Harrowing Habits Sample

 

 

Harrowing Habits 

Part 1: Gospel of Indemnity

Chapter 1

VANESSA didn’t raise her hands to her ears. The screeching, burning sound of rubber was nerve-wracking. The buffeting movements, however, kept her hands busy. It was enough for her to grip the stained metal handrail. Outside the bus, along the dusty turn of the old cobbled-together town, was a rickety two-seater that had spun out after being over eager on the decline. Its driver and passenger and the bus’s driver and most of its passengers were shouting obscenities and invectives in a rapid symphony of Spanish. Vanessa whispered to herself in French and English interchangeably, inseparably, as she held on to a necklace, a cross strung along a chain—her prayers for her and God alone.

The calamity passed without much resolution, each vehicle going its separate way. There was far less fanfare and shouting upon Vanessa’s arrival at her destination. A single nun was waiting outside the nunnery. The convent was nestled inside a rare double monastery, abutting an aging cathedral, each a dusty tan, bordering on yellow. If it weren’t for the vibrant flowers—sprouting out of cracks, filling gardens, hanging off the arcades—the small city would be one parched shaded area. This sacred bastion was no exception. 

It had been a long journey, the flight terrifying her. The man beside her had invaded her seat with his bulk, pressing her to the window and all that open air. In her vertigo she saw God; oh, how jealous the angels must have been seeing humans soar. The astronauts piercing the cradle God had crafted for humanity reaching out, always reaching out.

Never worthy of the act.

The itinerary hadn’t been her choice. Ostensibly it was an act of charity—first London, then the tunnel beneath the channel, and onto France and its many railways, to arrive in Spain. It was a demotion in everything but name. Vanessa saw it for what it was: they wanted to shuffle her along, a nuisance and aggravation was what they saw her as. There were three choices: an abbey, a church, or a cathedral. Each was in a different country. It didn’t take her long to decide. She wouldn’t be a picky beggar. Even in denouncement and disillusionment, there was potential.

This is why he has given us adversity. Challenge, strife, and woe. This why. This is why. I must only overcome. If I only overcome. She crafted these words into a mantra, a litany as good as any standardized prayer.  

Vanessa repeated it in the cheap motels her meager budget could afford. The rest of her budget was given back to the church, God and his works—poverty was a vow. Obedience and celibacy were the other two tenets she had vowed, twice temporarily, then at last permanently. These oaths merged and joined with her own personal mantra. She repeated it, prostrate upon the bristled, tattered carpets. She said it when her habit became hazardously warm and oppressive in the stifling summer: those smooth lines, the simple monochromatic bliss. Again she whispered her litany when protests delayed her. Catalans demanding autonomy. Everywhere were signs of that old civil war. The wounds had never healed properly and the scars were hard to hide.

She had done her research well. Aragon, Catalonia, the culture, the politics. The constant Catholic throughline: inquisitions, discriminations against Romani, the current worries over migrants, and a loss of faith. The youth were fleeing, agnostic, or atheistic. New age spiritualism. Where were the Christians? Vanessa’s faith, paired with her youth, was seen as an exhalation. Or so she’d been so assured since she was twelve years old. There at her mother’s deathbed, with the light leaving her, Vanessa saw someone: a beautiful, miraculous angel to see her mother off. 

She was thankful for it, despite herself, for her mother had been the cruel sort, but if God had forgiven her, perhaps so could she. Regardless, Vanessa was freed. More so, she was saved. This salvation scared her father. He was of that agnostic sort, the ones who had only seen a figment of God amid the delirium of mushrooms and CBD in the sixties and seventies. Disillusioned by the world, he’d fled to Canada, tired and guilty of being an American. He’d learned French just to court Vanessa’s mother. They’d had twenty-two years together before the cancer tore them apart.

Vanessa’s mother had faith, one she kept secret, and when her daughter was born, her baptism was performed without her father’s knowledge. The priests were ever ready to add to the flock, even through duplicity. After such extreme means were used, one might expect her mother to have instilled the teachings in her daughter. But it was the opposite. With her mother’s passing and her vision, Vanessa had a pressing need to understand what she had never been taught.

This need consumed her and, in many ways, bore her through the turbulent years to follow. First, her father moved them back to America, “It will be better, the city, more children for you to hang out with. Besides, the church over there…” He looked knowingly out the window where the old wooden edifice loomed a mile away. “It’s bad karma, what the church did to the indigenous people and everything.” He inclined his head toward the steeple. Something unspoken hung in the air. Her mother resided on those grounds for eternity. That was the real reason he wanted to run. He needed to escape his grief, and Vanessa fled to her prayers, to the vocation that called to her as readily as any dream might. While the other girls wanted to be famous or creative or any of those other common dreams, Vanessa was called to a higher purpose.

It bore her through her adolescence and young adulthood, from New York and everything that transpired to Boston, a new convent, a new reverend mother, and a set of priests. Her quiet words, her simple phrasings. The unshaken devotion in her. The beginnings of her litany. Then, a month ago, Mother Elizabeth had informed her she’d be transferred across the Atlantic.

So she stood in a dusty courtyard, a spired gothic cathedral worse for wear dominating the view, the squat stone buildings of supple Renaissance-Florentine influence congregated atop older medieval facets. A plateresque facade dominated the outer building and that nave of worship. It was rife with details from effigies down to the little nubby crosses like handholds on a rock climbing gymnasium. Life sprouted and filled in the rest: a few vines, some bearing grapes, the obvious supermarket sort, roses and hydrangeas and lilies. Vanessa was more invested in the human habitations and habiliments, the newly minted shingles upon the sloped roofs, the aged windowpanes that hid any faces that might be watching the new arrival. So different from the many sculpted faces that watched her unabashedly. 

Vanessa took the monastery in for twenty seconds and decided she loved it, down to the last chipped brick.

Chapter 2

VANESSA was greeted by a higher-ranking sister, accompanied by another nun who collected the young woman’s few possessions. She was led to the office of the presiding mother superior, Francesca Lapointe. A French nun bearing an Italian religious name for her patron. Beyond her native French, she spoke Italian, Latin, English, a little German, and, upon transferring to the monastery, Spanish. She had worked hard, even as a novitiate, to stay close to the bosom of the church, the city, the state, and Christ’s vicar, presiding over the new Israelites.

The closest Lapointe had come was to an ancient and deteriorating monastery in the Italian Alps, where the people spoke German, and the lack of air conditioning led to frostbite so severe that she lost several toes. She made a lateral move to the borderlands of Spain and a convent where she might ascend the ranks. She did this through a disciplined constitution and the careful coddling of the then mother superior, who preferred “the old ways.” When at last the aging woman had retired, Lapointe had secured her superiorship at the relatively unheard-of age of thirty-eight, five years ago, almost to the day.

“Bienvenida, Sister Christina,” the mother superior said, addressing her firstly in Spanish and secondly using Vanessa’s religious name, the one she had chosen back in Manhattan. “Vanessa” was not religious or martyred, but “Christina,” in her view, held a nice ring to it, a name she could understand anyone choosing. If she were to use a name that felt false, it might as well be a pretty set of syllables, so surmised Sister Christina. 

“You come to us from New York?” the mother said, still in Spanish.

Vanessa remained standing, the rickety wicker chair on offer seeming uncomfortable. “Boston. It was New York before that,” she stumbled through her Spanish to reply.

 Lapointe switched to French. “This isn’t the first time you have been shuffled along?”

“There was a need for me in Boston,” Vanessa attempted.

The mother superior twisted her nose at Vanessa’s Canadian bastardization of French, so she settled on English. “Or a need to be rid of you in New York.” The mother superior held her peevishness fast under the cloak of authority and power. It led her impudence to become imperative. 

“That was more or less the situation in Boston, Mother Superior,” Vanessa added in deference to her enunciation—an explanation, not an excuse.

Such pitiable naivety, Lapointe concluded. “I understand you’re a Carmelite devoted to your local charity work.  You earned your degree in marketing, the better to spread word of your work and the great work on the whole. This is commendable, but you must know this is a much more monastic establishment—a Franciscan institution, though the Benedictine and Jesuit ideal of study is encouraged, if not the directed missionary and preacher work.” 

Vanessa nodded. “I believe others should find Christ, and simply by living the life as we do, one of faith and devotion, shall the path be shown. Leading by example. Is that not how we learn and worship? Our quiet ruminations? Schooled emotion and featureless exuberance.”

 Lapointe studied the young woman. Did this subtle oration hide a threat to her in its vigor? Shining young lights attract moths, pretty new lanterns. Even the faithful, for their charity and poverty, held an aesthetic eye. She had seen enough bright-faced, doe-eyed seers in her lifetime and watched how ignorance could become a liturgy of its own—an easy usurpation of power or, at the least, attention. The faithful need lightning rods. And the extraordinary is the nature of sainthood. Even relying upon psychologists to diagnose would-be saints, as hysterics (or the more politically correct “mentally ill”) could only do so much.

“Certainly quiet contemplation, endless prayer—that is our vow and we are betrothed. Never forget that.” Lapointe shuffled the papers on her table and typed a few notes into a decade-old Windows computer, trying to hide her perturbation. 

Sensing this immediate resentment, Vanessa watched as she filled out the forms. Those in authority, even members of the church, craved clay. A novitiate or juniorate would have been better, a sister who could be shaped into a nun. Undoubtedly, Mother Superior didn’t want a fully formed statue.

This is why he’s given us adversity. Challenge, strife, and woe. This is why. This is why. I must only overcome. If I only overcome.

Vanessa reverently repeated this to herself while she went to the desk to sign the paperwork. She sank so deep into her litany that when Mother Superior cried out for “Sister Esther!” Vanessa jumped in her skin, the pen fell from her hand, and she remained frozen, bent over the desk.

Sister Esther, the nun now standing in the open doorway, took a moment to take in the scene, which provoked hesitation in her. She was garbed in black and white, that most stereotypical of habiliments; her hair, where a single lock had escaped the wimple, was chestnut brown, dark above, lighter below, though never reaching the straw blond of Vanessa’s mane. A slender, almost oval face. Small but never beady hazel eyes, full of a sunlike warmth. There was an understated plainness to Esther, the way she held her tiny mouth. Everything about her screamed mousy, yet never in any way that might be considered demeaning. 

When Vanessa knelt to collect the pen, her sleeve caught on some papers, creating a new mess and fresh embarrassment. She kept her eyes on the sheets, trying to stifle how shaky she’d become. A long-fingered hand appeared to assist her, and she looked up to find Esther much nearer. She was smiling serenely, compassionately, without pity.

“Let me help you,” she said in French. She listened through the door, Vanessa realized. 

“Thank you, Sister,” Vanessa replied, matching the nun’s expression.

Lapointe took little note of this exchange, too focused on how stupid and worthless this latest outcast was. An imbecile—that’s why they’ve sent her to me, she concluded.

She dismissed them quickly, ordering a tour and an explanation of their liturgy schedule.

“Certainly, Mother Superior.” Esther dipped her head, as did Vanessa.

In the open-air corridors and arcades, Vanessa noted the brown of the wood and the dusty tan, how it blended so well with her brown cloth yet made Esther’s black stand out like a shadow, cut through by the light of the white. 

Vanessa was familiarized with their little ways of life. Days beginning at five. Morning prayer. Breakfast. Chores: cleaning, gardening. Computer or craft-based projects next, then lunch. After the meal came study and reading. Breaks for walks and conversations (always in sets of three or more, as a general rule). Supper. Sewing and other activities. Turndown. Nighttime prayers (the bell rang for profound silence, an unbreachable quiet). Sleep. “And we have a variety of services and prayers in the chapel, as well as the cathedral,” said Esther before dropping into a secretive whisper. “Sometimes, instead of the usual hymns, we’ll perform a few Gregorian chants. It’s really something.”

“In a cathedral that large, it must fill the space.” Venessa returned.

“Oh, it bounces off the stone and glass like… Well, I don’t really know; you’ll have to experience it yourself.” Esther beamed, clearly not very good at hiding her excitement.

As they toured, Vanessa also noted the many alcoves and pieces of statuary placed between the rooms and workshops, kitchen, and mess hall. The recesses were often inhabited by those kneeling to pray, too suddenly overcome to travel farther.

The color of the flowers and other growths had infected the khaki coloring of the various cloister window arches, the sap bleeding green stains, ichor fresh and long dried alike. Behind the structures was a low-hanging wall that met with the hill, the mound shorn to a smooth finish, acting as a continuation of the wall. This courtyard naturally formed a garden, idyllic and tranquil, with several trees. In one corner stood a bulbous oak, huge in diameter, its roots gnarled, its bark bleached by age. It reminded Vansessa of a portly grandmother, ready to hug her grandchildren and offer sweets.

Esther noted her fondness of the garden and showed her where the wall had been converted into a site for grapevines, as well as brown painted wood slats in a crisscross pattern, giving a bracket for the zip ties to latch on to, keeping the vines trapped like limbs in vises. “We make our wine, stomping and leaping. We have uniforms for that. They become as purple as Barney when we’re done.”

“These grapes seem very red, though,” Vanessa pointed out.

“Are you squeamish?” Esther teased.

“I…” Vanessa trailed off, her throat caught up.

Gently Esther laid a hand on her shoulder. “We have each been through toil. God has a habit of making his most devoted endure strife. It can seem so cruel, but that’s why it is unknowable.”

“You speak from experience.”

“So do you.”

“You don’t want to share, and neither do I,”.

“If it is between you and God, then so be it. I only deflect for the sake of time,” Esther spoke with careful compassion. The hand at Vanessa’s shoulder was firm, Esther so calmly solid. A slender companion to that graceful tree. Its leaves painted the nun’s face with a mosaic of light and shadow, one eye dark, the other glowing amber.

Vanessa pulled herself away from the sister and looked back toward the building, its arched roofs ending in points, its uneven cobblestone, the open-air corridor that led to a small courtyard (endless courtyards!), and standing there, at one vaulted opening, a man. He was a priest of the cloth, with an ornate cross hanging off his neck. He had a smattering of brown hair untouched by gray. His shoulder held no cope, for he wasn’t of sufficient rank. But he did hold power. His watery eyes were fixed on Vanessa, his pudgy lips slightly parted.

“Oh, that’s Father Matthew,” Esther explained, catching on to the informal event transpiring. “He’s also American. The monks reside in the other half, past the rather crude partition, the priests as well, to serve as confessors for us and the monks.”

The particular priest in question turned on his heel and disappeared back inside.

Vanessa took a long breath. “I’m Canadian. I’ve just spent time in America. Too much time.”

“Most of your life, no?”

“You read up on me?”

“Mother Superior asked me to give her an overview.”

“Too busy to sweat the details herself?”

“Oh, I’m sure she looked it over first. She likes testing our competence.”

“And? Are you competent?”

“Don’t know. I’ll let you be the judge of that.” Esther allowed a sly smile and continued the tour before bringing Vanessa to supper. There, she met her new family—dozens of names, all of them brides wearing wedding bands.

After helping clean the tableware, she was escorted by her sister Agnes to her cell. The room was sunken into the ground, three walls were stone, and one was plastered wood. It lacked anything decorative beyond the divine. (And peasant depictions at that.) 

Agnes inferred Vanessa was tired from the weary expression pulling at her dour face. “I’ll leave you to it. If you have any questions, I’m one door over.” 

Vanessa unpacked, prayed, and turned in early, though sleep eluded her and she heard Agnes return at curfew, doing her rounds quietly. The noises of her washing herself from a basin and changing into pajamas were noteworthy, seeping into Vanessa’s room like fog. 

Quiet and careful as could be, Vanessa moved to the wooden wall, finding part of it eaten away by insects. A small aperture through which to peer in on Agnes, a bit like a keyhole.

The sister moved beneath her covers, too eager and used to being neighborless. With one hand, she found herself while her other stopped her mouth, but she couldn’t prevent every noise from escaping.

Vanessa counted thirteen moaned exaltations of “Jesus” or “Christ,” an intimate prayer. She thought of The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. She had seen the statue when her school had held a lottery to visit Italy and she had won. Her father had gone with her to surprise and humor her. Of every majestic object she saw, that work of Bernini was her favorite, held above, hidden away in plain sight, for what it dared to depict. The rapture of divine ecstasy on her marble face. It was far more preferable to his depiction of Persephone or Daphne.

Vanessa returned to her bed, the sounds still audible across the throw of her cell. She decided there and then that she wouldn’t report on Agnes for her ecstatic pleasure. Sometimes the notion of marrying oneself to Jesus carries blunter interpretations, Vanessa mused before she rolled over, only repeating her litany three times before she fell asleep. 

Vision 1

SILENCE dominated the convent, monastery, and cathedral. The enveloping night was pierced by the flicker of flame and the ghastly inclusion of electric lighting. Even the pale moon felt chaste, touching the cloistered halls. 

Irrespective of this shy light, there was work to be done. Sister Josephine had drawn the short end of the stick, so her night would be sleepless. The possibility of burglary had ebbed and flowed over the decades, but with the rise in strife, poverty, and global tumults, paranoia had become cloaked in compassionate worry. Officially, while serving as night sister, Josephine was to ensure curfew was heeded, shut loose doors against the wind and the dust it would bring, ensure no candles risked fire, and check the stores were cleaned. Lastly she was to recommit herself to God and never feel lonely under his gaze.

She fought the urge to delve into the endless portal offered by the smartphone in her hand. A communal device passed from nun to nun, sister to sister. The device was strictly for emergencies or as a flashlight, never for dawdling on social media.

Josephine checked some locks, felt the sturdiness of some crossbeams, and was careful to avoid splinters. (She had bled profusely the last time she was on watch.) To her great dismay, the woodworking shop had been left wide open, pooling darkness emanating from it. Turning to illuminating technology, she split the night and came face-to-face with an anguished face drawn out in suffering. 

She shuddered and stepped back before shame found her. It was an effigy of her savior, rendered with all the glory of martyrdom. 

As the gentle fright abated, she scoured the room, hating the smell of fresh wood and the sharp pieces surrounding her. With nothing out of place save the dust she’d kicked up, she retreated hastily, righting her uniform and ensuring the binding around her chest was still firmly in place (it never moved, but she always checked it anyway). She needed to change her figure, to flatten her contours and shape; she’d always been warned she was a walking temptation. Even secluded in a neglected convent, she felt this pressure and animosity directed toward her, unrepentant eyes and sanctified eyes alike.

 At a courtyard with broad columns and thick pillars, she tucked herself into one corner, her garments billowing as she sat. She was penned in by the low-rising wall from the arcade and the pillar’s curvature. With the brightness turned low, she browsed the phone with no worry. She could giggle to her heart’s content—stifling herself as the internet’s many cats made her long for the feline of her childhood (so many years ago, high school adolescence, and now she was thirty-two and still felt as though she wasn’t grown up at all).

Amid her mirth, a discordant harmony joined in, a gurgling, an awful arrhythmia of bassy vibrations. The wet sound that followed gave the intrinsic texture of moisture, and then the moaning began. 

Josephine moved quickly before slowing, trying to pinpoint the noise. Above. The courtyard was two stories, with few rooms above for prayer and storage. But who would be up there in the middle of the night?

As she craned her neck, a fluid, dark and dim, dripped off the sandstone. Tar or blood?  Whatever it was came in an awful sludge, little bits caught in the slurry. Viscera and entrails. Josephine had no time to study them. Someone was hurt. She hurried to the tight spiral stones and took them almost three at a time.

At the landing, she stopped dead in her tracks, for there in the pale moonlight, tucked around the bend of a pillar, was a figure, emaciated, a face caught in a pitiful O, shuddering as it breathed—gurgling, the fluid seeping like drool from chapped lips, watery eyes. A soul tortured. Matted hair draped the hunched shoulders, while gnarled, broken nails held a stone, more ichor falling between the long, thin fingers. The repose was held with a careful discipline, the fingers arranged in an unknown gesture, each arm kept to a similar level and balance, prudent and practiced. And then that head, the horrified face, turned, peering with the deadened stare of recrimination.

Josephine couldn’t fight the lump in her throat, croaking instead of screaming. She held one distinct fact in her mind: A woman! But how?

She hid behind the wall, hyperventilating, hand clamped over her lips. The monstrous woman didn’t see me. She didn’t! She didn’t! 

She was trapped. Neither flight nor fight but freeze. She was rooted in place for several agonizing moments listening to the sound, a soft scraping announcing the moving limbs, tapping nails, and she swore it drew closer…the sounds quieting, disappearing. It was just before her. It had to be. She sucked in a hurried breath, waiting for her end. 

One that never arrived. The bowstring of her stress stayed coiled, waiting and waiting for nothing, until she smoothed it down enough. Her hands still trembled as she turned on her flashlight and peered around the bend.

The terrace hallway was empty. No woman, no monsters; she struggled to find even a tiny example of the hideous mucus, as if the entire ordeal had never transpired.