at his own cost. If he only had social media to scroll through, he could so easily switch off from the outside world and forget Emil’s grip. Forget how the day had turned into night within the span of just five minutes.
He couldn’t bear reading right now, and in a moment of absolute weakness, he left his bedroom and stormed to the rooms at the front of the house, wanting nothing more than to hear his Mom’s voice. He picked up the handset of the only working telephone on the premises and rested his hand on the cool side table, soothed by the steady beep in his ear. Adam used to know his home number by heart, but years of relying on the contact list in his cell phone had muddled his memory. As a consequence, he accidentally called a perfect stranger first, but as he started typing in the number he believed to be correct, the signal died.
Adam froze, his gaze meeting that of Jesus, who watched him from a picture on the wall. Adam’s head pulsed, as if his blood vessels were about to burst from shame, but when all lights went out, he dropped the handset as if it were a piece of hot iron.
Each piece of furniture was a creeping monster about to get him, and he frantically backed into the wall. His heart froze when a door opened somewhere in the house, but before he could have stopped breathing altogether, Mrs. Janina’s voice became the beacon of normality in a world of demons disguised as everyday items.
“What’s this racket? Is that you, Father Adam?” she asked. It was the first time Adam appreciated the clip-clop of her well-used slippers.
He managed to compose himself by the time her slender silhouette passed through the door. “The lights went off,” he said, baffled to find out she’d been home this entire time. He hadn’t entered her bedroom out of respect, but maybe he should have knocked after all.
Mrs. Janina stared at him and switched on a small flashlight, which cast a circle of white glow on the wooden floor. “You never get power failures in Warsaw? I showed you where the candles are on your first day here, Father.”
She was the evil step-mother he never had, but right now he wished he could spend the night listening to her numerous complaints.
“Yes… of course you have. I’m sorry. Where’s the electric box?”
She walked across the room and pulled out a white candle from the old wooden cabinet and handed it to Adam in her usual no-nonsense way. “It’s outside. We’ll just deal with it tomorrow. With this weather, I suspect pressing buttons won’t help much. It’s probably the cables. This happens almost every time we have heavy storms, and there will be many throughout the summer. We will have to wait for the technicians to fix it tomorrow. But don’t worry, we have a generator for the fridge and freezer.”
Adam wanted to stop her, because defrosting food was the last thing he cared about now, but words got stuck in his throat, so he watched her pad back into the corridor and then listened to her door shutting while he stood still in the middle of the living room with the candle as his only friend.
The sense of panic had subsided at least, but that did not mean Adam was fine. Far from it, actually, but if he wanted light, he needed to put the candle to use. Of all nights, did this power outage have to happen when he was so emotionally unstable?
The featureless face of a pregnant nun smiled at him from the darkest corners of his imagination, and as he lit a match and used it to start the candle, he feared he’d find her staring at him from the end of the corridor.
But all he got was a bit of brightness and longer shadows. He wouldn’t find peace without atonement.
And he knew just the thing to chase his demons back to where they belonged.
Unease clung to him when he walked to his room, eyes pinned to where the light was the brightest. The pastor didn’t know about his secret, and Adam needed to keep it that way. Self-flagellation, so widespread in the past, was now frowned upon—in the Polish Church anyway—and he wanted to avoid questions about the nature of sin he wished to atone for so badly.
But for Adam, it wasn’t about penance. He hurt himself, because it was the best way to stop