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At times my skin will crawl, and once more am I a girl of seventeen careening, a particle without Polaris. As common a thing as a will-o’-the-wisp at the foot of Notre-Dame.
Taking flight like the common kestrel, I chase the sun. Our Lady and all her roosting gargoyles hungry for the inevitable Fall.
I’m too much in love with the sky to realize I’m a stone’s throw from heaven. I’m too brazen to know that I’m a heathen darkening the gates.
A glimmering from within, La Biblia Pauperum, the windows like a rose, and my wings are limned in crimson, fleetingly cerulean. Colors so loud the tympanum seems to quake at the final judgement.
I soar, and it is the rush of voices that suspend me like a gale. The sinning saints, the fleet-footed pedestrians, and all the whispering dead surge en masse, lighting up the afternoon in bell-song.
Within, a gloaming silence absorbs the cold and the grim, the dark and the profane. Surely, I am no more alive than the strix roosted in the west. I break for air when I see her: the Lady in black.
Her nose is a beautiful hook. My eyes catch on her wiry tresses, spilling like so much soot out of a boiling kiln. I’m stricken by her, a plumed apparition that is both deadly and desirous.
Like a crow feasting, she’s after coin. The Lady is a queen in rags, swarming in her riches, clever-fisted. I’m anchored to the spot, staring into the void she inhabits.
I find that I love and abhor her. As I breathe, I watch her mighty talons reach for a smart-looking purse. A beating of death-defying wings, pigeons growing fat.
A sound escapes my throat, and her prey wheels in a motion so practiced, our Lady of Crows is thrown from the bough like an afterthought.
Oh how she finds me then, coltish and awkward, a wretch upon her altar. I am her spellbound, meager offering. Her visage twists like a gnarled old tree cursed by either omen or murder.
Her hand punches towards me to form a hateful fork between her most articulate and stunted of fingers. A gesture so perfect, it can only be a reckoning.
As if I were to plummet into the darkest of waters, I feel her mark upon me. For she whispers her spell with the gravity of a thing eldritch born.
I am seventeen when I discover that chimeras exist in certain pockets of the world. Our Lady is mythic, and I, a godless mortal, laugh in her face.
I turn from her sphinx’s grin, abandoning her once more to the shade of the cathedral. Immune to the bone-deep knowing that within me now there exists a thread.
A silvery cord encapsulates my mortal engine. A spider’s strand so impervious to destruction, should I dare at the unknotting of it, I shall unravel.
I am older now and no more the wiser. Yet rather than walk on eggshells, I hammer the evil eye above my threshold, a book for the illiterate.
So playfully do I contemplate bathing in goat’s milk rich with rosemary, or bartering in apothecary shops for witch’s broom, good luck finds me more often than not.
For I carry the Lady’s mark with me, and each time I feel my flesh stir, I am seventeen when I cross the Seine.
At times by foot, but in my dreams, I am a common kestrel sleeping in the shadow of the gothic.
The Bohemian || 1105 AZ USA 11.05.25