ROBERT NAZAR ARJOYAN
The Pain Away
In spite of the shovel’s age, its sharpened tongue sank into the sodden Earth with ease and slopped out mounds of black dirt.
The tool was accustomed to its recurrent duty.
Father Tigran wiped sweat from a prominent brow with the flapping sleeve of his only cassock. A merciful breeze kissed his cheeks and fled, flying perhaps in fear. He craned his ricketing neck and beheld a cloth of clouds which concealed his dying land from the rising sun’s good benediction.
It was morning in Armenia.
To bury someone was an honor, Father Tigran would contend. The ultimate rite of rest was his to administer, the sole priest of their village, a little plot of land just two small hours away from a tiny capital.
But to disentomb?
He dug and dug, did the graybeard, with some of his townsfolk watching. The graveyard lived behind the disappearing church in a sylvan swath of green, so many centuries older than the people relinquishing it. Such horrors it had seen. And much beauty.
The spade struck wood.
“Forgive me,” whispered Father Tigran to a deforming coffin. How many would be left behind, erased amongst these silent mountains, those ancient giants frozen in useless sleep?
Bones, bones, bones.
A pagan lullaby was escaping Father Tigran’s lips, unnoticed.
“Help me out,” he called out from six feet of soil. Once more, he looked upward and was grazed by a ray of heatless light. The clouds were breaking apart. As Father Tigran was hoisted aboveground, he noticed the cracking lines in the sky and they painted in his mind a portrait of desiccated ribs, the remains of careless God. Great, the priest thought, be dead, for the mongrels would surely find a way up to kill you too.
The family wept and heaved, raising their deceased and hitching the casket on a creaking van. Father Tigran left them to toil, swishing his hand in a powerless blessing. He had couples to wed and babies to baptize, but, thankfully, no more bodies to exhume.
The endmost day was at last upon them all.
Father Tigran met a frightened throng in the courtyard of his church. The front door had vanished overnight, as had several of the pews, and pieces of the roof were fading out into nothingness. The rapist horde was stomping closer, the rumble of their hate and hunger effacing the evidence of millenia.
It had been a conquest of slow time, repeated excursions across the battered and thrashed territories over many hundreds of years. Small bites at first, mere tramples over flower and grass that elders swore as erstwhile Eden. Then lines began to tighten, minimizing an already miniscule realm, a one-way trade in endless blood. The mysterious peaks where Noah moored his ark could be seen by the bag-eyed survivors, but never again could they walk along its downy foothills, a pleasure only their ancestors had known. That and more besides were stolen.
The enemy was always deleting and always rewriting.
“Baptisms first, please, my dears, and then the nuptials. We have time yet.”
From where he stood, Father Tigran could see flames, blazes set by those forced to leave, burning down houses that had been home to generations. But wasn’t that the very nature of his country?
An old house on fire.
“We did the same to ours,” admitted a mother holding her anointed babe after noticing Father Tigran’s sorrow. “Better that than it… evaporating. Monsters. I won’t let my great grandfather’s work-”
And then she stopped, no longer able to speak. Her daughter giggled. “Thunder clouds do not always mean rain, my child.”
“Neither does spring come with one flower, Father.”
She was right.
“We will endure,” Father Tigran said, not believing his own words.
“Not this time. Not even for her,” said this mother, who was every mother. She cradled her baby close and left Father Tigran to his charge.
So he cracked on, even though the pointed dome of his church was yawning wider with each passing minute. He told the newlyweds to multiply, to propagate the planet with little Armenians who would one day return and make whole their broken hearth.
Prodigals all.
“Oh, won’t you come too, Father?”
He shook his head, afraid to talk as the only language he’d ever spoken melted on the tip of his tongue. Father Tigran put a hand on the cold stone of his church and willfully summoned a sentence.
“Here is where I shall-” the priest plummeted as the reinforced wall became only a sheet of air. He hit the ground, hurt but unshocked. He sighed, and like millions of his countrymen before him, he stood.
Tired, hopeless, alone.
But standing.
When the last of his neighbors evacuated, Father Tigran peered through binoculars and spied the encroaching swarm, the fucking plague. Though he’d abandoned faith ages ago, the old man still felt a connection to his church. He turned for a final goodbye but it was not there.
Waiting in liminality, he patted his puckering body and produced a pack of cigarettes. As he inhaled the terminal drags, Father Tigran remembered the fairy tales of his youth, those stories which eternally began…
Kar oo ch’kar.
“There was and there was not.”
It pained Father Tigran to realize the perfection of that opening line. He wished the pain away.
Robert Nazar Arjoyan was born into the Armenian diaspora of Glendale, California. Aside from an arguably ill-advised foray into rock n roll bandery during his late teens, literature and movies were the vying forces of Naz’s life. He graduated from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and has since worked as a writer, director, and editor.