Reverend Davies

Reverend Davies is the father of Owen Davies. He runs the Pallid Rock orphanage, and has a church. Although quite who the church is dedicated to, it may be better not to ask. It features an organ powered by live fish, and there may be a small Elder God living in the rafters.

This piece is set  around Sinners, at which point Reverend Davies has, through a mix of bad luck and his own actions, lost the people who mattered most to him…

The worst feature of grief

Is how things you used to loathe

Begin to haunt you

How your wife fussed over you

Moved things so that you

Could not put your hands on them

The precise way she had

Of closing a door too sharply.

Her only show of anger.

 

The way your son fiddled

Relentlessly, with everything

His insolence, his answering back

His total inability to leave

His dirty socks in a laundry basket

The things of his you sat on.

 

The indecent way she had

Of looking at you, sometimes.

How her mischief enraged you

When it tugged the corner of her mouth.

 

They are gone now

The things you used to loathe

Torture you most, I find.

The boyish, tuneless whistle

I would sell my soul to hear again.

Never to have my collar adjusted

By gentle, affectionate fingers

Never again to be laughed at

By the woman I most wronged.

 

What richness I had

When I thought myself ill-treated.

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