To Corinth, Sister of the Elect, Daughter of the Almighty:
I regret that this is the first letter from my desk in months, please excuse the absence of veneration. Time has been elusive as we enter into a season of Twelvetide and you understand the extensive pageantry involved with its execution. Alas, I do no write in regards to this event, but to address some troubling rumors that have boiled up from your sector of the
As you have doubtless already received the news from the Sheol, there has been murmurings of Geists who have traversed from the interior of the dark lands and back into our own. Surely, our brother Brother Ulrich has heard these rumors and has tried to address them, in his own way.
I am writing to assuage any anxiety regarding these rumors and to confirm their complete inaccuracy. As you know, this is antithetical to the Almighty’s canon, and thus a heretical viewpoint. Our Geists find their way to Sheol by the guidance of the Almighty and there the rest is both glory and mystery. Simple put, this is truly folk jabber and children’s fireside tales meant to scare and excite. However, we must treat these murmurings with all seriousness. I trust that you will resolve gossipers of this heresy appropriately and with marked resolved.
Please do send correspondence that this letter finds you and that relevant actions will be taken by yourself and the brothers and sisters in your stead. Again, please be assured this gossip is simply that: heretical gossip.
To see you again at Yule, Brother Calvin
Corinth,
Don’t listen to Calvin. He’s a cunt.
We were mermaid-young, our hips unformed against the July heat as we slipped noisily into the pool. You told me that I could be the prince that came to save you from the tyranny of your father, a god of the sea, the man who turned your legs into fins and scales and your heart into salt water.
It would only take a kiss. Pretend, you breathed at me and then on three! We submerged ourselves into the cool water and you pressed your lips to mine, softly, my eyelashes touching the tinted glass of your goggles.
We stopped playing after that summer. We both grew hips and breasts and starting shaving the downy growth of our calves and shins and knees. There was a boy at school who you began to talk about with a fervor, his floppy hair trimmed just above his shoulders and his smile changing color with the different rubber bands twisted around each one of his braces. When you asked me about which boy I felt the same kind of passion for, I would shrug and smile and you would take that as mystery, that I was hiding something from you. You were furious, but let it go, because we were pool sisters and your mother liked me, liked that I thanked her for when she made horchata and that I would go to mass with you every Sunday night.
We lost each other, in a way all things are lost: they go different places but never are not what they had been. You are still the same, a princess of a tyrannical father-god, swathed in layers of chiffon, frosted like morning ocean foam. The cathedral is full, my family and yours, joined in a way that I hadn’t foreseen or wanted. Your mother lays a cool hand on my cheek and says she is glad to see me again after all these years. She asks if my cousin ever spoke of you when we were still mermaid friends, you in a wave of white, you who is standing next the tower of cake, grinning up at my boy cousin, the one whose teeth are a perfect line after all those years of braces.
You hold the knife, aloft. His hand covers yours, curling it almost into a fist. Before the knife slides in, you look up, catching my eye. A twitch of the mouth, almost a plea of Pretend and then the knife divides, a clean and perfect tear.
I swung silently around the bend, into the turret’s alcove, trying to swallow my breathing. A thin stream of sweat stung the corners of my eyes. The Geist was lumbering down the portico, his footsteps neither unsubtle or quiet. This Geist was either dumb or bold, and I wasn’t in the mood to find out which one.
We were chosen young. So young, my mother was only a swear of a stern mouth and a ruddy forehead. An oiled curl escaped the crisp white of her bonnet, but I do remember that because it was the same rusty red as my own. Her voice, nothing, I hear nothing if I try to pull back thoughts of those days when I was only a chubby-legged toddler. She is only a fevered dream, opaque memory.
I have no remembrance of my father, although I have been told I must have had one, or else I would have never been chosen to be taken to Theses.
My new family would be elected over the years. At first, there were hundred of us, clad from elbow to shin in ebony rompers. My first friend was a boy with curly black hair and smooth brown skin, Luther. He was very quiet and very kind and I liked that in comparison to my mouth that would never stay shut when I needed it to. We would practice cursive on our backs during playtime, and his form was always more elegant, more patient, and gentler than my own, which I did with half-moons of dirt under my nails. Luther was my better in every way and so I was only shock still when the next election determined that he would need to go and I was still elected to stay.
My tears were bitter as he left, and I told Deacon Lydia that they have made a mistake, that I was very naughty and should be the one sent away, not Luther.
Deacon Lydia was grizzled, sinewy, a woman who seemed to have sprouted from the stony ground of Theses. But at that moment, she laid a firm but tender grip onto my wrist.
“Now, you know better than that, Corinth,” she said and it was supposed to be a chide, but the tone was too gentle to rise to that specific occasion. “The Election has nothing to do with being naughty or good or any of that. We are all creatures of grace, after all.”
I did know, it was the main lesson they drilled in our heads next to the Old Language. But I pulled at my tears before sputtering out a question of where Luther would go, what would happen to him now?
At that, Deacon Lydia chuckled as if she had heard something quite ridiculous. “Why, he will go where every child goes: back to his mother.”
My gaze was glazed with broiling tears when I stared up at her and asked her about my mother, what about her.
This time she smiled, but the crinkles of her eyes were hesitant, “You are part of the elect, my girl. Your mother is the Almighty.”
I blinked. And my father?
She gave me a pocket square ironed neatly into four folds. “Well, he is the Almighty, too.”
And that was when I decided that the Almighty must really be something, to be both at the same time, to be the one to keep my stay even when I was sure I was the naughtiest, clumsiest, dirtiest child to ever stumble across the halls and fields of Theses. And so, I believed, then at least.
When you roiled into this world, Folded envelope-tight until You unfurled, your silhouette was etched against the hospital window’s crisp white sunshine, the beginning of the first heat of a Tennessee spring.
Clutching you against my breast that Entire southern summer, Us both a Pollack of Sweat and tears and milk. We learned to be humans as the June thunderstorms broiled in the horizon.
Years followed, a blur of Staccatoed speech, latent laughter, A zigzagged row of teeth and then Fumbled steps before you trained Your tongue into words I think Finally came from that ineffable Chasm cleaving each person’s chest.
The year tips over, always, As we know the sun will slide Into the gullet of night. I knew that beginning you Meant there’s an end somewhere.
But the autumn is short in our country, A sliver of time tucked against Humid dusks and a too-soon night. You have zipped your own coat, The neighborhood children wait on the sidewalk. You do look back for a second before Jogging to their side.
What organ did they never remove that still clings to you? I feel it flare, roil, unfurl, as your silhouetted figure turns blurry in the autumnal glaze of October. I knew when I began you that someday you would be you, unclenched from me.
You come home, but still, I know. You come home, and I wipe a small dust Of frost from your coat, From the brim of your hat. You blink back a flake of melting snow Before saying that you love me In a way that lets me know You are no longer me, And this is good, this is how we Move to the end.
