Bastard

I yelled like a banshee that night as rain mauled a tin roof. She laid as if dead on the bloodied bed, already slipping wall-eyed into indifference. The midwife shouting over the drumming, the Irish priest humming a prattling prayer; my gums screeching blue murder. Inside the shack a lit-up secret and a shrinking Catholic dogma. They feel it, the odor of unsanctified sex, that salty itch that made me, while under their skins as if I were a rash, I crawl over their exposed nerves. They are all gone, the hypocrites, the abettors, the judged, all down under the peat now, except for the hushing rain, the last dim-day whispers.