placing her hand on the gate to the path.
He takes her to the Cathedral, and the Sisters whisper in a tight little knot while her parents stand to the side white faced and silent. No one will marry her now, they know. She’s a dreamer, and dreamers need to be broken to the will of the Sisterhood.
Her parents don’t object when the Sisters proclaim Tabitha as one of theirs. She puts on the black tunic and combs her hair from her face into a severe bun. She stands with the other two newest Sisters, Ruth and Ami, and listens to the enumeration of her duties. She bows her head and recites the prayers but that is not where her mind and heart are. They’re on the path, waiting.
She spends the next month planning her escape. Soon, she can’t sleep anymore, and she’s memorized every detail of her room. She’s tired of the stone walls, stone floor, tiny window looking past the graveyard at the dead roaming the fences. She thinks she might understand a little now why they moan.
She thinks she might understand the pain of such intense desire. It brings tears to her eyes that never seem to go away.
She starts to wander through the Cathedral in the darkness of the too early morning hours. She counts the number of windows, she counts the number of benches and cushions and even stones in the floor. Anything to stop thinking about pregnant moons and Patrick and the feel of him trailing a hot finger down her spine.
She’s tracing her finger along a crooked crack in the wall, remembering the feel of his skin against hers, when the crack dips behind a curtain and she follows it. There’s a door there, and she doesn’t hesitate before pushing it open and revealing a long hallway. She wanders down it to another door, this one thick and banded with metal.
It’s dark and she has no candle and it’s late, and Tabitha spends a long while staring at that door before she turns around and goes back to bed. The moans of the Unconsecrated whisper her into the deepest sleep she’s felt for ages.
The next night she doesn’t even change into her sleeping gown, but instead waits in her black tunic for the Cathedral to fall silent. She takes the candle and flint from beside her bed and goes straight to the curtain in the sanctuary, her heart pounding so hard that her fingers shake from the force.
She sneaks down the hallway, her footsteps disturbing a thin layer of dust, and this time she doesn’t pause before going through the metal-banded door. It leads her down a set of stairs, the air growing dank and thick enough that the light from her candle barely penetrates it.
She’s in a basement, and it smells like dirt, tastes like the wet rot of fall. Rows of wooden racks march through the large room, some cradling old grimy bottles but most just barely withstanding entropy. There are no other doors and no windows, no escape from the heady mustiness.
Along one wall hangs a curtain, and Tabitha already knows this trick. She pulls it aside and finds another door, but this one is locked. She tries every way she knows how, but the door won’t open, and eventually she gives up and goes back to bed, but this time she cannot sleep.
Soon, to Tabitha, the locked door behind the curtain in the basement becomes like the gate blocking the path. She knows she must go through it. And as with the gate, she makes her plan carefully.
She offers to take on the chores assigned to Ruth and Ami, cleaning rooms and scrubbing walls and floors, using them as an excuse to rifle through drawers and cabinets. She finds dozens of keys and she tries them all, but none of them work.
This time when the moon is full she thinks about abandoning Patrick in the Forest. It’s been months since she’s seen him and she’s angry and hurt and broken. Sometimes she’ll pull his book out from under a loose stone in the wall, and she’ll flip through the pages, wondering if all men are so cruel; if love is like a spring blossom that builds and bursts in a bright hot color and then wilts and dies, never to return.
Two days later, she spends the afternoon torn. She finds herself walking toward the gate and then turning back. She doesn’t know what’s right. She doesn’t want to give up the hope of him, but she’s not sure she’s ready to deal with the pain of him either.
It frustrates her that he occupies so much of her mind. Even when she tries to think of other things during the day, he invades her dreams at night, and she wakes up sweaty and alone. The second night after the fullest moon is no exception. She crawls from her bed and carries her candle to the gate and walks the path through the Forest to their meeting spot.
The tiny flame of the candle barely penetrates past the fences bordering the path, and it throws cruel shadows across the Unconsecrated who follow her. Their eyes seem more hollow, their cheeks sharper, their teeth and tongues black maws.
Moans surround her, peel away her flesh until she feels bare and raw. The Unconsecrated bang against the fence, claw for her so hard their fingers snap and bones protrude gleaming and sharp. She can’t sprint because the candle will go out, and so she’s forced to walk slowly, unable to outrun the death on either side of her.
The gate is as it always is: impassive and sturdy. As she expected, the path on the other side is empty. She stands in the darkness surrounded by the agony of existence and tries to decide what to do next. Go back? Go forward? Curl up on the path and let time take its toll?
Her shoulders crumble, her fingers going limp and dropping the candle. Just before the flame sputters out against the damp earth, she catches the reflection of something lying on the ground.
The moon is fat but waning, and she doesn’t bother relighting the candle before opening the gate. In the middle of the path is a small basket covered by a scrap of material.
She pulls it back to find a spray of wilted flowers, their petals black in the darkness. Nestled amid the limp leaves rests a scrap of paper, and it takes her three strikes of the flint until her candle is bright enough to read the words.
“My Tabby,” she whispers aloud to the dead around her. “My family has grown sick, and my father is on the verge of death. I couldn’t bear to leave my mother and sister so soon. Forgive my absences. Please forgive me. I have missed you like the shore misses the touch of waves. I promise that nothing will keep me from you after the hare moon. Hopefully you remain mine as I remain yours. Always, my love, Patrick.”
She presses the words to her lips, hoping for a taste of his skin on the paper. She holds her hand against her chest, wanting to rip out her heart and leave it in this basket among the wilted flowers for him. Because she now understands that it belongs to him and always will.
Tabitha keeps the note on her person at all times, tucked between the bindings for her breasts and her heart. She doesn’t care that the sweat of the day blurs his words, she needs them against her. She needs to remember the feel of him.
She continues her search for the key in a fever and daze. Her skin often feels flushed, and she finds herself in the middle of mundane tasks staring off into space. She’s late for services more than once and as punishment is tasked with the duty of the Midnight Office and Matins for which she spends several hours alone in the darkest time of night on her knees in the sanctuary.
Her eyes begin to look a bit hollow, the bones in her cheeks a little sharper, and her jaw more defined. There are confusing moments when she thinks she almost feels the comforting heat of God when she’s in her deepest prayers and she stumbles to her bed with thoughts muddled and hazy.
She’s so lost in the conundrum of her thoughts one afternoon that she doesn’t realize at first what it means when she comes across a large key while dusting the shelves and stacking papers on the desk of the oldest Sister’s chambers.
She holds it in her hands, feeling its weight, running her fingers along the blunt lines of its teeth. Something warms in her chest, loosens along the small of her back. She slips the key into the binding around her breasts, with Patrick’s letter, and spends the rest of the day itching for the time to pray.
She’s standing in the middle of the Cathedral, staring at the altar and trying to decide if she believes in prayer when a little girl comes and stands next to her. The girl’s name is Anne, and Tabitha recognizes her as a friend of her little brother’s.
Anne stands next to Tabitha quietly for a moment, and then she shyly looks up at her. “Are you praying?” she asks.
Tabitha thinks about this for a moment and answers, “I don’t know.”
