Give Me, I Give Thee

GIVE ME, I GIVE THEE

by C.A. Schaefer

The girls in our town have always been hungry. I watch from the window to see them pluck handfuls of grass, ripe with pesticides, and masticate until their tongues are stained. Others nibble at their fingertips and at the end of their hair, biting the keratin into neat little pieces with their teeth. I can smell hunger on them, sweet as honey, sour as urine. 

When I bake, as I frequently do, I leave out the goods to cool on the windowsill, inviting the girls to snatch handfuls of sunflower bread, of chocolate brioche, of baklava and pavlova. But no matter how many girls pass by, most of them are too afraid to eat, to take what it is that I freely offer. They know the adage by heart: If you keep a girl hungry, she’ll shower you in diamonds. If you make her fed, she’ll reward you with toads. 

On Spring Festival, Mother’s Day, June First—or any of the other occasions warranting a church bake sale—our mothers baked cakes, but we were never permitted to eat them. Our self-control was tested by bakery boxes and glass-domed platters containing buttercream and lemon glaze; angel food cake, ripe with sugared berries; white cake with silver sugar petals circling the centre, embedded with sugared metallic spheres. These cakes arrived at the church whole.

My mother handed me a Viennese plum cake one afternoon, and I could smell the butter on it. The fruit, pitted and sliced, gleamed violet, bright with sugar, edges darkened. I ate it all in my bedroom, spoon in one hand, the other shoved down the waistband of my skirt. I was desperate to taste, to fill up my stomach and my cunt, and even when my door opened and my mother stepped inside, I only swallowed. I didn’t even spit in shame.

“You deserve whatever you get,” she said, and oh, I did, I did. I knew that, even then. 

•••

There are two types of girls in the world: diamonds and toads. The lucky ones spill gemstones when they speak, cutting their teeth and tongues on garnets and pearls and aquamarines. In between the jewels, they drop roses, black-eyed daisies, calla lilies, or poppies. They may need new teeth, 3-D printed enamel attached to silver plugs, by the age of thirty, but at least their teeth have been ruined by beauty. 

Throughout my childhood, I was taught that the virtuous—the good and the chaste—got the diamonds. The dykes and the queers and the fat girls, the girls-born-boys and the boys-born girls, we got the toads. The only good thing a toad could do with herself was to follow the directive to get thee to a nunnery, and gag herself on vows and strips of fabric. 

 “Don’t be surprised when you’re a toad-spitter,” my mother would say, crude colloquialism that it was, whenever she caught me with cake (the Viennese plum was my favourite). I seemed almost certainly a future toad-licker, frog-kisser, snake-sucker. Not my language, but the words my mother used with her ladies church group after a few glasses of vodka-laced punch. A peony, pink and vibrantly striped with broken red, fell from her mouth. 

But, to their shock and hers and mine, I dropped my first freshwater pearls one afternoon. I was murmuring to myself in my bedroom, talking through my history homework, when I felt something in my mouth. I pinched my lower lip, pulling it taut, and reached inside. Freshwater pearls weren’t as good as real pearls, lustrous rosy ones or smooth black spheres, but my mother took them from me, jaw clicking in the way that the dentist warned her about. 

I saved one as large as a sunflower seed, and tucked it into the space between two floorboards in my room, enshrined in an envelope. Baby’s first jewel.   

•••

I think about this—the pearls, my mother, how little I used to eat—as I butcher this week’s meat. It’s cheaper to buy whole birds, so I raise my fists and bring them down on a chicken’s vertebrae, snapping it. Spatchcocking is the term, pushing their wings above their necks so that they can roast more evenly. I handle turkeys, partridges, even old-fashioned pheasants and Cornish hens. I sprinkle their limp bodies with salt, and stuff their cavities with bay leaves. I drape the birds’ pimpled skin in bacon strips, and roast them until the fat liquefies and hisses in the oven. 

My first act of freedom was to go to a grocery store. Nora and I purchased veal chops, blue cheese, Italian ground espresso, English muffins, flour, sugar, orange juice, maple candy, and green olives stuffed with roasted garlic. I didn’t know how to cook, then, so we ended up spreading the olives and the candy on the plate, a meal a child would make. 

•••

I talked enough that I could take my speaking into the jeweler’s and come home with strands of pearls studded with rubies, necklaces that I could wind around my knuckles, forearms, and neck. I could fill my room with snapdragons and pansies, lilacs and nasturtiums. But the flowers I dropped off at the hospital, and the pearls I gave to my mother. The rest of them, the small flawed sapphires and rubies and garnets, I sold to companies that produce the tips of record needles and drills, or else use them in the building of lasers, as a way to concentrate and then diffuse the light. 

The things we drop from our lips become more and less valuable, depending on the frequency in which they appear in the world. But we are a cunning species. When we have a surfeit, we create new uses: agate and amethyst crushed into powders swallowed for respiratory disease; rubies crusting the walls of art galleries to best reflect the light on Mona Lisa; emeralds refracting heat inside the boilers in our basements. 

Jewels and flowers—or toads and snakes—don’t appear with every word. The ratio, although variable, is closer to every other sentence. And everything has an effect. We have to be more careful with insects, now, especially the pollinators and pest-killers. Spiders are cradled in tissue paper, bees guided from apple tree to raspberry bush. Teenagers go toad-killing where they used to have paper routes. 

Sometimes I catch those teenagers near our cottage, and, spitting chunks of jet and tiger’s eye at their feet as I swear, I chase them off. After a few incidents, I hear they call me a witch, and I don’t mind. Our cottage is not in the woods, not precisely, but in a wooded lot that turned wild after a three-house fire. Developer disagreements mean that the shells of the houses are still there, full of snakes and toads and frogs and lizards. 

“So we’re the witches in the woods,” Nora says, delighted by the thought. 

•••

I met Nora at church-sponsored group for girls of a certain age and disposition. Diamonds like me, who barely earned the name. And the toads, the future nuns and factory workers, who would spend their days on assembly lines reciting manuals and spitting the resulting reptiles into plastic boxes. The room we sat in was thick with the smell of algae and dead water. 

“Say what you pray for,” trilled the woman in charge, cupping her fingers around her mouth. Nothing came, though; a woman’s jewels and toads slow with age.

 “I pray to be redeemed,” said Nicole mechanically, her fingers searching for a cigarette, echoing the phrase they wanted to hear. She had recently re-dyed her hair, this time to an onyx that seemed more like a shiny sheet of plastic than hair. We were old friends from junior high. She attended culinary school now, and brought us her failed cakes, the squashed Battenberg squares and the crumbling meringues. I wasn’t sure if she was a terrible cook or if she thought that was what we deserved. I watched a coral snake squirm out of Nicole’s mouth before she leaned forward and retched, spitting its body into the basket. 

“I pray for a goddamn break.” Cara rarely spoke, preferring to remain silent most days. When she did, soft porous gemstones like coral and amber and onyx fell out of her mouth. 

“I pray,” said another whose name is probably now Mary Francis, or Mary Rose, or Mary Ursula, knowing her. It came out garbled by a toad. She coughed, trying to cover her mouth, but the horntoad that emerged caught her lip. She sneezed blood and mucus on the floor near Nicole’s feet.

“Jesus,” Nicole said.  

Some kids, I recall, kept horntoads as pets then, but nobody moved to take it up.

“It’s all right,” said the last girl. Nora, she’d said. Her hair was nearly the same colour as mine, dark enough that it could swallow the moonlight. A midwife toad, just a few inches wide, popped from between her lips. She unfurled her tongue and let it climb onto her palm. 

 “Go screw yourself,” Nicole said to her. The pallid screw, that was interesting. I wondered if that meant that she liked the new girl. Nicole and I used to drive around after our work at the gas station ended. We would drive up the canyon together, eating pilfered candy. 

 “Just screw?” I said. 

“Fine,” said Nicole, “you can go fuck yourself.” 

We laughed for different reasons; some of us were desperate for any excuse to laugh, some hiding our shock at hearing the word so as to not seem like prudes, and some laughed just because we had to sit in this circle, clutching weak coffee with low-fat creamer, green packets of false sugar, waiting for Nicole’s dry carrot cake, overstuffed with walnuts. We were allowed to eat all we wanted now that we were fixed, for good or for ill. I was hungry for it already. 

After the meeting was over, I followed Nora outside. She gestured to her midwife toad. 

“I’m taking him down to the pond.”

“Him?”

“Midwife toads, the males, they fertilize the eggs by wrapping their legs around them.” 

I had never heard anyone speak about reptiles like that. I wanted to say something wise, about how tender her curiosity was. But her gray eyes looked as eyes sometimes do when they open after sleep. Her body was soft in all the places that tend to softness, like mine, but every curvature, every joint, was perfectly rendered, etched with a chisel. 

“After the female lays the eggs, he’ll have to keep them wet,” she explained. “So I’ll take him by the creek.” 

I didn’t remind her that the teenage toad-killers would almost certainly smash this toad with a shovel or brick before any eggs could be laid. I didn’t warn her that next day we would find constellations of raised mosquito bites on our skin, in spite of the number of reptiles by the creek. Mosquitos are like that. Persistent. Certain other insects have evolved to cope too. Moths are more toxic, they say. The monarch butterfly takes an extra generation to cross the continent. 

While Nora talked, tiny frogs, golden and lovely, emerged from her mouth, small enough that they didn’t interrupt her speech. I wondered if they might be poisonous, and when we stopped, I said so.

She shrugged. “It wouldn’t matter if they were. Nobody attacks their own mother. And maybe we all look alike to them—maybe that’s what keeps our toad-hunters safe.” 

We sat in silence by the pond for a while after that, smelling mold and sulfur and dying green things. 

“They were almost extinct before,” she said finally. “So we saved them, in a way. They’re valuable for medical reasons, since their mucus can induce tachycardia or stasis, depending on the dosage.”

She brushed my arm with her hand, dismissing a mosquito. Her hands were as cool as running water, and I wanted to feel her body on mine, the same way I would settle a blanket around my limbs.  

•••

Nora is ill again today. I wake before even the cats rouse for their food, and find her kneeling before a sack, retching bile so green that it looks like newborn grass. She vomits and vomits, and finally out creeps a trembling rough green snake. I hold her in the cradle of my body, and she drinks thin sips of water. I wish that I could cast a circle, pass smooth-rubbed citrine over her skin, or bargain with a spirit to heal her, the way that the teenagers who go toad-hunting in the woods think that I can. 

“Do you think it’s just the toads?” she whispers.

Maybe. There are some prices to pay, both for diamonds and for toads. It may only be her body, unruly in ways that shock me even now. Her fingers and toes, elegantly spindled, are always cold, and sometimes flush in patches of dull red, soft wooly blue, or else a glowing orange. I put my hand on her forehead and feel for a fever, but of course there’s nothing.

One of our cats emits a sharp, whining bleat of a meow, and runs in three circles around my feet. Nora sighs, but he’s only hungry. Cats and girls are both like that. I open canned chicken and herring, and the cat eases his face against my hands, made sweet again. 

•••

When I told my mother I was leaving, she only sat in her pink bathrobe, ruffles clutched to her throat. She wouldn’t even speak to say goodbye, wouldn’t bless me with a rose or a ruby. When I stood before her and tried to explain why I was going, pebbly garnets, so dark they were almost black, spilled from my lips. At last my mother flinched, standing to escape the stones scattered across her feet. She swept her toes across them, and together we watched them disappear into the carpet, visible only by glints of light. 

“You should have been a nun,” she said, looking away from me, biting at each word as if starving for the sound of them. She’d hated that I wasn’t a toad and that I couldn’t be forced into penitence. I turned my fingers into my palm, letting the fingernails press into the skin there, etching myself so I wouldn’t slap her. “I don’t know why you were gifted like this.” 

Get thee to a nunnery, Hamlet told Ophelia. I remember the shocked giggle that ran through the girls when we read the play in junior high. Ophelia, a toad-spitter! And after we’d been told how beautiful she was, how chaste and pure, how she handled all the flowers. A life of religious contemplation, we had been told, was the only way to save some girls from themselves. Only a vow of silence, a promise to devote oneself to God, and years of unwavering faith might free one of the curse. 

Nicole and I leaned against the balcony along the roof of our school after literature class and stared at the convent across the street. The girls there didn’t have names. Their heads were swathed in crisp white folds of fabric, their bodies vanished under black dresses. 

“The veil is so they can see if they’re speaking,” Nicole said, holding her fingers to her mouth to catch the squirming green lizard that emerged. “The white shows mucus.” 

A group of nuns exited the convent and walked down the sidewalk in a row, single file, their hands clasped in front of them in prayer.

Nicole let the lizard stumble over her fingers, one foot after another. “Christ, my father wants me to become one. You know, spare him remembering my birthday or wasting money on good beef.”  

“But you told me that toads run in your family,” I said stupidly, and not I’m so sorry, or fuck them for thinking that.  

Nicole snorted. “They do. But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? To get rid of us.”

•••

The first night Nora and I came to live in our cottage was what we called our wedding night. We sat under candlelight and ate a chocolate cake so rich I could barely taste the sugar in it. A toad leapt from Nora’s lips, stunning her with its tiny webbed foot that slammed her lower lip against her teeth, a smudge of blood shining on her mouth before she wiped it away. It landed on the frosting and struggled, feet burdened with the thickness of it. 

Nora freed him, and we ate until our bellies were stretched full enough to make us sleep on the thin camping mattress. When we woke, I looked at her cotton sundress, white printed with silver feathers and ferns, tight against her body. I touched her by the neck first, then the hair, and then she lifted her face. It was easy to do this without hesitating, as if I had known the movements all my life, to unbutton and untie and free her of the dress. When I say this, Nora laughs and reminds me that I have been undressing a girl all my life.

“I don’t count,” I said, as I pulled my limbs free and began to unravel my braids.

“You do,” she said. 

As if she were waiting for it, a green and gold snake, a common garter, fell between her teeth and into her hands. She coiled him gently around my wrist, weaving him against my knuckles, and then began to sing. She sang, and her snakes, all harmless natricinae, wove themselves around me, bodies smooth and dry against my naked skin. 

•••

Nora left me alone in the cottage some days, when she went to her chemistry classes to study. Potion-making, I joked. Her plan was to be white-coated and pristine in a laboratory, to learn to synthesize drugs from the secretions and venoms and mucus linings of reptiles. I wondered if it ever bothered her, to think of the creatures she made and loved to be put to such use, but I never thought of a way to ask such a question. 

I remained at home, singing jewels to myself—my useful, flawed stones—and learned to bake. Cookies first, since Nora loved them thin enough that they would break at the first touch of her teeth. Once I mastered those, I baked apple scones with cheese folded inside; pastries that required long hours of folding butter and freezing dough before I could work them again; lamb pies fragrant with rosemary and carrots from the garden outside. 

When Nora and I argue, the jewels that come from my mouth are brighter and harder, a mine-cut diamond or a Burmese ruby. When I am angry, they will sometimes catch on my lips and bleed, and Nora always sighs and wipes the blood away from my mouth. She found me a thick salve that smells of sweet pink bubblegum to smear on my mouth. I put it on each morning, and I can taste it today while I roll out unseasonable gingerbread (to build our next house out of, I told Nora) and pinwheels of cheese and spinach and bacon. 

I set the gingerbread to cool on the shaded windowsill, singing old folk songs, pretty ones about wronged maidens and spirits by the shore. Today is a pearl day, so I have to stop every so often to spit them into a butter dish; in between, I hollow out a section of my cheek and hold them there. 

I begin to roll out the dough for this week’s bread when I hear shoes tapping on the porch. I step to the windowsill to see a girl’s hand wrap around a loaf of gingerbread, and then a pinwheel. I open my mouth to invite her inside, to tell her that she doesn’t need to steal, but then one of the cats jumps up to investigate the butter. I turn to pull him away. When I return to the windowsill, the girl is gone, leaving gaps in my rows of baking.  

•••

Nora returns home that night with a package of lamb and a story. A man, she reports, a murderer, is hunting diamonds. He slits them open with the sharpest, thinnest knife that he can find. 

“From the throat down,” she tells me, and shivers. 

A murderer who did such a thing would imagine rubies as big as eggs and the colour of pigeon blood, Nora thinks aloud; sometimes he would dream of quartz lining the tender, pulsing flesh of women’s bowels. Sometimes, as he unwraps the apron-like fat that protects the abdomen, he would hold his breath, imagining diamonds glittering in the sheeny white tissue there. 

“You can’t believe he really thinks that,” I say. 

“No,” Nora says. “I don’t.” 

I know I swallow jewels sometimes, especially because I have a tendency to produce the miniature ones. I don’t bother to search my shit for them, although there are certainly some girls who do. But the murderer wouldn’t be able to find anyone with that many gems inside. He must do all this for hope of a single pearl, a chunk of unrefined emerald; or, more likely, he seeks the pleasure of his fingers digging inside their cavities, excavating them from the top down. I imagine the girls that he’s killed, how he leaves them crumpled on the floor like dresses. 

Nora curves her body around mine that night, trembling as if a snake is about to emerge. Finally I turn and hold her, and I can feel the way that she looks at the bare glass from the window, eyes open and staring. 

•••

“Don’t go out,” Nora says.

“No one’s going to kill me.”

“You don’t know that.” A tangerine-skinned gecko, its tail florid with black and white, crawls from her lips to my hair, and licks its eyes to clean them. 

“No,” I allow, watching the gecko, “I don’t.” 

We hide in the cottage at nights, the doors locked, the curtains drawn. In a fit of superstition, I weave together lavender, heliotrope, and dittany into a wreath, and hang it above our bed. I close and lock the window that I once used to offer pastries to the outside world. Parents will keep their girls inside, and perhaps will even feed them properly for once.   

I accompany Nora to her classes. The professor sits me in the back of the room, where I empty out my mind and watch the way that the light moves through the dusty crank window while they discuss the toad venom lactone class and its influence on malignant tumors. 

Nora and I link arms and walk past the town square. Memorials for the dead girls are plastered on telephone poles, on the bus stop benches, taped beneath advertisements for dog walking and toad-hunting. Women kneel before some of them, speaking quiet words of consolation, or (I hope) revenge. They leave the flowers that they drop, the snapdragons and the sweet peas, the peonies and the tulips, but they scoop the jewels into their handbags with pinching fingers. Men stand behind them, awkward arms full of teddy bears and boxes of pink-frosted cookies.

“Sweet,” Nora murmurs. We wait for a toad or a snake, but nothing comes. She shrugs. “Useless now, aren’t they?” 

I pick up one box and carry it home with us. The cookies are dry and thick, the frosting gluey in my mouth. 

•••

That night, I wake to find Nora shivering. At first I think it is only the cold—only the lack of blankets, only the need for a fire in our Victorian cast-iron fireplace—but even after I pile blankets over her and stack the wood over coals she continues to shake. She pulls back her nightgown, her legs splayed, and points to her lower abdomen. Edema, presenting with a small amphibious hand pressed to the surface of her skin. I push my finger gently to the bubble of fluid, and the toad pushes back. Wanting. But this is further down than the uterus, closer to the puffy pink ripple of her colon. Near the ileum, I read, consulting Nora’s anatomy textbook. Somewhere close to the useless appendix.

“We’ll have to go to the hospital,” I say, but Nora shakes her head. Not at night, she means. Not while there is a murderer. I call an ambulance, but they tell me that there is no immediate danger, that all I need to do is bring her into the hospital tomorrow morning. 

I take the opioids, those pills that seem irradiated by blue light in their bottles, and grind them as I do herbs, with the mortar and the pestle. I mix them into a tincture, to make the pain vanish faster, and Nora drinks it down and falls asleep. Her nightgown is gathered at her waist, exposing the smooth line of her belly. 

It is a common complication for toads, I know, that obstruction. Still, I sit by her, tracing my fingers atop the bubble, urging the toad to stay safely where it is and not vanish back inside of her, where it might kick at her tender ovaries, damage the delicate ducts of her liver, harm the sweet dark curves of her kidneys. 

I am nearly asleep when the toad begins to chew at the inside of her. Nora stirs but doesn’t wake. I see the skin wobble, punctured as the toad slaps and bites and nibbles at the lines of her ropy muscle, the thick fat that guards her from the world, cutting and peeling, cutting and peeling. Nora moans in her drugged sleep. I almost shake her awake, almost scream, but there is no use at all. Instead I hurry to the kitchen and grab my chopping knife, the one I use to slice carrots, peppers, and squashes into fine curled strips of vegetables. Its blade has a curved belly, so that if I rock it back and forth, I can mince herbs without even lifting my wrist. I press the tip of the knife very gently, hardly enough to cut, to her skin, and I hesitate. 

Living flesh does not cut like the butchered breasts of birds. It is resistant to the blade, spongy and stiff. I try once, and shake. Again, and I run to vomit, and barely make it to the toilet. It is only on the third try, when I position the knife but do not watch the blood seeping to the surface, and I try not to feel the skin parting, that I succeed in cutting her open.

The creature bursts out, and I see it is only one of her tiny golden frogs, wet with blood and bile, shivering just as Nora did earlier. Nora’s cut seeps blood gently, like water kissing the edge of a sink as it spills over the side. Inside I can see the slippery slush of organs, but I turn my eyes away, I do not look. They are my organs, too, somehow; somehow my body is her body, and hers is mine, and I can feel the dull pain of where the knife has cut. 

Some secretion, like a kiss of mucus, glistens on the edge of the cut. The frog’s tiny vocal sac vibrates, rattling as it exhales.

The ambulance will come, now, alarmed at my descriptions. I use a sharp needle, a ladder stitch that I use to mend the long holes of clothes, to sew her together. I sponge all the blood off her skin, cover the wound, and pull her nightgown down again. Nora sighs, her body limp but breathing, still not quite awake. I cover my face in my hands and wait for the knock at the door. 

•••

When we are being discharged from the hospital, Nora bandaged and suffused with antibiotics, an orderly comes to wheel her outside. His face is bright with acne and a blush, and for a moment I think that he will kneel before her and propose marriage. But instead he waves his hand in the air.

“Did you hear?” he says. “They caught him! The murderer! It’s him, they found him with his hands full of intestines. The other inmates will kill the fucker in his cell if they can get their hands on him.”

Nora and I look at each other. 

“He killed a lot of women,” he says, disappointed in our reaction.

“Yes,” I allow, watching the top of Nora’s head. “He did.” I offer the citrine chunk that fills my mouth to the orderly, who tucks it into his pocket and walks us to the door. 

•••

It is a few weeks later, as Nora takes her first walk outside our witch’s cottage, when we find her. I’m not surprised that the teenagers hadn’t found her, because this is a place that only Nora and I know about, a place where Nora can hide all of her creatures in peace: past the boulder behind our house, hidden by air potato vines hanging with fist-sized potatoes, lies a moss-furred path where snowdrops, flowers that look as artificial as glass, have forced themselves from the ground. Nora is alive, her organs gloriously pink and whole, beautiful in the same strange way that living fungus is. The scar from the line I cut—a very small one, a sensible girl, the doctor praised me—is already fading, smaller than I expected. Nora is alive, and the woman resting in our hiding spot has been killed. 

This woman’s body must have belonged to a nun. Her black dress still covers her above the waist, and the torn skirt has settled on the ground like a blackbird’s wing. Her abdomen was stripped with a hasty knife, and her organs are purple and red, like berries cooked over in a sugar glaze. The proof of her violence is dried on the stones and the ground and the leaves, and I can imagine how her blood scented the air. 

“Who killed her?” Nora asks, and opens her jaw wide, in case something comes, although nothing does.

I am sure it was the murderer, or perhaps my surety is only hope. But no diamond girl becomes a nun. 

Perhaps she was my mysterious thief, the girl who plucked my pastries and ran. Perhaps the murderer saw her with her hand to her mouth, doing her best to conceal her hunger, and perhaps he hoped that he might find something valuable in her, even if she was a nun. Sometimes an object falls back down the throat and swells in the body. Sometimes greed leads a man to take up a knife, and sometimes it’s love that opens the belly wide. 

“Look at her,” Nora says, and coughs, and this time a garter snake squirms past her lips and tumbles into her palms. 

There is no sign of the decay that should be present. Oh, her body is ruined, her stomach dark as stone, her hand unfolded over her mouth. But clustered around her are guarding snakes and toads and frogs, each of them having secreted some permeable jellied shell, not unlike the gift Nora’s yellow frog left for her. I’ve no doubt it helped, said the doctor when I brought it to his attention. 

And it must have helped her, our poor dead nun. Her body should be liquid by now, a heap of collapsed organs quivering around her brittle skeleton. Her skin should have bloated and blistered, bloody foam having spilled from her lips, finally something unaccompanied by a creature. But her body is still solid, her skin still smooth. 

We could call the police, return her to a morgue that will arrange her body inside a shining silver box that opens and closes like a child’s toy to reveal a perversity of her face, shocking and shocked. She will be tagged and autopsied, which the murderer had already begun, slicing her from just above her pelvis to her collarbone. Her family might come forward to claim her body, but they might not. Usually the nuns separate themselves from the people they used to know, if they weren’t already abandoned by their families. 

Her convent will fold her into a cardboard coffin and bury her with only a cross to mark her grave, without anyone to remember who she was. Better not, I think, as Nora puts her hand on my back. 

I was the one who fed the nun, in the end. Better a burial by unknown hands that loved her, than by the people who kept her starved, made her speak softly or not at all, to conceal what might come. Nora helps me wrap the nun’s body in a pansy-sprinkled flannel blanket, and cover her with pansies and daylilies, snapdragons and hollyhock blooms. We dig a space at the edge of one of Nora’s gardens, and when our hands are thick with red weals, we lower the nun down. We surround her shroud with stones to keep the animals from rooting her out. 

“Later today,” I tell Nora, feeling a gauzy opal work its way against my cheek, “I’ll plant flowers around her. Roses, maybe, or violets, or sunflowers.”

No one cares to check on what the witches in the woods do with themselves, anyway.

“Are you hungry?” she asks.

I wait, but no creature appears. Nora carries out my latest baked goods, small seed cakes glazed in syrup, and sets them before us. At first we stare at the cakes, both of us empty, both exhausted. Then I crack one in half, the dried sugar glaze on top splintering like ice, and pass one to her. We chew it in silence, grinding up the poppy seeds with our teeth, working it back to pulpy, lemon-scented dough in the hollow of our cheeks. Then Nora takes one more, and so do I. And then another, and another, and our stomachs balloon. 

We eat until the cakes are gone, and the plate is empty. Nora stands up and takes my hand, leads me back to bed. We’ll make love there, kiss each other silent. We don’t need to talk. We don’t need to give it all away.