"Where God Went"

Eldham, England – Anno Domini 1349

I am Thomas of Eldham. I speak to no one now but the dust and my own breath, though once I was a man among many. I tended fields with mine own sons. I kissed my wife by firelight. I watched my daughters chase geese through the yard, and I believed—truly believed—that God walked with us.

Now, all is still.

This pestilence, this black death, hath spared neither noble nor knave. My house stands yet, but it is no longer a home. It is a coffin with windows.

I buried Anne first. My goodwife of seventeen years. She coughed through the night, spat blood in the morn. Her hands turned cold before the sun rose thrice. I prayed beside her as she died, clutching the Book of Hours with a hope that turned to bitterness by the end. She stared at me in her final breath—not with fear, but confusion. As though to say, “Why does He not come?”

John and Michael followed. Then Maude. Then Ellyn. I dug each grave with blistered hands, behind the yew, where the roots run deep and the ground is soft. I wrapped them in what linen I had, kissed each forehead, and lowered them down alone.

There are no priests left to say the words.

No choir to sing.

No God to answer.

***

I have begun speaking aloud when I walk, if only to remind myself I am still here. I wander the empty lanes where neighbors once laughed and shared meat. Now their doors are shut with boards and marked with black crosses. A goat wanders through a cottage window where a child once played the harp. The well is half-choked with dead leaves and a shoe.

I’ve not eaten in two days. My stores are gone. There is no one left to barter with. The grain rots in the mill. The mice are bold now.

***

The church still stands, but its silence offends me.

I sat in the nave yesterday, upon a pew worn smooth by the faithful. The crucifix above the altar was dusty, but whole. I looked up at Him—arms outstretched in agony, nailed in mercy—and felt nothing.

Not sorrow.

Not reverence.

Only absence.

I knelt until my knees ached. I whispered prayers I once knew by heart. I confessed aloud sins I cannot name here. I pleaded, not for life, nor even for comfort—but for meaning.

Why?

Why the children?

Why all and not me?

No voice answered. No wind stirred the chapel’s stale air. I left with a weight in my chest heavier than the plague itself.

***

Each night I dream the same thing: my family at table. Anne slicing bread. Michael laughing as Ellyn spills cider on her sleeve. John telling stories. Maude humming. I sit among them, my mouth full of questions, but no words come.

Then I wake, and the silence is louder than their laughter ever was.

***

I keep writing, though I know not who shall read it.

Perhaps a traveller. Perhaps a scholar years hence. Perhaps none.

But I must say this plain: faith, when stripped of comfort, is a fragile thing.

I believed once that God watched over us. That He spared the innocent, protected the meek, lifted the broken. But the plague came like a scythe, and He did not stay its hand. He did not even blink.

I am not a learned man. I know not what this plague is—curse or pest or simply the world's own rot. But this I know: when I buried my last child, and laid the last cross of wood at the foot of the yew, something in me also died.

***

I do not curse God.

But I do not seek Him now, either.

If He is gone, then so be it. If He never was, I shall not waste my breath crying to the empty sky.

There is no need to fear the Devil. We have proven well enough what men can do to one another. What men must endure. What silence we must learn to survive.

I will not last much longer. My body is thin, my limbs unsteady. The sickness may yet take me, or the hunger, or time itself. But before I fade, I leave this:

A record of a man who loved, who lost, and who dared ask where God went.

If ever thou findest this parchment, remember death is not the only end. There is also the living after it.

And that, dear stranger, is the harder thing.