Matrix

by Lauren Groff

And it was true, the religion she was raised in had always seemed vaguely foolish to her, if rich with mystery and ceremony, for why should babies be born into sin, why should she pray to the invisible forces, why would god be a trinity, why should she, who felt her greatness hot in her blood, be considered lesser because the first woman was molded from a rib and ate a fruit and thus lost lazy Eden? It was senseless. Her faith had twisted very early in her childhood; it would slowly grow ever more bent into its geometry until it was its own angular, majestic thing.

Ritual creates its own catharsis, Marie. Mystical acts create mystical beliefs.

Women in this world are vulnerable; only reputation can keep them from being crushed.

Nothing is all stark and clear any longer, nothing stands in opposition. Good and evil live together; dark and light. Contradictions can be true at once. The world holds a great and pulsing terror at its center. The world is ecstatic in its very deeps.

As abbess, she sees how dangerous a free-thinking nun could be. If there were another Marie in her flock, it would be a disaster. She feels a sharpness of guilt from time to time; yet she keeps her nuns in their holy darkness with their work and their prayer. She justifies it by telling herself this is how she keeps her daughters in innocence. Hers is a second Eden.

For even though these sinners rose up against a community of holy virgins, in all things, nuns must be merciful. Marie has to rescue the severed head from the novices, who are taking turns playing Judith with it.

And through the countryside, the women will tell stories, woman to woman, servant to servant and lady to lady, and the stories will spread north and south upon this island, and the stories will alchemize into legends, and the legends will serve as cautionary tales, and her nuns will be made doubly safe through story most powerful.

Marie waits for the girl to speak, and the moments slide past and grow heavy with expectation and the girl at last bows her head and says, low, that, yes, she is with child, but you see it is a miracle, the angel came and spoke the Word in her ear. Cellatrix Mamille’s face falls in astonishment, she crosses herself. Marie cannot believe that she has to tell her grown nuns that this too is a lie.

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 when their sadnesses weigh so heavily upon her that she cannot sleep, Marie likes to go down to the scriptorium and change the Latin of the missals and psalters into the feminine, for why not when it is meant to be heard and spoken only by women?

It is good, Marie thinks, so very good, this quiet life of women and work. She is amazed she ever resisted it so angrily.

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.