The Everlasting

by Katy Simpson Smith

  When they opened the gate for her, their faces were angry and scared, and the messenger seized her arm and pulled her through the pelting crowd into the tunnel that led to the stairs that took her back down to where the day’s offerings, human and animal, waited to be sacrificed. “Filthy,” the messenger said, pushing her into an empty stall. Somewhere a horse bellowed and kicked its door with an echoing hoof. Prisca knelt down again in the dirt and hay and touched the small indentations on her calf where the lion had placed its jaws, and the bruise on her upper arm where the messenger had grabbed her, and the blisters on her back where the wax had boiled through, and beneath them the welts from her first lashing at the Temple of Apollo, back on that sunny afternoon when her father had gone to the forum to attend to business and she had visited the baker’s to get loaves for dinner. She reached her hands inside her robe and touched her chest, where no one else had touched, but it too ached.

  Her next home was a slaves’ prison. A dozen other women stared as she hoisted her tunic to pee in the corner bucket. None of them reached toward her with a sponge for wiping or, seeing her dry lips, a ladle of water. There wasn’t any water. Their eyes were sunk deep, and their wrists and ankles were red. As she squatted over the bucket, she felt the clumps of her menses come glooping out in the steady stream of her urine. What a small thing to make the heart sink. She tore a strip from the bottom of her new robe and wadded it up and buried it in her underthings.

  The next-youngest prisoner looked eighteen or nineteen, and Prisca sat beside her. The girl didn’t speak. Her hair was unbraided and black, and she had a hawk nose and a small rabbit mouth. She was digging beneath her fingernails to clean them.

  Politeness didn’t make friends; secrets did. Prisca leaned over so her mouth was close to the other girl’s ear. “I got my period today,” she whispered. “It’s a mess.”

  A brown-skinned woman in the corner yelled, “Stank so much the lions wouldn’t have her!” and threw a cup at Prisca.

  The girl with the pointy nose got up and walked away. “Fecking martyr,” she said.

  Night came and sent most of the women to fitful sleep, and Prisca lay carefully so she wasn’t touching anyone. Every few minutes she’d feel another warmth of blood slip through onto the wadded cloth. When she dozed, she had nightmares that the cloth was soaked, flooded, and she’d wake up in a panic to check, and no, it was a regular trickling; she wasn’t dying. A dark flutter flew from one corner of the ceiling to the other. It must have been a bat, but she couldn’t think how it got in, there being no windows. Maybe it emerged like an omen from her womb.

  Her body, which had been singular, was now splitting into multiple futures: the one in which she stayed a sole person, Prisca, for as long as she so desired, no one ever quite understanding her feelings but no one trying to change them either; the one in which she used her budding blood for its most direct purpose and found a man to tie herself to, using his seed to make a child, and then another, and then another until the blood dried up or he proved to be a lying liar with a stone heart and a secret girlfriend in the city, who didn’t deserve all the purpose she’d saved up to give him; or the one in which she finally became a woman, like Mary, and offered all the complexities of her sex to the idea of a life everlasting, in which goodness fell like a warm blanket over the sordid, over manipulations and betrayals and deceptions, and smothered them. She wanted her blood to be a seal on the promise she made to Christ—that she would be good, she would be good, she would be good—and in return, he would give her love without pain.

  A blond pebble in the corner of the cell shone like a crumb. She crawled toward it, grabbed it, but it was a stone after all, hard and inedible. She hadn’t eaten in three days. The other women, none of whom would share their rations, had been taken away, one by one, to fates uncertain. Only one was left, an African who was nothing but rib and elbow and knee. They were both stacks of bones, she and Prisca, and the guard stopped coming altogether. The dark-skinned woman no longer used the pot in the corner. Her arms folded against what was left of her stomach like broken poles; she listed to one side. Prisca had tried talking—asked after her family, stroked her skin—but the woman never raised her eyes. In her state, being thrown to the animals would make poor sport; what was their plan? Was she part of Prisca’s punishment, left so the girl might watch what happens to the body of a disobedient woman: collapse, desiccation, and then rot? [You can shut your eyes. Suffering won’t cease because you see it. I only pause my plot to judge if He has some little bean of empathy left—to see if He’ll save you, child of belief, my fallible girl. I want my love for Him, at least, to be worthy. I tried to sway you all, trumpet my appeal so it’d prick His judging heart, but earth is unwinnable; you lust and fight and fix and forgo with no mystic impetus at all.] The only hint that death was still waiting was the butterfly rise of the woman’s chest, the short contractions of skin across the dunes of the rib cage.

  Prisca’s stomach had stopped crooning and had begun curling over on itself—all her organs seemed to crawl and climb around her torso—and her limbs went trembly, her head as light as a balloon. Her eyes balloons within the balloon, feeling so bulbous they threatened to detach and float away all on their own. She chewed on the sling of skin between her thumb and fingers, for there was always salt to be found there. When she ran her fingers through her hair, the knots came out like many-legged spiders. Once she woke in the middle of the night, or what she assumed was night, and had lost the sense of whose body was whose, and found herself licking the cheek of the African woman until she was awakened fully by the richness of a new kind of salt. That’s not my skin, she thought.

  They brought her to another grand room for her last chance. She didn’t know why she was being given so many chances. The gold was blinding, all the luxury of sofas and thrones, marble and tile, several dozen purpled men, bowls of overflowing fruit. The fruit wasn’t there to be eaten; it was there as a lure. She saw a woman in the corner, some rich wife, turn away at the sight of her.

  Someone flicked a hand, and a man brought her a stool. What an unfamiliar comfort. Her knees popped when she sat down. She twisted her tunic so the torn edges would be less noticeable, but this pulled a swath of bubbled skin off her back. Her teeth were sore from clenching. The wad between her legs was drying out; it was coming to an end. Two men whispered by a gray-veined column, one with a gold wreath around his head. Both were bearded and handsome and reminded her of Hierax, and for an instant it occurred to her that she might already have died and this was heaven, though it was a disappointment for heaven to look so much like Rome.

  The one with the wreath and curls nodded, looked at her with an inquisitive sympathy, and left the room.

  “The emperor has heard much about this little philosopher,” the other man said, approaching.

  “Was that him?” She turned around. “Where did he go?”

  “He would’ve liked to question you himself, but he’s afforded me that privilege.”

  “Was he afraid?”

  Some of the other men in the room were listening, but they stood at an angle to her so she wouldn’t have a clear audience. Others mumbled to one another, or to the handful of wives, most of whom looked at the floor and seemed somewhat emotional.

  “He’s a great man, Marcus Aurelius. A king of reason and thought.”

  Being a king of thought seemed silly, given that the only territory you could govern was your own.

  “We’re all curious about your devotion, and sorrowful for it. The emperor believes in kindness and justice, but peace comes not from fervor but from self-control.”

  She considered herself extremely self-controlled, having not eaten her cellmate.

  “And being a man of forgiveness, he would like to extend to you a final opportunity to renounce your allegiance to the Christian god.”

  The man had strolled around her stool during these speeches and now stood before her with his hands together in a pose reminiscent of prayer.

>   “Your family is waiting outside to take you home. They are greatly aggrieved.”

  But her father was a Christian—unless, of course, he wasn’t. It seemed hard to believe they were all out there. Her weeping mother and Servius too, kicking his sandals against whatever hard surface he could find, and—now her vision was really turning golden—even Crispus, come along to add his powers of persuasion, to fall to the floor with apologies, to clutch at her calves in supplication, to speak of regret and even, could it be, of delayed affection? [Yes, yes, imagine it. Stay on this earth for it. Surely your boy isn’t like mine, who once He shuts his heart to you— Once He chooses not to love you—] It came back to her like a shock: the kiss, the pond, the warmth in cold places, the rupture, that moment when her lips were no longer touching anything but air, like the first break between an infant and its mother. This was goodness, but it was human, so it was flawed; it wasn’t religion.

  The emperor’s surrogate was droning on about rationalism and stoicism and the alleviation of pain through the management of emotion, and she believed all this and it was true, just as her brief fire of want was true, her desperate reaching for touch, for closeness, for profane understanding, and it was very possible that in this moment she was making a mistake—was mistaking Jesus for her own thwarted potential—and that human love as moderated by patience and reason was really the highest attainable paradise and she should return to the nest of her home with humility and spend the remainder of her earthly life cultivating empathy, but she was twelve. Settling for an imperfect existence was not enough. This war could not be won through reason, not if you were a little girl in this world.

  She stood up. “I believe in my own sorry power,” she said. “And so does the Lord. I love every one of you here, but not one of you loves me back, and you won’t love me any more for turning tail and going home. I’m ready for the pyre because it’s possible that maybe just one person who watches me burn will be stricken with the same belief.”

  Her blood thumped in her ears, behind her eyes, in the red rag between her legs. Everyone was staring at her now, except the women, who already knew everything. She felt a great wildness. Her little hands were clenched in fists. Just try to dispossess her!

  The man in front of her coughed. He went through the remainder of the questions by rote—where are the meetings held, what are the names of others—and then he summoned two guards, but she knew by now how to walk without being dragged. Half the population of Rome must be guards. Outside the room was a hallway, and a steep set of stairs, and down the stairs was a large foyer, and across the foyer were two tall doors, and through them was another sun-beaten square—she hadn’t stopped waiting for the rain—and as the guards ushered her toward a chariot she saw, though she was half-blinded, a group of mourners: she thought it was her family. Her father, a grand chief of cowards, eyes shot through with lava; her mother crying with gusto; Servius looking like a lost boy, not a man at all. Their fields still as dry as when she’d learned Christ’s name. She was breaking her family. But then the sun splintered, and it was some other family, some bunch of weeping strangers. Crispus, Crispus, where was his mouth.

  She kept marching. The sun was a hot seal on her neck. God’s lips on her skin. She ran through the commandments, the miracles of the Old Testament, the passion of Christ. She had already seen her mother; there was no one to wipe her face. They bustled her into the chariot, and someone snapped a whip at the horses—two horses, black and white—and they were leaving the Palatine Hill, crossing the templed plain, when she overcame the house-collapsing sound of her heart and asked where they were going and one of the men said, “Ostia.”

  The sea!

  They wouldn’t burn her at all but drown her, and this was a comfort because she’d wanted to visit the shore again and her father, full of promises, wouldn’t take her, and she thought of all the ways Jesus had touched water and decided this was a good way to die, and she was ready. Imagine the pebbly sand and her ankles in the water, and then all the way up to her hips, the salt burrowing in her wounds, lighting them up, reminding her one last time of life and its necessary anguish. The sea would wash the blood out of her. There’d be gulls and shearwaters and terns, and while her lungs filled with heavy water to carry her starved body down, they’d form a great feathered net to carry her soul up to wherever it belonged.

  The chariot rumbled past the fine houses and then the poorer houses, through the piazzas and between teetering tenements, and when they came to the great stone arch of the Servian gate, the horses slowed to walk with gravity underneath and down the Ostian Road, where they picked up their pace again on the broad stones. They passed a great white pyramid Prisca had heard of but never seen, and beyond it a hill where men were stacking the shards of oil jars. The city gave way to the country, the road punctuated again with mausoleums, the country being the same everywhere. They passed a spring bubbling up from a stone basin, and Prisca remembered that somewhere along this road, this very road to the ocean, the Apostle Paul had been killed. His head, released from his body, had bounced three times, and where his saintliness struck earth, water began to flow. Had he thought he was going to the ocean? [Stop. Turn around. Goddamn God, goddamn it, who gave us hearts to break and bodies to bury and told us instead to think of souls, what sleight of hand was that? It wasn’t Him I loved at all, but what He made, and now He’s taking it back, and though nothing ever ends in time’s long loop, I somehow never know what’s left. What sacrifice is great enough?]

  At the ninth milestone, Prisca became aware of strange trees along the side of the road, abnormally straight with few branches. As the horses slowed again, the branches became clearer: white and rickety. The trees weren’t trees at all but poles, and the branches weren’t made of wood but bones.

  The chariot stopped at the tenth milestone.

  The men pulled a wooden block from beneath the wheels and a sword, and it became clear, her short life and its conclusion, all at once, like a string of yarn become a ball. She didn’t cry, except she was, she was in fact crying, and the man hauling the block to the side of the road stopped, abashed. The second one had Prisca’s arm in his hand, and his grip loosened and he began to stroke her skin unconsciously.

  The man on the side of the road wiped his forehead clean of sweat and looked down at his shoes. These were to be her last friends, and she didn’t know them.

  “They make us take you out of the city,” the one next to her said. “You not being a citizen anymore. Look, it’s very pretty.”

  And it was pretty, the rustling poplars like women in dresses, the willows leaning like they were looking for something they’d dropped, the hush of the Tiber to the north—or was that the wind, or was that the burst of birds’ wings as a family of swans took flight.

  The man beside her dug through his bag and brought out a quartered pomegranate wrapped lazily in cloth, the stains like monthly blood. He offered a slice to her and she took it without pause, digging her dirty fingernails into the pith, picking out the bursting seeds, sucking on her fingers with nothing like grace. Her mouth became thick and sweet and bitter and dry, and she chewed through the wood of the seeds and let the sharp juice rest in the pockets of her cheeks, and this food, which would never fill her, was like a miracle. She was Proserpine, but she was eating the food of the living, may it not keep her from the land of the dead.

  The guard helped her down from the chariot and she stood in the grass with the afternoon sun like a warm cloth on her face. Behind her, she heard him sharpening the sword. Jesus, Jesus, Crispus, home, afraid, I want, not afraid, I want. She put her hands on her hair to smooth it out, no reason why. She touched her chin, just to feel it a final time. Be a strong girl, be a better girl, love, love these men. She put her arms around her chest, her waist, hugged herself. Going home, God will come, God is watching, watch my strength. Now touch felt urgent, insistent; she ran her hands down her hips and thighs and over the bony humps of her knees and crouched into a ball there in
the grass so she could wrap her arms around her whole body, so she could take in all of herself at once. This body! Sweet child limbs, sweet stinky toes, flat bottom that hadn’t yet grown round, wrists too thin for bracelets, nipples the color of dawn, all the places that ached, all the places that yearned, her proud ears, her blazing eyes, the open melted wound of her loyal back.

  The guards looked nervous, so she stood and smoothed her robes and saw they were her last responsibility.

  “I’m all right,” she said.

  And when she knelt down in the tickly grass, she didn’t think of her sins or her frailties, not of desire or jealousy or pride, not even of Jesus who had saved her from a faulty world, but of the eel she once caught with her father’s fishhook, its slippery small body under her human hand. She had knelt in the grass then too, looming above it with a rock, trembling, reading the terror in its eye. She hoped what she mistook for fear had been faith.

  Acknowledgments

  For reading chaos and nudging it toward order: Anya Groner and Jonathan Lee.

  For offering maps: Deborah Johnson, Odie Lindsey, Katie Parla, and Nathaniel Rich.

  For peeling back the layers: Paola Fornasier, Viola di Grado, Ilaria Mazzini, Stefano Sarcinelli, Francesco Sorce, and Martina Testa.

  For unexpected faith: Bill Clegg, Terry Karten, Jonathan Burnham, and Millsaps College.

  For my family, which grows and subsides, like a city changing in everything but its immortality.

  About the Author

  Katy Simpson Smith was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. She received a PhD in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is the author of We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750–1835, and the novels The Story of Land and Sea and Free Men. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Oxford American, Granta, Literary Hub, Garden & Gun, Catapult, and Lenny. She lives in New Orleans, and currently serves as the Eudora Welty Chair for Southern Literature at Millsaps College.