The Fourth Child, Jessica Winter [fantasy novels to read txt] 📗

She had consumed nothing but water and Coca-Cola for breakfast and lunch. She refused to apply bandagesto the blisters mushrooming across her heels, one of which had started to bleed and stick over the miles they covered on footthrough the city. Jane looked up at Teresa as she worked her heel against her shoe, the friction turning wet and warm, thecorners of her eyes crinkling with virtuous discomfort.

Behind Jane, a boy muttered, “Fairy stuck her with his spear,” as another boy laughed.

Colin Chase and Patrick Brennan. Pat. Football players. B+ students. Smart enough, but indifferent to school. Colin tall and horse-faced, shaggy-blond, jaw strong or overbearing depending on the angle. Pat slighter, darker, objectively pretty. Wide-set deer eyes. Elise and the others called them Thing One and Thing Two.

At the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, the Salus Populi Romani glittered atop the altar. Mary, Mother of God, was pinched, maybe resentful, gaudy crown perched atop her hooded robe, state-fairbaubles hanging from her neck and pinned to her shoulder. Baby Jesus, a skinny homunculus, sat stiff on Mary’s lap, peeringup at her skeptically. Are you my mother? he seemed to wonder, the same question that haunted the just-hatched baby bird in the book that Jane had read a hundred timesto Jeanette Vine.

Behind Jane, big blond Thing One muttered to dark pretty Thing Two, “Mary got fucked by God.”

Gaat fucked. Gaad. Jane’s mother made sure her children were vigilant about the Buffalo accent. “Round your vowels,” she commanded them.

Thing Two laughed as Thing One huffed and grunted in an orgasmic imitation of Mary. “Oh Gaad. Oh Gaaahhd.”

Jane’s upper lip kicked. A puff of air escaped her throat. It was funny—all of it. The carvings, the sparkles, the incantations, the incense, the spectacle, the money. Her money. How many little piles of fives and ones would equal the value of one marble pillar in this place, one square footof mosaic? Jane’s tears dropping on a cheap dumb candy tin as she sobbingly latched it shut, her mother yelling in the vicinity—thewhole thing was hilarious.

Jane looked at Elise beside her, who rolled her eyes. For almost laughing at Colin’s blasphemy, Jane assigned herself tenHail Marys and a few smacks to the head the next time she had a bathroom stall to herself.

Sister Tabitha, their catechism teacher, had told them in class that sinful thoughts didn’t put your soul in danger, “so longas you don’t consent to the thought,” she said.

“But how do you consent to a thought?” Alyssa Piotrowski asked without being called on, her hand in the air. Jane felt gratitude toward Alyssa for always posing the questions she was too timid to ask herself. Maybe someday Alyssa would ask Sister Tabitha for Jesus’s precise cause of death.

“You consent by taking pleasure in the thought,” Sister Tabitha replied. “By not fighting it off with prayer.”

“But—the thought is still there,” Alyssa said. “Didn’t you consent to the thought by thinking it in the first place?”

“Alyssa got raped by her own brain,” Thing One said, and Thing Two laughed into his sleeve.

In Vatican City, Michelangelo’s Pietà presented an optical illusion: vast and solid Mary, curtained knees spread, Jesus’ shrunken corpse slung across her lap. Janesquinted at the sculpture, willing Jesus and Mary to change positions, to strike new poses for her mind’s camera. She guessedthat if the sculpted figures thawed and rose to their full heights, Mary would tower over her son, twice his width.

“Jesus died because Mary sat on him,” Thing One said to Thing Two. “Fat cow.”

At the Santa Maria del Popolo, Caravaggio’s Conversion on the Way to Damascus and Crucifixion of St. Peter hung facing each other. The apostle Paul, fallen from his horse, his arms outstretched, his dirty legs parted and quivering,his eyes closed against the light of God. Peter at first appeared decrepit, wretched in the hands of his captors and tormentors,but further contemplation revealed him as powerful in his insistence to be nailed to the cross—not just nailed to it but nailedupside down, so as not to offend Christ through straight mimicry. Peter was powerful in the pride he took in his degradation, in confrontingthe desecration of his flesh. His flesh would be seen. It was evidence. His tormentors would look him in the eye.

An odor of old sweat wafted from the canvases. Burlap and hay. The paintings heaved and groaned. Their lights flickered beneaththe shadows of shifting bodies. The paintings were alive, animal. They stirred like a sleepy beast who slowly emerges fromdarkness. The first thing you’d see would be the blinking yellow eyes.

Jane never could have said—she could not say now—what constituted a “religious experience.” But if she had to guess, standing right there between the Caravaggios, it was a nauseating little quake of dread and ecstasy. Your throat opens up and you think you might be in love. For a second, it’s like the ghost of God is inside you. You can contort yourself however you want to see his face, but he will always elude you.

He is not even looking at you, Jane thought. It existed beyond language, or before it. You had to kill it first, before you could put it into words.

Not for the first time, in another church but far from home, Jane felt the boundaries dissolving. If only for a second, shecould flow in and out of her surroundings, take on their colors and compositions without hardening or getting stuck in place;she could absorb and reflect light like a panel of tesserae. She was no longer petrified by the eyes of God. Between the Caravaggios,something opened up in Jane, just then, and it would never close.

Behind Jane, Thing One muttered to Thing Two, “Cara-fag-io.”

Jane turned away from the paintings and toward the voice. She met Colin’s eyes, then Pat’s. Colin bucked his big jaw at herand thrust his tongue inside one cheek. Pat stared placidly back at Jane.

The next day, on the Metro, Colin pulled to the edge of his seat across from Jane and Elise and said, to Jane, “Fucking