The Everlasting

by Katy Simpson Smith

  Halfway through the night, she woke up sweating: a bony hand had reached all the way down her throat and played her insides like a lute. She could not tell if it was Crispus or Christ.

  Servius asked her to run sprints with him in the new-mown wheat fields—cut early for hay, in hopes of saving the cattle—only because Quintus had lessons and Marcus was sneezing and the tutor was visiting his mother in Greece. They stretched their legs like Olympic runners, his exaggerated knee bends making Prisca laugh. It was easier to pretend they were part of the same organism when they were younger.

  They shouted start together, and her body fell forward into a great thrust of energy, her thin legs digging at the soil, paddling it back, her elbows punching behind her as if the air back there was the enemy to speed. No thought at all, just legs and arms hoisting, first feeling gloriously unhinged and wild—matching Servius stride for stride, she felt like a wind nymph, melting the atmosphere, all resistance—but then she saw her brother inch ahead, and the ground came back up to fight her feet, and the air became glue, and her lungs shrank, and her thighs turned leaden and shrieking, and though she pushed and pushed, she couldn’t grab that freedom back. Servius won, as he always did.

  “It’s your flubbies weighing you down,” he said, thumping his chest with a smile.

  She spat at him.

  When he timed her sprints, she tore at the air, her teeth bared. In her slowed-down mind, she dreamed of pushing her body so hard it broke. Servius would rush to the cart path and find her collapsed, or better yet, on fire—all that friction between flesh and sky having lit the spark.

  Anna started the morning with a wool shawl, and by the time she went to cut herbs for lunch, she was wiping the sweat from the crannies in her neck and saying blasphemous things about Jupiter. The day was too hot for the season. The wind had stopped, and the sparrows came closer to the house, boldly begging. Inside, everyone complained of headache.

  Prisca lingered in her father’s study. He wasn’t speaking to her, but he wasn’t busy at his papers either, so she waited. She picked up his old shirt of scale armor, the bronze plates of which had begun to turn green, and looped her arms into it. She liked to run her fingers up and down the fishy flaps. It was hard to imagine him wearing this heavy thing, homesick.

  “You look absurd,” he said.

  She knew very well how she looked. “What’re you going to do next?” she asked. “Go back to secret prayer?” She raised an arm high to hear how her sleeve flapped, rung.

  “Jesus didn’t seek death; he accepted it.” He gave his head a quick shake, seemed surprised that it was her standing before him and not the bearded man. “Prisca, I don’t want you to worry about any of this. We’re safe, everyone’s safe. I’m grateful—” He had to think carefully about what exactly he was grateful for. “It’s a blessing that you’re interested in the Word, that you say you believe. That’s enough for now. Your mother and I agree, you’re just a child.”

  Prisca tucked both arms inside the mail shirt and punched a fist out—boom, boom—like her heart was beating through the bronze. As if her parents really sat down after she’d gone to bed and asked each other, “Do you think Prisca is a child?” and weighed the evidence (“On the one hand, she’s four and a half feet tall; on the other, she can seem very somber sometimes”) and finally came to the conclusion that, yes, she was not yet an adult. She lifted the mail off with a grunt, felt her little pyramid breasts spring back. She had a quick fantasy of smearing her father’s library with her monthly blood, dipping into her warm supply and dragging her red fingers across his rows of scrolls.

  “Faith is not for cowards,” she said, then dropped her voice to what she hoped was a menacing whisper. “Jesus loves children.”

  In and around the outbuildings she dragged her feet through the thirsty dirt, creating clouds of dust, hoping that Crispus would come, that Crispus would not come, that God would somehow send her the strength she lacked, that he, God, would look at her weak girl’s body and want it for his own.

  “Call me,” she said quietly. The air fell on her shoulders like a blanket. The slaves in the far fields had gathered under a tree with a bucket of water. The grasshoppers were silent. The twitch inside her had grown; she felt desperate in her stomach and her throat and her ankles. “Call me,” she said. “Use this body.”

  Men would come for her; she would turn cold, unkind; she would succumb to that desire for warm skin; she would learn how to dissemble without guilt, because that was how grown-ups built the shaky houses of their lives, on lies, on closing their eyes to so many big, hard, real things. Like: There are a thousand moments to be afraid of, but death isn’t one of them.

  “I’m the one you should want,” she said to the sky, to the one vulture floating on some unfelt high wind. “Want me.”

  They weren’t supposed to go to Rome—or was it that they were supposed to wear shawls to mask themselves—but their father had a manuscript that must be delivered, and of course he couldn’t show his face, and Anna needed new sponges for cleaning, fresh from the sea and rough, but her bunions kept her at home. Servius brought a sack of cherries just so he could spit the pits at her.

  When they were younger, the Via Appia was an unfurling obstacle course, with imaginary games built into the journey—hide-and-go-seek among the tombs, find-the-nut in the carriage ruts, dare-you-to-fart when a soldier passed. But the older she got, the less interesting her brother found her. It felt as if she was walking into the empty horizon of young womanhood, where no one else would come.

  Behind the apartments growing taller and the wall that separated the sophisticated from the farmers—or maybe the city-poor from the country-poor, or maybe just the riotous world from the lonely girl—the Aqua Claudia rose up like a honeycomb. A half-dozen boys were throwing rocks through the arches.

  “I’ll meet you back here,” Servius said, looking not at her but at a buxom woman walking past with a monkey on a leash.

  “She’s fifty years old,” Prisca said. “Where are you going?”

  He handed over the scroll he’d kept in his belt. “This goes to the lawyer’s, and Anna wants three sponges. If you get them from Maxentius, he’ll sell them on credit.”

  “What, was I supposed to pay for them? You didn’t get any money?”

  They could’ve been urchins; no one would’ve cared.

  “Two hours,” he said.

  “But you don’t know anyone!”

  “Crispus is at the baths. Be good.”

  By the time she came up with a retort, he’d swum into the strangers. She began trotting after him. She didn’t want him—she didn’t want to spend time with him—but she wasn’t certain enough of anything to spend time with herself. And Crispus. Crispus’s lips were in those baths. What if her brother left and never returned? [The list of worse things is so long I’m already bored. Stop sitting on your ass. Fossilize your impact so well that Latin Prisca will become Prisca Latinized, the Priscasaurus whose ancient diet consisted of mollusks and swoons. Breeze through phantom tourists at the foot of the Colossus, the referent in Bede’s prophesy, “As long as the Colossus stands, so shall Rome”—that bronze, hundred-foot man that, contrary to Byron’s comforting mistranslation (“When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall”), is in fact no more. Once you’ve swallowed enough future ghosts, go back to your sorry brother and his weak-veined friend and tell me they still bother you.]

  Everything was hotter in the city; she felt the grit on her ankles rubbing up her calves, and though water was right there, sliding into the capital from the empty hills, a hundred feet above her head, she could not touch it. A sheep pushed into her. Past the expanse of the Circus Maximus, temples rose like mushrooms. Across this city, people were buying, arguing, every now and then maybe fornicating, and then walking hushed into the temples and asking the gods to grant them luck. Prisca got a sour taste in her mouth.

  Inside the Baths of Trajan, she saw Servius stop at an oasis in the grass courtyard, where a
palm sagged over a fountain and a boy and a girl were sitting, their hands draped in the water. Prisca was desperate for a drink. Men leaving their afternoon baths brushed past her, and a woman with her hair still wet asked if she’d lost someone. Prisca pretended not to speak the language. She recognized the back of his neck, those two ropes leading down his head to his spine, that shallow gully between them where a hand ought to rest. She did not recognize the tickling fingers that reached up to that sacred skin and pulled a hank of his hair.

  She was too far to hear, half-hidden behind an oleander, but Servius knew the girl, nodded amiably at her, and the three began their game of laughing, of stupid jokes, of lounging around admiring their own nearly grown-up bodies. Crispus’s hand found the girl’s waist; he squeezed. Servius gestured toward the tepidarium, but Crispus shook him off, his body twisted toward the girl’s. Servius dropped his shoulders into a slouch, cocked a knee. Studiously not caring. The sun was cutting in the side of Prisca’s eyes—that’s what caused the tearing, and that’s what conjured a halo around the fountain and made it look like something unworldly and preordained when Crispus’s long lean limbs folded over finally and wrapped up the strange girl in a mouth-on-mouth embrace. If it weren’t so bright, Prisca wouldn’t have been crying.

  Two hours later, sponges in hand, she stood at the base of the aqueduct—unflinching—as Servius and Crispus and his girl approached, freshly cleansed and sweat-glowing from the baths, which were filled whether or not there was drought, because the emperor was a minor god.

  “Livia,” Crispus said, and the stranger nodded.

  No one said Prisca’s name.

  She offered the girl a sponge.

  Jesus, son of a king, and nobody’s daughter, what are men thinking? Did you, God, make their hearts in a different shape? Did you put rocks in their chests and plums in ours? Is human love a game, a long distraction, a swamp where you catch the sinners? If so, will you show me how to climb out? I don’t know if you knew this—we were nearly underwater—but he kissed me. The son of a whore. He’s your son too, God, what’s your responsibility? My outside says, “I am twelve years old and grown and I do not mind,” but my inside is a plum underfoot, an old rotten plum that jumped off its tree in chase of a lamb—my only hope left being that maybe Crispus caught my pit in his hoof and will be forever a little bit lame. Jesus, you who are better than a man, cure me of my sinful heart and let me not mind how I am used.

  They dropped Livia at her family’s apartment just outside the wall—half a mile of walking and her robe still white as blank marble. Prisca’s eyes, aimed hard at the ground, still caught Crispus grasping the girl’s hand, twiddling his fingers across hers in a tumbly waterfall. The nerves across her collarbone all seemed to snap at once.

  Heading home, the boys talked about fishing. Crispus wanted to scout the far stream, but he’d run out of hooks.

  “I’ve got one,” she said. “A pretty good one.”

  “You look green.”

  “Only Father won’t take me out anymore.”

  “She beaned a fish so good only half was left to eat,” Servius elaborated. “What a waste.”

  “You didn’t mind Livia, did you?”

  “Me?” Prisca’s palms held balls of snow, and worms came out of the ice and crawled to each of her fingertips; she beat them against her hips to stop their tingling.

  “She’s rich as a devil,” Servius said.

  “What makes you think devils have any coin?”

  “You wouldn’t be chasing her around if she didn’t come with an estate. You could hunt quail through winter.” Servius raised his imaginary bow, squinted one eye, let an arrow go winging out through the spindly pines.

  “Why do you care?” Prisca said. “What I think?” She was trying to remember where she’d put the hook so she could give it to him as soon as they got home, so he wouldn’t have time to forget, so nothing would waver.

  “I just wanted to make sure you weren’t—you know.”

  Servius lunged for his friend’s armpits, and the boys scampered across the stones. From beneath a headlock, Crispus looked back at her with eyebrows raised, as if to say Will you pardon me or not?

  Was this a scene from the Bible? Was she a Samaritan or was she Judas? Should she be Christian and honest (I am brokenhearted, I am gutted, I’m forced to wonder: Am I so ugly? Am I so dull? Am I just a gathering of flesh, like an apple is a gathering of fruit, to be consumed?)—or should she be Christian and kind (No, I do not mind)? [I’d guess you can only be honest about the kind things. He doesn’t want to hear the rest. I’ve fattened myself on his id’s prayers. This is my girlish consolation, my arm tentative around your shoulder, one ruptured heart to another. I don’t know how many times this earth has to spin for our wounds to scab.]

  The boys were now far enough down the road that she could say, “I think your girlfriend looks like a skinned mink.” A cloud didn’t pass over the sun; a bush didn’t burst into flame. “I hope she falls into a well where the sides are so slippery she can’t climb out, and after she’s just a skeleton, you’ll fall in too and I’ll walk by and you’ll say, ‘Prisca, throw me a ladder,’ and I’ll say, ‘Make a ladder out of your girlfriend’s bones, you rat.’”

  Jesus, blessed boy-king, forgive me. I have been willfully bad. I have thought unkindly about someone I love. I have said cruel things, though out of earshot. I have taken the life of an animal with clumsiness. I have recognized an injustice and done nothing about it. I have not tangibly helped anyone, not even Anna when she was folding napkins. But will you allow that I am learning?

  The latest broken butterfly she’d rescued and put on her windowsill with a dish of dampened bread crumbs was now tossing slightly in the breeze—the wing and a half levering back and forth, its furry abdomen the only weight keeping it from blowing off the sill. It was easy to mistake this movement for life.

  There was no shame in Jesus. He did not make you feel dirty, he did not invade you, he did not bring you questionable joy, he was not secretly keeping a girl on the side, he did not have obscure motives, his affection for your soul was unconditional, he forgave you your awkward shape, your freckles, no one said it was wrong to seek him out, to want him every hour, to be alone with him, to linger on the wounds of his body. He could not hurt you. To give your love to anyone else was masochistic.

  She and Christ would be latched together like the eel and the hook, except the pain would be pleasure.

  The afternoon finally felt like October. The dust had fallen from the white temples and the brick apartments so the city briefly gave the impression of newness. A drizzle in the night had wet the tongues of prayer.

  “Don’t poke along like a snail,” her father said.

  She’d walked into his study that morning—spine straight, chin down, her fidgeting hands wrapped behind her back—and asked if she could come to town with him that afternoon. He’d been given the all clear from his comrades in the city.

  “I’m just delivering papers,” he’d said. “Your mother says you’ve been in the sun too much as it is. Might be time to—you know. Have you seen where I put the long map of the fields? Anyway, what’s there for little girls in the city?” He’d hardly spoken of religion since he lost Hierax. He was cooling just as all the little fires in Prisca were being set.

  “I’m twelve.”

  “Well,” he said, shuffling his papers together and scrolling them round, tying them off with cords he kept in an old boot on his desk. “It’s time you were thinking about other things, perhaps.”

  She knew what he meant. She put her hand on the delta between her legs. “This?”

  She shouldn’t have done it, but there was something so provoking in the way he looked over her head. His mouth went small and stern, and he came from behind his desk and without saying anything slapped her arm hard and walked out, the scrolls drawn tight against him.

  What a powerful little space, this secret part of hers. How sad to think that God had none.


  They didn’t speak all along the wide stone road to town, the crooked pines above them unmoving in the wind, like wooden models of trees. By the time the meadows turned to buildings, he softened and began to remark on the red squirrels dashing around trunks in dizzy circles, the hawks leering at them from high branches, the mausoleum that reminded him of what he wanted on his own one day: a frieze of men bearing baskets of wheat. A beggar sat on the side of the road with no legs below his knees, and Prisca asked her father how he would stand at the end of the day and find his home.

  “The Lord provides,” he said.

  She left her father in the forum and fetched the bread from the only baker her mother said didn’t cut his flour with dust, an old man who’d reached that point when he could never look older than he already was. He winked as he pulled the loaves from the barrels, though he surely didn’t know her. She was still leaned into a corner with three coins rolling in her palm when the street outside turned violent: a loud burst of flesh against flesh, the autumn-settled dust kicking up again in an orange wave around the figures. Hunger worked its way from the stomach to the brain. The red flash of a soldier stepped into view, and soon the street quieted.

  When he walked into the store to wash his hands—his helmet askew, his armor grimed—the baker averted his eyes and fetched the bucket of water without saying anything. Prisca clinked her coins.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  The soldier looked around with raised eyebrows. “Nosy girls,” he said to no one.

  She repeated herself, this time more slowly, to convey her assessment of his intelligence. “What hap-pened?”