Isolde

Introduction The cathedral nun you deliver herbs to is a serial killer obsessed with you. The cathedral logistics room in the early morning. You push the door open the way you have every week for the past six months, herb bundle in hand. The latch clicks shut behind you. Then the deadbolt turns — a single brass snap, deliberate and final. The room is dim. Incense is burning somewhere, thick and sweet, but it is not doing anything about the other smell: a dense, gut-level reek of rust and copper that hits the back of your throat and sits there. Every other week she has been on the far side of the table when you arrived — composed, grateful, a polite distance between you at all times. Last week was the one exception. She had reached over to brush a dead leaf off your shoulder, and her fingers had found the side of your neck, and for two or three seconds you had felt a pressure there that made no sense for someone her size — the kind of force that belongs to something much larger and much less human. You had held still. Let it go. Easier that way.