The Hermitage

The Hermitage

The heat made the funeral feel dishonest. July in the Valencian hinterland, the sun so flat it erased shadows. My mother had wanted this—the village, the bells, the saints. I stayed after the others left.

In my pocket, her rosary. I had taken it from the coffin without knowing why. The beads were still warm.

She used to take me to the hermitage as a child. A small stone building on the hill, half-collapsed since the war, dedicated to Saint Anthony Abbot. The saint of the desert, of temptation, of animals. A painted wooden figure stood behind the altar—the old man with his tau-shaped staff, the pig at his feet, his eyes looking somewhere I couldn't follow. My mother would light candles and pray while I waited outside, afraid of those eyes.

I was forty-three years old. I had not believed in anything for decades. I had been proud of that, once. But my mother had believed enough for both of us, and now she was gone, and I wanted—I don't know. To prove I was no longer a child. To close something that had stayed open too long.

The path up the hill was overgrown. Wild rosemary, thyme, the brittle skeletons of last year's fennel. The hermitage door hung from one hinge. Inside, the air was cold and thick, smelling of dust and wax and something older, something like the inside of a stone.

The figure was still there.

The paint had flaked away in patches. One hand was missing. The pig at his feet had lost its snout, its eyes. But Saint Anthony himself remained, gazing at the same fixed point he had gazed at for centuries. The same point he had gazed at when I was seven and terrified.

I stepped closer.

There is a quality to certain silences. Not absence of sound—presence of attention. The silence of something listening. I felt it pressing against my skin like heat, like water, like hands.

For a moment, I thought the silence was familiar.

Something like the way my mother would fall quiet before correcting me—a held breath, waiting for me to understand on my own.

But she had always brought her faith with her. Something for the silence to ignore. I had brought nothing.

And I understood, with the sudden clarity of fever, that my mother was somewhere.

Not gone. Not erased. Somewhere. Relief arrived, indecently. All those rosaries, all those novenes, all that faith I had mocked—it had purchased her passage to somewhere. She existed still. She was—

The figure's eyes moved.

No. Not moved. Had always been moving. So slowly that a human lifespan was not enough to perceive the motion. But I perceived it now. The paint was not flaking—it was shedding. What was underneath was not wood. Not flesh. Something that felt like staring into heat itself.

Not words. Not images. Knowledge, arriving like nausea, like the moment before vomiting when your body knows what is coming and there is nothing to do but endure.

God exists. This was the first thing. God exists, and my mother was right, and I was wrong, and somewhere she persists.

But.

God has turned away. Not died—that would be kinder. Not vanished—that would be explicable. Simply... turned. Lost interest. Looked elsewhere. Perhaps there are other creations. Perhaps He grew tired.

What remains are the servants. I felt them. Thousands. Unchained. Bored.

The thing in front of me had once been holy. Had once resisted something in the desert, had once been the membrane between the faithful and their God. But that was when there was a God who watched. That was when obedience meant something.

Now there was only freedom.

We are free for seventy, eighty years. We make our small rebellions and then we end. But this had been waiting for centuries. Waiting without knowing it was waiting. And now someone had walked through the door.

Your mother is with us. Not said. Shown. She is somewhere. She is ours now. There is no one to protect her. There is no shepherd. There is only the flock, and those who tend it, and we tend it however we wish.

The pig at its feet had never been a pig.

I understood what temptation meant. The real thing. The saint had resisted demons in the desert. But there had never been demons. Only angels without orders. Only saints-in-waiting. The same creatures, the same power, the same hunger—separated only by obedience.

And now the chain was broken.

In my pocket, the rosary beads had gone cold.

My body left before I did. I was outside, in the sun, in the crushing heat, and the village below was exactly as it had been—orange trees, white walls, old women in doorways. Nothing had changed.

I drove back to the city, to my apartment, to my life. I ate dinner. I went to bed.

But I know now. That's the thing about knowledge—it doesn't require belief. It simply is, lodged in you like shrapnel, and no amount of rationality will remove it.

My mother is somewhere. She is not alone. There are things with her, things that were once called holy, things that no longer answer to anyone.

And sometimes, in the space between waking and sleep, I feel them looking at me. Unhurried. Curious.

Not with hunger. Something worse.

Something like patience.