Lapvona

by Ottessa Moshfegh

They distrusted Ina because of her wisdom, while they still made use of it.

It was Marek’s custom to lie down on his mother’s grave, placing his body crosswise as though he were a babe in her dead arms through the dirt. He had always felt that the ground below him was charged with a sense of belonging. He would lie there and gaze up at the swaying branches of the poplar tree and listen for a birdsong. A bee-eater or an oriole might tweet a few happy notes. Marek would take this as his mother singing down to him from heaven.

Marek knew his father’s body was beautiful. But he didn’t revere it. He simply respected Jude’s physique as a part of nature, the way he found a vulture beautiful, or a cow.

him to his precious lambs.’

She smiled and sniffed at the sooted air. ‘Take off his clothes and burn them in the fire. Then chop him into pieces.’ Jude recognized her madness. It was the same insanity that he’d seen in Agata while she was in labor with Marek, a female power, evil, something he would never understand.

She was an atheist herself. She had once felt that there was a power in the way things happened, a kind of fatedness that she depended on, an order to life. After Jacob’s death, she lost that faith completely. Life was chaos. There were no rewards. Best to make the time tolerable,

But a person should never judge someone else’s faith. Nobody knows the truth.

The thing Lispeth despised most in people, or at least how she imagined people to be, like Marek, was their expectation that faith ought to be painless. As if faith required no effort. Anyone could whip himself and say he’s faithful. Real faith was earned through self-denial.

Children are selfish, she thought. They rob you of life. They thrive as you toil and wither, and then they bury you, their tears never once falling out of regret for what they’ve stolen.

Didn’t they know that the land was God itself, the sun and moon and rain, that it was all God? The life in their seeds of wheat, the manure from the cow, that was God. The priest had nothing to do with

As a woman, she would always lose. It was not her place to stage a battle, but to back away to preserve what life she had left to live.

When God gives you more than you can tolerate, you turn to instinct. And instinct is a force beyond anyone’s control.

Poverty had its limitations, but if you had nothing, there was nothing to be stolen. He moseyed