"I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens and I find that I've been knocking from the inside."
Astrid, marked from birth as the devil's own, bears the weight of a curse whispered through cold convent...
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Astrid did not scream. She could not see anything, but she felt it all. The scrape of the blunt carving knife against her skin, the hesitant sawing of a reluctant but complicit hand. Blood drawn from parted flesh like Moses had drawn land from the parted sea. A cruel kindness to a rebellious lamb.
She struggled to blink, eyelids bound to her skull by the rag they had blinded her with. So the devil does not look upon us, they had said, as if afraid he was using one of her eyes as a scrying glass from his abode in hell.
It was not her fault her mother had not given her a matching pair like most people, one a deep brown of dirt and decay, and the other a clear azure of the morning sky. Astrid had always thought the sky to be God's domain, and yet the nuns seemed convinced it was the devil who had stolen one of her eyes and replaced it with his own.
As if the devil had nothing better to do than spy on a child.
Although perhaps it was such a response that had branded her a disobedient and willful girl in their eyes, someone to be corrected, someone to be punished.
Astrid did not scream as the acrid smell of her own blood filled her nostrils, pungent and metallic. The coppery tang seemed to cling to the back of her throat, a constant reminder of her body's betrayal. It was a small mercy that she could not see the crimson rivers that trickled down her skin, mixing with the sweat and dirt that coated her frail frame. She wasn't quite sure where they had taken her this time, but the gravelly dirt beneath her bare feet was familiar, and recognizing it was akin to a corpse recognizing its own grave.
She did not scream as they held her thrashing form over the smoking pit, her slender limbs restrained by rough, calloused. The air around her was thick with the choking smoke of incense and something else she could not recognize, the substance burning with a nauseating sweetness that made her stomach churn and her lungs ache. Each breath was a battle, the smoke filling her lungs, searing her insides as they forced her to breathe it in. Every time she jerked her head, they wrenched it back over the smoke, and eventually, she stopped writhing, her movements limited to the occasional sporadic twitch like an insect in its death throes.
Baptism by fire, they had called it, after they had failed to drown out the devil inside of her. The words echoed in her mind, a cruel mantra that seemed to mock her suffering. The kinder ones, their voices tinged with desperation, had begged her to listen, to obey, to recite the prayer of God, but for a child of only ten, Astrid was remarkably stubborn. She would not recite the name of a God who did not exist, who had abandoned her to this unholy ritual. She had called out for Him the first few times, when they pushed her headfirst into the ice-cold bucket of water, when they had force-fed her foul-smelling substances to purge her of whatever being her unholy frame supposedly hosted. She had begged and pleaded, the fervent pleas of a lamb resisting slaughter, just as pathetic, just as futile. Still, no God had come to her aid. No divine presence had thrown open the door to rescue her from her living nightmare.
