A Hagiography in Two ActsWren Douglas
1100 words When the beads first washed up at the beach, the City reacted with befuddled caution. The small, star-shaped blobs of pearlescent substance had nothing in common with the fish, gulls and turtles whose carcasses usually littered the coast. They weren’t plastic, either, or any familiar waste. The Factory collected samples to run their tests, but all that came out of those was the beads had nothing to do with what happened at the steel mill. People in the City believed this statement with varying degrees of faith. For the Factory also said lung cancer percentages had nothing to do with them, nor the animals dying, or the black sediment at the bottom of the sea. A number of folk tried to pray the beads away. Men clad in white carried the statue of the Saint across narrow streets and steep inclines, while women followed intoning lamentations. The City issued a statement that people were not to touch the unidentified material with their bare hands. Tourists came to see the invasion, then left as quickly as they’d swarmed, citing a sense of disquiet. Oily goop kept sluicing from the Factory into the sea. *** Two weeks into the phenomenon, a stringy young girl named Aclena walked to the cordoned-off beach. She pinched a bead between her thumb and index finger. The spikes dug into her skin, razor-sharp, but failed to draw blood. Aclena tried a different angle and still her fingers remained intact. A murmur like a song made of foam wafted from the little starburst in melancholy tones. “Weird,” Aclena said. Then she pocketed the bead andwent home. She lived with her father in a narrow apartment in the shadow of the blast furnaces. Asthma rattled her father’s chest, but the two of them couldn’t afford much else. The soil of the fields sprawling outside their home was red with fine iron powder. *** More and more beads flooded the beach with each day; they rolled over each other in a mounting swell, pushing deeper into the City. As they littered the streets, the men clad in white and the lamenting women had to cease their processions. No devoted soul would risk carrying the Saint on rough terrain, lest they shatter his visage onto the tarmac. Aclena’s father counted himself among the devoted. Every night he prayed to the Saint for enough money to leave the City, so that his daughter could grow up somewhere safe. Aclena listened to his rough, whistling whispers from her corner of the bedroom; with the bead clutched in her palm, it was hard to pick apart the praying from the foam song. *** One day, as she was skipping along the shoreline—kicking up droves of beads with her bare feet—Aclena found a head. Its hair was half shifting froth and half plastic netting, all matted together in clumps. When she nudged it, a pale, squid-soft face speckled in black gazed up at her. “I am the Saint,” the head said. “Yeah, right,” said Aclena, who had a tendency to buck authority even in the face of the anointed. She nudged its slick cheek with her toe. “Where is your body, then? The statue of the Saint has a body. Dad took me to see it.” “I gave my body to the fish, the gulls and the turtles, for their food has been poisoned.” This dented Aclena’s skepticism, if slightly. Giving away one’s flesh as food for the downtrodden did strike her as a saintly action. “Shouldn’t you say ‘be not afraid’?” “That’s angels,” the Saint said. “And you do not appear afraid.” “I’m not,” said Aclena, who woke up with the roar of the blast furnaces every morning and had lost her mother to a growth in the larynx. “You’re just a head.” The Saint-head rumbled. His eyes had a nacre sheen to them, as if the sclera had been carved from twin shells. He fixed his gaze on Aclena and wished it had been someone older to find him. “These are my tears,” he said, eyeing the beads. “Here to mourn the land as it dies under the weight of industrial waste. Soon, nothing alive will remain. Only the steel and the money it brings.” On the horizon, foam spread across the sea; another spillage at the Factory. Aclena’s ears rang with the memory of her father’s rasps as he grabbed for the inhaler. The head of the Saint regarded the stringy young girl in front of him. Soon, she too would fall ill, red dust seeping into her soft tissues. Her medical expenses would pile up on top of her father’s. The weight would drag the both of them deeper into the dross. The Saint closed his nacre eyes, letting hesitation wash upon him for the long second between the ebb and flow of a wave. Then he said, “Will you be my champion, child? And douse the earth in sacred flame to cleanse it of its sickness?” Underneath his tongue gleamed the hilt of a sword, coral red and encrusted with pearls. Aclena studied its glimmer. “If I do, will I become aSaint myself?” “To some,” the Saint conceded. “But most people will address you as a devil. For you will upend their meager certainties. You will show them life goes on, even without a job at the Factory.” Aclena’s mother had worked at the Factory. Her salary had bought the family decent fruit—from out of town, where the fields didn’t ooze with ground iron—and a trip south every few summers. Her savings had bought her a casket. “Won’t they just build a new Factory, if I tear this one down?” Aclena asked. “They will,” the Saint said. “And then you’ll tear the new one down, too.” The waves lapped at his severed neck, then retreated, then rose to meet him once more. A new bead slipped from his eye. “Few people will thank you, if any. They will not carry your statue across the streets.” Aclena shrugged. “Those processions are creepy. Will my father breathe better?” “Yes,” the Saint said. “Once you’re done, I will bring upon a great rain, to wash away the iron from the air. This will give your father respite.” Torrential rain usually meant an angry, dangerous sea. Aclena’s father would forbid her from wandering along the shore, but the trade-off was worth a few days without the murmur of the waves. Aclena pondered this as she took the bead out of her pocket. This close to the Saint, surrounded by the expanse of his tears, the foam song had the strength of a storm. In it, she could hear the cries of the animals, the slow death of the reef. The trees creaking and moaning as the iron powder seeped into their roots, poisoning their fruits. And underneath it all, her mother’s lullaby. “Why me?” she asked. The Saint fixed his nacre gaze on her. “You are the only one listening.” |
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Wren Douglas
Wren is an SFF author from Italy, where they live with their devilish cats and one sprightly old dog. Their work has been featured in Strange Horizons, Kaleidotrope, and the 2023 Lambda finalist anthology XENOCULTIVARS: Stories of Queer Growth, among other venues. You can find them on bluesky @awritingwren.
Read more from Wren Douglas:
- "Tree, Gall, Song" - Baubles From Bones: Issue 2
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