Canonizing Dorothea

Race Harish | Prose

Dorothea runs through the streets of the capital. 

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Her bare feet fall against the cobblestone like lemon drops, a silent frenzy. She’d run faster if she had proper shoes. Her sandals lie outside the temple door, one a foot or so away from the other. They had been gifts once, though she never wore them as if they were. Dorothea knew that giving was worse than taking these days, so she hardly wore them at all. 

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She did wear them this morning. That was a surprise to no one. It is customary to wear sandals for sacrifices, as well as practical. 

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No one likes getting blood on their feet. 

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I lied before the Lord today. 

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He asked me first, was I still the shepherd of my own heart? I said, yes. 

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I lied. 

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He asked me second, where did I let it graze and what upon? I said, in His gardens, upon the grass and the bluebells and the lilies that spring forth under His hands. 

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I lied.

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He asked me third, was it well fed? I said, yes, it wants for nothing. 

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I lied. 

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I am not the shepherd of my own heart, I hardly know my heart anymore. I am merely its prison, its weary warden, and you are its wicked master. You are the farmer that fattens up the lamb before sending it to the slaughter. The foolish creature knows that it will die the moment you open your palm, yet it cannot stop feeding from your hand. 

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My heart does not graze in the garden of any God. It bleats and bellows in every crook and crevasse of your skin and feasts upon the wild jungle of your soul. 

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And it is always hungry. It is a wicked, ravenous thing that rumbles inside of my chest for the dandelions and false hopes that litter your glimmering body. You are poison, and my heart still drinks because it is yet a worse fate to starve. 

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I never was good at fasting. 

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Dorothea’s feet blister, thorn and jagged stone hooking against broken skin. She could stop, could force her knees to the mortar and raise her hands in surrender, but it would matter not. Her innocence lies discarded, kicked off like her sandals and left to rot at the temple door.

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“Heretic.” That is what the woman who made a mistress out of her said. The word is not a foreign one upon her darling’s tongue, she wears it like a shield and wields it like a whip in alternating breaths, and Dorothea has felt it lash against her so often it stings only so much as the shuddering gasps and lingering kisses scattered across her skin. In private, the word could not wound her. But they were not in private anymore. 

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So, she runs. 

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You wanted this. You must delight in this. The songs of your apostasy chirr and warble, evading the carillon of the temple bells like some perfidious acrobat. But it is your laugh, echoing off of dusty corners and stained windows, that torments me. You and your caustic touch have corroded everything right and good and holy within me and shredded it to ash in your palm. You dripped 

venom into my ear and they all called it birdsong. But I know you for what you are: a blight, a curse, a cancer with no cure. 

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And I am diseased. I am sick and cold and hollow and hungry. 

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Devil, demon, depraved lover, all the faces you have worn to ensnare my soul, every name you have ever called yourself— I release you. Lick your wounds, hound from hell. Weep if you must. 

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Then, run.

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Poor Dorothea, whose heart still beats in time to the hand-drum and the hymnals, even as they laud her demise. Poor Dorothea, tried and found guilty, all the while knowing that her only crime was being loved too much, too fiercely, too perversely, too often. Her only crime was not knowing that in the darkness of a cathedral, the ringlets that crown her in gold look almost like a halo, and that if she didn’t stop the song from escaping her lips, someone was going to take it as gospel. 

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Her only crime was bringing a woman to her knees for a purpose other than prayer and, like a jealous lover, Heaven has come to call. 

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I did not sleep today. 

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I don’t sleep at all anymore. 

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My nights are spent collapsing against the floor of our room, beating my chest with my trembling fists while you watch from the windowsill, or the hall, or the foot of our bed. Our cold, empty bed that I cannot bring myself to sleep in anymore because you haunt every inch of it. I can draw the curtains shut and still a featherlight breeze will brush against my forehead, and I will look up because it smells like lemongrass, a scent that is branded on my cheek, my throat, my collarbone, and the small of my back.

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If you knew what was best for you, if any part of you was real and not some sugar soaked syrup dream I swallowed years ago in a daze, you would take the mercy you were given. If you loved me more, you would rest. If you loved me at all, you would leave me be. 

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But here you are, your hands folded even as you lie next to me here, like you still have some masquerade to keep up. I can see your wisps of flaxen hair poking out from beneath your veil. I want to scream at you to take it off. I know what you look like without it, I know what you look like without any of it, and I will never see it again. 

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Show me, I almost say. Just one more time. The statues will never do your smile justice, so show me. 

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Lying on my back, in this light, you almost look like you did when I first saw you. In this light, you are every mask you ever donned and every disguise you ever wore. In this light, you are not what you are but everything I believed of you, the girl I sanctified, who taught me the word devotion. In this light, with you above me on the floor of the room we once shared, neither of us can deny that I loved you. It is more blasphemous to say that I love you still, but that might be true as well. 

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You may chide me through mirrors and steal the sleep from my nights, looking after me with the kindest and cruelest disappointment, but this vile, wretched, perfect love persists.

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Dorothea can see the city gate. Her legs quicken and moan as they do, kicking up sand and rock and bits of skin. Red speckles litter the street where her feet hit the ground. The hand-drum in her heart hammers against her ribcage, and the hymnals in her head crescendo into wails, and the roars of those behind her become barbaric and vicious, and her shadow grows and morphs, but it’s not her shadow is it, no, it’s— 

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CRACK.

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Some will say it was a mace. Some will say it was the pavement. Some will say that it could be heard through the capital, and there wasn’t a single person alive who didn’t know what it meant. 

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And no one will say, though it was true, that the best place to hear it was in the cathedral where Heaven’s beloved knelt in front of the altar to meet her Maker, and saw Saint Dorothea instead.