Marbles: The Hawk Who Refused to Die a Virgin

Chapter 3. Goddamn Water Carrier Looking Like A Snack

What had it been? Thirteen years maybe? Yeah about thirteen years since Lucy had taken her vows as a novitiate at the Owl God abbey. These vows included:

1. Chastity

2. Poverty

3. Stability

4. Everlasting and Complete Fealty to the Owl God, Silent Huntress of Our Souls

Of these four vows, three she was really just, destroying. Just swatting them out of the motherfucking sky. Chastity was a given. You could just count on it being there, like the sun. You could set your watch to it if, instead of hour symbols, it just said something like, "Not Fucking."

She was just not into her sisters, and up until the water carrier she hadn't had a conversation with a man longer than the time it took to ask a god-wrangler to move the Owl God into place for consecration. And it wasn't like she wasn't trying to break this particular vow. Good lord she was trying--this past year and maybe for the first time in her life.

Poverty was also honesty just not a problem for her. She didn't really like having a lot of stuff. She was still wearing the same cassock she'd had for the last five years, even though the order was now flush with new money from the Owl God harvest.

Everyone was getting a new cassock, sometimes two, sometimes with brightly colorful silk accents sewn into the cuffs of their sleeves and the trims of their hoods. They would ask each other which shade would most please their god. "Do you think The Huntress likes indigo?"

Lucy could not care less. She wore the same heather cassock she had received when she joined the order, its cuffs accented by frayed threads trailing over her wrists, its hood torn down lengthwise by a thorn just the other day.

She kept things simple, a new book of healing spells to memorize on her night stand, a candle stick religiously trimmed of wax every night, her worn leather shoes, a pocket knife, and her cassock. That was pretty much it. The nightstand only came last year when she was given her own room as a high priestess. Money was pouring into the abbey--loaves of fine white bread were now free, and waited steaming on the common table in the morning, to be picked up and bitten into by individual sisters and left lying half eaten on the pewter, ready to be swept into the scrap tray and fed to the abbey flint pigs. These pigs now ate better than she had as a novitiate.

"Ugh I'm stuffed," said Cassandra one morning, pushing away her plate. "If we keep eating like we might all start looking like Lucy."

"This bitch," Lucy thought to herself. "This bitch right here."

Lucy had pushed away her plate, smiled with downcast eyes, and left the table, and then later that night, before lights out, Cassandra made sure to stop by and invite her to the reconciliation chamber. To the Owl God order, any slight, be it real or perceived, that occurred between its sisters had to be patched up in a session as soon as possible, lest it fester and destroy the order from the inside out. Lucy and Cassandra sat facing each other on the cold stone floor of the reconciliation chamber, a candle on the floor between them, shining steadily.

"OK first, I'm very sorry about the comment I made at breakfast today," said Cassandra. "I've been thinking a lot about it all day, about how I was going to apologize. In my worst moments I was going to play it off like you had misunderstood me, that I would never talk about you or your body like that."

"You were going to say, 'I meant it would be a good thing to look like Lucy. Like it was a body positive thing about filling out or something," said Lucy.

"Yes," said Cassandra. "But that was not true, I was talking shit about your body. But I don't really feel that way, I think you look good, that you've always been pretty and that you're getting prettier, but if I start off an apology complimenting you like that it makes me look so full of shit."