AVALON FELICE LEE
Virgin, Punctuation
winning prose piece of our 2020-2021 Writing Contest
I am as still as a word.
No—as the memory within the Word, the memory people recall when they enter this confessional and face the ivory sculpture. The likeness of me. Linen robes pleated into windblown testament pages. Gibbous palms, lashes lowered.
As still and enduring as the word virgin, punctuated by my name.
Purgatory is not a place but a weather that hardens you into a sculpture, a motionless thing. Nonetheless, a thing damned with knowing. Like how a monarch butterfly knows this killing jar has a lid but its wings are pinned. Its antennas twitch: a demand for release from this jar or death. Even insects will resist the thorax between life and death. Unlike a statue, the monarch gets its wish. Its brittle veins snap, and life spills. Orange by the pint.
The priest and I are alone, face-to-face. He watches me, waiting, because taxidermy never loses its teeth. A bruised sack droops from his chin—a tumor, and growing. His own body is trying to kill itself since it knows death is the only thing that can stop those hands.
Through the panel, I watch as a girl in periwinkle overalls slips into the confessional and takes the seat. I can tell she put thought into her clothes. Overalls are harder to take off.
We can only dread what we know, and I have seen so much.
She confesses the sins of January, suffocating her rosary beads because she has been here before and knows what happens next. The panel slides back. A sculptor has stolen the outer rind of the priest. He finds inspiration in the way she quivers, a mammal that has learned what to fear. The sculptor begins his craft, kneading clay until it softens then patting it into a ball then the sculptor rolls and pinches in all the right places, squeezing where there should be breasts. Molding a body smaller. Be it boy or girl, he takes little notice. A true sculptor is fluent in any material.
She is too far to reach, but I can still hear her prayers. Virgin, punctuation. Virgin, punctuation. Her teeth scraping raw her pleas like the lyrics to a Latin hymn, the same prayers from the ones before her. Now, I grimace when the parish drowns the cathedral in Latin. Music doesn’t sound the same.
Still, she is too far.
Funny how I want to throttle her more than him. To curl a fist around her throat and yell at her to find her legs and run, run in a direction not even God has a name for. I want to yell at his tumor to grow faster; eat his face like a young mold. But no, I have never blamed him. Only the girl and his tumor.
How do I tell her that the saints won’t save you? To have faith and goodness and nothing else is just surrendering with honor; a white flag, made of silk. The saints won’t save you, and virginity is just a skin you wear because we like to name the things left to break.
After, she staggers from the confessional with too much for the third-grade dialect. Wet dough preserves his fingerprints. Her belly, permanently concave from the bulge of his vestment. Her skeleton, thawed by his kiln-fire gasps when he inhaled innocence like communion soup.
She doesn’t look back, afraid of becoming a pillar of salt. But looking forward only delivers her to another Sunday, and always, she is too far to reach.
Here’s the kicker. She is too far because the distance between us is not in feet but decades. And there was never a sculpture, because Purgatory is not a place but a state of being. A weather so still that time itself stills, and that frozen minute echoes in my head, over and over. Her, looking back.
“Virgin, Punctuation” seems to effortlessly proceed on sound. There is a tense musicality to the piece which pulls me through the vivid imagery of this girl and her experience with the priest. The result is devastating, and a must read. — Elle Nash (2020-2021 Prose Judge)
Avalon Felice Lee is an Asian American Californian. She has been writing poetry and prose since the age of eleven. Her work has been published in Right Hand Pointing, Parallax, Kalopsia Literary Journal, Minute Magazine, and elsewhere.