A drop of blood,
oozing from a tendril-prickle puncture,
sat on the blemish over Father McDowell’s brow,
a grotesque raisin in the Gregorian glow of candle wax scowls,
kept alive only by a slow pulse in the jugular,
until finally running down the bridge of an Irish rugby nose.

Bobby elbowed Billy,
who, holding up one hand in protest,
reached into the felt of his secret suit jacket pocket;
he took out the entire set of ‘The Sharpened Apostles’—
Bobby frowned whilst holding up a white paperclip named ‘Judas’,
and inspected its polished ‘claws’ in the fast-fading light.

Sally’s blood ran cold;
flashes of a recurring nightmare
(she reaches for her lipstick in the nest of her handbag,
and pulls the trigger at her niece’s birthday party by accident),
traced over the verses of Revelation 4
while she counted the bullets in the wheel of her six-gun.

“Blood, brothers and sist—”
Father McDowell blinked, and cleared his throat,
“The blood of the covenant—” he wiped at his brow;
rust-red drops clung to his eyelashes like parasites
ready to feast with the maggots and the flies,
“—is thicker than the water of the womb we share with our brothers.”