Work Text:
“No red,” Mary whispers, and Sam wants to laugh in her face. I want a dress that’s me, she says. No red, she says.
Sam turns feelings into dresses. Transformation, transmutation, transubstantiation. And Sam feels it in her missing left molar, in the dip of her knees, in the hollow in her hip that Mary so liked to trace with her clever tongue, that Mary is red, because Mary is history is blood is Sam is red, is red, is red.
She is going to explain this to Mary. Then she looks at Mary, changes her mind, says “Okay,” and pulls out a length of gold fabric, because she might as well save herself the breath; Sam’s going to make the dress red in the end, anyways.
. . .
Sam and Mary had a history. Sam and red had a history.
History is a living thing, which breathes, and bleeds, and can be killed, if you change radio stations often enough.
Sam has a lot of histories. Fewer, now, than she used to.
. . .
Some histories start here:
Sam Anselm is seven years old, and the blood of Christ is spilling down the front of the nicest dress she owns. Her mother had bought it clean and new and on clearance a month ago; now it’s pure white stained red, just like in the paintings of the martyrs. When she tastes the wine, it’s tangy. Sour tang, from the grapes, and metallic tang, from the chalice, which is cold and still against her lips.
She says she felt like a queen, then. What she means is she felt holy, as in the right of kings of old. The Father, the Son, and the Holy her in that church, taking communion.
Later, in the bathroom, dabbing away the stain with a wet paper towel, Sam will look up and smile at her reflection with port-stained teeth. There’s something grimly exquisite about the scene. Red spilling down her front, and it’s the most beautiful she’s ever felt.
. . .
Sam Anselm is eighteen years old, a lapsed Catholic, and the red spilling down her face and chin and neck is not communion wine. Her favorite person in the whole entire world is lying on Sam’s bed, flat on her back on a towel, legs hooked over Sam’s shoulders, and she is whimpering like a wounded thing as Sam licks into the soft, bloodied place between her thighs. Sam doesn’t relish the taste, the sour tang, the metal tang, but there is something about the way Mary looks at her when Sam has a mouth soaked in crimson that makes it delicious anyways.
Sam circles Mary’s hood, laps up the blood, fucks her tongue in messy and wet, and smiles into her cunt as Mary sings. The sounds that girl makes. God.
Sam doesn’t bleed the way Mary does, liberally, regularly, like clockwork every thirty days; hers are splotchy and painful. But though their periods aren’t synced, something else inside them must be, because she has never felt so close to another human being in her life. Their lives and dreams and legs tangle up in each other like thread. They live in the same dorm but Sam wants to live under Mary’s skin, the most beautiful, comfortable costume she can conceive of.
When Sam says jump, Mary asks how high. When Mary asks how far she’d go, Sam laughs, kisses her forehead, and promises her the ends of the earth. Mary blesses Sam and Sam dresses Mary and they do their Philosophy 104 homework together on the green, shoulder to shoulder, laughing.
When Sam shows her the first halo, Mary looks at Sam like she’s her savior, and when Mary puts it on, Sam looks at her like she’s God. That first dress they conceive of, blue and gold like Mary’s namesake, is their immaculate child—the beginning of a very successful working relationship, built atop their very successful personal one.
It’s also the beginning of the end of the world.
. . .
The world ends when Sam Anselm is thirty-one, and red spills out of her mouth as she watches her favorite person dance in someone else’s dress on a stage in front of thousands. It’s breathtakingly gorgeous and Sam hates her for it. A beautiful and terrible thing, to watch something you birthed fly the nest. A mostly terrible thing, when you weren’t aware that was something it could do.
She was hurt, when Mary didn’t give her the credit in her interviews. She was hurt by the way Mary took Sam’s history and Sam’s feelings, because that’s what Sam’s dresses were, history and feelings, and spoke them false and flat from her mouth as if they were Mary’s own. But Sam forgave her for that, because the public could think whatever they wanted about Mother Mary, but Mother Mary needed her and for a while that was enough. But it hasn’t been enough in a long time, and now it’s not even true.
In the end, she realizes that it comes down to this: she has loved Mother Mary for a decade, but Mother Mary no longer loves her.
This is a lie. Mother Mary is ineffable, is capable of infinite grace, infinite kindness, and loves everyone equally, the way only a saint could. And Mary, just Mary, still cares for her in particular, probably. But functionally she’s dead to Sam.
Sam has always loved the song Holy Spirit. She and Mary were both rasied religious, now lapsed, and found new faith in each other. Instead of church, they filled their Sundays with much more exciting services, at much more comfortable alters, blaspheming into each other’s skin. When she hears Mary sing “I believe in you,” Sam sees Mary on her knees in their shared bedroom, cheek against Sam’s hip, those brown eyes too big for their own good and staring up at Sam as if she were something sacred.
Holy Spirit is two songs down the setlist. Sam’s jaw flexes with a crack that echoes badly in her skull. The liquid flowing from her cracked tooth first floods Sam’s cheek, then her tongue, then her whole mouth, dribbles thick and viscous down her chin, and Sam has never been overly queasy around the sour-metal tang of blood but right now it makes her need to vomit.
She elbows her way out of the venue. Then she elbows her way out of their shared apartment, out of their shared careers, and finally, out of Mary’s life. The process requires a full and methodical disentanglement of two very entangled beings. Luckily, Sam is good at managing knots.
If you catch them early, you can tease them loose, slip them apart, nice and easy. It is about a decade too late for this approach. The cord is tangled around her throat, choking her air, so instead, Sam goes in with the shears.
Snip, snip, snip.
The incision is bloody but neat, the separation clean. A final gift to an old friend. With her, Sam takes her intimate knowledge of every part of Mary, her genuine affection, and her unwavering worship, only one of which will be missed. She leaves behind everything else: the throw pillows, the pots and pans, the novelty lamp, the comfortable socks. The photographs and the halos and the memories. The music, the color red.
This is how you kill history: by ignoring it until it goes away.
. . .
Sam Anselm has always had an overactive imagination. That’s why she’s an artist, after all—the imaginings in her head, spilling over into reality. She also enjoys lengthy, involved metaphors, for much the same reasons.
The shorn fabric at the foot of her bed may be a product of either of the previous facts, or both, or neither. She could also be insane.
The way she remembers it: it’s the middle of the night, her mouth hurts, and there is a streak of red across her bedsheets. Sam follows it, crawls her way to the edge of the bed and sees her lying, aborted and impotent, writhing on the hardwood floors.
She’s still beautiful, of course, in an ugly way, the way ghosts and infants often are. Sam finds herself fascinated more than afraid or disgusted of her, this pulsing thing she’s cut out of herself, though she feels enough of all three. Sam watches her undulate, rapt. Sam feels the hollow where she used to live ring like a broken bell.
She is fantastical, and impossible, and she is Sam’s, and therein lies the crux. There is ownership here. But ownership can always be relinquished.
It is less an exorcism and more slipping a guest out the door, into the trash, an excisement. It is the easiest thing she’s ever done. Sam sends it off with the expected amount of bitterness and an unexpected amount of tenderness, and the red smudge floats off into the night, over the trees, then the hills, then disappears.
“Go darken someone else’s door, child,” she whispers, then laughs at herself, feeling more than a bit crazy. Maybe living alone in the English countryside was asking for it. But as the ghost disappears, so does Sam’s resentment, her misery, her toothache, the ringing hollow in her chest, and call it psychosomatic but the effects are real.
In the end, she views it as a vindication. Her history, properly killed and dead and, if not buried, then at least gone away far enough that it’s no longer her problem.
. . .
Sam Anslem is forty-three, and if history is nothing but the consequences of actions, then history is alive and well. They sit cross-legged facing each other. Blood is spilling down the front of her shirt, and blood is spilling down the front of Mary’s dress.
Sam feels the same incision in her own chest. A mirrored birthing pain, between two Mothers.
With a shaking hand, Sam does something she hasn’t done in decades, and presses her fingers softly into Mary. The gasp Mary makes when Sam slips inside hasn’t changed a bit. Sam trembles with the enormity of it, of what they’re doing, but also with the simple wet and warm pleasure of being inside Mary once more.
Mary’s eyes, still too big, meet hers. Sam looks back.
Trust me, she mouths, not trusting her voice, not just yet. They breathe together: in, out, Sam leading, Mary following. To the ends of the Earth, she’d promised. Well, Sam’s barn in the middle of nowhere might not quite be that, but by some measures it’s more than close enough.
Sam exhales a final time. With gentleness, she grasps the living child of their dead love within Mary, holds it firm, and delivers it.
. . .
Sam Anselm is forty-three, and there is a dress on the mannequin in front of her. Mother Mary is forty-three, also, and there is no dress on her.
Sam smiles, tasting sour-tang, metal-tang on her tongue. Their immaculate child is in front of her, and she is red, is red, is red.