magdalena “maggie” clark (d5)
Mar 15, 2023 2:30:08 GMT -5
Post by florentine, d4b ❁ on Mar 15, 2023 2:30:08 GMT -5
magdalena “maggie” clark
fifteen and a half; district five
(child of god, child of ruins)
devotee to her faith - disciple to her core
self-taught exorcist, self-proclaimed success
detective, peace-bringer, sin-soother
law, and order and the truth (her truth)
pockets stuffed full of superstitions
(salt over the shoulder, cross-her-heart-and-hope—)
usurper to the family crown
good girl (save a bird with a broken wing, mend it, let it fly away)
bad girl (twist the wings off the fly one by one, look it right in the eye)
They have always lived in the old Church. Even before.
They will go on living there until he stops visiting them. He won’t, because they are good.1
Every day, at the strike of six, Magdalena kneels beside her bed, grazed knees on cold stone, bare elbows resting on wire frame, and prays. She is very good at it. The best, in fact. He visits her the most, more often than her mother or her sister, who demonstrate weakness of faith from time to time. (Like when father died.) Magdalena herself suffered no such thing - in fact, she considered the man to be a sacrifice well worth making. The whole thing brought her closer to God, she knew, and therefore, was good and right.2
Magdelena makes lists of things that are good and right, and things that are not. She writes the lists everywhere; in notebooks, the backs of letters, discarded scraps of paper, her bedroom walls, her arms and legs.3
An example list:
Good
- Water, icy cold (fog on the outside of the glass)
- Pillows (plump)
- The noise of the frogs in the garden
- Praise (from anyone, anywhere)4
- Clean skirts (not always achieved)
- Lit candles (don’t let them burn down to the wick)5
Bad
- Games that use dice (to gamble is a sin)
- Sleeping past dawn
- Talking to boys
- Opening someone else’s letters
- Books with magic in them6
Magdalena drags the brush through her hair every morning. One hundred strokes, but if she loses count she starts again. Her sister calls her vain for the way she sits in front of the mirror for so long, but she never paints her face or lips, only washes carefully and combs the tangles out, perhaps weaves braids to keep the knots from creeping back in. She thinks herself quite pretty - certainly prettier than her sister - but it would be wrong to admit it out loud. Instead she keeps it scrunched up like a wad of paper under her tongue, too thick to swallow.
Her father called her Lena and when he died she disallowed the practice and took on Maggie instead. It felt unfamiliar in her ears and scratched the inside of her mind, but that was by far preferable to hearing anyone steal her Daddy’s name for her.7 Her mother is rigid, cold and too stiff to bend or change, and so she avoids referring to Magdalena by name at all, and instead just gestures generally in her direction. They don’t speak much anyhow, so Maggie doesn’t mind. A name is just a label, after all, plastered on the front of her blouse. She is free to discard it and write a new one at any time.
In the old Church, they make preserves. What once was a graveyard has been repurposed into a thriving orchard, with healthy trees all lined up in rows. Together, they had planted them, and they had grown and produced an abundance of fruit each year. Magdalena hated fruit. She hated that the crypts below the Church were now used to simmer and sugar, to can products. What was once a sacred place was now lined ceiling to floor with jars of apple conserve, blackberry jam, preserved plums and figs and pears. When she had protested, her father had laughed and said, Lena, darling, we cannot sell God. God would not make us any money.8 He was right, certainly, that selling their wares had made them plenty, but now without Father the demand outstripped their ability to supply, and each harvest they let pounds of fruit rot on the graves because they could never get around to processing it all.
Their mother cursed the girls for this, particularly Magdalena. Her hands were tired, her back too old to bend anymore. Their young bodies needed to work harder, take on the burden for the family. Maggie needed to cease her endless wandering, slipping away to write or pray or whatever she did out there in the orchards and fields, and get her hands dirty - pull up her sleeves and do her part for the family. Magdalena ate the apricots all the way down to the stone and spat the pithy remains into the soil. She imagined another tree sprouting there where the seed lay, but they never did. Without her father’s attention and care, nothing new ever seemed to grow in the Churchyard other than weeds. Certainly, Maggie herself had not grown an inch since he had left.9
Maggie hid in the upper branches when she didn’t want to go to school. There was nothing the place could teach her that she didn’t already know. She read an old bible that she had unearthed from a dusty corner. They had lived in the Church all her life and yet she still came across things she had never seen before, behind moth-bitten curtains or tucked behind the rotting wood of old doorways. The decay had only really descended in the last eighteen months. It was as though the house had held its breath for half a year afterwards, hoping that Father would return.10 Maggie certainly did.
The day Magdalena’s period had bloomed had been the first time she had noticed that their home was falling into ruins, and when she had told her mother that she was bleeding, “I think, like father, I too am dying,” her mother had snorted and a speck of spit had landed on Maggie’s cheek and then she had begun to cry because that was unclean and her pretty face was tarnished. This had angered her mother, and in the end the girl had dealt with the blood alone, and scrubbed the stains from her sheets with an old bar of soap and cut up the nightdress with a pair of kitchen scissors before burying it in a hole she dug in the yard.11 Maybe it would grow a tree, and the fruit it would bear would be juicy, sobbing teenage girls. When you cut them open, the flesh would be foul and smell like shortbread and vomit.
Magdalena sister stole their mother’s old jewellery to buy her a new dress.12 For that she was taught a lesson. Almost, Magdalena felt guilty for the thick red welts on her sister’s cheek, but she knew that stealing was bad, and so she deserved it. Magdalena made a careful note of this.
Bad
- Games that use dice (to gamble is a sin)
- Sleeping past dawn
- Talking to boys
- Opening someone else’s letters
- Books with magic in them
- Stealing, even if its to replace a ruined dress when there is no money left over because all the harvest has gone to rot because no amount of work seems to make enough jam to keep up with things anymore
He was the strongest of all of them and yet the rose plague bloomed right in the pit of the stomach and twisted him inside out. The rest of them, the lawless, Godless ones, the three of them that were not so good and so pure and so right, were unkissed by its lips. It consumed him whole, quickly, as though he were a weak, faltering old man, rather than the pillar that held all of them up. He crumbled and fell in on himself and never got back up again. His body, ironically, did not lie in the crypt with the jars of rhubarb but instead lay at the altar, for all of them to look and pray upon, and when she prayed she was not answered, so Magdalena knew she was not a good enough girl. God punished her. When they wheeled his body away to be buried elsewhere, at a cemetery that was not an orchard, she repented.13
She memorised passages from the holy texts; she watched the flames lick the words off the pages and smack their fiery lips with glee.
Magdalena brewed tea for her mother as the woman wrung her hands, and cut her hair as she slept to line a nest for the birds.14
She returned the lost child to its mother; she crushed the snails under her boots.15
1. They are not good, but Magdalena works hard to make up for her sister and mother, and to ensure they are punished for their sins. She oversees this with a careful eye.
2. This is not how she felt at first, but she had told herself this enough times that now she is almost, almost convinced.
3. The lists also appear in things she does not own: in textbooks belonging to the school, across items belonging to her sister, etched into the trunks of the trees outside, scratched into the dirt in the town square, etc.
4. A man in the street told her that she had very beautiful eyes and asked her to come along with him to his house so he could show her to his children; her sister chased her down the street and dragged her back, scolding her for her foolishness. She only shrugged and explained that he had complimented her, and had seemed very nice.
5. This is bad luck. The sudden darkness that results can make you go blind.
6. When she was a small child she had loved fairytales more than anything. Her mother used to read to her then, or, once she learned to read, her elder sister. Her favourite was anything with goblins and trolls. She doesn’t believe in that now, but she did until she was much too old.
7. Three days in, her sister forgot and called her Lena out loud. Maggie tried to claw out her eyes for this, but her sister was stronger and she was sent to bed early as punishment.
8. Her father was a religious man, but a practical one, who believed that hard work was necessary to get a person far in life. Maggie agreed at the time, but now she is less sure.
9. She was five feet and four inches tall, and wasn’t budging.
10. More likely, it took six months without care for the building to begin slowly falling apart.
11. Actually, her sister had offered to help her, but Maggie had screamed and refused her help, and locked herself in her room until she grew hungry for dinner.
12. There was no money because they did not sell enough, they did not work enough, and because their mother had never in her life handled finances, and was altogether irresponsible with them.
13. Although both her mother and sister regularly visited the grave, Maggie refused, and is yet to see the gravestone. If she was to go and look, she would see that it reads:
Corrigan Samuel Clark, loving husband of Frieda, and devoted father to Imelda and Magdalena
14. Maggie maintains her innocence on this to this day, although there is no doubt in the Church as to what happened.
15. Magdalena does not really know what is good or bad at all.
