Lapvona

by Ottessa Moshfegh

‘But I see my hair is red,’ Marek protested. A punch in the jaw left Marek’s tongue flayed by his own teeth. Blood spilt from his mouth on the very spot on the hearth where his mother had supposedly died. Jude pointed again. ‘You see it now? Where she left me to raise a child alone?’ Not that Marek got much raising.

Terror and grief were good for morale, Villiam believed.

This frightened Marek because he, too, enjoyed the pain, and he was ashamed of that. Since he was little, a scraped knee or a whipped back, anything to make his body hurt, felt like the hand of God upon him.

All Marek really wanted at this age was to go to heaven, where God and his mother would love him.

If my father kills me, Marek thought, I am sure to go to heaven.

Jude calmed, then cried. He wiped the blood from his son’s face and held him in his arms, kissed his strange, swollen face, and told him the story of Agata’s sacrifice again. ‘She died for you,’ he said. ‘You see the blood?’ Marek was happy.

when she awoke, she came to nothing but the black light of her blindness and the stench of her family’s dead bodies in the bed around her.

She had indeed seen death and she was not afraid of it. What scared her were other people and their immovable selfishness.

Nobody knew where she went. Or rather, nobody wanted to find her.

God had not appeared to her in all that time. So she preferred to stay faithless rather than hold on to a fantasy.

‘I love you, Father,’ he said. It wasn’t quite love that Villiam felt, but an enduring trust and need for constant affirmation that was as good as love. ‘And I love you,’ the priest said back.

Oh Gesù

When Jenevere had come to pick tansy and canniba per Ina’s request, and she saw Grigor there, he had offered to pick the herbs himself—she told him which ones—and deliver them to the manor. The task made Jenevere’s work easier and made Grigor very happy. He had missed being in touch with what grew from the dirt. The herbs were all wild. Picking them was not like harvesting the crops of his farm, but like a discovery of nature’s magic. He hunted through the forest and picked them carefully, wrapping each bud or branch in its own clean cloth, like jewels. His heart felt cool and calm as he picked the herbs, as though even just the discovery of them had healing properties.

This was what inspired him: his passion was brought on by torment. So between the two of them, Jude and Marek, they had made quiet Christmas offerings of self-abuse, cruel words spoken carefully in their minds: ‘I am bad. I am shameful. I am a waste of life. I have done no good.’ And then they abused one another: a punch in the gut and on the jaw, vicious words of contempt and disapproval. It was the one time each year Marek struck his father, an intimacy that he now missed.