A Fierce and Subtle Poison - Samantha Mabry Page 0,14

and tell me to kiss her there first; she’d point to her bottom lip and tell me to kiss her there next. She’d take my hands and put them on each of her round, smooth shoulders, and she’d tell me to move my fingers up and down her throat. I did exactly as she said. She’d give me tips: slower, less pressure, more pressure, more movement. Sometimes she’d talk about all the other boys she’d let kiss and touch her and she’d compare what I was doing to what they’d done before.

“You’re not the best,” she once told me. “But you’re not the worst either.”

She was the first girl to make me hungry and desperate to the point that I would stare up at the ceiling and fantasize about her at night. More than anything I wanted her to think that I was an enthusiastic and capable learner, ready for anything. But mostly she just seemed bored.

One day she came to my room and didn’t want to start kissing right away. First, she asked if I’d heard the story of the young nun. I told her I hadn’t. She asked if I knew that before this hotel was a hotel, it was a convent. I told her everybody knew that. She asked if I knew that the very room we were sitting in, the room I’d stayed in every year for as long as I could remember had, hundreds of years ago, belonged to a nun who had died.

“The story es muy triste,” the girl said.

According to her, the nun was young, around fifteen, and the day before she’d entered the convent, she’d fallen in love with the local butcher’s son. Once a week, after saying her morning prayers and washing the floors of the convent with a potato sack, she would sneak out and give the butcher’s son letters she’d written in the margins of pages she’d torn from her Bible. At night, after all the nuns were asleep, the butcher’s son would jump the walls of the convent and slide his responses under her door.

“They were the best, most romantic love letters you could imagine,” the girl said dreamily. “They were about him wanting to lie in bed next to her and run the tips of his fingers across her lips and her neck and stomach and hips. She wrote to him saying that thoughts of them being together and touching each other kept her awake at night. She told him her body was on fire. She begged him to find a way for them to run away to Mayagüez or Ponce, to some place where nobody knew them and they could be together.”

“Have you seen the notes?” I remember asking.

I wanted the story to be over so I could put my hands and mouth on the girl’s salty skin.

“Of course I haven’t seen them.” She looked at me like I was an idiot. “How could I’ve seen them? This happened way before I was even born.”

According to the girl, the young nun kept the butcher’s son’s letters folded in the fabric of her habit, so she could pretend that the papers pressing against her bare skin were his hands, but one evening, as she walked across the courtyard on her way to vespers, several of the letters fell out and scattered across the ground. A few blew away in the wind; others landed in the fountain and turned to mush, but an older nun snatched one out of the air. She turned that letter in to the abbess, who was mortified. As punishment, the young nun was locked in her room—this very room, the girl who taught me to kiss said—without any food and just a small cup of water. She was told to come out only when she’d purged herself of all desire and was convinced that she was pure of heart.

Two days passed, then five. As they walked by her door, none of the other nuns ever heard their sister calling out to them. They expected those calls; they expected that after many prayers and with knees bruised and sore, that the young nun’s heart would’ve been stripped of all affection for the butcher’s son.

After a week, the abbess, with all the other nuns stacked behind her, finally unlocked and opened the door. They found the young nun dead on her bed, her green-gray skin a stark contrast to the now black blood that had spilled from her wrists and dried into her sheets. Scattered