The Monastery of Technologies

Kate took her vows over a violet-fuzzed computer screen, and then she took a plane to the Midwest, where she had never been before. It was like stumbling into a kingdom made purely for the desires of cows. Though humankind had lost their Eden, Kate thought maybe it persisted for other creatures. Then, on the way to the monastery, she looked out the window and saw a slaughterhouse, where a man tie-dyed with blood waved at the bus driver.

She was dropped off about half a mile away from the Monastery of Technologies and walked the rest of the way, one hand defending her tulle veil against the wind, the other holding the phone that guided her like a trail of pit-fires. The monastery was new, constructed and consecrated quite rapidly after the stone walls of the Philadelphia Convent were found too thick to allow internet access. No such problem here: this building, as light as a safety pin, was placed on the highest hill these flatlands allowed, and there were huge power lines mounted in a fairy circle around it. The wires did not sag; the poles, forged with righteous steel, did not bend. To Kate, the place looked like a museum made of razor blades.

A woman at the front desk, ready to check her in. The lobby was filled with warm paintings of Jesus intervening in the lives of domestic abuse victims.

“Sister Kate?” the woman asked. “It’s good to have you. We are so in need. Father Riley will be here very soon.”

“Thank you,” Kate said. “I had never flown before. I kept waiting for a wing to fall off.”

They talked a little more about the temperature of the monastery, which was chilly. They needed to keep it cool so all the computers ran at optimal processing power. Then the woman, Lorrie, told Kate an alarming story of one brother who had almost lost the soul of Saint Felix II because of a Cherry Coke spill. “We had IT from about ten different states here working to fix that one,” she said.

Father Riley arrived. Kate studied him as she hadn’t been able to over their video-chat. Sure enough, in real life, his eyes did possess pigment. He showed her the sleeping quarters, a carpeted room gridded with hospital curtains on wheels and stretched-fabric cots. The small, curtained cells went male, female, male, female—it was, ultimately, a modern monastery. In a now-notorious church bulletin, the Milwaukee Diocese had condemned the practice—but, so far, duties had gone about with the usual amount of reverence. 

“This is where you’ll mostly be,” Father Riley said, and there it was: the Computer Room, a huge glass eye never blinking. About fifty brothers and sisters were sitting at enormous white tables, clicking and scrolling away on desktop screens. Cables and wires ensnared the room like a pagan cobra god. There were library shelves at the back: one for unused hard drives, USBs, those kinds of specifics that Kate assumed she would soon learn; the other filled with charts and internet reference guides; and, behind a sealed door, the Reliquary, where the data of recovered souls was stored. It was like looking at a cut-in-half thunder egg, the gleam of those CD-ROMs and sleek hard drives. 

“We have, by now, found six souls of saints lost in the internet,” Father Riley said. Kate knew and recited them in her head, as she did nightly: Peter, Ciaran of Saigir, Felicity, Felix II, Henry Morse, Leocadia. “The approach is very systematic.” 

The first saint found, Felicity, had been in 2021, noticed by a nun in Kansas City who, while looking up gardening tips for the convent’s ever-blighted tomato patch, saw an underwater glimmer above the words “potting soil.” It was like looking at divinity, apparently. Divinity was subdued yet garish—a thread of holographic light barely longer than a fingernail. Sister Margaret, feeling a horrible wet sucking inside her, prayed right at that computer, and Saint Felicity spoke. She said, in testimony that now hung cross-stitched above every door of the Monastery of Technologies:

There was a catalog, a zagged, infinite spreadsheet constantly being updated with new internet websites, links, bases, et cetera, and whether or not a brother or sister had thoroughly vetted it for any sign of souls. This document was as inscrutable and mysterious as the Trinity: filled with mathematic equations, boxed cryptograms, pixelated usernames. Father Riley sat Kate down at an empty computer, pointing at the screen with a limp carpal tunnel wrist.

“Do you know what you’re looking for?” Riley asked.

Kate did. She knew that she would recognize the trapped soul of any saint when she came across it. She would discover them, release them into a Heaven that seemed ever more tangible and rewarding. The trenches of Hell, in which Kate had once seen herself torn apart every night, were distant. She would do this clerical work with all the humbleness and efficiency of a farm animal.

“Thank you for this opportunity,” Kate said, and cried. 

_____

The Monastery at night was swaddled with the insectile chitter of live wires and the warm gasp of computer exhaust. Kate lay on her cot, photos of her children—forbidden in the Monastery bylaws—arranged on an overturned wooden box, the rest of her belongings at the foot of her bed. She kneeled there and prayed for an hour, stuttering over words, feeling them as something different and larger in this divinely muffled sanctuary. The isolation she had hated, screamed against, and earned, now felt like a gift. Her vows of renunciation, her ascetic abandonment, gave her suffering the shine of nobility.

She slept as hard as a dirt clod, but only for hour-long intervals. Then she would wake up, body blurred, hearing the soft whisper of hospital curtains, the canvas creak of beds, underwater prayers, the clutching rattle of hand and rosary, early morning movement from the herd of sheep kept outside in the paddock.

The Monastery at night. Around her was the slow movement of fabric, twining with a grace that gave proof of God.

_____

In the morning, she had breakfast with the other brothers and sisters. It was not tasty: it was like eating the wax food at house stagings. Kate licked her yogurt container and smiled as she met her cohort, who were neither mean nor friendly, simply managerial. There were a couple of them she liked: Suzanne, older than her, trimming her nose hair at the end of the table, and Rory, because he grumbled about every piece of food and gagged when he bit into a candle-like Red Delicious. 

Then it was immediately to the Computer Room. Lindy, who had been at the Monastery for a year, sat next to Kate and answered questions when she had them. In what spreadsheet cell did she demarcate the website she had just searched? What happened if two people accidentally picked the same domain? Would someone eventually have to search sites of pornography for saintly emissions, not that Kate knew anything about that?

“Yes,” Lindy said. “And it will be no different than assessing the weekly menu for a nursing home in Alabama.”

That seemed impossible, but Kate nodded. She was first assigned a website for outdoor ceramics. The products were ugly, but Kate had never been a woman of great taste. She hovered her cursor over the alternating font choices, scrolled to the very bottom, then moved to a page showcasing a fat clay toad. After she went through the inventory, no sign of anything unusual, she accidentally clicked “Add to Cart” and almost bought a thousand dollars’ worth of garden pottery. Lindy, savior, rushed in and emptied the cart before catastrophe.

It was slow, methodical work. Kate wondered as she went along. These saints, most of them, had died before the internet. But the weaving strands of time had cohered around them nonetheless, ensnaring them with electronic frequencies that wouldn’t exist for thousands or hundreds or tens of years. Of course, this was an impossible math problem for Kate to put together, but she tried. She drew diagrams of big circles that fed back into each other, dashed ink lines through cylinders, poked a hole through the paper and shone her phone’s flashlight at it. She looked through the pinhole and saw her own life that had already happened happening again—the good things, but mostly the terrible and wrenching. She began to feel headsick. Her eyes hurt from looking at the computer. Through that pinhole she could see the lives of her children, and then she could see their imagined deaths. They sputtered through her mind in static flashes of projector reels. Knife, gun, car crash, cancer, rape, murder, drowning. She saw what she had done to them in even brighter flashes. She tried to see them in her arms again. She couldn’t see them in her arms again.

_____

At lunch, she went out to the paddock to see the sheep. They were so adorable. She cat’s cradled her fingers through their thick wool and thought about grade-school lessons. Sheep are a kind of mammal. Sheep bleat. Sheep have wool that’s made into winter coats. Sheep sleep.

“They like you,” said old Henry, who seemed beatific in the way he looked after the herd. He wore a small ruby jewel in one ear, as alien to this landscape as a meteorite.

Kate’s face opened like a palm. “Really?” she said.

“Well,” Henry said, “sheep mostly like everybody.”

She turned away. It made her sad to think she wasn’t special in their eyes. Then she felt guilty, because wasn’t it better for a creature to contain such gentleness that any person could be granted all their love? Even if it was only caused by barnyard stupidity.

Kate made it through two more websites after lunch and was discouraged to find no signs of hidden saints. She wanted so badly to open up a browser and see there, dangling in a web-corner, something really holy. But there were no souls. None of the brothers and sisters found any. 

“Is this a typical day?” Kate asked Lindy at the end of their shift. Lindy nodded.

“Expect nothing,” she said. “We are picking through the biggest junkyard in the world.”

Kate prayed. 

______

The post-work sessions were not called therapy, but to Kate, somebody who had tried and failed at the practice for years, they felt familiar.

Ostensibly, Kate was there to give basic facts and general reports. She was being catalogued in some way—all of them were. There was no way yet of knowing: could perhaps only certain types of people see the souls? Was it folly, outsourcing this holy work to so many hastily ordained brothers and sisters? She was there to give her stories and be analyzed, so that if she one day found a soul, Father Riley, or—more likely—some big-city Archbishop looking to better his station, could look back over the records and see that it was because she was allergic to grass seed, or liked pickles with cheddar cheese.

The dark wooden brocade of the confessional. Kate was nervous, swarmed by shadows. The Analyst, on the other side, pressed the button on some kind of recorder, which whirred like a disc of sand.

She was asked her name.

“Kate Ballantine.”

She was asked age, date, and place of birth.

“Thirty-six, April 4th, 1987, Beaverton, Oregon.”

She was asked if anyone she had ever loved was allergic to latex or mylar, or any material used to make balloons.

“No,” she said and, thinking about textures, “but many don’t like the feeling of coconut.”

She was asked if she had children.

“Two, a boy and a girl.”

She was asked their ages.

“Eight and eleven.”

She was asked where they were currently.

“Boise is an hour behind, so most likely the dinner table with my husband. They live with him. He’s not my husband anymore.”

She was asked if she had been a good wife.

“I hoped to be.”

She was asked if she had been a good mother.

She examined the small fingernail notches in the cross-hatched wood. “I don’t think Mary would be very proud.”

She was asked if she had special attachments to certain household tools.

“I don’t like things with blunt ends,” she said, understanding they had already vetted her scrupulously.

She was asked if she was told to hold a burning candle, would she blow it out or let it burn down to hot wax in her palm.

“Whatever was instructed of me.”

There were many more questions, increasingly esoteric.

_____

When they were not working, they were cleaning floors, peeling small burnished potatoes, praying, weeding, tending to their cells, and spraying the windows a blind eighty-year-old nun liked to sit by every morning, waiting for a miracle. So many people were waiting. With the number of recognized saints, Kate thought that there should be more miracles in the world, or at least more evident ones. Water gushing from concrete, pouring through the air with the sound of angelic symphony, was beautiful—but useful only up to a point. Yes, some paralyzed women walked; some blind men did see. But these things felt too contained, bodily, so unlike the endless mysteries God was supposed to live in. They were not windows into Heaven, they were not staring contests with the divine—they were visits to a really good optometrist. Everyone was still caught in the same daily traps, worldly inconveniences, embroiled by traffic. 

Kate liked best working out in the paddock with the sheep. She was so lonely. She wanted to be friends with Suzanne and Rory, but their computer stations were in the front, far away from her, and they always seemed in a hurry to find a new, interesting place to dust. She had expected silence, but she had not expected to be bitten by it, daily. The sun rose through a scissor cut, and then everything after seemed pointed and violent. 

And still no souls in the computer. Not in the website for the Los Angeles Metro, at least. 

She cried, silently, at her monitor most days. Nobody said anything. Well, Lindy asked once, hovering guiltily. Kate blamed it on screen brightness and asked if the Monastery allowed eye drops. They did. Every fifteen minutes, Kate deployed some into her irises, feeling suddenly overtaken, a city lashed by acid rain. And then it was back to the screen.

She called her ex-husband, who picked up and only answered the baseline questions. He underlined his support for her, but she knew what that support meant: distance and kind aphorisms. Which, she thought, was for the best. The children, how else to explain it, were growing up. They were living and doing a good job of it. They had school lunches they wouldn’t eat, friend sleepovers they called out of when they got scared and homesick, the torture of world capitals and U.S. presidents. 

After the call, Kate recited the name of every state under her breath. She forgot Kentucky—she only realized when the brother in the cell next to hers spoke it through the curtain.

_____

The Monastery at night.

Kate tried to sleep, turning back and forth on her cot with an unhinged desperation. One of her legs was restless, sputtering like a loose tailpipe, and the summer air had crept in through the Monastery doors, settled, and curdled into miasma. She believed she could will herself into sleep, jam her brain into darkness like a key into a lock. What was needed was the right kind of pressure.

Murmurs all around; the sighs of sleepers pickling in their sweat. The old man two cells down was clipping his toenails. Hate threatened to melt her body into something so liquid it would drip through the earth and take her directly to Hell. She turned and thought about knives.

When she awoke she was outside her body. The lines of the world had become static electricity. All the curtains that separated the members of the Monastery murmured in the air, suspended by what could only be the invisible talons of angels. She could see everyone else, and they were all sleeping the sleep she so wished she could grasp.

But she was sleeping.

A voice crawled through the doors. The whole room was cast in an undersea darkness, shot through with glimmers of sparkling twine. The light was wherever it needed to be—the darkness parted like heavy thighs—the voice grew louder—

She hung above her bed, just as the curtains did. The fear of unknown footsteps in a house at night. Anything could be in front of her.

It was the roar of a void, the spark that had taken deep inside. It was the spew of something more ancient than any leviathan dead in the sea. She understood she was nothing more than a screw made of flesh, a bolt of bone and blood. She could be so easily lost in this world, its bedlam, her miniature purpose immediately forgotten.

Everything opened its mouth at once. Oh, Kate! Oh oh oh!

The gasp!

_____

She stood up at breakfast in the morning, throwing down a container of yogurt to get everybody’s attention.

“Last night,” she said, the ecstasy still as close to her as the flyaway hairs tickling her ears, “a saint spoke to me.”

The table looked at her in unison, with the same dopey cock of the head, as if they had been trained in a sitcom school for dogs.

All at once:

“Who was it?”

“What did they say?”

“Sister Kate—!”

Kate shut her eyes, then spoke again. “I don’t know, I don’t know.” The table was rapt around her, save for Suzanne, who looked at her with crab eyes. “I couldn’t discern its words. No name was given. But I felt the spirit in my sleep. The taste is still under my tongue.”

Many people put down their bananas. They shot looks back and forth, making quick inferences and building toward a communal disbelief.

“That’s just a nightmare,” Suzanne said. “We’ve all had them here.”

“This was not a nightmare,” Kate said.

“How do you know?” Malachi said. “What does it want with you?”

“She’s lying,” Rory said. “Someone should get Father Riley.”

And indeed, at this most glancing urging, a chair flew back, a sister out the room.

“It’s true,” Kate said. She looked at everybody seated at the table, and with gutting sadness knew that no one believed her.

“I’ll show you,” Kate said. “Come to the Computer Room. The soul of this saint will be on the first website I check.”

She exited quickly, too afraid to see if anybody was following. She moved through the medicinal white corridors and heard the clop of sandals and shoes behind her.

Lindy opened the door with a huge jail-chain of keys. The room was dark, then light, like that. Kate rushed to her computer station, trying now to remember the horror and holy will from the night before. How real could it be if simple adrenaline overrode it?

Kate logged in. All the brothers and sisters were huddled too closely behind her chair. Their breath smelled of oatmeal and underripe apple. Kate went to Google. She had no idea where to go next. She typed: mountain lions in Illinois.

The first link was the official government site for the state of Illinois—but they called mountain lions “cougars” instead. Kate clicked on it. Everybody moved closer.

Her eyes became spotlights, prison beacons, dangerous and exacting. Every pixel seemed to vibrate. Each informational line—cougars are also known as pumas, the males can weigh up to 160 pounds—was capable of holding something mystic in its fragile Times New Roman body. She was a heap of sweat. She scrolled.

“There’s nothing here,” someone said.

“Let me see,” someone said.

Necks wrenched around her face. Someone stuck their finger at the screen, gasping, then went silent, because it was only a bullet point. Kate prayed, never removing her eyes from the screen.

please please please my God my angels my saint lead me to you please

“There’s nothing here,” someone said again. Kate was at the bottom of the page.

“It’s here,” she said.

She felt the brothers and sisters shifting around, once more exchanging looks. In the reflection of the screen, she could see they were pitying.

“No,” she said, “I promise.”

She didn’t know how much longer she was there, going up and down, scrutinizing each letter and line. People drifted off, and Father Riley’s hand took her shoulder.

“Sister Kate,” he said. “Take the rest of the day off.”

“You must think I’m always crying,” Kate said, because she was crying again.

“This is hard work,” Father Riley said. “We have all mistaken something or the other for divinity.”

It was just the two of them in the room, enrobed in the chatter of computers. Father Riley’s hand moved to her elbow and helped her up.

“I wasn’t trying to lie,” Kate said. Father Riley’s face was a cavern of sorrow.

“I know, sister,” he said. “Let’s take you to your cell to lie down.”

please please please she recited, and:

oh my God, please, my loving God—

_____

In her cell, Kate searched for something to consume and end her pain. There was nothing, except her drooled-upon pillowcase. She didn’t know how to move. She wanted to see the sheep.

Weather was happening all around her: a denture-rattling wind, early sun, the wetness of grass and lawn. The sheep were huddled together under the off-kilter roof of the shed, as battered and besieged as a sea cliff. She joined the huddle, worming her way into the musk of dirty wool and chewed-up feed. It was so warm and nice. She slept as the sheep gnawed at her ankles and licked her teary cheek.

When she woke, Henry was shoveling in fresh alfalfa. Two sheep lingered at his legs; the others were out grazing, the wind quiet, the day warm.

“Are you all right?” Henry said.

Kate nodded. “I was given the day off.”

“Good. You seem a little out of it.”

“No one in there believes what I saw.”

He spread more alfalfa. “Well, you can only believe so much. God takes up most of that space.”

Kate helped him with the alfalfa. She tucked it in at the bottom of the walls, where there was a gap between the wood and the air.

“Were you here before the Monastery became this kind of monastery?” Kate said.

“Yes, for a time,” said Henry, his pitchfork tines singing. “I’m not a brother. I don’t have all the proper qualifications. But someone needs to keep the sheep. And I’ve always believed.”

“You must miss a lot of things.”

“Not that I can remember,” Henry said. “But you must.”

“My children,” Kate said.

“Natural,” Henry said. “You had a whole other life before here. I never really did. They’re grown up?”

“No,” Kate said. “They’re with my ex-husband. I turned thirty and something clicked wrong in my brain. I thought they were dark and evil. I had a hammer. They hid in my daughter’s closet.”

“I’m so sorry,” Henry said.

“I’ll never see them again.”

They went out to the field, where one of the sheep had caught his head in the wire fence.

“This is Gabriel,” Henry said, pulling his black head out patiently, placing the ears flush against the side of his neck. “I would never admit to favorites, but.”

Kate scratched Gabriel under the chin. The sheep closed his eyes and smiled with his tongue out, like he’d eaten the most tender blade of grass.

“He is the sweetest,” Kate said, hugging him close.

“Next spring,” Henry said, “when the lambs come, you can help bottle feed them in the mornings.”

“How do you do that?” Kate said, full of wonder.

“I’ll show you,” Henry said, adjusting his cap to protect his face from the sun. “You have to hold them on your lap.”

_____

At dinner, a campfire-tasting pasta with jars of whole green olives, no one spoke to Kate. All was a hush; the toothsome pasta and the rubbery olives.

The Analyst was waiting for her after dinner, hidden by wooden shadows. In the confessional Kate sat down uneasily, as if the chair was covered with sewing needles.

She was asked her general feelings about soup.

“Positive,” Kate said.

She was asked what the correct punishment for lying should be.

“Prayer and penance, extra kitchen work, apologies,” Kate said.

She was asked why she had chosen a hammer to kill her children with, rather than another implement. 

“I was hanging up pictures with nails,” Kate said. “It was already in my hand.”

She was asked if she was worthy of forgiveness.

“Jesus teaches us yes, but I don’t agree,” Kate said. “Which is another one of my sins.”

She was asked if the end was near or far away.

“Equidistant,” Kate said, puzzled at herself, not knowing exactly what that word meant.

_____

The doors of night opened again and let in the holy force.

She rose with the sleep-breaths of the others; the curtains made tunnels of noiselessness.

It was a mathematical impossibility, the light and shape in front of her, until it snapped in half and took form, like fluid poured into a glow stick. 

There were hands made of tapestry, a crown like a peahen, sizzling fiery rods. Everywhere were symbols and illuminations. She could not focus on the whole of it lest her eyes be burned into copper.

She spoke:

Let me untangle you from your nets.

The force became diaphanous, protozoan. She opened her mouth again to speak. There was no spine to any of her words, a jellyfish softness.

All the curtains lifted—everyone was there—they were all together, mechanical, an elaborate cuckoo clock.

The brothers and the sisters of the Monastery all looked at her, electrified by the light, growing phantom arms and glass tongues, and finally:

—I am Saint Dymphna, my soul is torn by metal. My miracles are trapped and caught. I am here with them. You must be my carriage, you must help me, you must be the thing that ushers
                                                            me into the greater light—
                                           —do not let these words get lost, do not let this dream turn to vapor—
                     —It’s all around, it’s always always always been here, and forever is not much more than a thumbnail—

Do you know what is happening, Kate?—

_____

She moved in silence, forgoing the usual plopping sandals she wore to and from the Monastery bathrooms. Outside, she could hear the pathetic yowl of coyotes, close. She worried about the sheep, then cleared her mind. Already the vision threatened to abandon her.

She saw door hinges that needed to be oiled. She saw the dust bunnies a broom had missed. She saw the glow of the kitchen light, the one that was kept on at all hours to scare away pantry mice. She kept moving, sliding over the floor in her wool socks.

Outside, blue night like plastic gems and raspberry candies. The electrical towers stood, sagging with purpose. Fall was coming, and rain would come soon, and the yard of the Monastery would swamp into mud. Now, hard ground and an Easter-green field. 

It was the clarity of a modem, a router, a transponder: she was now a frequency. She understood time and all of its implications: death, death, death, birth, not in the order anybody would assume. It coagulated inside her like a heart attack. She understood, she understood: she was Kate was Kate was time, was death, was murder, was liquid, empty vessel, unsanctified candle holder, cougar, puma, mountain lion, sheep, coyote, children, her Paige, her Robin, her left hand, her end, their end, and God, above all, oh God, she was here, He was too, they all were together in such a perfect way, god, God, miracles, so many more to come, so much sadness left, so much, so much sleep, hunger, pangs of every name and religion, and something else too, no name for it, it set her hair into holy fire.

On her knees by the backup generator. She scooped at the dirt, like her hands were throats and the ground was water, pebbles pressing into her skin with the bite of a wild animal. Blood tickled down her wrist. She knew what she would see buried here: a dead finger of a USB drive, lost seasons ago.

She pulled it out of the earth, her pain ringing out as beautiful as the bells they tie in a horse’s mane. Back into the Monastery, where everybody was sleeping a sleep she knew they would never have again. Her blood fell to the hallway floor in patters of beads. The door to the Computer Room was locked; one hand cradling the USB drive, Kate grabbed an errant broom and rammed the plastic handle through its pane of glass. She reached through and let herself in, night burglar, garden thief. At her usual station, she plugged the drive into a port and opened the files.

Someone had tried to smuggle in personal photos. The files were all pictures of small children lost in shrouds of Christmas wrapping, couched in tee-ball outfits, holding onto mommy’s hand, and mommy was Lindy, Kate barely recognized, for she looked very young in the photos, lacking all administrative ardor. 

Saint Dymphna was there too. Her soul was as plain to see as a toad in a bathtub.

“Oh,” Kate said, crying. “You are so lonely and tangled in there.”

She held out her hand and touched the soul-spot on the screen. It was a shard of dented metal above a man mowing a lawn, three children belly-down in the deep grass. She felt her finger burn, like she had touched the chimney of a Bunsen burner. How to free this saint?

She put her cursor on the soul and moved it around very quickly, to help dislodge it. She did the maneuver: her computer on and off very quickly, to further disrupt the electrical signals and frequencies bipping invisibly around her head. She moved the photo, the soul inside of it, to the trash icon, and dropped it there.

The screen dashed into pure light and out came the soul.

Kate watched it. Her keyboard was bloody. Her wool socks frizzled with static.

“Ow,” she said, touching the metal leg of her chair. The shock burst in the back of her skull.

Kate was Kate. Saint Dymphna was gone.

Yes, she was gone.

_____

In the morning, at 5:30 when the Monastery woke, Kate explained to Father Riley the manner in which she had found and released Saint Dymphna’s soul. She showed him the broken window and the USB drive. On it, a diamond singe. Waking, the brothers and sisters gathered around with suspicious footsteps. They looked at the strange light on the surface of the drive and ran their open palms over its surface.

The artifact was placed in the Reliquary. Later, some whispered about seeing it pulse at night, like a coil of jeweled organs.

“Seven souls recovered,” Father Riley said. “We are doing our job and doing it well.”

Kate went to Lindy as the news disseminated through the Monastery. She was struck dumb upon hearing it all.

“I’m sorry,” Kate said. “I’m sorry she had to become trapped in those photos of yours.”

“My children,” Lindy said. “They don’t speak to me anymore.”

“Mine either,” Kate said. “We can’t be sad. We can’t always be sad.”

But when Kate held Lindy, they were both crying.

She was given the day off, and went out to the blustery paddock, where Henry was digging a hole. Kate became afraid.

“The coyotes,” Henry said, and with dirty leather gloves he wiped a wet eye. “They dug under the fence. One of them bit Gabriel on the belly, his little belly.”

The sheep was dead.

“It’s times like these we have to remember that grace is still alive,” Henry said, and held onto Kate’s body. “Even if we don’t feel it.”

It was a strange hollow. The divine had vanished from the world. Kate had heeded it along. And now there was nothing. Cheery priests and a dead sheep. 

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Kate said, absorbing Henry’s shuddering cries.

She wandered the rest of the day, trailing through the grounds, touching the small trees that never bore fruit, thinking blasphemy. She felt cut in half by a sword meant for justice. Had there been any real revelations granted to her last night? She thought about the rest of the flock and wondered if they could feel Gabriel gone. She thought of Lindy’s children never speaking to her. Once, all she had wanted was to be a vessel.

God, wherever He was, was purely ornamental. He was a beautiful empty vase no one was allowed to touch.

She slept in her cell and had dreams, not the saintly kind, where she guzzled down oxycontin in heaps. She awoke, fell back under, awoke and walked again.

In the confessional, Kate listened to the Analyst’s questions.

She was asked what she had eaten the night before.

“Communal meal,” she said. “Dry chicken and the broccoli in soy sauce.”

She was asked if she liked her showers hot or cold.

“Who likes a cold shower?” she said.

She was asked if she preferred leafy houseplants or flowers.

“I like snake plants,” she said, caring in no way.

She was asked—

“What do you think made it happen to me?” Kate said.

The Analyst was quiet. Kate let herself live inside the small confessional walls.

“Maybe,” the Analyst said, “you have the right kind of suffering.”

Kate stood up.

“That’s a horrible thing to say,” she said, and left.

Dinner was too jovial and kind. The brothers and sisters kept reaching out to grasp Kate’s hand, congratulate her, and apologize for their disbelief. The attempts did not feel like real Catholic forgiveness: they felt like grappling hooks aimed at angels. They were mistaken if they saw her as that—she knew because she felt that deep mortal sin, her old dramatic favorite, coming back up with the overcooked potato she’d eaten.

“Seven souls,” Suzanne said. “We’re making headway.”

As everyone got ready for bed, Kate went back outside. She unbound her hair and rebound it with a black tie. She tried to shut out the sound of electricity; she tried to shut out all the sounds.

They continued unabated. She went inside, to bed, with malignant emptiness.

_____

Someone urged her awake, gentle, touching her ankles. Always the easiest way to ease a person out of sleep.

It was Saint Dymphna, in the guise of an empty white robe, floating over her cot.

“You have done a great thing for me,” she said. Quiet.

“I have one miracle left unclaimed. It is for your body. Ask for the thing you want. The one thing. And I will see it done.”

_____

When Kate awoke, dread. She went back to work in the Computer Room with the others, but made no progress. It was a trick. And, if not a trick, it was cruelty.

She wondered if the saint could bring her children back to her.

I am not healed, she thought. I will only hurt them again.

She wondered if this saint could heal her mind.

It won’t matter, she thought. They will never give my children back.

One miracle, one thing, for her alone.

After computer work, she did not return to the Analyst. She was too sad to face the paddock, so she went to the kitchen to clean the stove burners. They were coated in grease and lard. As she scrubbed, Malachi came in, opening the pantry to check expiration dates on the canned food.

“If one is given a reward,” Kate said without any greeting, “do you think one has to take into account whether or not they deserve it?”

Malachi set down chili beans with mild interest.

“I guess it depends,” he said. “Was the reward given for an act of evil or goodness?”

“Goodness,” Kate said, “but that’s always confusingly mixed with selfishness.”

“It’s still goodness, I think.”

“What to do with that?”

“Charity,” Malachi said.

The stovetop became as clean and shiny as fresh linoleum. Kate went to the sleeping quarters. Suzanne was sweeping in the corner. Kate approached her humbly.

“If you were to be gifted one thing,” she said, “one thing for you only, what would you choose?”

“At this rate, better meals,” Suzanne said. “Maybe I would choose something for proof.”

“Proof? Of what?”

“Of faith.”

“Faith exists without proof.”

“Yes,” Suzanne said. “That’s what we all say to pretend we’re fine not knowing.”

Kate returned to her cot and sat down cross-legged. She was afraid. But she was curious too. Maybe it was not a trick. Maybe it was a puzzle.

Or maybe it was nothing like that at all. Maybe it was just something happening, one of those rare communions between Earth and Heaven.

Oh, Kate thought. What will I choose?

When it got dark, she fell immediately to sleep.

_____

It was like being in a bath of hands, all of them warm and caring for her. She was so confused. She didn’t know what her dream-body should say or do.

She was not in the Monastery anymore—she was in the place where her dreams always used to happen: the road winding to her childhood home. Except then it had always been dark. Now, it was daytime. 

There was a swooping breeze. She could smell things. She had never smelled anything in a dream before.

The one thing, Kate. Are you prepared for your miracle?

She had one last cut of horror—and then the emptiness inside of her was gone.

Revelations would come and go through her life, she understood. The miracles would cease and end, spring up again like long-forgotten seeds blooming into a shabby garden. Why had she ever been afraid? Why had she ever been horrible, evil, sad, an endless idea of suffering? She understood the pinhole, the light that shone through. She reached out into the air and held her children close, remembering the way children smell, covered in sweetness and pet fur. She would not see them, she would see them, they were not the same thing but very very close.

It was miraculous. She would have her miracle. She would go on for however long she could.

“Yes,” said Kate, as it all retreated back into a thumbprint, a pulse.

_____

The Monastery was the Monastery when she awoke in the morning. Why should it be anything else?

The sound of sleepy shuffles, the donning of socks.

Kate sprang upright in bed, overcome. Still as a post—then—

She ran, past all the other brothers and sisters waking up, she ran barefoot, faster and faster, with a gasping smile so big it was as if she could swallow the atmosphere herself. She ran past the cells and down the hallway, where they had cleaned up her blood and the glass, and outside to the paddock.

The pen was filled with sheep, Henry enveloped in them. He saw her running, his eyes reaching hers. Still as a post; and then he waved his arms.

“Kate!” he shouted, laughing.

When she reached him, he was scooping up a small creature in his arms, as limp and fuzzy as a throw rug. In one hand he held a plastic bottle opaque with milk. The rest of the sheep looked up at him, then turned to see Kate. Their heads moved with a force independent of all else. 

“He came early this morning,” Henry said, showing her the lamb. It wasn’t spring. The seasons of the world had been loosened. He gestured for her to sit on a crate, the kind the Monastery received their Bisquick mixes in.

She felt the warmth of the sheep’s breath on her bare knees. He lowered the lamb into her arms, and it nestled its head against her shoulder immediately.

“Here,” he said, handing her the bottle. “C’mon, the milk’s not in her shoulder.”

“It’s right here,” she said to the lamb, and its head moved away from her body, toward the bottle. The lamb suddenly understood everything, and began sucking in hearty gulps.

Her hands underneath the downy legs. The lamb’s body a ball of heat against her torso.

“Look at him,” Henry said. “He looks just like Gabriel.”

The distant scent of cigarette smoke pinched Kate’s nose. A few sisters were gathered behind the Monastery, blocking their sin with huddled bodies. The milk was already half gone. The spittle running from the lamb’s mouth encircled her wrist like a bracelet of opals. 

“Henry,” Kate said, hugging the lamb tighter. He stood by her, taking off his work gloves to scratch the lamb’s head. “Oh, Henry, I’m so happy!”