'The hanged man' by Bethany Corrigan (ISSUE 2-JUNE 26')

By vespers they had hauled him from the earth,boot soles slick with spring mud, wrists smelling of iron,and strung him from the oak beyond the abbey wallwhere crows nested among last year’s acornslike black thoughts caught in the branches.

A priest stood beneath the beam in wool dark as wet bark,speaking of judgment and flame and the narrow gate,but his words keep breaking apart in the wind,snagging in the branches above like scraps of cloth.Above him is a man made to climb, rung by rung,feeling the wood give slightly under his weight.

Rope firm around his neck,tight enough for him to hear his own breathbecome something smaller than it had been before,and then the world did something like turning,a hand taking hold of the horizonand tipping it until everything that should have been belowbegan to rise instead.

Behind his head the evening sun iscaught in the leaves of the oak,hammering them into bright coins.Gold flickering at the edge of his vision.For a moment all is illuminated,a page lifted from some saint’s book,its margins burning with guilt gilt.

For years he had studied only the earth:ruts in the road,spilled grain,the hems of richer men.

Now all of that is loosened,scattered like chaff through the air,and finally seenwithout the narrowness of his ground-bound days.

He searches for the lord among the crowd,for the men whose voices had shaped his ending,but from this height velvet collar and patched hoodbecame only variations of the same fabric.

And hanging there between earth and sky,between the weight of the body and the widening dark,he forgot, for a little while, to die.

The priest still preaching, the crowd still waitingfor repentance or some final accounting,except their voices no longer reach him in the same way,softening into the soil,and his attention moving instead toward the swallows,cutting through the air beneath him, or above him,along the seam where direction is no longer certain.

Still he cannot help but smile down to the ground,the world looks so different from this way around.