The Best American Short Stories 2015 (13 page)

“Only burns,” Aoife whispers, “from Prioress Ethelburh's hellish candle.”

Wilda allows her knuckles to stray across Aoife's soft cheek.

“I was out walking in the garden,” says Aoife, “watching the moon shine on the snow, and she . . .”

Sister Lufe bustles in with a rank wheel of sheep's cheese, and the two girls jump apart. Aoife dumps melted snow into her pot of dried peas (the well is frozen). Wilda hacks at a black cured beef tongue (the last of it). Outside, the sun glares down on the endless white blight of snow. The trees are rimed with frost, the woodpile obscured, the garden paths obliterated.

Wilda kneels on cold stone, stomach grumbling. For supper she had three spoons of watery cabbage soup and a mug of barley beer. The crude brew still sings in her bloodstream as she takes up pen and parchment.

The Lammbbe will come again
, she writes, murmuring the word
Lammbbe
, reveling in its deep, buzzing hum. She closes her eyes, pictures Jesus hot and carnified, walking through snow. Frost melts upon contact with his burning flesh.
Walking accrosse the barren earthe
, she writes,
the Lammbbe wille leeve a hotte traile of lillies
. When he steps into the convent orchard, the cherry trees burst into bloom.
Thirty-sixe virgines stand in white arraye, pearles withoute spotte
. The nuns stand in order of age upon the lawn, ranging from thirteen-year-old Sister Ilsa to sixty-eight-year-old Elgaruth. Jesus pauses before twenty-three-year-old Wilda. He smiles with infinite wisdom. He touches her cheek with his hand, peers into her eyes to look upon her naked soul. Wilda feels the heat from his spirit. At first she can't look at his face. But then she looks up from the grass and sees him: eyes like molten gold, lips parted to show a hint of pearly teeth, a tongue as pink as a peony.

“My bride,” he says.

And cherubim scream withe joye, squirminge naked in the frothe of heavene
.

The shrieks grow louder—so loud that Wilda looks up from her book. She's back in the convent, hunkered on the cold floor. She gets up, walks down the hallway, turns left by the lavatory. The screaming is coming from the sad room where nuns are punished, but Wilda has never heard a ruckus in the middle of the night. She peeks in, sees Aoife seated, skirts pulled up, hair wild, eyes huge and streaming. Prioress Ethelburh twists the young nun's arms behind her back. Prioress Willa burns Aoife's creamy left thigh with red-hot pincers. This time, Aoife does not scream. She bites her lip. She looks up, sees Wilda standing in the doorway. Their eyes meet. A secret current flows between them. Ethelburh turns toward Wilda, her mouth wrenched with wrath, but then a violent cough rocks through her. She shakes, sputters, drops to the floor. And Aoife leaps from the chair like a wild rabbit. In a flash she is halfway down the hall.

“Surely mockers are with me,” says Prioress Willa, casting her clammy fisheye upon Wilda, “and my eye gazes on their provocation.”

The next morning, Ethelburh is dead, her body dragged beyond the courtyard by hulking Sister Githa, a poor half-wit fearless of contagion. Twelve bodies lie frozen near the edge of the wood, to be buried when the ground thaws.

Aoife is singing in her mother tongue, the words incomprehensible to Wilda, pure and abstract as birdsong, floating amid the steam of the kitchen. Poor old Lufe is dead. Hedda and Lark have passed. Only Hazel, the girl who carries bowls from door to door, loiters in the larder, bolder now that Lufe is gone, inspecting the dwindling bags of flour.

“Prioress Willa has taken to her bed,” whispers Aoife.

“God bless her soul,” says Wilda, crossing herself.

Aoife chops the last of the onions. Wilda picks worms from the flour. And the soup smells strange: boiled flesh of a stringy old hen.

“Sister,” says Aoife, her mouth dipping close to Wilda's ear, “I have heard that the Abbess kept food in her chamber. Pickled things and sweetmeats. A shame to let it go to waste, with our sisters half starved and weak.”

Snow falls outside the kitchen door, which is propped open with a log to let the smoke drift out. The light in the courtyard is a strange dusky pink, even though it is afternoon. Wilda thinks of Jesus, multiplying fishes and loaves. She sees the bread materializing, hot and swollen with yeast. She pictures the fish—teeming, shimmering, and salty in wooden pails.

“Sister,” says Wilda, “you speak the truth.”

The Abbess lived in the turret over the library, and the two nuns tiptoe up winding stairs. The door is locked. Aoife smirks and fishes a key from her pocket. Aoife opens the door and steps into the room first. Wilda stumbles after her, bumps into Aoife's softness, stands breathing in the darkness, smelling mold and rot and stale perfume—myrrh, incense, vanilla. Aoife pushes dusty drapes aside, discovering windowpanes in a diamond pattern, alternating ruby and clear. The nuns marvel at the furnishings: the spindly settee upholstered in brocade, the ebony wardrobe with pheasants carved into its doors, several gilded trunks, and the grandest bed they have ever seen: big as a barge, the coverlet festooned in crimson ruffles, the canopy draped in wine velvet. Wilda wonders how the crooked little Abbess climbed into this enormity each night, and then she spots a ladder of polished wood leaning against the bed.

Aoife opens a trunk, pulls out forbidden things: a lute, a fur-lined cape, a crystal vial of perfume, and a bottle of belladonna. They find a clockwork mouse that creeps when you wind it up (a mechanism that Aoife, oddly, seems to understand). The girls giggle as the mouse moves across the floor. Aoife strokes the ermine cape as though it is a sleeping beast. Wilda leans against the settee, but does not allow herself to sit. The second trunk is chock-full of dainty food: small clay jars of pickled things, dried fruit in linen sacks, hard sausages in cheesecloth, venison jerky, nuts, honey, wine.

Aoife opens a pot of pickled herring, sniffs, eats a mouthful, chews, and then offers the fish to Wilda. They taste fresh, briny, tinged with lemon. Something awakens in Wilda, a tiny sea monster in her stomach, so weak and shriveled that she hardly knew it existed. She feels it stretching strange tentacles, opening its fanged mouth to unleash a wild groan. Wilda is starving. She gnaws at a twisted strand of venison, tasting forests in the salty meat, the deer shot by a nobleman's arrow, strips roasted over open flame. When Aoife opens a pot of strawberry preserves, she moans as sweetness fills the room—a kind of sorcery, the essence of a sun-warmed berry field trapped in a tiny crock. Aoife eats with her fingers, tears in the creases of her eyes. And then she offers the jar to Wilda. Wilda pauses, feels the monster slithering in her gut, dips a finger, and tastes the rich, seedy jelly.

“Hallelujah!” she whispers, smacking her lips. She eats more strawberries. Offers the pot to Aoife. But Aoife has discovered a stash of sugared almonds. Wilda tries them: butter roasted with cinnamon and cloves, a hint of salt, some other spice, unfamiliar, bewitching. The nuns sit down on the soft settee and spread their feast on a carved trunk. They eat smoked fish, dried apricots, pickled carrots, and red currant jam. Suddenly very thirsty, they have no choice but to uncork a bottle of wine, passing it between them. After shaving off teal mold with a small gilded knife, they consume a chunk of hard cheese. And then they discover, wrapped in lilac gauze, a dozen pink marzipan rabbits.

The monster in Wilda's stomach lets out a bellow. She can picture it, lolling in a hot stew of food, the scales on its swollen belly glistening. She pops a candy into her mouth, closes her eyes, tastes manna, angel food, milk of paradise. The young nuns drink more wine. And now Aoife is up on her feet. She opens the Abbess's wardrobe, rifles through gowns and cloaks. She pulls out a winter frock, thick velvet, the luminous color of moss, sable fur around the neck and cuffs. Wilda looks away as Aoife undresses.

“How do I look?” Aoife asks, still buttoning up the bodice, contorting like an acrobat as though she has pulled on fine frocks a hundred times before.

Wilda tries to speak, but the words will not come. Her throat feels dry. She takes another swig of wine.

The dress brings out the secret lights in Aoife's eyes, the swan-like curve of her neck.

Wilda feels ugly, small, though she has not seen her reflection in a good, clear mirror in seven years, not since her parents and brother died and her aunt sent her off to the convent.

Aoife chooses a fur cloak from the wardrobe, slips it over Wilda's shoulders. Wilda feels cold, but then a feeling of delicious warmth overtakes her, and her spine relaxes. Aoife picks up the lute, strums a strange tune, sings a song in her mother tongue that makes Wilda feel like she's dream flying, her stomach buckling as she soars too fast into whirling stars, the air thin and strange and barely breathable.

Imitating the Abbess, Aoife hobbles over to the bed, climbs up the ladder, peeks over the edge at Wilda, who can't stop laughing.

“It's a boat,” Aoife says, crawling around like a child. Wilda remembers her brother, galloping around on his stick horse. Memories like these stopped haunting her two years ago, part of the earthly existence she has kept at bay. Now she remembers the two of them rolling in the garden, flowers in their fists, singing bawdy songs they barely understood, laughing so hard she thought her ribs would crack. She remembers the way her parents would scold them with stanched smiles, trying not to laugh themselves.

Wilda climbs up the ladder. She sits beside Aoife on the high bed. The stiff fabric of the coverlet smells of must and myrrh.

“Look!” says Aoife, opening a cabinet built into the bed's headboard. Inside is a crystal decanter encrusted with a ruby cross, a burgundy liquid inside it. Aoife sniffs, takes a sip.

“Wine,” she says dreamily, “though it might be some kind of liqueur.”

Aoife offers the bottle. Wilda drinks, tasting blackberries and brine and blood, she thinks, though she has never tasted blood, for the Sacrament does not transubstantiate until it passes into the kettle of the stomach, where it is boiled by the liver's heat, the same way alchemists turn base metals into gold. Some kind of matter floats in the liquid. Wilda feels grit between her teeth. The grit dissolves and the world glows, a fresh surge of pink light shining through red windowpanes.

Aoife's hand scurries like a white mouse over the coverlet to stroke Wilda's left wrist. Their fingers intertwine. Wilda marvels at the deliciousness of the warmth streaming between them.

The two sisters sit holding hands, leaning against thick down pillows, sipping the strange concoction at the very top of a stone fortress, snow falling in the eternal twilight outside—upon the monastery and meadows and forests, upon frozen ponds and farms and villages. They discuss beasts in winter, the mysteries of hibernation, the burrows and holes where furry animals and scaly things sleep.

“Do you think their blood freezes?” whispers Aoife, her breath on Wilda's cheek. “Do you think they dream?”

Wilda has the strange feeling that everyone in the world is dead. That she and Aoife are completely alone in an enchanted castle. That they are just on the verge of some miraculous transformation.

Wilda wakes to the clanging of monastery bells. She clutches her throbbing head. She tries to sit up, thinking she's on her cot. But then she smells musty perfumes, odors of pickled fish and honey, and her cheeks burn as the previous night's feast comes back to her in patches. How had it happened so fast?

Her swollen belly throbs with queasiness, the sea monster slithering in a mash of wine and food. She has no choice but to lean over the bedside and heave a foul gruel onto the floor. Bright sunlight shines through the windows. How long has she been asleep? She turns to Aoife, still dozing beside her. Not Aoife—where is Aoife?—but the Abbess's fur cloak, crumpled, patched with bald spots, sprawling like a mangy bear. She remembers a tale from her childhood, about a fair woman who turned into a bear. The she-bear scratched out the eyes of lovesick hunters and devoured them whole. The bear, like Aoife, had eyes the color of honey. She sang with the voice of a nightingale, luring hunters into deep woods.

Wilda climbs down from the bed, hurries back to her cell, and latches her door. She paces around the cramped space, feeling the rankness of the flesh upon her bones, the puffery of her belly, the sea monster roiling within. Her brow and cheeks are hot. She wants to check on Aoife, see how she feels, laugh about the previous night's feast—a whim, a trifle, nothing—but her skin burns with shame. She pictures Aoife singing in her green dress. She imagines fur sprouting from her freckled skin, yellow claws popping from her fingertips.

Wilda vows to stay in her room without eating, without sleeping, whipping herself until the hideous sea monster ceases to squirm in her belly, until she has purged her flesh of excess fluid and heat and is again a bird-boned vessel of divine love—arid, clean, glowing with the Word. She has a clay bottle of water, almost full, the only thing she needs.

Wilda kneels on the floor, naked, whipping herself for the third time, bored with the effect, not feeling much in the way of spinal tingling, her mind as dull as a scummy pond. She sighs. Tries not to think of Aoife, the lightness of her laughter. She contemplates Christ in his agony—hauling the cross, grimacing as iron nails are hammered into his feet and hands, staring stoically at the sun on an endless afternoon, thorns pricking his roasted brow. But the images feel rote like a rosary prayer. So she hangs her whip on a nail and lies down on her bed. She watches her window, waiting for the day to go dark, the light outside milky and tedious. She hasn't eaten for two days, but her belly feels puffed up like a lusty toad. Contemplating the beauty of Christ's rib cage, the exquisite concavity of his starved and hairless stomach, she shivers.

When she hears the giggle of young nuns running down the hallway outside her door, her heart beats faster. And there's Aoife again, knocking softly with her knuckles.