ENVY by Paul Negri
THE FINAL PRAYER OF THE DEBAUCHED by Allison Lowe
In Ancient Rome, the Vestal Virgins were priestesses charged with maintaining Vesta’s sacred fire and protecting the empire from bad luck. After the Romans were defeated by Hannibal in the second century, it was discovered that two Vestal Virgins, Opimia and Floronia, had broken their vows of virginity. One was buried alive while the other took her own life.
Even the hearth craves warmth. My mother and father dreamed of my life
in pure white, as clean and weightless as a lamb’s first coat. Now I slit
the youngest lamb’s throat in the temple. Holy only in the most wretched sense, I
offer sacrifice with unwashed hands. Everything red and sinewed beneath my knees.
If I were a goddess, if I were able to walk the fine line of mortality,
I would at least be forgiving. I would at least accept the smoking offering
of a broken girl. A debauched woman split open by nothing more than her selfish
desire. But I know that I have no such hope of forgiveness.
There is no selfishness with an empire on your back, there is no faltering
that weight. I can at least hope that the earth will not be cold. I can imagine
a summer stitched together with the threads of all my sins. A summer that warms
the dirt and drives the animals away from my body. If I am whole and uneaten,
maybe death will be nothing more than a dream. I will lie beside my sister
and we will dream of an empire that is not obsessed with the act
of conquering. Where our bodies will always be unconquered, will always belong
to nothing more than our own thinning hands. We will sit in the forest and light a fire
that no one deems sacred. We will lie atop one another and laugh. The sky will purple
as I tell my sister about a nightmare I had, a nightmare where wishing to be desired
was a crime. She will smile and kiss the crown of my head, will remind me
that I never needed to be desired by anyone but myself.
Allison Lowe is a rising high school junior from the San Francisco Bay Area. She has previously been published in Polyphony Lit, The Loud Journal, and Same Faces Collective, among others. She has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and Hollins University.
Paul Negri has twice won the gold medal for fiction in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Writing Competition. He has edited a dozen literary anthologies from Dover Publications, Inc. His stories have appeared in The Penn Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Lunate Literary Journal, and more than 50 other publications. He lives and writes in Clifton, New Jersey.