After the death of her lover, Agatha goes on a journey of penance, which becomes both harrowing and transformative; meeting both monsters and new friends, and discovering love along the way.
Note: This is actually a completed story, but I have to re...
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There is Hope, and there is despair. Some cannot tell the difference.
— Simeon the Father.
I KNEW IT WAS OVER the moment his body went limp.
I chuck the scalpel onto the table beside his body, where it clattered to the same stillness as him; the reality of what has just happened is too much for me to accept. It feels like a dream — I am dissociated from the horror of what I have just done.
I take a deep breath, shaking. My body, at least, knows the weight of my sin.
I should be crying right now. I should be collapsing on this floor, wracked with guilt, grief, and self-hatred. I should be taking up my scalpel and slicing my wrist, my neck, my filthy treacherous heart. I failed him. I loved him.
I have just murdered him.
A part of me, some otherness within, is trying to reason with me: I had no choice; this operation was the only way. The disease was too advanced for any other procedure. Was that true? Or had my pride and hubris wormed its way so deep into my thoughts that I believed myself incapable of failing? I thought I could do this, but when I opened him up, I could not find the lump, as if it had moved, scuttling away like a mouse into a hole.
I searched within my lover, my hands touching and stroking each of the organs inside him with the same tenderness I used when we made love. I searched for too long, and now, and now he is dead.
What have I done?
I know what I have done. I have let my pride guide me, beguile me, and lead me to perform an operation beyond my capacities.
What idiots they are! I am not innocent. When the elders and the Bishop held court over me, and all watched, I gave my confession. And then, to torment me, they produced a row of people who told all of how I had saved them. Martha even had the audacity to look down at me from the telling stone, pity in her eyes, as she told me that I shouldn't blame myself. I did everything I could, she said. No. I did more than I should, and I killed him.
I miss him so.
And I hate the pity in their eyes, as they look down at me, here on my knees in the mud. Telling them of my sin. How my inflated belief in my capacity to heal led me astray. The Devil himself whispering in my ear — yet make no mistake, I do not blame the Devil nor any other. This is my doing. My sin. I could have stopped and reflected upon my plan at any time, but I did not.
I did this.
"You should seal me away in the tomb with him, and let me starve to death for my punishment. Or tie me hand and foot and drown me like the witches I dissuaded you from sentencing," I yelled at them, denying their pity, their awful love for me, and I realised in that moment, that there were few things worse than the pain of undeserved love.
