I was told there would be a library. Books floor to ceiling, books spilling from their shelves, books piled on a table with pages rippling when a breeze comes through the window.

But it’s only a cave high above the wine-dark sea. The walls teem with words at dawn but when the sunlight hits they fade to salt spray from the waves crashing outside.

There is nothing here to stare into but a mirror recessed into the opposite wall like a cabochon jewel, its glass clear crystal despite the cave’s humidity and dirt. My own face looks back at me, interminably.

The only thing keeping me is the chain. It threads through the brackets behind me and drags heavy on my arms and locks across my breast.

#

Before I took my vows, I dreamed of convent libraries filled with strange books. Kircher’s Oedipus Aegyptiacus. The Speyer Malleus Maleficarum. Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. Archimedes’ Catoptrica.

But there were so few books in our tiny library, so few besides the antiphonals.

There were so few tasks that weren’t tending to the animals, stirring the soup, kneading the dough, feeding the fire, washing the scapulars in hot water, readying the cots after vespers.

I wanted other things. I wanted the library our brothers had. I wanted. I wanted.

My sisters, are the gardens blooming?

#

The mirror looms in front of me so that I cannot help but see it. When I look in the mirror, which is all that I have to look upon, I watch age dig rivulets in my face. The tears in my ragged tunic reveal my atrophied limbs. I hold up my hands and read the wretched fortunes that deepen the creases in my palms.

This is what they want of me: the markings of time. They, too, want.

#

Those books, my sisters told me, they were not for me. The world was not for me. Such airs didn’t suit a novitiate, much less the fully professed.

There were bigger needs. Time was passing and with it our hold. The parishioners were vanishing, new ideas supplanting God’s place in their hearts. The altar was crumbling. The tithes were disappearing. How could we survive?

My sisters, is the chapel filled with villagers returning to praise?

#

At night they come slithering up the sides of the cliff. I can hear them chittering after sundown, waiting for the darkness so that they can slip in. They ooze through the cave opening and wriggle across the floor. They crowd in a mass in front of the mirror and slick it all over with their greenish oily limbs and slide their black tongues across the moistened glass and lick up the visions of slow coming death that daily march across my face.

And when they’ve had their fill of mystery, they turn toward me. I close my eyes and their spindly wet fingers pry open my mouth and a hundred dark tongues fill me with the sour taste of my life passing. And I am fed on my own waste to last another day.

#

We could see the stranger nearing for almost an hour before he arrived. His form was a flickering shadow on the stone road that not even the afternoon sun could illuminate. He came in and out of focus even once he reached the threshold. Mother Superior herself answered, as though she knew he was coming. They spoke for hours in hushed tones behind a closed door. And though I stumble and shake, I was told to deliver their wine and bread.

I set the tray between them and he looked me hard in the face. As soon as I thought I had grasped his features, they slid from my vision and new ones took their place. He licked his lips with a slender dark tongue and his breath smelled like wet rock and mollusk.

When I took the empty tray his hand brushed mine and his eelish skin sent shockwaves through me.

My sisters, do the hives overflow with honey?

#

I grow smaller day by day from lack of nourishment. If I pinch my skin the folds stay up and prickle in the air.

This body is a vessel of time and nothing more. It is an icon of passage between this world and the next. In the mirror I read my destiny, which is the ocean and the grave.

#

I pretended I had a choice. I told myself I wanted to see the library. I followed the stranger to the carriage that had appeared like a magic trick. My sisters watched me from behind their veils like seagulls, a little curious and dumb. The last I remember is the door shutting tight against the daylight and darkness overtaking my eyes.

My sisters, are the seasons turning as they once did?

#

My body shrinks outwardly yet underneath the weakened muscle I bloat and swell. My skin is transparent and behind it glows the iridescent sheen of spilled petroleum.

The feeders’ nightly whispers have become sermons. I find myself salivating, now, for the taste of my own putrefaction.

I decipher the salty patterns festooning the wall. They are instructions for transubstantiation.

#

My sisters, you sacrificed me for coffers filled with gold, for an altarpiece of tempera and stars.

When I am satiated from the cup of my refuse and I transcend this vale of tears, I ask you, my sisters, will you recognize me? When I am ink and I slide from this chain of skin and I slip at last into the mirror and I crawl underneath your doors and I slink my fingers and the fingers of my ancestors into your mouths, will you know it is me?

My sisters, when death arrives for you, will you know I have become it?