Vivere Sin
Article by Shea Li Dombrowski, art by Isabella Hageman
Content Warning: Religious trauma, infanticide
When Elizabeth was younger, her mother used to tell her that for people like them, to live is to sin. In those days, among the sweet smell of wheat and the wind tugging at the strings of her bonnet—before she bolted to leave it behind in all abandon—those words did not mean much to her. The years of the lord passed, the fruit fields ripened, she married, and eventually, she fell in love—and she found sin.
And the thing, Elizabeth thought, that no one told you about sin was that it felt like benediction.They told you the temptation was great, the fruit on the tree of knowledge looked sweet and ripe, but it was a poison to the Garden of Eden. Sometimes, when she was laying beneath the weight of her husband’s grip, under the full and waning moon—feeling nothing, not fear nor anger nor even sadness—she reflected that there could be no sin in this. There was no debasement, even the violation felt bland and tasteless. And they said that the sting of the switch the same width as her heavy-handed husband’s thumb was cleansing as it sang through the air and into her flesh, but it was nothing to the feather-light touch of a knuckle against her breast. Morning, noon, and night they prayed; but she only felt true worship in those stolen moments when the moon was new and day was almost approaching.
They sinned in more ways than she could count under that darkness, so quickly and so many times that the heady pounding of her heart made her head go dizzy with it. Sometimes, she wondered if it was one big sin or many little ones—if every breath she took from the first moment, the first glance on was a sin and she simply had not stopped for a single second. In those days after, when her head had cleared, but the desire grew within her, and her heart tugged at her to steal away again, she thought she understood what her mother had meant. Time wove around her affairs like the slow pull of the needle through the tough fabric of new trousers for her husband, to the quick pull of thread through the hole before the process would start again. Somehow, she never saw an end to the line—perhaps she thought her thread would be cut short before she ever reached it.
When she was out in the fields, the palms of her hands slowly turned the color of the dirt, dusty and slightly brown, light and dark together. She could feel the particles gathered on her skin, building up layer by layer until they felt like a part of her. When she was dyeing fabric, her hands were stained black from the sumac. It felt wet and slippery but stayed embedded in the layers of her skin for days. When the color faded, she looked at her hands, surprised, as if she expected them to stay that way forever. When she gave birth, her hands clenched the sides of the bed as she screamed, the other women urging her to push, to endure, to bear it, her child—his child. And then the woman washed the blood away, but her hands were rough and calloused and still held the dye and the dirt when she cradled the baby to her breast, allowing her daughter to suckle.
Her husband named her daughter Leah, and held her duly in his heavy hands before relinquishing her back to her mother as the baby’s tears began to form. Elizabeth called her daughter Abigail when they were alone, murmured it into her soft head, and whispered it as she drifted off to sleep, but never when anyone could hear. She felt her lips crack and break and almost bleed as she placed soft kisses on her daughter’s head and lay awake at night, hating her sins for staying hidden so well in her, only to manifest in her daughter. And she tried to remember the first moment, the original sin, and her legs kicked the sheets that felt slick with blood, blood she knew had been washed clean days ago. But even in the darkness, she thought she saw faint stains of red that would not wash off.
During the day, she cradled Abigail, Leah, to her chest and fed her. She swaddled her tiny body. It was all at once childish and already marked as woman. She waited for those fragile breaths as her baby-blue eyes sparkled through tears. As she cooked, she watched her daughter’s face screw up into a wail or open up in delight at the smells that must have seemed strong and new to her. Elizabeth imagined which dishes might be her favorite to make in the future. And even in those first days, when she caught a glimpse of the future, as she thought about teaching her daughter how to cook, how to clean, how to live, she felt her heart boil in stew and turn over with the careful mix of the spoon.
That coming Sunday, she sat in the pews with Abigail cradled to her chest as she listened on an empty stomach to the preacher. When it was time for them to approach the altar, her husband carried her up and whispered to the other man the name that he had chosen, the godparents he had chosen, and she stood and watched as he took her in his hands. The basin of water was so clear and still that the streaked light of the stained-glass window shone clean to its bottom. Her heart clenched as she saw the beginnings of a cry upon her daughter’s face as the water hit her closed eyes. It felt like her ears were bleeding when the priest declared her, Leah, cleansed of sin and welcomed and the congregation dutifully bent their heads. On the walk home, Elizabeth tried not to let her arms shake as she brushed away the droplets of water still on her forehead.
Later that day, as she was washing Leah, Abigail, in the tub, she felt the warm soapy water that she had left in the sun and saw her daughter’s clean skin and took a breath. The baby’s skin was unblemished and soft, and the water ran in crystal drops from her crown down her breast only to return to the water. And Elizabeth thought of her child, his child too, cleansed in that moment—thought that living is sinning. Elizabeth’s hands were heavy as she cradled her infant’s head back towards the water. They trembled with strength as she began murmuring prayers so fast that the words blurred together into cries.
She cried, not because she was damning herself, though she was, but because she was not so sure in heaven. It was the massacre of an innocent. But she did not want her, Abigail, to suffer. Elizabeth sinned and she suffered. She cried because she knew that in those moments, when her daughter was washed to the sheet-white of bone, that she would never taste the sun or run through those ripened fruit fields with the sweet, earthy tones wafting across the breeze, on her skin, and through her. But she still cried, still prayed.
She was still crying when her husband, the doctor, and the priest arrived to see her hunched over the basin of water, her hands dripping wet in her lap. The dirt and the dye had loosened. Water flowed from her eyes, and the bloodshot in the whites surrounding her irises made her tears look blood red as they fell to the tips of her fingers and pooled in the palms of her hands. And she prayed for her, for her daughter, as the water cleansed the inside of her lungs, washing them until they were full.