Sister Clothilde leaned over the loom, picked up Sister Martine’s hand, and bit her thumb to the bone. Martine gripped her wrist, her sleeve speckled with blood like stewed cherries. Clothilde, hearing my stunned gasp, began to giggle and shake on the loom bench. The tip of her tongue flicked out of her mouth and a bloody thumbnail dropped onto the half-woven tapestry. A serpentine, blood-stained smile followed. Her mouth had discovered a new sensation.
Clothilde fled the weaving room. We jostled at the window to watch her stagger down the path to the forest, growling, baring her teeth to the warm sun and the pollen-clouded fields. The abbess, our Reverend Mother, chased after Clothilde with a rope.
Sister Martine in turn scratched two nuns in the chapel during Lauds. The girls shrieked, barely suppressing their fascination with their pink-striped forearms. The chapel’s benches, varnished dark with soot and sweat, creaked under our squirming thighs. The day was unusually hot for late spring, but a chill passed over us as though the devil himself had sauntered down the aisle.
Reverend Mother pulled Martine aside and threatened a flogging. Martine dug her fingernails into her own skin from temples to jaw. I am not myself, Martine insisted. I am no one. There is nothing behind this flesh.
Martine often claimed she was someone else, or no one at all. But we knew who she really was. We’d whispered in the cloisters that she was the illegitimate daughter of the bishop.
Reverend Mother demanded Martine atone for her sins. Martine did not respond. Instead, she made obscene gestures in our direction, her fingernails grimy with dried blood. Reverend Mother bound Martine’s wrists with a brocade ribbon from a nearby hymnal. The ribbon would be burned later. It was the proper way to dispose of it after such use.
Sister Clothilde sat at supper with her hands tied together, sipping from her bowl of thin broth. When Reverend Mother entered, Clotilde cackled and threw the bowl across the room toward the abbess’ head. The chunk of soft carrot and slice of potato spilled out and were snatched up by another nun. This was our only meal of the day–an extra carrot was a luxury. Reverend Mother ordered a pair of novices to collect Clothilde and remove her from the hall. Clothilde swayed in their hold, trancelike, to unheard music.
A week before, Clothilde had received word from the abbess that her entire family had died of the plague. Only her sister’s dog, a scruffy little rat-chaser, had avoided the miasma. The dog was turned out into the Strasbourg streets and promptly run over by a corpse-collector’s wagon. Clothilde did not mourn. Instead, she prayed. Fervent prayers at all hours for her mother and sister to be welcomed into Heaven. She prayed that Satan would dole out a fitting punishment for her father, a drunkard who had beat her with a barrel’s metal stave for speaking out of turn.
Clothilde always spoke out of turn. That was why she was here. That was why most of us were here. Someone with more authority than us decided that we were too clever, too stubborn, too costly, too hotheaded, too much of a risk. When my father’s crops failed for three straight seasons, he sent me to the abbey. I decided to prove that a pious daughter was more valuable than a good harvest. His barren soil recovered, and yet I remained here.
We listened to Clothilde and Martine laugh through the night. They were louder than we expected. Their hands slapped at the stone walls of their cells. Their bare feet stomped against the damp limestone in a furious dance. We shifted on our bedrolls until we heard the bells in the middle of the night for Matins Hour prayer. But prayer did not lead us back to sleep. It did not silence our sisters. The stones still echoed with their howls when the bell rang again before dawn.
I suspected devilry. In her grief, Clothilde had summoned the devil to our abbey. Who else could reach us? Our own families had forgotten us. Two nights passed with Martine and Clothilde wailing and cursing like demons in their cells.
During the next two nights, we listened to Father Henri, a monk skilled in exorcism, perform his rites upon them. His Latin drone was no match for Clothilde’s squeals of petty laughter or Martine’s blistered-throat screeching. We prayed for them all to stop, for the devil to depart or Father Henri to declare defeat, for the cool drip of silence to return to our nights, as sleepless as they were.
I increased my prayers and encouraged the other nuns to do the same. Prayer would protect us from the unholy madness buzzing about the abbey like a hornet. And when we weren’t praying, our chores kept us from thinking about who might be afflicted next.
We had no other defenses.
With Sisters Clothilde and Martine in their cells, Sister Genovefa now had to oversee the day’s task of pressing grapes from the monks’ vineyard. Genovefa claimed to be a descendant of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. According to tales, the queen herself was the daughter of the monster Melusine, half woman, half serpent. Genovefa, we’d heard, had behaved sinfully with a blacksmith’s apprentice and was banished to our abbey. Had she not disgraced her family, Genovefa would have been given in marriage to a lesser lord, cloaked in ermine and silk, birthing sons.
Sister Genovefa distributed linens to wipe grape skin from our hands and feet. As we cleaned, Father Roland crossed the courtyard to collect the juice. Father Roland carried empty wine jugs on both shoulders with his fingers looped through the small handles. He was the youngest and healthiest of the monks and made a point of regularly demonstrating to us how hearty he was. Sister Genovefa looked up from her stained arms, frowned, and grunted like a hound on the scent. The air shimmered with heat and dread.
Genovefa padded barefoot through the courtyard behind an unwary Father Roland. Some of the nuns clutched each other’s arms to contain ecstatic shivers. When Genovefa got close, she knocked on a cask as if it were a window. Father Roland spun, nearly hitting her with it. She grabbed him by the collar and snarled. She pressed her body against his, moved the threat of her mouth closer. Through the wavy glass of the cask on his shoulder, their faces appeared melted together.
Father Roland dropped both wine jugs. He clutched her arms and pushed her away. Who is doing this to you? He asked. Who is commanding you to perform such blasphemy?
Genovefa smiled. A smile of contempt. A smile of victory. Of licking a knife clean of an enemy’s blood. She did not reply in Latin but in her native Alsatian: Luzias. Lucifer. The devil’s name had appeared in the courtyard.
She announced she had some knowledge to share. Because I spoke her dialect, I translated for the others. Between frantic breaths, I recited her description of the devil’s penis: long and thick and grey as the trunk of a walnut tree, with a ring of curved thorns at the tip. Genovefa was a wellspring of knowledge indeed.
She pointed to Father Roland, now kneeling in prayer, eyes pressed shut. This priest has the same penis, she said, and I dare him to prove me wrong. Father Roland choked out a protest and pushed himself up from the grass. As he stumbled away, Genovefa pulled the wood crucifix from his collar and clutched it between her teeth.
Clothilde and Martine had broken the narrow windows of their cells and climbed through to join Genovefa in the courtyard. They raged like creatures I hoped to never encounter in the forest. In response, the nuns around me tore off their veils and wimples and caps, their scapulars and belts and tunics. The warm afternoon sun burned their once-hidden skin.
Clothilde lifted one of the wine jugs and smashed it against the other. Shards as clear as December ice on the Rhine flew toward torsos, thighs, shoulders. The courtyard swelled with blood and glass and sunlight and dancing. Clothilde held her bleeding arm aloft. She said she was now possessed by the spirit of the blessed Beatrice of Ornacieux, who drove a nail through her own hand to experience the suffering of the Crucifixion. How is Clothilde of Strasbourg so different? she said to the nuns writhing in the courtyard. How will she be remembered? For her obedience or for her blood?
I made the sign of the cross and knelt. My prayers came swiftly like a plague fever. A few remaining nuns joined me. Who would the madness touch next? Who would the devil choose to anoint with his pestilent staff?
The breeze from the courtyard carried the pungent scents of grapes and exhausted, sweating bodies. I opened my mouth and, without thinking, breathed in the dangerous air. Now that it was in my mouth, I had no choice. I swallowed the infection.
I prayed for the sickness to pass through me without incident. I did not doubt my piety. But I also did not deserve the bewildering torment it gave, the thrill, the ecstasy, the passion.
Or perhaps I was worthy. I had been pious. I had been patient. I had chosen to hold my breath until now.
I took the hand of the nearest girl. With a shiver passing through me, a bell ringing in my bones, I slid her finger between my teeth.
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Michele H. Porter lives in southern Illinois and works as a nonprofit proposal writer. Her stories are in Bloodletter Magazine, 100-Word Story, and others. More of her fiction can be found at www.michelehporter.com. | |