The Reliquary

The Curator is pleased to admit you for a seventeenth viewing.

You will come in out of the cold to the door of a great shrine-house, the precinct of a cause for sainthood, on the last night when the acts are sealed and the relics translated and the name raised to the altars, all gold feretory and warm lamplight and the relic exposed in its glass and the rows of candles lit and the custody's low chant of it is holy, raise it, where every soul who could not bear to be the one no one would ever hold sacred is venerated at last. There is a niche kept for you in the warm upper shrine, a name already in the calendar and a whole devout custody drawn close on your relics, and the keeping of the shrine-house shut around you, and a precinct that has learned by heart the one name it could not do without. One reminder, with our compliments: the way off is real, and this time it asks whether you can let your name be struck from the calendar, your relics deposed and given back to the ground, and walk out held sacred by no one, with no one at your side, to an ending that is wholly your own, mortal and your own.