On the street I see one of my neighbors, dressed in a yellow plastic raincoat, stooping to pick up her newspaper. She waves to me briefly before she scurries back inside her house, even though she knows I can’t wave back because my hands are holding on to the wet straps of the cross. She’s an attractive young woman who works in an office. Sometimes I see her getting out of her car in the evening, her tight skirt riding up her thighs, her high heels gleaming in the late-afternoon light. Only recently married, she and her husband have lived on my street just a few months. For a second I catch a glimpse of her legs as she stoops, and I wonder what, if anything, she’s wearing under the raincoat. Even at this distance I can tell that her breasts are full and round. Her big red nipples puff out and stand erect beneath the cold plastic, begging for my tongue’s devotion. Her hot host is already moist with the anticipation of everlasting joy, of paradise on Earth, of things to come.

But God loves me. My thoughts are interrupted by a car at the corner that splashes the cold and holy water of repentance upon me as it passes through a puddle in the road, drenching my budding lust in its wake. My hair clings limply to my head, and rainwater runs down my face as I struggle against the weight of the cross, the cold, the wind that sends chilling spikes of pain up and down my legs. Sharp pebbles press into my bare feet. I pass through residential neighborhoods, and as I do, I know that temptation lurks behind every door, every window. I avert my eyes, cast them downward. Along the sidewalk I see drowned earthworms that have been flushed like so many unclean corpses out from their soaked graves. Bent beneath my burden, I contemplate my life and its eventual end. As the sky weeps, so do I, for my sins are great and many.