The church was filled with the smell of dying flowers. Its stone walls captured the warm summer breezes that washed over its neighboring garden, carrying with it stolen lilac perfume and a searching scent of magnolia blossoms, sickly sweet after baking under a judgmental sun and left to die between the church’s high ceilings and cold marble floors. On exceptionally hot days, when temperatures raced well into the one hundreds, the smell of decaying life was stifling in its absurd persistence to exist. Petals and soft flowers withered to a crisp, but we were left with insistent ghosts that haunted our nostrils and demanded that their previous beauty be remembered.

On days like this, it was hard to concentrate on the priest’s sermons. The stench of candied rot penetrated thoughts of golden cups and sipping blood as it mixed with the hazy gloom of burned incense and settled among the worshipers bent forward in wooden pews. Incense to mask the smell of the dead, to encourage devoutness, but the smells mixed and danced and joined to form a cocktail of warm smoke - its stench sweet and strong enough to wrap a mind in cloudy, perfumed thoughts.

The smell was everything, and so was the fog. It drugged me away from the stain-glass windows and strong voices, a crescendo of praise and zeal raised in faithful Hallelujah, to a smutty dark room clouded with wisps of grainy silver cigarette smoke drifting between lips and sheets and legs. Dried hydrangea hung like a crucifix above the bed, stinking and reminding.

Banish the smoke, breathe through the mouth, kneel down, and pray. Repeat. Listen to the priest try to save your soul. Pray. Don’t think about your knees, how they ache against the hard church floor. Don’t think about the room, kneeling beneath a crucifix of flowers. His rough, demanding hands gripped in my hair, his voice, grainy and booming like that of a priest’s, sliding between his lips, forming the harsh utterance of, “Slut.”