Jonathan Purtill

To be the sacred apprentice to the Saints of the Hole was the worst job. The story went (the outer saints said) that they could trace their lineage back to the cavemen before cavemen. The old ones were kind but weak, picking berries and shitting wherever they wanted. But the new cavemen were unkind. They wrecked their huts and killed their kids. So some of the old ones died fighting, while others fled to the Cave in the Mountain.
The Cave was enormous, but shaped like a funnel that went on forever. It got narrower towards the back till the Cave turned into the Tunnel and into the Cranny. Time went on, and the old ones made their home in the cave, killing bats and salamanders and drinking treacle. But to be close to the light was a privilege, and the weaker creatures were forced to move further and further back into the Cave. They kept getting squished! Time went on, more were born, more were pushed back, and the hindmost old ones had to be born thinner and thinner to survive, and they kept getting pushed into narrower and narrower places.
Now (after time went on) you can’t see the old ones. They turned themselves into the Saints of the Hole, and live too far in cracks, are too thin to fit in your eyes. A sacred apprentice was supposed to crush himself daily, to fit just far enough in to get food to the outer saints, who passed it on down the line. It hurt so much, but the apprentices were all proud. They all thought of the saints in different ways.
Some thought the saints were within the mountain, narrowing themselves to be closer to the earth, to talk with the rocks and moss. These apprentices worshipped the saints and wrote manifestoes based on two-dimensionality. Others thought that enough time had gone by that the mountain was now made entirely of saints. These apprentices worshipped the mountain, set up shrines and blood sacrifices. A few apprentices (and these were the happiest) thought that the process had been going on forever. The saints had made themselves the mountain and surpassed the mountain, fitting themselves into the earth and the air and the mist. This is why the apprentices tolerated being crushed: they were feeding the saints who were feeding the saints who were the world. They were feeding the world endlessly.