virgins have written some resplendent books

1.

Julia Incitius watches the birds for three days. If this is justice – that her mother shall live and her father lie under the earth, that a stranger take both house and wife – may she be sent a certain sign. Julia watches the skies in every corner and holds what she sees in memory – she waits for the ravens and the crows and notes the sound of their wings.

She sets her snare in the morning and at noon kills what she’s caught with her hands. Inside their bleeding bodies she finds her sign, and that is that anything living can be killed.

2.

His hair is dark and his eyes are pale; he rides a black horse and the colors of his fine clothing are unsubdued by age and utility. Dogs bark on the street when he walks by and he sends big black spiders to watch them at prayer. Peeping through crazed window-panes and chinks in the timbers she has seen only dimly, the scene cut into thin glimpses, but his voice bleeds gentleness, and he catches her by the wrist when she turns aside. She has taken down her hair, in a brilliant red spill, and the two of them have spoken in such close whispers that they seem to kiss. He sings to her, and she listens. Some nights Amity believes he might sing to her too.

This man is the Devil. Amity Stoker opens the door and lets the devil in.

3.

Empress Adeodata covers her hair, wraps herself in yards and yards of suffocating white. But in her own private apartments she takes it all off and counts rows and rows of tiny pearls. Her daughter insinuates herself into a shadow and watches.

“Do you suppose on the day of judgment he’ll be resurrected without a head? They never did find it, but it must have gone somewhere. Unless the stag took it.”

“Don’t be ghoulish,” she levels sharply, plucking at a stray thread with her sharp white teeth.

Placidina takes small steps so that her scarlet shoes don’t show from under her skirts, and brings her a pair of scissors with swans on their blades.

4.

Maybe this is how it was: There’s a house, a piano, a gun, and a girl. Uncle Charlie comes home from the war front with dog tags that aren’t his and a suitcase full of photographs. He and his brother’s wife dance to the music on the radio. His brother’s daughter cuts paper dolls out of the newspaper, reads comic books, smooths her dress. The three of them circle one another cautiously for days and days, uneasy orbits locked around one another – but Evelyn is not a giddy fool, and Charlie is not a proficient predator, he has made a terrible mistake and if he has the higher ground he only has further to fall.

5.

Maybe this is how it is. There are two women and a boy, three men, no men, two men and a girl. This time nobody dies, the girl keeps herself and the man learns. No boy will make her flinch or bruise her arms. No kickback will bruise India’s white shoulder. No belt will mark Evelyn’s throat, no roadside stone will cut points into Charlie’s palm. India may not live to tell about it, but she’ll live long enough to leave it behind.