All of us, wrapped in scarves and heavy coats, harried and hurried, find our collective way down into the bowels of the church where they are distributing the ashes.
The Franciscan friars, two old men in black cassocks standing before the altar with dour, pinched faces, relentlessly press ash onto the foreheads of the faithful. They don't even bother to make a cross, sufficing with a thumb-print smudge resembling a mid-sized roach.
Katie and I find an open pew and sit quietly for a moment, before clambering the stairs past stained-glass frozen fables, out into the cold morning air.
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