The Other Silence
Image by Microsoft Copilot AI Fiction Father Gabriel had learnt early in life that there were two kinds of silence. There was the silence of the chapel after Compline, the good silence, the silence that seemed to have a place for everything. And there was the other silence. The silence that came when two priests were talking in the corridor and stopped when he approached. He had never been able to prove that the silence was about him. That was perhaps what made it worse. Gabriel had entered the religious congregation when he was only sixteen. He had completed school. His father had been a farmhand, his mother worked in other people’s houses, and the family lived in a small house at the edge of the village. The priests from the monastery had given him books, helped him pay school fees, and built into his psyche a semblance of self-respect which his parents’ social class wouldn’t ever offer. They had belonged to an untouchable caste until they chose Christianity and whatever dignit...
