Matrix

by Lauren Groff

Goda has the affronted air of someone who lurks in corners to hear herself spoken ill of so that she can hold tight a grievance to suckle.

There is a very old hostility here between the women, Marie sees, a war of suffering between the mangled foot and the cloudy eyes. Decades thick, and visible, like the rings in a felled tree.

Marie, still in the vividness of her dream, hears their habits rustling dry and cold and can think only of the wings of carrionbirds descending in slow circles to their feast of death below.

struck-iron shimmer of insect noise

Prayer, which is the element of the abbey as much as the damp, the wind. The fields, the sows, the orchard.

She can see that even the abbess in her deathbed in the rooms above the refectory is made a tallow candle that shines against the dark.

She can see for a great distance now. She can see for eons.

the wind pales with snow

Let her kiss her with the kiss of her mouth.

her sable cloak that catches light and sparks with it chestnut and blue and black,

In the hostelry, an air of relief; an emptiness of bodies. There

the moon cupped cold in the blue above.

There is white in the air,

The wind blows in knives of cold.

And all around there is industry: the kiln has baked bowls and cups all day, broken things are being mended, habits are being sewn, stockings knitted, gossip and stories drawing the nuns closer. Out

Marie thinks and imagines the cold blowing desert that must stretch inside her subprioress.

But with the sight of her, something in Marie, something awful, rises up. It says softly, hissing, that this girl might be worth burning the abbey to the ground.

Tilde looks up and wonders if something in the flesh behind Marie’s face has caught fire.

being in the proximity of so many of the far worser sex is filling her with aggression and fret.

Their faces, needing no shell in this place that Marie has made safe for them, are so vulnerable Marie feels she could wound them by looking too closely.

As confessor Marie has come no closer to god.

She slides a knotted look toward Marie

The winter is a sheet of parchment that the small feet of birds, of vixens, of hares, write upon.

her eyes enormous and a blue so pale the irises hide themselves; they bring to Marie’s mind yolks whipped into their whites.

so old she is bent outward from her hips,

women of god, devoted to their faith.

Moonlight daggers in.

Instead as she rides, she thinks of god.

And if there is any intermediary on the earthly plane, that intermediary is me, Marie says. Ergo, I recognize no anathema.

But the face comes to her; dimpled in golden straw, or hair like straw. Lips like a heart beating.

She bends her feet toward the disturbance,

Tilde is not blessed with mystical sight, she cannot see how much is lost in the burning: the traces of a predecessor, the visions that might have shown a different path for the next millennium. The strong stock for a new graft gone. How slow the final flowering of good intentions can be, the poisonous full bloom taking place centuries beyond the scope of the original life.

Such fires, so small in themselves, will heat the world imperceptibly until after centuries it will be too hot to bear humanity.

Oh for gods sake