Mirabilis

art by Loralee Clark

by Reagan Davis

Most people have abandoned the old gods, but not my family. We understood that all we had come from our patron’s protection; to deny it was to defy common sense, to abandon reality. As a young girl, I embraced His salvation with such rigidity that even now, so many years later, He follows me everywhere I go. His teachings are branded on my bones and His voice continues to whisper in my ear whenever I feel alone.

My stepmother was a gifted prophet. She could see the future and the past as clearly as the baby fat on my cheeks. It took her only a glance to know who was damned and who was saved. She possessed our patron’s favor more than any of us, so she made it her mission to proselytize and prophesy wherever she could. She showed our father the light after he fell off the straight and narrow. In return he left my mother, a man possessed by a convert’s zeal.

Father and I would fast together. We had so little in common, but the fast was shared struggle. Stepmother had been blessed, but he and I had to fight for salvation. We were prone to folly – no god would choose us. We were destined for damnation if we did not monitor our bodies. And it was easier together: we tracked each other’s as well. We even studied strangers’ bodies. We deemed them sinful. Our fear of becoming like them brought us back, again and again, to purifying mortifications of the flesh.

We knew our god was real because we saw Him everywhere. He protected against the eyes of other followers, ready to judge us and treat us like gluttons. Through Him, we saw the truth of the harsh, cruel world: no one will give you the benefit of the doubt. Everyone is watching you, waiting for you to fail. You are prone to give yourself grace you have never deserved. To prepare for their cruelty, you must preempt it.

I grew to understand that the body is a test, a lying adversary, seeking only to tempt believers into ruin. We reached salvation when we transcended its deception and understood its cries were only a mask for its true agenda: sabotage. Our god redeemed me by teaching me how hunger could be overcome, how exhaustion could be ignored, and how everyone would mistreat me if I could not wrest control from this body.

Yet, I have never felt as safe as I did in His embrace. He protected me from judgement. He prepared me for hatred. He gave me a path to ensure that one day, I would stop needing to fear. I knew He guarded against something very real because I saw it every day in my parents’ eyes and, eventually, in my own. The world was filled with people who hated my body just as we did. But, through Him, I could make them stop hating me. He gifted me with a power, a miracle which might overpower any insecurity. For a small price performed properly, I could transfigure myself into someone loveable.

There is security in His dogma. Perhaps that is why, no matter how many years pass, He never leaves. Our patron god still haunts me, taunts me, and berates me because I no longer possess the body of a child. His voice rings in my ears every time I mistakenly catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. He seeks to protect me as He did before, to remind me that I was born into flesh I must fight and I am failing to do so. That my failure is revolting. That I am now unguarded against a world which finds me revolting.

I search elsewhere for something salvific and come up empty-handed. Our god is truly omnipotent. He lives in each fiber of my clothing, in every place the fabric touches skin. His eyes glare back at me through every stranger’s gaze. I compare myself to them, hoping for a moment’s relief if I am smaller. It never comes. My gaze cannot be trusted.

His voice drowns out my heretical new mantras and, often, they fortify Him instead.

Most of all, I berate myself because He can so easily pull me back to His dogma. In those moments, I try to resist Him, even though He is me. Because I know the alternative. I understand what it is to be consumed by the god with no stomach.

I remember when He has stolen of my body, leaving me with vision lost and stomach empty, unconscious on the floor. I still suffer as He has steals my mind, absorbing weeks of thoughts and winding them up onto each other, forcing my attention to Him alone. I refuse to return to that state. In turn, He refuses to go quietly.

He rages as I reject His protection.

He tells me how many people I disgust. I try to tell Him such people aren’t real. He reminds me that I know such people.

I try to tell Him they have no power over me. He reminds me that I cannot ever know for sure.

I insist I do not need to know, but this time I am the liar.

I grew up being taught I had the power to make anyone love me by whittling away at myself. I am forever haunted because I believed it. But it was a familiar, comforting lie. And now, without it, I have all the same fears, but no means to make anyone love me.

Together, we sit in the unsureness, terrified.

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