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Notes on This Manuscript

The following manuscript, printed here for the first time, came to light on the eve of November 4, 2024. While on a self-directed silent retreat at the Riverdale Center in the Hudson Valley, a Franciscan sister uncovered a plastic bag nestled in the hedges surrounding the life-sized crucifix erected in the cemetery of fallen sisters. The Franciscan sister believed the bag was trash, perhaps a forgotten bundle of dried leaves, and, in her due diligence to this distressed planet, retrieved the bag to toss on the compost in the garden. But the Franciscan sister, taking note of the bag’s unusual weight, undid the plastic knots to find a bulk of printed papers bound with a strip of gray cloth, cut from a pair of fleece sweatpants, or maybe a sweatshirt. Despite the valley’s unpredictable elements, the manuscript’s black lettering was clear and pristine. Still, the sister needed her prescription glasses, so she took the manuscript to her room on the third floor. The following morning, the Franciscan sister broke her self-imposed solitude to announce her discovery to the prioress of the Dominican order that owns this land, which rests upon the Traditional Territory of the Sint Sinck Tribe.  

The prioress, along with the order’s Millennial Archivist, spent six weeks inspecting the manuscript. We were, admittedly, distracted. We’d organized a six-hour-long Zoom session of contemplation and reflection the night of the presidential election. Although we prepared for all kinds of scenarios, we hadn’t accounted for discovering an anonymously written manuscript on this property initially belonging to the Sint Sinck people. The Millennial Archivist kept her camera off during the Zoom session and began annotating a copy of the manuscript with a mechanical pencil. She didn’t look at an electoral map the whole night.  

No name was attached to the manuscript, but we believe Mary is the primary author. 

Mary does not appear to be a vowed religious sister nor an official member of the Third Order; we have identified her as a street person. She arrived at the Riverdale Center in the fall of 2021, around Thanksgiving, which our order now observes as a collective day of mourning. According to our records, Mary was vaccinated (twice), but she did not receive her boosters. She lived on the third floor’s eastern wing, where the order previously housed refugee families and, before that, a rebellious sister with an equally defiant tabby cat, Siena. But Mary lived alone in Room 356, which has a view of the river only partially obstructed by the center’s towering white steeple. 

We used the order’s medical records to trace the events of Chapter One to March 2022, though it was difficult, since Sister Louise holds the order’s record for hip replacements. Numerous scraps and fragments—bodega and liquor-store receipts, business cards, even an out-of-print missal—were also tucked inside the manuscript’s pages. We have determined that the majority of these writings belong to the women we have named The Magdalenes. Our Millennial Archivist reconstructed these fragments and dated them between 2004 and 2024. We deduced that The Magdalenes lived together in an institutional Catholic group home between 2011 and 2012. (The timestamps on those bodega and liquor-store receipts helped us immensely.) 

Most peculiarly, the cloth that bound the original manuscript was stained with what appeared to be blood. Unfortunately, neither our order nor the Riverdale Center had the technology to test the composition of these stains, so we must concede that this is only an educated conjecture. One of our sisters thought it could just be ketchup, or perhaps some type of hot sauce. At the time of this writing, our Millennial Archivist is consulting a forensic anthropologist she once dated in New York.  

While we have annotated this manuscript to the best of our shared abilities, we of the Dominican order that owns this land once inhabited by the Sint Sinck people have not verified all the claims in this manuscript. We are certain that there existed an institutional Catholic group home for young women in the Northeast; we have identified the city as Philadelphia. We have not yet identified the order of nuns that ran this group home, nor all of the women named in this manuscript. Some of our sisters have offered differing interpretations. We acknowledge that these writings, divine and mysterious as they are, are open to interpretation. We do, however, repudiate any claims of heresy that may form in the minds of readers.  

Despite Mary’s non-institutional status, we found great truth and compassionate wisdom in the experiences illuminated here, and so, we affirm Mary and her place in our canon of saints.  

—The Dominican Sisters of Charity of the Riverdale Center, the Traditional Territory of the Sint Sinck Tribe (Ossining, New York), January 2025  

 

The Gospel According to Mary, As Reconstructed by the Millennial Archivist 

(c. 2004 C.E.)

Mary Magdalene told me I wasn’t fit to play the Virgin Mary. We should switch roles, Mary Magdalene said. We sat cross-legged behind the canvas tomb of Jesus, thumbing through the latest issue of Cosmopolitan, which I’d bought at Wawa even though I pretended these women’s glossies never worked on me. It was a pretense I kept up thirteen years later when I plugged the tip of my tongue into a man’s urethra, and he asked—Did Cosmo teach you that?—and I couldn’t say they did. Mary Magdalene didn’t know this story. We were only sixteen here, Cosmo had yet to publish that mediocre tip, and the only blow jobs I ever gave lasted ninety seconds in half-finished basements and suburban cornfields. Mary Magdalene had yet to give anyone a blow job, let alone be kissed. 

Mary Magdalene wanted to know about everything I did. Imagine Mary having to teach Mary Magdalene everything she knows—and not about piety or purity. Mary Magdalene was always better at those things. After all, it was Mary Magdalene who hung around Jesus’s tomb for three days until that giant rock rolled away. Really, who’s to say Mary Magdalene was a whore at all? We all knew she married Jesus. We were yelled at for saying that in CCD class because if Jesus was married, then priests could get married too, and there goes Catholicism. 

Or maybe it’s because no one wanted to marry Mary Magdalene. 

I didn’t think any boys wanted to marry me, and I didn’t want to marry them. But I had the most community service hours; I volunteered at the homeless shelter, the nursing home, and the thrift shop. I attended Mass every Sunday and never missed a holy day of obligation. I went to an anti-abortion march and held a Defend Life sign, because I didn’t think defending life and sex went together. And so, they cast me as the Virgin Mary two years in a row. 

She really is a good girl, the adults said about me at church. 

Beneath the darkened bingo board at the back of the church hall, Mary Magdalene flung her red veil onto the linoleum. That’s what the boys say about her, too. 

 

CHAPTER ONE

Holy Saturday (approx. 2022 C.E.)

When snow falls in the valley, hawks circle hungrily above the Hudson, stilled and steely beneath the ice. After breakfast, I trekked across the cliff to the sisters’ cemetery, the half-dozen rows of bronze plaques concealed entirely in white. It was the last weekend of March, an early Triduum, and the priest, the old Jesuit who preferred a bow tie over a starched collar, was stuck on top of the hill, the city having prematurely retired all of its snowplows. Sister Rosemarie refused to call the town parish for backup. She’d warned me about those young Dominican men—she didn’t even want them on the property. So, it would be Sister Rosemarie giving the Holy Saturday blessing in the cafeteria: Święconka, a Polish tradition. Only a few locals would attend anyway. But let’s not make a big stink of it, Sister Rosemarie said when I gave her the prayers I downloaded from liturgies.com. It wasn’t like Sister Rosemarie was celebrating the Eucharist or baptizing a child—just blessing, in broken Polish, baskets of cinnamon babka and streakily dyed eggs.  

I shoveled a narrow pathway to the oversized crucifix, dusted an ashy coating off Jesus’s feet. No one ever visited the sisters’ cemetery; only an uneven break in the holly hedges marked the entrance. I’d often wondered when these sisters last had a visitor—a real one. A descendant. Someone who knew their birth names. But the sisters buried here were among the first of the order to move to the States, some with death dates still in the 1800s, so I liked to maintain the graves, sweeping away dead leaves and stray twigs from the oxidized plaques in the fall and planting pink geraniums in the spring. Around Christmastime, I tacked a red-threaded wreath above Jesus’s crown of thorns, those cheap metal bells whistling until the new year.  

This wasn’t part of my job description at Riverdale. The sisters had stopped calling it a convent years ago; they preferred retreat center, and I was their hospitality assistant. The pale brick building spanned three stories and four wings—in the shape of a cross, naturally—and once housed over one hundred sisters. Now, if the sisters weren’t in the larger cemetery in town, they were moved into assisted living. Only Sisters Rosemarie and Louise remained on these sixty wooded acres, sharing a three-room hut at the edge of the dusty lilac meadow, the former site of an open-air skating rink. Their hut served as the rink’s warming house, and the sisters still used its majestic stone fireplace during the winter for roasting marshmallows. On slow nights, when the only retreatants were elderly Capuchin friars—the good men, Sister Rosemarie approved—the sisters would invite me inside their hut for Scrabble and s’mores. Otherwise, I cleaned toilets, mopped floors, and washed bedsheets. I checked in guests and stayed on call overnight and on weekends. In return, the sisters rewarded me with free cafeteria meals and a room on the third floor equipped with a twin bed, a desk, and a private ceramic sink. 

I discarded the shovel and followed the pathway, the residual snow just beginning to soften. You were supposed to sit and meditate, but I often found myself moving. You’re a waddler, my rehab roommate called me. She was the one who told me about the charnel grounds—she likened it to shock therapy. Can you jolt yourself out of this body? A lesson in aversion she learned from the Buddha via her newly divorced guru from Nyack. She paid him $200 to visit a cadaver lab and spent ten minutes vomiting into a plastic bucket. I guess it was a success, my rehab roommate laughed. She wanted to know if I’d ever catapulted out of here. 

I understood why people want to leave their bodies. None of the sisters here understood it. Sisters Rosemarie and Louise would watch news reports of the tent cities crowding Hunts Point and debate the efficacy of safe injection sites. Should we start one here? What would the bishops say? The sisters always described it—this whole state of things—as painful. Painful to take in, painful to comprehend. Think of all their families. I never told the sisters that sometimes, late at night, I scrolled through Instagram reels of sleepwalkers waddling through Kensington, the EL shielding them from the daylight, curious to glimpse a familiar hoodie or backpack. 

Only Emily knew the truth. I’d confessed the last time we spoke in person: If I go back out there, everything’s on the table. 

And Emily smirked. The rooms really worked on you.  

We loitered on the front stoop of her group home then, lime seltzers and a pack of menthols between us. It was Emily’s second stint in this joint, just another red brick rowhouse on a long, slanted stretch of rowhouses that overlooked the freeway. A multimillion-dollar chain owned this one, the brainchild of an anti-wellness Ivy League grad who promoted something called communal actualization over self-restraint. Billboards posted across the tri-state area promised an end to oppressive systems—We are all in recovery!—but with no fewer strings: Curfew at 6 p.m.—7 p.m. during the summertime—and lockless bedroom doors. The women were a little older, a little richer; they strove to improve their credit scores and eventually get veneers. Some believed recovery was adulting, while others opined that adulting was for capitalists. All of them scattered the morning Emily entered the kitchen and saw her housemate barefoot on the table, lassoing a makeshift noose around a refurbished wood farmhouse beam.  

What did she use? I asked.  

She cut up tote bag handles, Emily said. Those Target ones, you know.  

Jesus. I stubbed my spent menthol against the top step. I didn’t even try that this time. 

Emily traced my body with her lit menthol. You did all that with booze?

It was that or jumping into the marina.

Wow. She exhaled, ashing into an empty seltzer can. All because of a fucking guy. 

I know. I raised my seltzer in a toast. How fucking middle class.  

Emily clinked her can against mine. So fucking bougie.  

I got word of Emily that morning. I left it up to Blondie to uncover the full story—she was never too ashamed to ask for all the gory details up front. I only knew what Emily’s mother had posted on Facebook: a missing persons flier created on a Word doc and then, three days later, a link to an obituary. One of those digital memorials with a photo carousel and comment wall. Emily always was, in Blondie’s words, a skinny Minnie, nearly six feet tall with hips narrower than her shoulders. She would’ve made a fine basketball player if she’d kept up with it. But her cheeks swelled, her jaw and shoulders melding to her neck as if jammed into a permanent shrug. Her body wanted to outgrow her frame in a way that made Blondie suspect: Hep C. No doubt. 

My rehab roommate said the Buddha would force his monks to watch round breasts deflate and stomachs distend, unblemished skin darkening to yellow green. The body releases sounds after death, too—all kinds of emissions—but I didn’t tell this to my rehab roommate. She still couldn’t get over the bodies, the cadavers, how they looked, how they smelled. 

Formaldehyde, she said, and I didn’t correct her. She’d never been to a wake or a funeral. What’s the difference between those bodies? my rehab roommate asked. One of those bodies belongs to another. 

I squatted at the edge of the pathway, directly across from Jesus’s crossed ankles. These sisters were always in good spirits, even though we had three funerals at the center in the last month alone. See you at the next wake! had come to replace Peace be with you! at Sunday Mass. When I scrolled through Emily’s digital memorial wall, I almost commented the line the sisters printed on every flimsy Mass card: Pray for the repose of her soul.  

Emily wouldn’t let me forget it if I sent her off with that nun-talk, but she would have liked what Sister Rosemarie called us this morning. Sister Louise, she was an Easter person. But we’re Saturday people, Sister Rosemarie told me. They always forget about us. 

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Sister Rosemarie needed an altar server. This wasn’t part of my job description either; this task, I liked a bit less. I taped the printed prayers inside the gold-trimmed Gospel and crouched down low for Sister Rosemarie as she teetered on a wooden stepstool in her orthopedic shoes and beckoned to the dozen Poles gathered between the dining tables. 

I’m improvising here, Sister Rosemarie whispered to me over her purple-tinted glasses.  

I think it’s working, I whispered back.  

The kitchen worker, sneaking a cigarette beside the Sleeping Saint Joseph, first heard the yelps. He banged on the windows, cigarette waving, before sprinting across the cliff. I left Sister Rosemarie flicking holy water over the assorted straw baskets, dodged between the Poles crossing themselves, and followed the kitchen worker to the shaded wood-chipped path that snaked above the river, where Sister Louise had fallen for the third time. 

It wasn’t Sister Louise’s fault. She’d taken Dominic, the order’s dog, on his morning walk. Where the flattened wood-chipped path gave way to tangled thickets, Dominic spotted the deer, the one that’s been limping around here with that bum front leg, and Dominic—that sheltie-Labrador nutjob of a mutt, Sister Rosemarie groaned—took the poor sister on an accidental luge run. We discovered Sister Louise splayed like a snow angel halfway down the hill, the red leash handle tangled around her right ankle and her right Ked, long gone somewhere over the slate-gray stones that separated us from the river, and Dominic, strapped against a nearby tree trunk, his white paws splashing in the snow.  

Sister Louise, she just laughed it all off as we loaded her into the backseat of the Suburban the order shared. Her palms floated toward the SUV’s fabric roof: And here I rise again! 

---

We waited in the emergency room, sipping watery coffee from beneath blue surgical masks while some People Magazine-sponsored, Wheel of Fortune rip-off flashed across three suspended flat-screen TVs. As the hospitality assistant, I’d also replaced the order’s youngest sister, the Gen Xer tasked with shuttling the rest to and from their doctor appointments and hospital stays. It’s a privilege, this sister had sighed, as if to say: It’s also a massive headache.  Sister Rosemarie surveyed the men snoozing across the plastic ER chairs, ice packs pressed against their foreheads. Must’ve been a little too good of a Friday.  

What should I do about those Easter baskets? I asked Sister Rosemarie. The sisters had wanted me to deliver Easter baskets to refugee families, elderly sisters, and group homes around town.  

They’ll get them by the resurrection, honey, Sister Rosemarie said with a quick pat on my forearm. 

I cradled my phone in my lap and waited for Blondie to call. I’d texted her before we arrived at the hospital: But she was clean.  

And Blondie had responded: 👌 

The Wheel of Fortune rip-off ended, a fanfare of confetti exploding over a sparkling Kia hatchback. Soon, another game show flashed across the three flat-screens. Sister Rosemarie and I didn’t know what to make of it. The contestants had to guess a person, any person. Sister Rosemarie thought it would be ironic if Jesus were the answer; instead, the answer was Pippa Middleton.   

The game show transitioned to places, and I texted Blondie. Anything yet? I watched her typing, three dots appearing and vanishing. There was a time when Blondie would call every day to keep me from crying. You better not be doing that shit again. When Blondie was the only person who knew where I was—You’re better than that shit—and I was more annoyed by her incessant calls than relieved. I hadn’t so much wanted to disappear then as I did disappear, and when I did, I didn’t know how to return.  

What do you say, I turned to Sister Rosemarie, when your friend dies? 

Sister Rosemarie crushed the empty Styrofoam cup between her slim fingers. She wore a silver Claddagh on her left ring finger, always facing inward, so one could draw a line along the meridian from heart to heart. How young?  

Around my age. 

Sister Rosemarie squeezed her Claddagh into my palm. Too young. 

She couldn’t beat it. 

Cancer? Sister Rosemarie released my hand. 

No. I massaged the heart indented into my palm. She couldn’t beat living. 

How can you stand it? I’ve long resisted asking the sisters this. It took me a long while to understand that everyone walks around shouldering some kind of loss. It wasn’t spectacular, really. We’re all just waddling out of our homes into the sunlight, spackling these cracks where the light streaked through with whatever gratitudes we’ve collected. Now that I understood this, I didn’t know what to do with it. I arrived at this convent that was no longer a convent saddled with two duffel bags and seven grand in credit card debt. My first week here, while mopping the floors of the women’s bathroom, I overheard Sister Rosemarie’s session on something called heart-centered spirituality. These sessions were the retreat center’s top sellers, attracting lawyers and marketing executives from the city. Cultivating awareness, meeting your present suffering with curiosity and compassion—you’d think these sisters were Buddhists if it weren’t for the Sacred Heart of Jesus keeping watch from the fireplace mantle.  

I wheeled my industrial yellow bucket into the kitchen as Sister Rosemarie beckoned: 

And we say, thank you. Gripping the mop with one gloved hand, I placed the other over my heart. And we say thank you. Soapy water seeped through my white T-shirt. Thank you for the awareness. 

---

Hep C, Blondie was saying over the phone. Fucking knew it. 

Hep C didn’t kill her, I said, stifling a sigh.  

No, flashing a twenty in Kensington did her in. 

Yo. I rolled down the Suburban’s front window and lit a menthol, blowing the smoke away from Dominic, his shaggy chin resting on the console.  

Yo, Blondie snapped back. You were saying worse. Never no junkie. She dragged the last syllable, preventing me from fighting back. 

Okay. Stopped at an intersection, I scratched behind Dominic’s left ear. I’ll own it. 

Poor Em, Blondie continued. Surprised she made it this long. 

I didn’t think Blondie and I would make thirty, either, but here we were, coming up on thirty-three.  

Jesus year! Blondie whooped.

I turned into the parking lot of the local parish—the last stop of my Easter-basket run. Tinny organ chords accompanied by a soprano belting Alleluias filtered through the open foyer doors to the snow-covered lawn. A wayward young Dominican fidgeted with a barbecue grill, assisted by two teenage altar boys in Nikes. In less than an hour, parishioners would arrive in beige overcoats, their patent leather pumps skidding on the ice-glazed steps as they processed through the open doors with long, white candles—the only light that would illuminate the mahogany pews from Genesis to Isaiah.  

When I let Dominic out of the Suburban, he galloped directly toward the priest. We going to the funeral? Blondie was asking.  

I began unloading the Easter baskets, chocolate ears poking through the canary yellow cellophane. We can’t start trouble, I told Blondie.  

I’m clean, girl. 

I know you are. I leaned against the Suburban, already forgetting the baskets, and lit another menthol. Dominic sliced between the teenage altar servers to the young Dominican, who had zipped a navy-blue puffer vest over his layered cassocks. 

Can I tell you something? Blondie asked.  

Anything, Blondie.  

You won’t judge a junkie? 

Before prodding the charcoal with the mechanical torch, the young Dominican folded his cassock sleeves to his elbows; a black-ink rosary snaked down his forearm, leading to the Antiochian cross spread across his wrist bone. The cross vibrated with every jolt of the mechanical torch. 

Try me, I told Blondie.  

Okay. Blondie gathered herself. My coworker—that yoga teacher, you know? 

With all the fillers? 

Miss Khloé Kardashian, yeah. She gave me kombucha. 

Kombucha?  

Yeah. But, like—what the fuck is it? 

It’s got fetal parts in it.  

Alleluia! 

The young Dominican embraced the sky as orange embers sprayed across the lawn. The altar servers snapped their fingers. Dominic chased the stray embers, attempting to snuff them out before they reached the snow.  

And Blondie laughed: Fuck off, girl. 

Conspiracy theories once swallowed Blondie whole. Every conversation turned to fetal parts, first in vaccines, then in our food. A rugged white man shot up a Planned Parenthood out West, or maybe it was Florida, the panhandle. That’s when Blondie started badgering us. Ain’t you ever mad? For them taking your baby parts to Hollywood? Blondie wasn’t the type to be hung up on politics—I doubt she could even tell you the name of our vice president—but there Blondie went, joining some right-wing Facebook groups. Everything I saw was secondhand, screenshots sent to our group chat. She’d posted that she had multiple abortions, one right after the other. That they had talked her into it. She claimed she could feel the baby twisting, gripping the walls of her uterus. As the vacuum swirled inside me. Now, we knew Blondie never had any abortions, and we wanted to let it go; we thought it was just a phase. When she sent us an Evite to the spiritual baptisms of the fetuses she adopted, we thought: She’s gone now. Before long, Blondie was jumping into a van headed for DC. We still don’t know what happened. We found her shuffling along I-95, south of the Susquehanna, purseless and shivering; they’d snatched her parka, too. I wanted to see the river, Blondie kept repeating. We never recovered her parka, but we did retrieve her purse from a trash bin at the nearby rest stop, where we force-fed Blondie Wendy’s nuggets and fries. Fox News played across a dozen flat-screens. That’s how we discovered the cops had flagged the van outside the Supreme Court, several rifles and Molotov cocktails—or the ingredients for them—hidden beneath its bucket seats.  

Blondie had forgotten about the rifles—if she even knew they were there. But she hadn’t forgotten what Emily said beneath those flat-screens: They’ll lie until they love you.   

You think Mindy’s going? Blondie was asking me now.  

Across the parking lot, the young Dominican pumped his mechanical torch toward the church’s steeple and grinned. Well, you know, I told Blondie, she has her kids. 

Like I don’t? Blondie snapped.  

That’s not what I meant. 

My kids count. 

I know they do.  

Just because I don’t dress like some fucking church ladies don’t mean they don’t fucking count.  

I know, Blondie. I know.  

Blondie clicked her tongue against her teeth. I could envision her then, wanting to laugh yet knowing enough, now, to resist. You fucking guys. She clicked her tongue a second time. Get me all riled up.  

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The day I disappeared, I moved into a two-story motel overlooking a marshy inlet several blocks from the ocean. The motel shared a parking lot with a crab shack, where I would drink for six hours each day. I started in the afternoon, sipping goblet-sized margaritas on the rocks beneath the netted décor in the corner, and ended up chasing Jameson shots at the center of the horseshoe bar, surrounded by men in Bermuda shorts and baseball caps, puka shells wound around their thick wrists. I listened to these men tell me all kinds of things. I listened to one man tell me about his wife, another tell me about his girlfriend, and another tell me about his wife and his girlfriend. I was very good at listening; I always remembered the names of the wives and girlfriends, but never the names of the men. A blackout isn’t deletion but suspension. All that crying, kneeling in the margins of the marsh, my head bowed before the moon, became its own form of prayer.  

Even when Sister Louise still had two good hips, I walked Dominic at night. The sisters no longer attended morning liturgy—they needn’t starve themselves for Jesus’s flesh. But their eyesight was poor, their knees vulnerable to the shallow bogs that lay undetected across the cliffs, and so I always accompanied Dominic, the two of us dodging stray sinkholes until the rumpled land smoothed into a semi-circular clearing; an overlook of the valley saved just for us. The sisters had placed a boulder there to honor the Sint Sinck people, who called this land stone upon stone for the slate-gray rocks that coated the shoreline. The Hudson guided us through this blue-green valley, now sheathed in a darkness that collapsed the clouds into the mountain ridges. But we were not so ensconced up here; the Metro-North sped by every twenty minutes until midnight, and yachts drifted downstream, yellow string lights woven around their masts.  

I loosened Dominic’s leash, letting him graze the brush along the chain-link fence at the cliff’s edge, and opened the hidden album on my phone to its only saved photo. Emily and me, arms draped across each other’s shoulders, lime seltzers clamped between our thighs. I’ve never been the type of girl you envy; men have described my breasts as handfuls, while women have gasped, a size eight. Here, in this photo, my oval face had hollowed out into a heart, my collarbones spiking through my V-neck in a way that made Emily giggle, skinny Minnie. Just like her. When Mindy picked me up from rehab, her metallic blue hatchback coated in red dust, she scoffed at the Gap joggers hanging off my ass, the stringy hems stuffed into the Ugg boots I lifted from the lost and found. Mindy plucked one of my menthols and took a slow, calculated drag. Girl. She exhaled a perfect circle. You’re the best faux junkie there is.  

Did you miss the drama? Mindy asked later that night, our knees knocking in her full-size bed.  

No, I said. I was sick of it.  

So, it’s for good this time?  

I hope so. 

Every so often, a breeze arrived through the open bedroom window, rippling the fairy lights tacked over her upholstered headboard, the plastic clinking like a broken windchime. I can’t stand it, Mindy sighed. Some days I’m just bored. Then I’m tired. Or I’m just— 

She paused, and I counted the clinks until I reached double digits. 

It’s just dull, Mindy finished. 

I tucked the few loose, fine strands from Mindy’s top knot behind her ear. I thought you wanted dull.  

Mindy rolled to face me, raking her fingers through her black hair until her top knot collapsed. A white scar shimmered through the day-old foundation along her cheekbone, slicing her face as if it were a permanent costume party mask. I moved to touch it. 

Mindy narrowed her eyes. It was the look Emily always feared.  

And she said: I wanted to get away from you.  

Dominic jerked, his red leash funneling through my fingers. He sprinted across the cliff, past the Sleeping Saint Joseph, the covered pool with its lifeguard station, the community garden still closed save for the compost, the collection of picnic tables clustered between towering sycamore trees, to the sisters’ cemetery, right down the shoveled pathway to the base of the crucifix.  

Dominic wouldn’t budge from the crucifix. I waited on one of the wrought-iron benches along the shrubs and stared him down, the red leash winding around my hands until they were bound at the wrists. Beyond the cemetery, Sister Rosemarie’s sole bedside lamp glowed from behind her gauzy cream-colored curtains. She would be sipping black tea and reading a book on eco-spirituality, maybe something by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. She’d given up doom scrolling for Lent. It’s amazing what you learn about the world, she told me. What you understood when you returned to yourself. This life, Sister Rosemarie’s, was a better life than most—a better life than those girls had in Hunts Point or Kensington, if only they would know enough to know it. 

Judgy, Emily said.  

Not like Mindy, I said.  

You guys are both bad. Emily laughed. But I’ll take you over Mindy. 

She always would.  

Whenever I tried to sit and meditate, the visions came quickly. What’s the difference between those bodies? One of those bodies is loved. Yet I never see any corpses on the charnel grounds. I only see scraps, bits of myself scattered like cigarette ashes. Scattered so they do not make a body.  

But tonight, I saw Emily, frozen as a snow angel mid-flight.

 

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LAUREN BARBATO’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, The Common, The Hopkins Review, Blackbird, North American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Cola, and elsewhere. In 2025, she won the Short Fiction Award from American Literary Review, and has received scholarships and recognition from Lighthouse Writers Workshop, the Community of Writers, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Lauren has also been in residence at Jentel Artist Residency, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. A PhD candidate in religion at Temple University, Lauren teaches in the gender studies department at the University of Delaware and researches pro-choice Catholic nuns and reproductive politics when not writing fiction. 

 

Featured image by Gianna B, courtesy of Unsplash.