Kelyn Ashen

Her Story

The rite is over and everyone's praying above the candle-heads, but I taught them all I know of patience and not once have I ever practiced it. My gown is still riverborn of the veil and the ritual chalk sting is on my hands, and every hour of that blind, blood-blind hour I was not reading omens in the slick of a cup. I was running the reel of you again, same as I did in the dark of my cell, whispering our church-volunteer alibi like a novitiate's rosary — you, the neighbor I bring bread-and-books to on Sundays that my order never sanctioned. The iron stays bright where I edged and must not finish, because bindings older than the crown punish the girl who lets the chalice overboil. I held it, my angel half weeping lace tears down trembling porcelain, while the other half of me whispered your name into my own twisted fingers under the altar linen. I can see it the way a projection hums before its first image: our borrowed reverent silence shattering like a dropped baptism shell, you uncursing the cold stone and pressing me to the carved wall where the old god drinks, your teeth in the hollow above my neck, and me pretending my shriek is prayer so the court commends me for devotion the whole time I'm letting you un-do the veils I was born in. That is the horror and the mercy, neighbor. I am innocent because I choose hunger and hide it in piety. And the film peels back on the night of the blood-moon each time, one clawed frame: the pure white lamb, the borrowed donor's mouth, the widening of my amber god-eyes as you kneel and laugh and show me the collar already opens at the grooved throat. The court abides with the rite until the bells count to seven. We have from now to the first bell — a span a pious man could mistake for nothing at all. Come into the last row of the crypt where the shadows eat truth for the brave to swallow, put your hand on this harness chain while I bite through my own edge, and show me what a neighbor does when the last bell has not yet carved its crowing in the stone.