All Out--The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages
Page 23
“Was I wrong? I mean, the tooth fairy isn’t real,” I said, feeling a little guilty that I ruined a bit of Katie’s childhood frivolity.
“Yeah, but couldn’t we have just enjoyed the tooth fairy for a moment before you rationalized the joy away?”
She had a point. The jerk.
“You’re not going to wake up tomorrow and pretend like it didn’t happen, are you?”
She placed her hand on top of mine.
“I’m not making any plans to take you to prom,” she said and I don’t think I’d be ready for that, either. She continued, “But I’m sorry about ignoring you. I thought it’d be easier than dealing with uh—you know. Feelings.”
“Ugh. Feelings are gross,” I said softly. “Don’t shut me out again. I get why you did, but don’t.”
“Never. I just couldn’t deal then. I still sort of can’t deal now. But you know, the world only ends so often.” She rubbed her thumb over my knuckles.
“Now that I’ve officially killed the mood, do you want to sleep over? No funny business; I’ll take the couch downstairs.”
“No funny business indeed,” she said with a smirk. “But don’t be stupid. We can share the bed. I’ll keep my hands to myself.”
* * *
On New Year’s Day, I woke up alone. The T-shirt and sweatpants I had given Katie the night before to wear as pajamas were folded neatly at the edge of my bed. No funny business had taken place, but I thought she’d at least stick around to talk. I shifted in bed and heard a paper crinkle. I tried to figure out where it was coming from and smiled when I found the note under my pillow. Tooth fairy style.
It read: “Happy New Year, Ez. The world has not ended. We’re going to be okay. Tell your mom I couldn’t stay for breakfast. I have to go break up with John. Talk soon.”
I read the note another twenty times on the first day of the New Year. I felt warm and thrilled, but a little uneasy as to why. Katie Brewer. Huh. Who knew? Maybe we both did. Maybe it was a long time coming or maybe it wasn’t. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to find a better New Year’s kiss for many New Years to come.
I had a whole slew of questions about what the future would hold now.
* * * * *
THREE WITCHES
BY
TESSA GRATTON
Kingdom of Castile, 1519
I.
I’m not a witch, she says to herself as the bolt slides back on the door to her cell. I am Violante Donoso, and I am not a witch.
Weakness forces her slowly to the straw mattress, one shoulder pressed to the plain stone wall. She breathes carefully around pangs of hunger. Beneath her, the mattress ropes creak in the bed’s simple wooden frame; she imagines her bones just as brittle holding her together—holding her alive.
Thin sunlight spears through the single high window just over her bed. At midmorning, light shines across the cell to the crucifix hanging opposite, carved of very fine black wood. That, the bed, a single chair, soft pillow and a rosary are all she’s been allowed these weeks.
Two at least, though hunger and boredom—and growing terror—lost her the edge of passing time. She’d not thought, when she’d first stumbled in here, loosed from the tight grip of the Sister to fall hard on her knees, that she should scratch the floor or foot of the bed to mark the days.
“Good morning,” a voice murmurs, soft as unused silk. These Sisters rarely speak, she’s been told. Cloistered here, they offer their voices only to the Holy Mother.
Violante opens her eyes. Two women, both in white tunics and scapulars bound at the waist with plain leather belts: the elder wears a black mantle and black veil and holds a heavy wooden rosary in her folded hands as she positions herself in the corner, unspeaking. Her clear gray eyes watch Violante with an eerie hunger.
The younger girl, Violante’s age, wears no mantle, and her black veil fits against her head exactly as luscious long black hair might. Her skin is as warm a gold as burning sunlight, and those magnificent deep brown eyes console Violante’s starvation.
Morisco, Violante thinks before she can stop herself. If this girl is from a Morisco family, how did she end up a Sister of Our Lady? A beautiful, dangerous sister.
“Good...morning,” Violante says, mouth tacky.
The young Sister kneels at Violante’s bedside to place a small tray with water and a clay bowl of broth against the packed-dirt floor. She remains kneeling, hands folded in her lap. “I would like for you to eat, Violante Donoso.”
“I am not hungry.” Violante raises her chin, though her lips quiver at the smell of simple broth.
“If you starved yourself for our Mother, or to free yourself of the world, I would admire your force of will, but you do not, little sister, and it does not punish us. Eat, that we may help you.”
“Tell me your name.”
“And you will eat?”
Violante hesitates, glancing at the elder Sister, silent in the corner. That one stares intently; she could never persuade Violante to eat.
“Violante?” murmurs the young Morisco Sister.
The ease with which a beautiful girl can seduce Violante has been the core of her troubles all her life. A beautiful girl destroyed her once. But Violante is so hungry, and so lonely, and she did nothing truly wrong! She says, “I will eat, if you stay.”
The brown-eyed Sister smiles, and after these weeks of lethargy and spiked fury, Violante is comforted.
“I am Gracia Magdalena.” The Sister lifts the clay bowl of broth and brings it to Violante’s lips.
* * *
Every day Gracia Magdalena comes with the silent elder Sister.
“I’m not a witch,” Violante says aloud to Gracia Magdalena on the third day. She’s graduated to bread with her broth, and her stomach no longer twists and knots so badly as before.
“Who said that you were?” Gracia blinks those large brown eyes.
Violante glances at the silent Sister, who leans in the corner where the sunlight never shows. Watching. “My brother, Lucas, who brought me here.”
“He fears for you.”
“He’s wrong.”
“To fear? Something put that fear inside him.”
“I did nothing but love.”
Gracia frowns, and it is as beautiful as her smile. “Tell me.”
This is how Gracia converses with Violante: small nudges, open doors. She says nothing about herself, but offers brief contemplative words for Violante to expand upon.
Violante touches Gracia’s hand; her own fingers are pink and raw from making fists and scratching at her scalp, pulling her hair. Gracia’s wrist is soft, the gentlest brown, and warm. “My friend Inés. I love her, and so my brother brought me here.”
“Love would not frighten a good man.”
“Love alone is my sin. There is nothing else it could be.”
“Love is no sin. Love alone does not harm us, or turn us from the Virgin. Acting on love, though, can lead us away from her. If the act is a sin.”
“This is no confession,” Violante says darkly. “I do not confess.”
“You are not on trial, my sister, and I have no authority to hear confession.”
Violante pulls back her hands. “Then why are you here? Why do you come again and again? Why am I prisoner? When can I go home?”
“You are ill with temptation. You need to be freed from the voices of demons. You must pray and be absolved. What...what tempted you, Violante?”
“I am not ill!” Violante stands up, swaying. She glares at the Sister standing in the corner, then at Gracia Magdalena. “Get out!”
* * *
Violante huddles in the dark corner of her cell. Through the window she hears singing: not the Sisters, but birds flitting about in the early morning, before the sun itself rises.
I am not a witch.
She thin
ks of the fire in her hips, the beat of her heart and how transported she’d been by only Inés’s soft mouth. Better than prayer, better than wine. Better than wind in her hair when she rides on the back of Lucas’s horse, or the thrill of ghostly danger when the rafters in their house moan. Ah, Inés! Ah, your palms and flick of your eyelashes against my skin. Was that witchcraft? The heat of the hearth their only light, their urgent breath a music more sacred than any monastic song. Joyous life, like those birds outside the tiny window. Singing for each other.
* * *
The first time Gracia Magdalena offers Violante fruit, it is a dried fig along with her bread. Violante lets the wrinkled, soft skin touch her bottom lip, enjoying the tension as her teeth press down, not quite breaking through; then the skin splits and the sticky, sweet mass fills her mouth.
Gracia’s lips part, as if she, too, would eat a fig. Violante smiles.
* * *
The elder Sister never speaks, but brings with her a basket of sewing and kneels in her corner. As a guard, an honor, a chaperone. Gracia Magdalena never even glances her way. It puzzles Violante, but she determines to also ignore the woman with her strange colorless eyes.
Gracia leads Violante in praying the Holy Rosary every day, soft and gentle, and Violante does not mind, for she’s never begrudged the Virgin a moment of time. The prayers are soothing, and Gracia traces the beads with an adoration that puts shivers along Violante’s spine. Would that the bones of her back were beads of the rosary, and Gracia skimmed her fingers against them so ardently.
That, Violante realizes, is a thought Gracia Magdalena and Lucas and all the world would find to be heresy. But this feeling must be the same as the one Gracia feels for the Holy Mother: love. Adoration. A longing to share. For Gracia’s fingers do linger at each bead, seeming reluctant to move on to the next, as if the simple knots of carved wood were the Virgin’s own knuckles, fingers, wrists.
“Violante,” Gracia murmurs at the end of the second decade of beads. The girls contemplate the Glorious Mysteries as they pray, for Gracia hopes meditation upon the Virgin’s grace and the hope of resurrection will lead Violante away from earthly temptation. Each ten-bead decade holds space for considering a single Mystery.
“Hmm?” Violante does not take her gaze off Gracia’s fingers, which hold a smooth red bead like a drop of holy blood.
“You stopped praying.”
Violante lifts her eyes. Gracia sits beside her on the creaking straw mattress, their shoulders near enough the slightest breath could lean them together.
“Are you well?” Concern melts in Gracia’s brown eyes.
“Yes. Please don’t stop.”
Gracia touches the back of Violante’s hand, and it’s a struggle to remain still. Violante begins the next prayer, and halfway through Gracia joins her.
In the corner, the elder Sister watches both girls, following their prayers along her own rosary beads but never speaking the words aloud.
* * *
Violante wonders, at night, if they send Gracia Magdalena to her as temptation. They know why Lucas brought her here, and had they sent a less lovely girl, or an old Sister as wrinkled as a grandmother, how could they know if prayer and isolation had cured her yet?
She dares not ask, for if Gracia stops visiting, Violante will be alone.
* * *
They bring her out beyond the cloister wall to meet her brother. It has been a month since he dragged her here.
Violante wears a clean linen shift and plain kirtle, sandals, and nothing else. She was allowed to wash with soap and water, given a cord to tie the end of her braid, and a simple veil to cover her head. Lucas will never have seen her so plain, nor anyone in her life since she was a babe. Inés would disdain such common garments after the layers of velvet and vermilion linens she’d regularly laced and pulled around Violante’s body.
Her brother sits on a short stone bench beside a flare of pink roses that climb the outer cloister wall. His red hat tilts left to shade his eyes from the sun, and his doublet is rich brown, deep and magnificent and slashed to show creamy linen beneath. Its full-striped skirt covers him to his knees; his pink hose are at least two shades darker than the roses. He is so handsome and glorious that Violante pauses, afraid and desperate.
More a father to her since their own had died in the Americas eight years ago, since Lucas brought back almost immeasurable riches, he should be taking care of her, not hiding her away.
Violante pretends heavy velvet skirts hang off her hips, and a bodice with some elaborate, stiff embroidery presses her together like armor. She imagines half her hair in a crown of braids, a lace veil of perfect snowy white trailing down over her hanging curls.
“Violante!” Lucas says eagerly when he hears her footfalls. He clasps her hands and inspects her. “You’re thin. They tell me you ate nothing for days, darling. Do you feel better?”
Hands limp in his, Violante says nothing. His skin is dry and stained with ink at the fingertips, which their mother would hate. She turns them over to the whiter, softer skin of his palms. “Take me home,” she finally whispers. It is not strong. She does not feel strong.
“Are you...well?”
“I always have been.” She jerks her chin up to glare at him.
But Lucas’s loving eyes narrow at the edges as he frowns. He shakes his head. “No, you—you long for unnatural things. You must stay, if you do not see so!”
“Lucas!” Violante pulls free of him, stumbling away. She hugs her stomach, clawing her nails into her own elbows. I am not a witch.
Behind her, Lucas touches her shoulders. “Try to understand, little sun, I beg you. I want you to come home, but... I won’t have it in my house. I need you good and pure and ready to do your duty, whether that be to our family or to a husband.”
“I am!”
“Your soul, little sun. I worry on it.”
Violante bites her lip. Her brother sleeps poorly in the summer, when the days are longest and hottest, and cries out with nightmares he never had before he went to conquer across the sea. Only Violante soothes him, only she cheers the haunting woe from his voice, the tears from his eyes. He is excellent at covering it, but it soon will be Easter, and then the nightmares will come again. He means to say, “My soul. I am afraid for my soul, little sister.”
“I am well, Lucas,” she whispers, leaning back against him.
“Another month here.” He squeezes her shoulders. “Find peace, and righteousness, and the Holy Mother’s blessings.”
Grief and fear sink down through her, dragging at her heart, heavy in her guts, like a hot stone in her womb. She covers her belly with both hands and feels the sinking sensation that presages her bleeding. “Lucas, don’t leave me here,” she begs.
“Violante, give up your sins and come home.”
They aren’t sins.
* * *
But she isn’t certain.
Blood stains the hem of her shift, and Violante huddles in the very corner of the cell that silent elder Sister prefers. All night she weeps, bleeding trickles of life out of herself because she refuses to call for help. She whispers the Holy Rosary, wondering if Mary, the Mother of God, bled. She had to, did she not? To bear a child.
The Holy Mother was a virgin who never knew any man, and so is Violante. She prays, she knows the ecstasy of love and longing, desire, and the pure, perfect happiness of hands on hands, lips on lips, the breeze of fluttered lashes. Yet she has never known any man.
Is that not perfect love?
“Why is desire not holy?” she asks Gracia the moment the girl enters in the morning.
But Gracia Magdalena screams and drops her tray of food and water. “Violante! Violante!” She scrambles to Violante, who startles back in shock.
“What have you done? What is...” Slowly Gracia regains herself, leans back on her heels.
In silence, Gracia begins to clean the spilled food, gather the broken clay bowl that had held a simple stew of vegetables. Salty, sweet broth and the uncomfortably similar scent of blood mingle in the cell. Violante stands, wiping the floor with the hem of her shift.
Another Sister, one Violante has never seen, and formidable in the black veil and mantle, comes with a clean shift and wrappings for Violante. To prevent such an inappropriate mess. A third Sister brings fresh food and drink. There is no sight of the silent Sister and her basket of sewing.
Violante washes and changes, then eats in the presence of all. When she finishes, Gracia is left alone with her, but only briefly. She gathers the bowl and water onto her new tray and watches Violante for a long, resonant moment.
“Desire can be holy if it is desire for God,” she says, and before Violante may reply, leaves.
Violante sinks to her knees and whispers, “Hail, Holy Queen,” but it is not the Virgin’s bright cheeks and warm heart to whom she prays.
II.
Oh, Holy Mother!
Blessed Queen of Heaven!
To you do I cry in my moment of desperate need.
To you.
I don’t know what to do.
Hail, Holy Queen. Mother of mercy, of life, of sweetness and hope, hail. To you do I cry, a poor banished daughter of Eve, to you do I send up my sighs, my mourning and weeping from this, the vale of tears. Turn to me, most gracious Advocate, your eyes of mercy, and after my exile, show unto me the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus Christ. Oh, clement, oh, loving, oh, sweet Virgin Mary. Pray for me, that I may be worthy of the promises of Christ.
Salve, Regina, Mater misericordiae,
Vita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salve.
Salve.
Salve!
I want to let her kiss me.
* * *
The blood frightened me, and also gave to my mind’s eye the thought of His sacrifice—the poor seeping wounds of Christ. That is wrong, wrong! I know it, but her eyes blaze with such ferocity of purpose, Holy Mother. To disregard her is like disregarding my own heart. I do not know how to turn away.