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.

Instead, she works on, and Emme sleeps with a gentle wheeze in her nose and a fly beats its crisp body on the shutters.

Then the white doe lifted her head and looked at Marie across the pond; looked her entire self into the girl. She spoke something there into the wordlessness at the center of Marie. Time stilled. The forest watched.

and at last they too relent and reach into their pockets and pay the abbey’s portion, some grumbling but most half proud to have a woman so tough and bold and warlike and royal to answer to now. 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.

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

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

As she sometimes does when she rides out to the abbey’s estates, she leans forward against the horn of her pommel, and lets the motion of the horse’s gait build against her until she gasps and something in her breaks. She is always calmer afterward.

the hot still August days with the struck-iron shimmer of insect noise

And all souls as they sing shine radiant into the world.

Women act counter to all the laws of submission when they remove themselves from availability.

She understood then that it didn’t matter that the landscape inside her looked so different from that of her sisters, that they had been taught to crave their own subjection and she had not, that they believed things that she thought silently were foolish, unworthy of the dignity of woman. They were filled with goodness as a cup is filled with wine.

Of course Marie did have a greatness in her, but greatness was not the same as goodness.

Open your hands and let your life go. It has never been yours to do with what you will.