MJ Burns is a queer writer and artist from the North East of Scotland. Careers Adviser by day, they are a published short story writer in a number of literary magazines such as Gutter, Loft, little living room, Shoreline of Infinity and Tangled Web. They were shortlisted for the 2023 Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival Writing Award, and the 2024 Edinburgh Award for Flash Fiction. They also hold Masters degrees in Creative Writing (University of Aberdeen) and Comics & Graphic Novels (University of Dundee) and they studied English Literature at the University of St Andrews. Their passion is developing their graphic novel adaptation of the Scottish classic by James Hogg, ‘The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner’. You can find them on social media at @mjburns_art 

Little Stuffing-Head

Raphael calls me Stuffing-Head. I regret that I ever told him it was once my boyhood nickname. He found it – in his words – so incredibly funny. The chapel’s intense echo made his laughter come down upon me tenfold.

Stuffing-Head! It suits you, Tod. It’s all that yellow hair. Like straw inside a cushion.

He put down his hammer, plucked the cap from my head and ruffled my hair. He likes his hands on me. If they’re not on his work, bending hard stone to his will, then they’re on me.

It’s all just soft up in there, isn’t it?

He likes to think so. So do many others. Folks tend to think it of people who don’t speak much. He certainly enjoys that I’m quiet: allows him breathe the air without the taint of other opinions. Allows him get on with his work – the chapel’s echo filled only with the clinking and scraping of our tools and the music of his own voice.

Our patron hired three journeymen to help us – Thomas, Jock and Malcolm – skilled labourers from the surrounding villages. They, like me, fall silent when Raphael is around. When he gets angry, his voice clashes against the sandstone like dragging a chisel across it the wrong way. We prefer to keep him happy, so we’ve developed a habit of silence.

Since the day he took me on as his apprentice, I got good at rehearsing my words before I said them. Sometimes it would take me too long – like a player learning lines, I would have ran through several attempts at the correct reply, only for Raphael to have moved on to talk about something else. Slow and silly little Stuffing-Head, his dumb set of hands. His adoring, gaping mouth. Always having to come up with different and original ways of saying wow.

I believed his greatness, his bragging, the way our patron praised him. Raphael after God’s angel, became master stonemason at the age of only two-and-twenty. Jock says it’s because he killed his own master and took his place. The part of me that believes that is the part of me I must drag to Confession every Sunday. Lord knows my heart is good, but the Lord also knows I am impressionable as softened clay. The journeymen saying these things is what makes the Devil repeat them inside my head.

*

Our patron is sending Raphael to Florence to learn from the masters there. He’ll be gone a long time. He is not taking me with him.

You are my hands, Stuffing-Head. You’ve to remain here, completing my work whilst I’m gone.

The chapel commission – as exciting as it was when he first received it, has been dwarfed by our patron’s promise of a much larger church. Soon this chapel will be only a small part of a grander whole and Sir William wishes it to be as extravagantly decorated as he can afford.

He left me a completed pillar by way of instruction.

Just do it exactly like this when I’m away. Exactly like this.

He made me stare at it all afternoon, contemplate it, wonder at the beautifully carved flora – and he’d watch my face as I did. He made me sketch each flower up close, and after that, he made me sketch it from far away – to where he knew I could no longer see the details. Although I am only nineteen years of age, my eyesight is beginning to blur like that of an old man. Raphael says this is why I will never be a master stonemason. I will never be able to see the grand design.

When the journeymen were gone one evening, Raphael had me against the pillar. He ignored my panic that this was the house of God.

His house is not complete yet, he said, God isn’t here.

He said he wanted the memory of me against it – his creation – to be with him on his travels. It would help him remember me.

I had visions of stone roses when I tried to sleep. How he’d managed to make them look soft, although they were rough and broke my fingernails when I gripped their petals. The cold sweat of them against my cheek I felt on my pillow all night.

*

Each of the fourteen pillars were to be exactly like that one, and he had plans drawn up for the walls and ceilings. I practised on cast-off stones and presented them for his approval. He would only ever frown and nod.

I may not be clever, but my mother says I have a beautiful mind – only it doesn’t come through my mouth, but through my hands. That’s why I’m training to be a stonemason. Maybe my creations are what thoughts are to others. Maybe I do have beautiful thoughts, but they’re just deeper than I can see. Glittering fish at the bottom of a pool, moving faster than I can catch. But still mine. They must be mine or else they’re God’s. I’m not that conceited. God doesn’t talk to me in any special way. He talks to me like he talks to anyone here.

*

We planned a good farewell for Raphael. Malcolm brought in a flagon of ale and each of the married men’s wives had baked. Together we’d pitched in coins to commission an artisan to make him a Saint Christopher medallion to protect him on his travels and our priest had blessed it.

We waved to him as he disappeared around the path and into the trees, his confident swagger and shining hair.

Jock was the first to break it.

Prick, he coughed.

We all broke down laughing. I half expected Raphael to come racing back around the corner. It wouldn’t be the first time – What are you all laughing about? – he would always reappear suddenly in the chapel after stepping outside for a moment. Even if we hadn’t been laughing about him, he would make us go silent again.

No more. For another year.

Twelve months fasting from him. I was sure that it would turn into hunger eventually, but for the first day, it was a relief. Then that feeling began to spread. Soon enough I felt that my whole being was filled with light and air. I would have suspected the Holy Spirit, if it weren’t so sinful of me to feel this happy that my master was gone.

*

A week later, I fell asleep in the chapel. I stayed back after we had stopped for the night. At first, I told myself that I wanted to spend some time alone in it, to think about Raphael and his creations. To try to miss him. To take in the pillar and remember him and I against it, as I know I should. But if I were being honest with myself, it was because I was dog-tired. The weeks of work had caught up with me. The punishing schedule he dictated, I tried to keep up in his absence. It left me feeling soulless with exhaustion. I lay down on my side on the scaffolding at the altar, and I slept.

I should call it a vision. But then I hear his laughter – What, so you’re a prophet from God now, Stuffing-Head?

It was just a dream. But it changed me.

Something moved in the cavernous dark of the chapel. Although I had to squint for the sake of my poor eyesight, I could see very well that I was not alone. Only I did not expect my company to be a huge, scaly creature.

By the paltry light of my candle, I could see the creature’s mass – flanks of muscle and scales. It unfolded itself in a spiral, then stretched out to its full length and reared up.

I lay very still and I begged God for my life.

A dragon.

Like a Biblical beholder of angels, my heart quaked pitifully in terror. But when the beast looked upon me, its fiery eyes resting gently on my quivering form, I knew it to be one of God’s creatures. My fear whirled away.

The dragon opened its great mouth, but what issued forth was not fire, but vines. Winding, twisting vines. They leapt from its throat and slithered around the walls of the chapel, up the pillars, up to the ceiling, like each was a hunting serpent. Up and up in an excited flurry until they covered everywhere, turning the church wild and rich with green. Flowers and leaves exploded into life along their lengths.

I ought to have been alarmed when a pair of human eyes opened from among them and stared straight at me. Instead, I was filled with a beautiful agony that I have not experienced since I first heard a church choir sing. From among the vines, staring into my soul, was the ancient, foliate face of the Green Man. Fresh green leaves poured from his mouth to form his beard, his cheeks, his hair.

I could not take my eyes from his. He blinked slowly.

And somehow, just like that, every detail, every sharp edge of every leaf, I could see. I could see all the way to the other end of the church. The clarity of vision I had as a child had been restored. I felt like I had levitated. I found myself sitting up. I found myself with tears streaming down my face.

The moment I noticed was the moment the apparition began to fade. The dragon curled up around a pillar and vanished. The vines lost their vibrancy. They sunk away into the stone.

For a perfect, fleeting moment, I saw the chapel finished. I saw how it should be carved.

This is how it wants to be.

*

The journeymen noticed a difference in me the next day. Malcolm asked if I was drunk. Jock asked if missing my master had done this to me. When I told them about it, I had to sit down for giddiness. They mocked me at first, but that’s when I noticed that from where I sat, I could see the farther end of the church in detail I have never been able to see before. Just like in the dream.

My eyesight had been restored.

They believed me after that.

Calling it a vision from God still made me nervous. I didn’t want Raphael tormenting me over it. But at the same time, my soul ached to see the chapel completed in the way it had appeared to me. I longed to surprise him. I wanted to see his mouth agape. I wanted to take his hand and walk with him amongst the vines. I wanted him to look into the eyes of the Green Man and feel the pulse of the chapel beneath his hands as he worked the stone.

I started carving the dragon first, on the pillar next to his. The sacred vines from its mouth spiralled up and up and around the column, just as I had seen. The journeymen watched me during the weeks I worked on it. I couldn’t explain everything to them with any sane-sounding clarity, so I just had to work on it alone.

Thomas would click his tongue and shake his head. Raphael’s not going to be pleased, Tod. Don’t do it so deep that it can’t be sanded down.

But I paid them no heed. I worked day and night for I did not wish to waste a second. I knew exactly what carving should go on each surface, every corner – on the ceilings, on the floors on the stairs – and the Lord was indeed thorough in his visions, for the images He wished for me to create for Him would pour from my hands the moment I touched the stone. Saints, angels, faces, cherubs, grotesques, creatures, and above all, flowers and ever-linking, ever-spreading, beautiful vines. I felt elevated. I felt holy. Filled with grace. I felt how Raphael always said he did when he worked on his creations.

And yet, I looked over my shoulder at the pillar he left for me to copy, and… Lord forgive me, I had stopped seeing the beauty in it. Its neat, straight rows of roses were not the soaring heights of genius he always proclaimed. It was pretty. That was all.

*

Raphael said he would be back a year to the day of his departure. Months of autumn and winter swirled by in bouts of freezing weather. We were cut off from our work by snow. We downed tools to celebrate Christmas. Snows cleared, lambs were born, summer sweltered and all of a sudden it was five months beyond the date he said he’d be back.

It was around then that I began to entertain the idea that he might not come back at all.

The journeymen, without saying they suspected as much, began to defer to me like I was the master mason. Me, Tod, the master mason.

I found I enjoyed directing them in their work and they respected me. I got to know them better. The sageness of Thomas, Jock’s jolly teasing, and Malcolm – who I thought was as quiet as me, turned out to be quite the wit. The chapel was filled with chatter and laughter. I would go home singing.

Tod the master mason.

The sharpness of Raphael’s words inside me began to blunt. His face, whenever I thought of it, became shrouded in vines. They would steal him away from my sight. I felt lighter when I couldn’t remember his face.

*

Then one day, he came back.

It is an overcast day in September. Jock comes running.

“He’s back! Master’s back!”

A drop of stone in my stomach. A carving tool in my throat. In a single moment, I once again become the apprentice. Stuffing-Head. I look at my carvings, my beautiful chapel almost complete, and I realise what I have done.

On the farther designs from where I stand – St Francis of Assisi at peace with the birds and animals – the finer edges begin to cloud over.

I go outside and wait for him.

There he is, Raphael, master stonemason, gleaming with new Florentine clothes and his skin golden from the sun. The journeymen gather around him and clap his arms, embrace him, welcome him. I can see that their limbs are heavy with his return too, their faces a little strained.

He can sense it. His welcoming party isn’t as enthusiastic as we had been at his farewell. He can tell that amongst us there is a secret. It flits between us like a reflection of light on glass, and he cannot catch it. He turns to look at me. He does not smile.

“Tod. How is my creation? She should be nearly finished by now. I have a few more things to add, and some amendments to make from my trip. But of course, I’m reserving the main ideas for the cathedral. How is that coming along?”

Jock answers, “Construction hasn’t started yet. Sir William is drawing up his finances.”

Raphael snorts. “He’s probably worried that his master mason may not return. He wouldn’t want a church as bare as a whore’s arse.”

He starts to walk past me. I step forward.

“Sir… I had… it’s a little…”

“Stop mumbling, Stuffing-Head, and get out of my way.”

Tod the master mason would have stood his ground and not permitted him to pass. He would have told him the plain truth upfront. But Raphael’s return has swallowed Tod the master mason back down into the nervous place he occupies within the gutless guts of little Stuffing-Head.

Raphael walks into the church.

I watch the back of him. His rigid posture is all that I can bear to see. That is the back of an animal, its hide prickling, rising up along its spine.

God in this moment, directs the sun to emerge from behind the clouds, and fling itself across all surfaces. Each flower, each thorn is lit up in magnificent golden light. The stained-glass windows pour heavenly drops of rainbow across the flagstones. Amber light from the fire of a martyred saint directly strikes the dragon’s mouth and the Green Man lies within a glory of emerald.

The windows’ colours catch in Raphael’s hair, shine across his shoulders. He trails a hand along the workbench, forefinger tapping the spaces in between the laid out tools. When he comes to a stop, he lays a hand upon his pillar. I had not changed it. I kept it for him.

He turns around.

“You did this?” His voice is a whisper. It slithers around in the echo.

“Yes, sir.”

“I told you to be my hands.”

“I… I had…”

Thomas speaks up for me. The three journeymen have come in to stand around me.

“The lad had a vision. From God, sir.”

“From God.”

“Aye. What he described to us… it sounded ludicrous at first, but then he said he could see clearly at a distance again. We tested him to make sure he told the truth, and have you ever known our Tod to lie? Take a look around, sir. The boy has been gifted by God.”

“And you just let him destroy my vision? My commission? He’s nothing but an apprentice!”

“Sir, we didn’t think you were coming back.  We’d reckoned you dead. And we had to honour God’s will.”

I find my words at last, and I say, “I was God’s hands.”

The shriek Raphael gives is a sound straight from the Devil’s throat.

“YOU’VE RUINED IT!”

From the workbench, he grabs a hammer.

We all move together, the journeymen and me. A dance of desperation. I have to protect my Green Man, his serene face watching his incoming destruction with the wisdom and calm of the immortal. I did not see that Thomas and the others moved to protect, not my work, but me.

They lunge to catch Raphael’s arm as it plunges down through the air.

When the hammer makes contact with my skull, the pain sprays from my head like vines. Dazed by the damage, my broken shell of a head falls to the flagstones.

I see my master struggling against the journeymen. His hammer goes clang to the ground. The floor is slippery and they all stumble. They fall from my sight, to reveal behind them my dragon.

His head turns and he looks right at me.

I am calm.

It’ll be alright. After all, what lies beneath my skull is only stuffing.

*

The new bell chimes from the chapel tower – over and over and over, in a steady heartbeat of song. Tonight, Mass will be spoken for the first time within these walls. My walls. I can feel the eager vibrations in every stone. My Green Man, my dragon, my vines and all my creations for the first time will feel a hundred eyes upon them and we will sing through the meeting of our gazes.

All afternoon,  I have enjoyed the company of the journeymen – my friends. They’re here to place the finishing touches. Jock wipes stone-dust from his hands. He steps down from the ladder. Then he hocks and spits at what he’s created. Thomas whacks him with his cap, chides him, it’s still the house of God, you lout.

They return their eyes to what they have made. A familiar hard face stares back at them. I think they have captured his snarl perfectly. My master now resides up in a corner of my chapel. The lips I remember so well, the disdainful curl of them that I thought I would cower beneath forever.

He had tried to fight them off to take another swing at me. Thomas and Jock had held him down while Malcolm tried to wake me. I watched my own limp, lifeless body bleeding into the flagstones. I marvelled at how quickly a body becomes so perfectly still. How quickly that in that stillness, in that lifelessness, it becomes simply another part of its surroundings – the pillars, the tool bench, the body, the altar.

I watched Malcolm’s face sicken with horror.

I watched my blood pool at the dragon’s feet, soak into them, seep into the base of the pillar.

I watched Malcolm sprint off to fetch the town guard. I watched them take Raphael away in chains, his swollen and blood-splattered face a rictus of rage and ugliness. He did not spare me a single look as he left. Thomas closed my eyes for me.

In the weeks that followed, I watched how hard they tried to wash my blood from the floor. Soft and porous stone drank it in, staining it dark like red wine on lips. Perhaps there will always be a dark patch there.

It was Jock who saw me first. He had yelped with fright and shouted for Malcolm. Both of them had wept. They said it was as if God had, just for a moment, softened the stone and my spirit had peeped in through the chapel walls to take a look one last time before I departed for Heaven. They said I was smiling.

My friends created a carving of my head and affixed to it where they had discovered my apparition. With solemnity, they struck a gash deep across my forehead to remember my murder. They often come and speak to me and pray for my soul.

Although they have now also wrought Raphael from stone, they do not pray for him. Where they have positioned him, where his eyes are forced to look, he can see only a sliver of his own creation, his pillar of stone roses. Obscuring it is mine. My dragon, its roaring jaws unfurling the spiralling vines – where my entire vision burst to life – and below it, where I died.

The bells chime the hour and my friends make to depart. They take a moment to appreciate their work. Thomas nods to his former master.

“High above everyone else as he always thought he was. And doomed to look upon our Tod’s masterpiece forever.”

END