Matrix

by Lauren Groff

to give up the ghost.

For it is a deep and human truth that most souls upon the earth are not at ease unless they find themselves safe in the hands of a force far greater than themselves.

Animals are closer to god, of course; this is because animals have no need of god.

If only she had time to examine this feeling, Wulfhild thinks ruefully; but she does not have time, she never has time, her children call, the business of the abbey calls, the hungers and fatigues of her body call. She will come closer to god when she is old, in a garden among the flowers and the birds, she tells herself; yes, someday she will sit in silence until she knows god, she thinks, lying down in her bed to sleep. Just not now.

Visions are not complete until they have been set down and stepped away from, turned this way and that in the hand.

The celebrations of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany like lights shining in the dark.

And the world silences in Marie’s ears; all she can hear is her thumping heart. She casts about inside herself, at a loss. If beauty has been stripped from the most beautiful, grace from the most gracious, does that mean god’s favor has been stripped away, as well?

All souls are limited in the circles of their own understanding.

Her face, without its nose, so like a skull already, vanishes. It is replaced, for a moment, with an actual talking skull. Memento mori.

A voice in her says that she will never again see the city that burns so darkly at her back. She is glad of the release of it. Aging is a constant loss; all the things considered essential in youth prove with time that they are not. Skins are shed, and left at the roadside for the new young to pick up and carry on.

And below my feet fathoms deep upon the ground, I saw the four beasts of the apocalypse: the lion, the she-ox, the eagle, and the woman-faced one; all with wings and all their bodies covered in blinking staring eyes. And the beasts were slavering and howling and climbing the sides of the tower with a slithering like that of a newt under a rock; and they came so swiftly upward they stopped my blood in ice.

and how she has swallowed the sin, which is not hers, and taken it into herself as her own.

It is up to saints and angels to intercede for those humans embroiled in the dirt of the earth beneath, filthy small creatures that must seem to them in their grandeur as little writhing insects crying out in words too muted to hear.

Life slows. Time is wheels within wheels.

To think: All the hatred so deep inside Marie when she was young has, through the pressure of time, somehow turned to love.

she wondered if in fact this had been the closest she had been to god—not in fact invisible parent, not sun warming the earth and coaxing the seeds from the soil—but the nothing at the center of the self. Not the Word, because speaking the Word limits the greatness of the infinite; but the silence beyond the Word in which there lives infinity.

She smiles at the version of herself at that time of pain, so young that she believed she could die of love. Foolish creature, old Marie would say to that child. Open your hands and let your life go. It has never been yours to do with what you will.

The pain is eating Marie alive. Mouth that cannot speak, eyes that cannot see, hands that cannot feel, feet that cannot walk, nor can she make a sound from the throat. It is coming, it is coming. The end times: seas rise, seas fall, the monsters come roaring from the seas, the water burns, the trees sweat blood, the earthquakes topple buildings, the hills turn to ash, all people flee, the bones of the dead rise, the stars fall from heaven, the heavens and the earth burn, the earth releases the good dead to the heavens to their judgment, yes judgment is coming. A doe burning white in the steam of the cold water, a mother, a queen, her crown her rack of antlers.