Grant Fuhst
The Second Saints
Rose
It burns. That's all I can think about is the burning. My skin feels like someone has punctured it with an awl until I am shredded. I feel like my face is not my own. The rocoto peppers melt in my hands as I wash my face with their red skin. I can feel my flesh start to glow. I shake my head so that the pain spreads evenly like seeds in a pan. The pain feels better on my face than the eyes. There are so many eyes that follow me whenever I walk wherever they are. It doesn't matter the age of the eyes, I can feel them covering me like a potato sack. I wash my face in the fire of this chili so that I might not be what they seem to covet so dearly. There are no motors in our town, but I can hear them churning inside of the men. I hear the ignition. Their lights find me again and again. From across the plaza to the bakery or the butcher's, even from the other side of the confessional. I want to destroy my face. I do not care to be beautiful. Only one face is beautiful, and it is his face that I focus on. There was one who caught me in his headlight and took me to a dark place that felt like I was at the bottom of a well. The bucket. It was as if the bucket was hitting me. I could feel it beat against my small body. Then I could not fight it. And then the well was wet with my blood. And he had stolen my promise. Who could I tell? I could not tell my parents. I could not speak to the Padre. For all I know it was him. Because I did not see the man who stole me. I did not see the man who beat me with the bucket. Only there was no bucket. And there was no well. I was in a deep hole, but it was his body that beat me. He hurt me with his sin, and he gave me his sin. And now I have his sin inside of me. And so I am scraping off the beauty that I was cursed with by the devil himself. Because I know that I was meant to be a vessel. I was meant to pour and not to be filled. And I would spend my days trying to empty him from me. I would spend that summer trying to reclaim myself.
Even though he used me as something you might find commonly on a kitchen table, he gave me something else. I cut it from me just as many others had done in the cold dirty waters of the river at night. And when I came back to my home with my disfigured violet face and the dead space in my stomach, I took the dull knife from the kitchen counter and I hacked the hair from my head. I filled the basin with water and looked at my reflection. I was a carrot. I was a bloody knee. I was not the girl I was only a few months earlier when he threw me into that well of sin. He would not recognize me now. And the pain I felt in my face and on my head became the voiceless prayers that I sent into the universe. Prayers that I would send that way everyday for the rest of my life. And years later I would fashion a crown made from the scraps at my father's blacksmith shop, but instead of showing off my nobility, I would fill the crown with spikes. They would burrow into me like the worms that make holes in the earth. And one day when I was much older, they would not relent, these spikes. There was no way to remove the crown from my living head. They will have to wait until my death and hack the crown from my body. This is my penitence. This is the price I pay for the sin I did not commit and for sin I did. My hands were always finding their way into the fire. I would burn them until they were useless. Until the sisters at the nunnery would have to pull them out and wrap them carefully in the leaves of the palm trees that grow everywhere around us. And when I was in the most pain, I would tell them the date of my death. It was foretold to me, and I would want them to know so that they could make my bed and give it to another. Bring another useless girl into this abby so that should she be as infected with sin as I was she might find her own ways to push herself into the well.
Because I am finished. I will disappear into the Earth. There will be no more. No need to mutilate. No need to hide. No need to fear the hands and the fingers that approach me so grotesquely. I will become paper thin. I will be white. I will be the shell of an onion. I'll be no one and no one will be me.
Was i named for a flower? Or was I named for a savior? I will rise. I have risen. I am Rose. Saint. Hardly. I don't deserve the title. But I made my way out of the well. Life is a well. If you drink it you live, but if you fall into it you die. You drown in the life that you give. The bucket hits you again and again. And then you are gone. I am gone. Pray for me. Don't pray for me. I can give you no other instruction. I can give you no other hope.
When the nuns discover me, they will have discovered an empty body. I emptied myself long ago. I climbed out of the well dry. I left the wettest parts of myself down there in that well. I was like a leaf in Autumn. I was like a stone in the cold dead Earth. I was dry. I was bone dry.
Faustina
IIs there dirt in Heaven?
I sat and I thought about the dirt. Where does it all come from? How do the clean things become dirty?
I wanted to think about where each particle of dirt comes from? Is it on the shoe of the man who is visiting the town where his mother is dying? Does it blow through the open window when the woman leans out with her cigarette, looking at the city, sobbing? Does it blow through the vents of this old stone building where I am working to earn enough money to pay for my nun’s habit? Does it come from me even though it is my job to clean the floors and fold the towels and make the beds?
It all has to come from somewhere. All the dirt has always been here, yes? It doesn't come from outer space. It doesn't magically appear. No. Everything that's new and clean eventually starts to come apart. It starts to decay. And what was once shiny becomes dull. And what was once fresh becomes ash. I understand this. Things are born. Things grow. But everything that's here was already here. Yes?
It was all put here at one point. It multiplied. It grew. It died. And then it came back. Here it is in the corners of this little kitchenette. Under the bed. In the cobwebs under the radiator. Those cobwebs are made by the spiders, but the spiders came from somewhere. The spiders came from the other spiders. And you can trace that back forever. All the way back to the beginning.
I am a speck of dirt. I am ash. I am hiding in the corner of this nunnery that I must clean to earn a bed, waiting for the future maid to clean my dirt. My filth. I know rejection. I am dirty, and I am poor. I wear shabby clothes. I cannot afford better clothes. The people brush me aside. They put me in a dustbin and tell me to get better clothes. But when do the things that are new become the things that are old? And when do we stop coveting these things? When do they get so dirty that we drop them into the dark corners of the world?
I knocked on so many doors. So many heavy doors. Each time the stern face would come and let me go no further than the squint of her eye. They would kick me off the porch or sweep me down the walkway.
It wasn't until I found the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy that I was given a bed and a place to wash. Even those women had very little hope that I would ever be clean. How could I tell them that I had been told to come? How could I show them that my orders were not something I could ignore? How could I say that my filth is my salvation? It would take a lot to change their minds.
The Voice that spoke to me was the Voice that was there when the first speck of dirt was created. And He didn't care how dirty I am because He knew that everything was dirt. It was all dust. Every last one of them with their tall black columns and their tightly tied knots was nothing but dust.
We weren't even dust, to be honest.
We came from someone who came from dust. We weren't original. We were the inheritors of dust and dirt. And so as I clean these dirty rooms over and over again just to make the small amount of money I need to buy my own black column and my own tightly tied knot. I know that everything I put in the trash bin will be clogging up the corners of this room the very next day. Because we're all dirty and poor. That's what He tells me. And let me tell you something, He talks to me a lot. And I've been listening to Him since the beginning. I'm not missing a single word.
Cleaning the Dirt
I grew up on a farm, and farm life teaches you humility rather quickly. While you might believe that as humans, we are masters of the universe, the things of a farm won’t kneel. They won’t lie prostrate to anyone. You have to learn what they want and how to bring out the best in them. I worked the dirt on the farm. I had to work so that the dirt would be free of clods. I had to make the dirt smooth. So my interest in dirt stretches back almost to my beginning.
Was there dirt in Eden? Of course. He made the first of us from dust. And so all of us have that in common. We are dust. We are dirt. We cannot demand of the dirt or bully the dirt. We must accept it (even if we are forced to clean it). The cycle is the first instance of G-d’s Mercy.
When He came to me, I was a young silly girl twirling and spinning at a dance in my village. He asked me, “How long do I have to wait for you?” I was humiliated and broken by that. His pain embarrassed me. The crown of thorns poked holes where blood ran out like streams through the filth of His face and His tattered body. It wasn’t his defiled appearance that shocked me, it was the pleading in His eyes. He asked me that question, and I knew he was expecting an answer. Not in words. I never speak back even after all of this time. His words to me inspired obedience. Respect. And never fear.
“Now is the time of Mercy.”
I was alone in my cell, thinking about how the dirt of humanity is such a plague here on earth, but it must be a blessed thing In heaven. And He came to me as flesh, clean of His wounds, with His heart radiating light, red and white.
“Now is the time of Mercy,” He said to me. I felt the light and the words intertwine and penetrate my heart. “This time of Grace will lead to the time of Justice.” I knew His words as soon as He spoke them. I knew the course. He had directed me once to step out into the wilderness with nothing but His blessings on my head. And now He is here to direct me again.
Bernadette
When I was a girl, I would sit on the ground near my mother who would clean our clothes and bedding and towels. She would scrub the clothes on the old washboard that she had inherited from her mother, and then she would ring them out by twisting them into tight knots till almost every drop came out and landed in the bucket. I loved to watch her do this because this was how my lungs felt most of the time. It was always difficult for me to breathe, and I imagined my mother's hands at either end of my lungs, squeezing and twisting them until all the air was drained. It was easier for me to imagine my mother doing it. Otherwise, who would do this to me? I had been sick my whole childhood. I was ill when the other children were outside running and screaming and playing. I did not have the air to run or to scream. Sometimes I felt like I could barely whisper. I knew I was too young to feel so close to death, and yet still I felt it.
One day when I was out doing the chores that I was capable of doing, I found myself breathless by a cave. There was a cold gust and then there was a very hot breath and I dropped the sticks that I was carrying. She stood there, unexpectedly beautiful. She was wrapped in an ocean. Her skin was brown. She glowed when she spoke to me, and I felt my lungs fill fully for the first time in my life. Over the next several months, I returned to the cave and saw the vision of her. It was the Immaculate One, And she bid me to do so many things. I did them all. The people half believed me and half thought I was a loon. But when the waters ran clear and healed the ills of the bathers who came, I didn't have to whisper. Everyone listened.
What is my pain now? What does it matter? She gave her son to the cross. What can I give? I am a human being, and once again my body breaks. All the minutes I'm awake I feel the pain, but I know I am blessed. Whether the voice was in my head or standing right in front of me, I heard it. It spoke. And now there is a chapel where the cave used to be. They've built what I told them to build. Even though I was never very good at breathing, the breath inside me is proof that I'm a sinner. I lay here in this bed of death, every inch of me suffering. All this is good for heaven. Blessed Mary, pray for me.
Perpetua & Felicity
Perpetua
My father's fingers tremble. It is rare that he gets angry, but I could see that bit of wetness in his eyes that always comes when he is frustrated. He is watching lightning strike his house. He simply has to watch it burn. He is burning now. I have set him on fire.
I look across the table at the pitcher made of clay that was half full of wine, and I say to him, "do you see that pitcher, father?"
He does not want to break his stare, but he glances over and nods his head. "Yes."
I square my jaw and speak quietly and clearly. "Can you call that pitcher by any other name?"
He swallows air through his nostrils, and I watch his beard tremble as he answers my question. "No."
“Would you call me a stalk of corn? A hammer from your shop? Would you call me a fish or a lion or a bird in the sky?"
"I would call you daughter."
"I am a Christian. A believer. Like that pitcher of wine, I can be nothing else but what I am."
He looks at the clay vessel on the table and he picks it up. He pours the wine onto the dusty floor. "This is a pitcher," his face twists, and I can see that the lightning has hit him as well. He sends the object hurtling towards the wall where it shatters. "And now I call it dust. You cannot put wine in it anymore. The wine is spilled like your blood will be spilled. And you will no longer be my daughter or a Christian. You will be dead."
My hand by my side wishes to clutch the icon of my faith, but it is not there. The governor of our town had followed the laws of the emperor. To slow the spread of my faith they made it illegal for anyone new to convert. We had to hide our beliefs, but I was not afraid to be turned to dust.
"It does not matter if I am broken down into pieces like this vessel.” I say. “Even in tiny pieces I am still a believer. I still serve my lord."
My father would never strike me, but I can see that he wants to crack me like the broken pitcher. It is a moment where he thinks that he might do it but then something passes over him and his mood wilts. His voice softens, and I can hear a childish desperation.
"Why would this carpenter of yours sacrifice you the way he sacrificed himself? Would he leave your own infant son without a mother? As it is you travel from room to room in our home, quietly thinking and staring into nothing. The servants bring you your baby, and you refuse to hold him or feed him. Will you have your son be raised without a mother?"
I step towards him to remind him of my youth and of my love for him. My devotion as his daughter.
"But I have a father too besides you. And I must follow him. I would not have my son grow up with a mother who is afraid to be who she is. And if I am not here to raise him, he will have an example and a light to lead him down the path. And one day he will be with me and with all of us who have seen the light. All of us who travel the pathway."
My father pushes his hand up under his beard, a sign that he is making a decision. "I have three sons before you and none of them have the courage of my only daughter. I cannot support you in this suicide, but I agree that your son should have the memory of a brave mother."
I wrap my arms around his waist and hug him like I am a child again. He puts his arms around me and in the embrace of my father on earth I feel the love of my father in heaven. I will be baptized. I will convert. Even if it means my death.
Felicity
I cannot say who the father is, but I know that my child grows inside of me. He is ready to see the world. I can feel his feet trying to kick his way out. He is looking for the doorway. There isn't enough room inside of me for him. I do not like to think about the night that he was forced to be my child.
I am a servant. I am loyal to my lady. She has helped me through so many dark times. There were nights when my baby's father would revisit me in my sleep.
A nightmare.
I would wake like a bolt, quite sure that he was once again on top of me, but my mistress would come to my side and gently sway me. I felt as if I was her child even though she had a baby in a crib not that far away from us.
The night was stretched out across the sky, and it felt like he could tear a hole in it. Not even the darkness could protect me. This man. He was not a stranger to me. He still lives in this house. I can never reveal who he is but I stand there close to him everyday. I cannot understand how my mistress can be so warm and so kind and so clear in her head and her brother is such a monster.
Perpetua
I look down at my hands, and I wonder what it would be like to have nails driven through my palms. What is it to hang from a cross for days and days? They say death was slow for him. I'm told my death will be quick, but it will be painful. I will be mauled and eaten alive. All of us will. And the crowds will roar and cheer and have something to do that day.
I sit here in this cell with the stench of the dead everywhere around me and the shadow of sin. I am not afraid of death. I know when I'm gone, my baby will have lost his mother. The judge and the guards have taken pity on me and they have allowed my son to stay with me. I look down at his hands and wonder what size nails would it take to crucify him?
Felicity
All my life I never knew there was a way for my mind to be this occupied, and now I am certain that I am using every last chamber of my brain. All I can do is think about this baby inside of me and how I want her out. I'd like to pretend that I'm driven by a deep-rooted desire to protect her, but I don't want to see my sisters and brothers murdered without me. Especially my lady.
If I am pregnant on the day of the execution, they will not send me to the monsters. I will have to wait. Sometimes I feel that my baby is a seed inside, growing so that I can die and no one will notice. But most of the time I know that the seed inside of me is my love for my lady. She is the one who inspired me to commit my soul to heaven.
It was all just a dream. We were together as the water poured over our foreheads and we became immortal. The birth of a thousand babies can't match the love of two believers. And I love her very much.
Perpetua
It is terrifying to stand in this dark tunnel and listen to the flesh of the “criminals” being torn from their bones. They are monsters doing what monsters do. As each group of the baptized is pushed into the arena, a new beast awaits.
My darling reaches her hand for me. We became mothers together just a few days ago when her daughter was delivered by God’s grace. Felicity refused to name her, but she held her hard enough to leave a mark. I know I hugged my son just as hard. It was almost as if we each would have sent them to heaven, but without a baptism, they would wind up lodged between heaven and hell for eternity. We will only be reunited once they have been baptized. With the new suffocating laws, that might not happen soon.
So our babies are stuck on this earth for a lifetime. That’s what’s best. Hopefully we will mother from heaven. I am certain that as we are torn to bits, we will feel our babies in our arms. I trust the immaculate one’s grace. I am certain the pain of dismemberment will feel like a wisp of air compared to the loss of our only children. We are both broken in two, even before we enter into the arena to the bloody-thirsty music of the screaming crowds.
Felicity
It is not a time to follow laws. Our devotion made us criminals. I am holding her hand no matter what society dictates. I can feel the blood dripping from her shredded arm. The creature tore into us, but he could not kill us. The governor has ordered that the centurions slay us with their swords. Our lives could never be saved here on earth. I pull her closer to me. One soldier trembles and weakly plunges his sword into me, but it misses my heart and only slices my shoulder. I stumble but I will not let go of my lady.
His eyes open wide and then sharpen. He is not going to make the same mistake twice. But before he can strike again, I embrace my sister, my mistress, the woman I had served since I was a child. I kiss her the way Magdalene must have kissed the cold body of Christ when he was dragged into the cave.
We had been reborn together and now we will die together. As we kiss I can feel how we each pass our lives into each other. Her love makes me hungry for death. Her kiss makes my soul invulnerable.
Thérèse
I feel them open and shut the door maybe a hundred times a day. I remember each time the door slams and bounces off the frame. I have counted the number of bounces. It's hard and then less and less until it's almost not a sound. I hear that quiet sound louder than the banging of the door. I'm sensitive. Quiet is not the absence of sound. Quiet is a threat. It’s the promise of a storm to come.
My bed linens wrap around me like thick rope. The pain in my head is either my imagination or my disintegration. I can’t be sure. I spend all day coming apart. I listen to the sounds of my sisters and my father because everyone else in our family is dead. I think of my dead siblings in their tiny coffins, and I think of my mother under the earth and the tombstone with the carving of the mother Mary.
Can they hear the doors slam in the underworld? Is it quiet when you're dead? I certainly know that my life is a gift and to take it is a sin, but it's so hard.
I feel the invisible ropes that cuff my arms and legs and slip around my throat. I know that death can grab me this way whenever it wants. I don't think it's quiet anywhere. There are people who go into nature or a library or an empty house, and they feel the pressure of silence, but whenever I'm in a place like that I find the noise.
Or I bring the noise because I'm always coughing. I had hoped that the nunnery would be quiet, but I knew the truth was that every one of those women had to breathe at night. The older nuns breathe heavier than the young ones, but everyone still breathes, and I can hear it. I know the tragedy of noise, and I pray to be cured. Silently…so silently, I pray.
I know why I am this way. I am selfish. My sisters had worked hard to keep me as a baby since I was the one who lost our mother at the youngest age. (Childbirth.) By doing this, they squeezed the throat of my compassion. I could be so lazy and so vicious until my father would turn his head and look at a wall rather than see me in a tantrum. How could he? I needed his attention, too. I needed his soul. Why would he turn from me?
Time passed like a loop. After so many years trapped inside a tiny body and a tiny mind, my heart finally grew. I was cured. The malady that kept me awake at night was gone. I saw my heavenly mother smile from a statue that was still, and I knew that my life would change. And for the first time ever I didn't make my father suffer when he said something to me that sounded like "no." I swallowed the air and remembered my earthly mother who got sick when I was so young, and I listened to his heartbeat once again. And though I had to strain, the pelting of his love inside of his chest was loud enough for me to know It was endless. It was enough for two parents.
This is what I'm thinking of as I stare at the objects in my room as if for the first time. Because I believe that Jesus was here with me for as long as I could remember, but now I know He's gone.
As I grow stronger, He abandons me. It's insufferable. I would gladly sit in my own sweat back in my childhood sick bed rather than search for Him when I know He's left me. I'm talking and talking and He's not here. He's not holding up His end of the conversation. There is a theme of love leaving. His mother who once smiled at me must have felt this way the day after His death. He was not there to talk to her or to them. He was not there to share His voice and His message.
I began as a chopped up little girl whose mother had left her and whose health went away just as fast. And when I recovered from that illness I also recovered from my selfishness which had been foisted on me by people who I now know were made of love. And now I have lost h\Him, but He teaches me a lesson.
He's telling me that if I can lose Him, I can lose everything. I should sacrifice all that I can. Sacrifice my pride. Sacrifice my honor. Sacrifice the only hope I ever had as a girl. My heart aches at the loss of Him. He has hollowed out my soul, and I will hollow out my body. There will be nothing left. I will listen for His footsteps or for the rubbing of His hands. I will try to remember the days when my ears were my enemies because now they are my only friends.
Maria
My brother's arm sparkles in the sunshine because he is drenched in sweat. He pulls his arm back and quickly slices through the wheat with his sickle. I can hear it cut through each stalk. Woosh! Woosh! He uses short chops like a man stabbing someone to death. He is skilled. Since the death of my father, he has worked the fields this way day and night. He is the oldest. My whole family works the fields except for me and my baby sister. My mother told me that because I was small it would be better if I stayed home and took care of the house, so she could go to the fields and sweat like my brother. We were barely moved into our new home when my father got sick and died. We could not afford to bury him but we found a way.
Sometimes when it's very hot and the baby is asleep, I sit on the steps and I sew. The needle slides in and out as I darn the socks. We are poor, but we will not have holes in our clothes. Our floor is swept. There is always dinner when they come home after the sun has bled away from the sky.
I can see them working when a shadow interrupts me and my work. I look up and I see the red sun setting and a black silhouette of a man. It is Alessandro. If I have nightmares, they always are of him. He looks at me from his church seat or across the Palazzo. Even when he's not here I feel his eyes on me. Like he is somewhere, watching me.
He touched my shoulder and smiled and indicated with his head that he wanted to go inside. He wanted a drink. While my family worked tirelessly, Alessandro was likely in his home drinking the last bits of wine that his grandfather had left for him. His family had abandoned him. He lived alone. His home was the opposite of ours. I told him that I had to finish my sewing, but he could go inside and get himself a drink. He told me no. He wanted me to get it. “That’s your job, girl. I am a guest.”.
I stared at him like he was a thunderstorm. I only wished it was raining because it might mean my family would come home early. But I was alone. I could see the splash of color that was my oldest sister who always trailed behind in the fields. I could not see her face, and I'm sure she could not see mine. I stood up. It was the last time I would ever stand.
With the door open only a crack, he hit my body like it was a battering ram. I was on the floor and he was on top of me, and then I saw the flash of his smile that matched the silver of a knife that he held to my throat. His knee was forcing my legs open. He was not a big man but I was only 11 and undersized. I told him it was a sin and he said he knew. I felt him undressing himself and trying to enter me. I spit at him and told him I would rather die. He pulled himself inside of me and put his face close to mine and said, “don't worry, you will.”
I've always assumed there was one for each year of my life but there are so many reasons why he might have stabbed me 11 times. Maybe he got tired. Maybe that was as far as his rage would take him. Maybe the spirit got to him and guilt took over. I do not know but I know that the next moments of my life were the last moments. When my family discovered me, they rushed me to the hospital. My mother brought me a statue of the virgin and I clutched it to my chest as if it were a salve that might heal the wounds he had made. The holes he made in my body did not pierce my soul which was still a swollen balloon inside of me. I could feel it lifting me. And I knew when my life on this earth was over, I would simply float up into heaven. All around me my family wept. There were tears from others, too. Even the doctors and nurses looked sullen. There were so many tears for my wretched life. I tried to tell my mother that I wasn't worth it. They should cry for themselves. They should cry for Alessandro. And when I said his name the room got more than silent. It was as if everything had been turned inside out and the faces looked at me the way the moon looks at the Earth. I told them to forgive him. I told him that I had forgiven him. And I remember that now they wept at their own weeping because they felt the guilt of their selfishness. I left behind all the wounds he had made and I took with me nothing but my virgin heart. Because he never raped my heart. He never touched me there.
Philomena
I am bones. I am old and damaged, but I am still intact. I can remember what it was like to be inside of her. To help her stand and move. To help her pray by bending to her knees. I remember the violence. I have been stolen from the place where I was buried and taken to a new home. I have been placed inside of silver cases, and now they worship me. They say that I have cured cancer. I have performed miracles. They say it is evidence that I am a saint. Where was this evidence when I was alive? It was the ruler Diocletian whose love turned to violence. When I denied him, he ordered my execution several times. They tried to kill me. They whipped me. They tried to drown me. They executed me with arrows. Every time I survived. It infuriated the emperor, so he had me beheaded. The body I once lived in hasn't been whole for centuries. That’s why they can take me in pieces. I only exist as a dream and from the dream came a story. The story became the truth. When they questioned the truth, they tried to kill me again. But they can't kill me. I am not Philomena. I am the bones of a saint. It doesn't matter when I lived. It is my death that matters most. And they have built statues to me and made offerings and attributed symbols. There is not a pain hard enough to scratch me from the records. I live on. In fragments, I live on.
Edith
"Who is God?" I never could understand the suffering of Christ. It was beyond my comprehension. I knew that he suffered terribly and that he suffered for me, but it was only an idea. Like any idea, it demanded thought. It demanded meditation. But I never understood what it meant to be crucified. Not until now.
They are not beds. They are empty spaces where they can pack our bodies. And in these spaces we do something different than awaken. But we do not sleep. I know I don't sleep. In fact it’s as if everything has been whitewashed and covered over in a milky film. It fills our mouths and our lungs and coats our eyes. It is everything we see or taste or touch or hear. I am not wearing clothes at all. These rags that hang from me are like pieces of paper blown up against a fence. My bones are like the links of the fence. We are wires.
But it's in this wretched place that I found he had not left me. The meditation came to life for me. We had to move quickly around the camp, but I found that even as I forced my feet to shuffle forward I could slip into a kind of reverie. A trance. And I could see him there as tattered as I am, hanging from his cross.
Every thought I have in this abyss, I devote to him. I know he is here. He would have been tossed into this wretched hole along with the rest of us. He would have splintered under the weight of their hate. But he would be the cleanest of the clean. He would clean us all. Because no matter how many creatures eat away at our skin or how many diseases creep up inside of us at night, we will not be dirty. We know we are right. Even though like him I have my doubts as machine guns take away the souls of the slowest workers and the very old, I can find him in me. I can see myself on the cross with him. They can nail every part of my body into the rotten wood of our lodgings, and still I will not lose faith. Forgive these monsters. They know not what they do.
The Immaculate
Wife
The way that the rainstorm turned sideways and nearly knocked me off my feet is the way that he came into my room that night.
I felt wounded. Joseph seemed to forget me. He didn’t see me. We were going about the business of managing the farm. Feed the chickens. Herd the goats. Chop the wheat. Fill the cart and drive the mule…moving the crops from the fields to the barn. It was an ordinary day. The sun climbed slowly up into heaven and sat over us for hours. I felt naked with my clothing rendered to my skin. We moved through the heat and finished our chores. We made the moves and the motions to keep the wheels of the farm turning.
I felt like kindling, but Joseph only saw me as a beast. To him I was the mule or the geese or the hens. He was a beast, too. An ox. A bull. A thing that pulled and pushed and turned his shoulder into the work. We were this way even when the wind and the rain came. It wasn’t a cool rain. It was like the sweat of the sky. It was work. We labored this farm from the first breath of the sun until its death at night. Long days equalled black nights. Even the sky, packed with stars, didn’t light us enough to keep us awake. We slept and dreamed of the work until the morning when the dreams became the crow’s call and the rooster’s song and the calves in their pens, trembling themselves awake.
But the night of the day when I felt invisible was not so easily lost to sleep. I was awake in my bed. The shutters flew open and I saw a face in the rain. The room was my body. My mind was the shutters, slamming open and closed like a drum loud in your ear, too close to find its rhythm. A sound like torture.
The face was a thought. It was a noise. It took up space inside of me. The face was a man more beautiful than anything my eyes had ever seen on earth or in dreams.
He was forceful and took me like a husband (even though my husband slept in the room next door to us). The moment he was inside of me, I could see my own birth. I squeezed my eyes shut. It was painful and frightening, and the whole time the angel (for what else could he be but an angel?), he was with me. I was living as a newborn. My head was wet and dented as I came out of my mother. I felt the blood and the waste cover my body as it hit the fresh air for the first time. I took a breath and screamed. I was terrified but I was alive. “Do not be afraid, Mary. Your womb is blessed by God.” My eyes opened, and I saw his wings fill the open window. I felt alone. It was a new feeling, and I was afraid. I was certain at that moment that I would never feel any other way.
The unsparing night eventually let me fall down the dark tunnel of sleep. I dreamt of childbirth, a new labor. It was a feeling I would know for the rest of my days. It was endless, but it slipped into the back of my spirit, hidden in my mind, and became just a dull ache in my womb. I slept this way with the pain like a pillow. It was a sympathy that would guide me for the rest of my days. I slept, almost floating on the dull throb of hurt. I would wake up feeling this way, too. Nothing in the day ahead would hurt me as much as this miracle shifting and tumbling inside of me. A blunted soreness. A sharp and gnawing miracle.
Joseph woke me. He was surprised to see me asleep since I was always the first to heat the water for our tea. Something spread across his face. It was the awareness that I was no longer just one. He let that realization melt. His place was in the fields and the furrows and the barn. He was not made to see me. I was his virgin wife and his partner on this farm. He shook me and ignored the persistent thought that I was pregnant. But I was. “I am” were my first words to him moments after I had wrestled away the deep sleep filled with its vision of an amorous angel who took me as an innocent and left me to my womanhood.
I stood behind him as he split the bread for me. “I am, my husband.” I took my piece of bread. I ate it with words crowding my mind and my mouth. “Behold, husband Joseph, I am the servant of the Lord, now: let it be to me according to your word.” He just sat, chewing and drinking from his silver cup, the only thing of value that wasn’t living or dying for food or coins. The cup came to us from a deep hole we needed to fill, but the sun pointed to the cup in the ground. We took the cup and cleaned it and used it daily to drink the clear water from the river that flowed in the corner of our farm.
Joseph’s silence heard me, but he tossed the news off of him and hunched over his meal of cheese and bread and goat’s meat. I moved to my chair and reached for the cup. He would always have enough water for me, but today he held the cup back and slipped the bladder to me so I could drink right from its spout.
“I will work in the fields. You will stay here and scour the floors and walls and make bread. Your work is no longer outside, my wife. Do you hear?”
I did. There was no way to protest, although words were shooting into my mouth that wanted to counter his commands. But there was no point. He was right. Whatever the angel put inside of me was real and it was already growing. Labor in the field could never match the labor that I would bear as the fruit of this transcendence. This would be our only fruit as the lemon trees we once kept all died in the vicious stare of the sun.
I wanted to speak, but my husband could not look at me. His shoulders slumped and he headed to the shed to hoist his tool and the tattered cart. He pushed it out into the field and walked toward the barn where our mule slept but roused as he heard Joseph approach. Every living thing on the farm could sense the change in him. It was only the respect of habit that allowed them to follow him, but his power over them had shrunk. He felt the evening, too. His sleep was just as tumultuous as mine.
Husband
The shutters slammed shut on his window as a spirit slipped in through the slats. The spirit held him down and kept him mute. Joseph knew his wife was in trouble. That’s how he felt it. He struggled with the spirit. His arms are strong from hauling hay when it was too hot for the mule to do the work, but even his strength was no match for this immortal creature. The thing was shrouded by shadows that it wore like garments. It was regal in that. He could feel the rain, too, but for Joseph the rain was a lock on the shutters. This room was his jail. He could do nothing as his wife was being violated by God? An angel? A spirit like the one sitting on his chest so heavy that his heart felt pressed beatless against his spine. He was dead, he was sure of it. But the spirit left him, and his heart leapt back into place, slipping into it’s normal thump-thug, thump-thug.
It was hard to work the fields without her, but the mule seemed charged as if last night’s visitors were not limited to the humans on the farm. Every living thing seemed to know the changes in his wife. They all filled in the gaps left by her absence…her change. Everything including the sun seemed to know there was another one on the farm, in the house, inside the wife, stretching itself this way or that, turning her into a mother. They all worked the land and finished with more harvest than if she were alive with them instead of locked into her new obligation.
Days and weeks and months slid down the sides of the mountains far in the distance and rolled like a river into their home. She noted that time was speaking to her, guiding her, whispering about a journey to Bethlehem. The mule knew that his work would change, but he kept at it with Joseph. It wasn’t until she was showing that Joseph took his wife and the supplies they would need for a long journey. He wrote to his older son’s, delivered by his widow from a previous union. James responded and came to the farm with his young family. More hands would be needed since the mule would be gone.
The trip was long, but Hashem was with them the whole way. Every stop was in an inn that had one room left where the windows were secured snugly with shutters of its own. The three of them found sleep after their long journey. Letters from Paul assured that the stumble into winter was met with even more hard work. His children were plenty and all knew the work of the farm. The mule was missed, but seven pairs of hands in all sizes could move the old cart just fine. Joseph’s eldest son, Simon, also climbed down from his meditation and joined the labor. The farm was alive. Joseph felt the pressure of the journey and the buried pain of being cuckold by God, but he was humbled by his sons and their efforts to keep the farm alive for the eventual return of this bastard family.
They visited her cousin who was also pregnant. “Hello Joseph.” Elizabeth was a mirror image of his wife. After a few late evening conversations it was revealed that both women were impregnated in the same way on the same night, the night when the rain moved sideways.
Elizabeth’s husband rarely looked up, but when he did he locked eyes with Joseph. They were the only two men who knew that the nearly born babies, Jesus and John, were impositions on their manhood, but what could they do? It was heaven’s will that stole their own. They were prisoners in this rape of their wives. It was anger that was fruitless for both of them. Zechariah was a man just as Joseph was. Hard working. Loyal. Men who worked the earth or the wood of the trees. Elizabeth’s husband was a carpenter, a job Joseph admired. In fact, he spent time learning the tools and how to use them. Joseph found the work difficult but dignified. He would not live long enough to see his son take over this craft from his second cousin. Trees turned to clean wood and carved into beams from homes or heavy spikes for crucifixion (the streets to Jerusalem were decorated with these deadly warnings to strangers or enemies of the Roman state).
They loaded the burrow and left the mule behind. The donkey had fresh legs and wasn’t bent from years of plowing and hauling the cart. As they said goodbyes, his wife touched Elizabeth’s stomach and Elizabeth did the same to her cousin. Their eyes brimmed with tears. Joy? Pain? Sadness for a future that they both saw that ended in death. Joseph held out a small shoddily carved baby in a manger and placed it in Zechariah’s hand. The two men knew a pain that was invisible to any other eyes but their own. Two blessings. Two babes that would grow up to change the world. The men wanted to weep, but the dust caked in their eyes made that impossible.
Bethlehem
As they began their long walk to Bethlehem from Judea, they followed the old roads, surrounded by Pines and Oaks like the long fingers of God, protecting and guiding the three.
Somewhere far away, three men were gathering gifts to bring to the baby Jesus. They too would travel far to witness the birth of the outcast baby, born in a barn, cuddled by a dry trough. Nothing would drink from the manger tonight. It would be where Mary would place the bloody, crying child. The only other noise was the unstoppable sound of crickets and the laughing doves and the partridges. Nature sang God’s song for them. The wisemen’s gifts leaned into the hay bed where Mary sat alone in many ways.
Joseph found himself standing off to let the other visitors see the miracle. For Joseph, this was the moment when he let go of the crime and gave in to the mystery of the prodigy of love. There was no way he could not love him as his own for wasn’t he? Hadn’t Joseph given as much of his body as his wife? Hadn’t he split himself away from the physical world in order to see this tabernacle of shocked and blessed faces surrounding the transformation of his son from the noisy, trapped baby in his wife’s womb into the Son of God? Joseph touched the wooden child he kept in his pouch. The wooden baby didn’t cry, but the new Messiah was a piercing noise in the night.
His cries went up to heaven, and the Angel had led the shepherds from the fields, singing the good news “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” Joseph was a man, and he let the good will of all the angels surrounding the stables pierce his heart. He found his two feet and stood up straight for the first time in months (maybe years). He listened to the songs of nature echoed in the angelic voices that now blanketed the stable like a roof of stars and darkness. He looked at his wife for maybe the first time since their wedding. She was worn to the bone, but she was a blessing that reached out to him with her smile and her glassy wet eyes. She said she loved him with that look, and he mouthed the words to her.
It was the end of their marriage as they had known it. It was the end of her humility. From now on, she was the Mother Mary, the Virgin Mother, and no longer his wife. She was the lover of God. She was His wife and not his. Not Joseph’s. He looked at the babe in the woods and let the dusty tear escape. Soon the sun would show its face, reminding Joseph that his farm would need him especially since they traded a mule for a donkey. The heavy lifting would be his as his wife would raise the child of God, the same God that now entered Joseph and hugged him from the inside out. Alone with himself after God left him, he marveled at the child. He wouldn’t see the boy become a man, but at least he was here to witness the first breath, the first trembling of his new hand. The first smile. The first of everything that even God could no longer say was His. He belonged to everyone gathered here on this crisp cold December night.
Mother
The babe was swaddled and held as Mary laughed with the Angel Gabriel. “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is still with you.” Mary remembered the comfort of Gabrielle, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will call him Jesus.” Mary looked to the Angel and remembered. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most high. And as she remembered these words from the night that the rain moved sideways, she held her son tighter, afraid to give him the world. He was his and Mary fed him with her mortal body. Her warm milk nurtured him, nurturing the Son of God. Feeding her son as mothers had been feeding their children for hundreds of thousands of years since Eve first gave birth in the wilderness outside of Eden. Since the first birth of Cain and then Abel after their parents had been driven from paradise. As she took in a deep breath, she could feel the barn pull tighter around them, a new Eden in this humblest of homes, the first her son would ever know or love. Bethlehem. Praise be to God.
“Praise be to Him,” Mary whispered. “Let Him live forever.” And He did. He surely did.
The Magdalene
First
The water won't sleep. It lifts and lowers the boats all night long. It slaps the sides of each. I do not understand the sound. It is like a strap to a bare arm or a naked back. My heart beats faster. I look at all of the boats in the darkness. They are empty. I should be asleep, but I came here. I want something to make it quiet in my head. It's so noisy inside of me. It must be like this at the temple. All those voices. Everyone I know is dreaming, but I can't. I cannot dream because I can't stop the wilderness inside of me. I don’t feel human. I am a jungle. I am the creature that lives in the dark wet corner of a muddy tree stump. I am tortured. Please, let me sleep.
I do not know if these are demons. This feeling. I have felt this way for such a long time that it makes me wonder…am I? Could I fool myself into believing that I was something that I'm not? Maybe I've been a demon this whole time, hidden in the skin of a woman. Maybe I look out of eyes that are evil. I do not know what this feeling is. Life is hell for me. Would a demon feel this way? All I know is that there's a fire. Everything burns.
And so they take me this way with what they believe to be seven evil spirits inside of me. They need me to be purged. I might be sacrificed for all I know. They might throw me on an altar and cut the demons out of me. If that could bring me peace, I would let them torture me. But they come at me violently. I am in a relentless rage, as I am dragged screaming and fighting. I feel the same dangerous pressure in my head that leaves my eyes like stones staring at nothing with the howling and the trembling of my body. I am cast down in front of a man whose filthy robes and gnarled hands seem terrifying. There are others all around us with afflictions, but my handlers swear to him that I am possessed with all seven sins. They beg him to exorcize them from me. He is a rabbi. A healer.
His face is darker than mine. He is not from Magdala. I can see this. His eyes are iridescent in the setting sunlight. His mouth is humbled by a smooth scar. He crouches in front of me and puts both hands on my shoulders. I shudder. “You are not possessed, child. You are simply ill. If you believe that healing is possible, I will show you how to heal. Can you believe me?” Through the unraveling seizure, I shake my head. He takes my hand. HIs embrace is swaddling. I am born. He wraps me in a feeling of love. He pulls me to him so quietly. I have not known a quiet like this. A sound starts to rise in my ears. It’s a drum. A heartbeat. It is his heart, charming and healing me. I relent. I give myself to the heartbeat of this healer.
“Yes. Indeed, you are safe. We are a small group, but you are welcome to join us. Follow us. Follow me.”
And so I will. And even though the spells might continue, I know I am no devil. He tells me I am a child of God, and I believe him. He tells me that love is not the opposite of evil. Love is all. And we are loved. He loves me. This is not kindness. This is the law he preaches. I am his neighbor no matter where we live. And his beating heart replaces the noises of the screaming that were my constant foes. HIs heartbeat frees me.
“Do you believe you are a demon?”
“I don’t know.” He puts his arms around me and I am divine. I feel like I could fly out of this torment. He gives me wings.
“I won’t let you down, Mary. My arms are always your protectors. Do you feel that?”
I nod.
“You are with us, now. There is no other place for you. Yes?
I nod again. I feel like I have been nodding at this man forever.
Last
I am the only one of the four of us to wake. The sun is just pushing his forehead over the edge of the earth, and when I look up from the blackness of the tomb I can see light streaming in through the mouth of the cave. The stone is moved, and Jesus’ body is gone. I search the small cavity and then stumble out of the tomb into the morning. I can see my sisters are asleep, undisturbed by this revelation. I feel my head start to split and shake. My body is rigid and drops to the dusty path. From the ground, I see the shoes of the gardener approaching. I reach up to grab him and get his attention, but he pulls back before I can. “Don’t, Magdalene. Don’t touch me.” I stare dumbfounded. It is Jesus. His dark skin is clean and glowing, and the thousand cuts are gone. He is more perfect than I have ever seen him, but his voice is the same river. I sit up as far as I can. “Your ‘demons’ are gone.” He smiles and makes an unusual criss-cross shape in the air. He stares at me. “Everyone is asleep, Mary. Wake them. Wake them all.”
I squint to see his face once more, but he ascends to heaven. My bones feel light, and I stand up like a bird. I cover my eyes to see him flying, but his spirit is gone. I move my arms and legs and prance in a circle. I am his witness. I am his friend. I will start the story that we will tell for as long as we can. There are no devils now. Only the light of the morning. Only the sun sitting over us, so warm and steady and strong. I want to work and sweat today. I want to be of use. I will be a tool. I will be a tool for the world. I will wake them all.