The Proctors find a canny soul to build a church to Progress.
(Tales of the Mosaic – 350 words)
The Proctors were rich as sin, yet holy, in their way. They worshipped Progress: a goddess with six arms and eight breasts who blessed industry and punished indolence. Poor souls in the Proctors’ workhouses were taught Her Tenets, often in lieu of wages.
The Tall Ones up in Pearl Estates thought little of these gaudy upstarts with poor manners, and when the Proctors flaunted cash in search of crews to build their church, no respectable builder would be seen to take them on. So it was they settled for an unrespectable one.
Lizzy Kumar was so deep in debt the vultures circled daily, but she still looked the part, and she could lay the blarney thick. She took the Proctors’ coin and up the building went: halls and spires of glass and steel that blossomed over Gizzen Lane.
When the work was nearly done, Lizzie sold them more: a bigger dome, a taller spire. She tempered their impatience by suggesting they hold service in the kirk while it was built. “What better home for Progress than a house unfinished? Completion is the end of work; to ‘finish’ is to stagnate.”
Soon, the kirk could grow no higher. So Lizzie toured the salting clubs, where Tall Ones pretended not to go, bought a round and toasted loudly: “To my cathedral—so tall, the Pearl Estates will wither in its shadow!”
Two days hence, the spire was gone: thieved away by well-paid thugs in zeppelins.
Lizzie was commissioned to build it back anew, and within a week, it was stolen again.
For years this carried on, but Lizzie told the Proctors: “What greater aspiration than to labor without end?” And when the Tall Ones finally yielded, and the steeple stood untroubled, the Proctors followed Lizzie’s charge and tore it down themselves, for their own enrichment.
Decades later, Lizzie Kumar vanished with her fortune, and the Proctors took up her role too.
The Gizzen Kirk is still unfinished—Proctors build it up, while Proctors tear it down—but through happenstance, or deference, or some divine intelligence, the statue in the transept is of old Lizzie herself.