on the walls. The ridgepole is burning all along its length, gleaming like a funambulist’s wire, inaccessible to the streams of water, as though traced by a delighted god.
    No alarm bell has sounded, but the crowd grows to watch the steeple fall, chimes of the poor that soon will shatter, in a puddle of water. It is a man, not the women, who is weeping now; they are busy herding the children out of the way. If he was the one who built the shell of the steeple, this is a sad business. But how can anyone know, the priest is on his annual journey to the Holy Land and the vicar won’t return till late tonight from the far-flung parishes whose penitents require his presence once a week. The body, in any case, is burning more cheerfully now. And it’s over, some brave soul has gone in through the basement to save the holy vessels and most of the objects in the sacristy. In the inferno, no one can see the vanished varnished pews, tomorrow only steel hooks will remain. It was a church without statues, and so with nothing to regret.
    Marie climbs up the southern slope of the hill where the more opulent houses provide a view of the fire from a distance, in the event that the wind should drive it towards her. The summer has been so dry. But smoke and sparks continue to drift towards the back, near the grounds of the former boys’ school, which is made of brick and empty now. Water is trained on the presbytery, trickles, cool, down the stucco, it will be saved.
    She looks for sadness but finds none. The door had to be closed one day on the pale copies of the mystic emotions fostered in places like this, with their monotonous chants and promises of a peace as impracticable as it was offensive. She will only miss the giggles in the choir loft at the organist’s trembling legs as she pumps away at the country harmonium. From up there, unless some lost soul blocked your view of the nave, you could see every detail of the twelve cardboard saints mounted on the walls, twice as large as life, some bearing the symbols of the evangelists, but most of them martyrs. All had the same face, the face of men-women indifferent to the flesh; they looked God in the eye and turned more pallid still as a result. Skeletons under the pastel robes. She will remember them more than the confessionals, though their terrors had more meaning, you