You refused supper, practically a sin to the Patriarch of Venice, who loudly protested, stabbing his fork in the air in your general direction, until you softly explained that you felt led by the Holy Spirit to fast and pray until morning. In all honesty, you had no appetite, and promptly excused yourself from his table.

His gaze burned a hole through your back as you hastily walked out of the dining room. The other sycophants who composed Tedesco's inner circle murmured among themselves about your leaving the meal so abruptly, but you knew well enough their conversations would shift back to the hot topic of the evening in a manner of moments, namely the city’s upcoming film festival. Despite yourselves, you all shamelessly speculated on what celebrities would dare make an appearance at the palace you called home, fearless enough to risk the press jumping to associate them with its radical Patriarch whether they agreed with him or not.

Quick, heavy footsteps echoing your own shouldn't have surprised you the way they did. The firm hand on your shoulder shouldn't have either, abruptly stopping you in your tracks and forcing you to turn around. The blotchiness in your Patriarch's cheeks betrayed either his anger at the perceived slight or the exertion from chasing after you, likely both.

You were his favorite. He made no secret of it, especially since his future no longer involved any chance at the papacy. In the weeks following the conclave, you'd heard his own rantings about Benitez—Innocent, now, with his soft-spoken, milquetoast homilies of peace and tolerance. Hardly the image of strength the Church needed as she struggled and gasped to survive in the modern world, one that shunned her, mistook her beauty for wickedness, her purity as something to be mocked. The Church survived so long because of its traditions, not in spite of it. There was simply no getting through to bleeding-heart Benitez. 

But you understood his concerns, empathized with his rantings and ravings. Your former Mother Superior had been eager to wash her hands of you because of it. Sent you to Venice to make you Tedesco’s problem. Except you were hardly that. Coming into the fold three days after he quit smoking, miraculously, you were one of the only people who didn’t irritate him during his bouts of nicotine withdrawals.

"What's this I hear about your request to serve elsewhere?" he demanded. "You'd leave the diocese, leave me?"

"I withdrew the request."

"What possessed you submit it in the first place?"

Your eyes widened at his confrontation, wracking your brain for an appropriate response until you finally managed to say, "At the time, I believed God was leading me away from the city and serving a secular mission. I thought He was calling me to be cloistered."

He raised an eyebrow. He saw right through you. Always could.

"When you left for the conclave, I assumed you would be in Rome, to stay. I saw no reason to remain in Venice without you as Patriarch," you confessed.

He sighed. "Rita—"

Upon taking your vows, you had chosen Margarita in honor of Saint Margaret. An early martyr of the church who may not have even existed in the first place, she resisted the powers that be, the ones that wanted to force her into marriage, to obeying the status quo. So unwavering was her faith, her tenacity, that prior to her execution, when Satan appeared as a dragon to devour her, the cross she so faithfully wore protected her, causing the beast such distress as to slay it. In choosing your name, you hoped to siphon St. Margaret's strength for yourself.

Some of the other nuns called you Margie. He wasn’t opposed to the clergy in Venetian palace giving each other nicknames, plenty of them called him Fredo, but he didn’t care for that nickname bestowed upon you in particular, displeasure evident on his face whenever he heard it. Margie was unrefined, almost too English. To him, you were Rita—‘Like Rita Hayworth,’ he had told you conspiratorially one evening, an amused twinkle in his eye when he noticed the bashfulness in yours.

Rita Hayworth. Not due to any particular physical resemblance, but what she represented—classic, sensual, befitting the way the two of you had perfected toeing the line of propriety over the years. Hours spent holed up in his office, lending your fluency in Latin to his personal crusades. Watching old movies together over a bottle of wine, the closest you'd ever had to a date—and to a break-up, when you expressed your opinion that the best depiction of Christ in cinema was 'The Gospel According to St. Matthew.' His eminence protested in near rage. Pasolini was a communist, a homosexual, everything the Church stood against. You countered that perhaps it meant the Church needed better artists.

"Rita," he repeated, "did you hear a word I said?"

"I'm sorry."

Your Patriarch grumbled to himself, taking a hit from his vape. As always, you resisted the urge to grimace, not at the habit, but the smell—strawberry, then. Juvenile and sickly sweet compared to the strong, heady aromas of amber cologne and rich incense, especially the latter if you managed to catch him not long after Mass ended, frankincense and myrrh clinging to his scarlet robes, so warm and inviting, an ache in your heart at not being able to embrace him, breathe him in and know you were exactly where you wanted to be.

"What's troubling you, then?" he pressed, taking your hands in his. "Tell me."

"I'm weak, your eminence. I beg God for strength, but I can't—I don't know what I'm doing wrong. And I leech what strength I have from you. That's not right, or fair."

"Women aren't made to carry the burdens of men, you know that."

"What I'm talking about is different. There's more I know I can do—that I'm meant to do, but it's out of reach for some reason. I can't help but feel you're having to make up for my inadequacy."

"Inadequacy?" he repeated, his voice rising in outrage, hands gripping yours more tightly. "Who put that nonsense in your head?"

Instead of answering, you lowered your eyes to your hands clasped in his—warm, safe, strong. You let out a shaky breath. There was no one in Venice whom you trusted more than the man standing in front of you, but you couldn't tell him. It'd be asking too much for him to believe you, let alone understand.

"What would I do without you? You're the only reason my Latin is passible. I learn best from a tutor worth paying attention to," he teased gently.

"You've improved so much since I came to Venice," you admitted, meeting his gaze with a smile.

"Come back and eat," he urged softly. "You can tell me more of your worries, then."

Worries. His use of the word pricked at you. Dismissive, feminine, as if you were some housewife pathetically worrying about what to make for dinner and not a woman crushed by the weight of her soul, or what it so glaringly lacked, to be more specific. If you were a bride of Christ, you couldn't help feel as though your heavenly betrothed wasn't fulfilling His duties as a husband. It made that night all the more important.

You shook your head. "I think I'll turn in for the evening."

His lips pressed in a thin line. Nevertheless, he nodded, releasing your hands from his.

But you caught his bejeweled hand in yours and brought it to your lips for a chaste kiss. "Thank you, Fredo."

He relented with fondness in his gaze. "You'll be the death of me."

You turned to depart, unable then to see him, the way he stared longingly after you, caressing the spot where your petal-soft lips pressed so gently against his hand.

Disappearing down a narrow hallway, then another, though you'd only been there on one prior occasion, your body led you exactly where He was calling you. A small, old chapel off of a lightly trodden annex. The first time you entered, the door groaned awake after years of not being used. It did so again when you reached the place, this time the old door creaked a tired greeting, as if expecting your reappearance.

The forgotten chapel afforded you all the privacy you could need, tucked away as it was, and you didn't bother to close the door behind you.

You breathed in the stale air, chilly despite the warm weather. No one had walked its floors since you last did, everything almost exactly as you left it that night, from the votive candles you snuffed out in haste to the drops of blood spilled on the marble floor, having dried from their fresh crimson to warm rust in your absence.

After making a sign of the cross, you walked up the narrow aisle, three sets of wooden pews on either side of you, to the bare altar. Practically collapsing before it, you gripped its edges, pressed your forehead against the cool stone and whispered, "Magnificat anima mea Dominum. Et exultavit spíritus meus in Deo salutari meo. Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae.”

Lifting your gaze to the crucifix on the wall, you rose. Four dozen votive candles lay in six neat rows at Christ’s feet. Taking great care at lighting each one, you used the opportunity to pray for His favor, the same He showed you last time you answered His intimate call to you.

To you.

A shiver ran down your spine upon lighting the last candle, your hand shaking when you set the taper down.

You needed to. You needed to. The itch you neglected demanded your attention, demanded claws to shred through it and satisfy.

Turning to the altar, you saw the discipline laying where you'd left it at the end of your prior excursion, exactly where you found it when you first entered the chapel all those weeks ago, when it was waiting there for you. Picking it up, your fingers brushed the worn tendrils, leather frayed, far from its glory days—like you, like the Church.

Gingerly laying it down on top of the altar, you rounded the stone slab, gaze fixed on the now illuminated crucifix as you pulled the bobby pins that kept your habit in place, allowing them to fall to the floor with a soft clatter. You removed your habit, the rest of your clothing, your robes, undergarments, shoes and socks all in a puddle at your feet. Only the gold cross that sat above your breasts remained when you reached for the implement before you.

A soft whimper fell from your lips when it first made contact with your bare back, already having healed from the last time. You'd lost yourself in it, hadn't noticed hours passed by the time you stopped, prostrate on the cold floor, blood tricking down your back. It didn’t even feel like a punishment. Perfectly on the cusp of sexual gratification and Christian suffering.

Your muscles ached as you scourged yourself with increasing intensity, desperate for that release, that connection, the warm bliss that came with being in God's perfect love. Your skin burned for it, back arched up toward heaven, the feeling you so desperately sought drawing you ever so nearer to Him.

"I love you," you cried out in a moan. "I love you so much."

Heat tore through your body as your skin finally broke, sending you to your knees, your cry of ecstasy echoing around you until Your Patriarch's voice cut into the fog of pain and pleasure you found yourself swimming in.

"Stop!" Tedesco demanded with a worry all too misguided. "For the love of God!"

You turned to him, chest heaving, eyes pleading, "That's why I'm here."

He closed the short distance between you, his hand squeezing your wrist until you dropped the discipline. "Where did you get this?" he demanded, kicking it lightly. His face was red, sweat dripping from his temple, curly, gray hair in slight disarray as if he'd been running his hands through his incessantly.

"The first time He called me to meet Him here, it was waiting for me. I felt no doubt or fear, just perfect confidence in knowing I was doing His will."

He balked in exasperation. "Despite what people say about us, we don’t want to send the Church back to some dark age."

"It isn't dark, Goffredo," you whispered, voice ringing with crazed ecstasy. "It's light, blinding light—the closest I've ever felt to seeing His face, to feeling the warmth of His presence."

"Does it have to be like this?"

"He asked me to. Who am I to deny Him?"

He took you in his arms, careful as he cradled you against his chest as if you'd fall apart if he weren't there to hold you together. You'd never felt stronger in your spirit, the weakness of your body hardly a concern when it failed you time and time again. Still, you couldn't help the affection you felt at his tenderness, just barely able to hear his whispering, to you, or to himself, comforting promises that you'd be okay, he'd make sure of it.

Some time passed before he moved you from his arms, taking a closer look at your back, the scars from those weeks prior, raised and stark against your unmarked flesh like bolts of lightning striking your skin, the dried blood from this night's excursion, the wound sticky with coagulated blood, still gently weeping a trickle down your back, a small puddle having pooled on the floor.

"You said this isn't the first time. When was it? Why didn't you come to me?" he asked.

"It was two months ago, when you left for the conclave. I didn't want you to go," you confessed, unable to stop yourself from telling anything but the truth while in this state of grace. "I didn't want you to become Pope and leave me. I knew I was selfish to think such a thing. That's when He called to me. I needed Him and He was there because He knows I'm weak. He loves me in spite of it."

"I would have taken you with me, Rita," he murmured against your skin, "to Rome, if it had been me, if it had been His will. You don't belong anywhere but by my side." He pressed his lips to your temple. "Look at you, you fall apart without me."

"Yes," you hissed, tensing at his touch momentarily, his fingers brushing your fresh wounds. "How did you find me here?"

"I followed you. I could tell something was different about you tonight."

You smiled, your eyes fluttering shut as he continued to berate you. At least he cared, misguided as he was. But he found you, and he stayed. That meant there was hope for him yet, that you could share this with him just as you wanted.

With confidence and joy you kissed him, trembling when he returned the gesture with as much passion, his lips on yours, a type of consummation that didn't fill you with the guilt you'd become so used to feeling with every thought, every action in your daily life that you so desperately sought relief from. It was good and right. You opened your mouth to receive him, allowed him to slip his tongue in your mouth, to taste and see the goodness of the Lord.

But it was too much for him. Overwhelming, maybe, as he pulled away from you abruptly, the flickering light of the votive candles betraying the fear and awe in his warm brown eyes.

"It's alright, Fredo," you assured him, placing a hand on his cheek, the gray hair of his beard soft against your fingertips. "It's alright because you understand Him, you love Him like I do."

He kissed you again, softly, reverently, bringing his lips to the tip of your nose and then your forehead.

Grunting, he grabbed your discarded robes off of the floor and began dressing you, taking care when pulling your garments over the raw skin on your back. He mumbled something about being too old to be hunting the floor for the bobby pins you so carelessly discarded on the ground. Nevertheless, when he placed your habit back on your head, he did so with the same concentration and reverence that he did when bestowing the statue of the Blessed Mother with her crown of flowers during her adoration Mass in the month of May.

He wiped the tears that had rolled down your cheeks with the pads of his thumbs. You didn't know when you had started crying.

"Who tended your wounds last time?" he asked.

"I did it myself."

He huffed. "No wonder they scarred over so badly."

"It doesn't matter. No one will see."

"Don't argue. You have no room to argue right now," he scolded, wagging his pointer finger in your face, rearing to berate you again until his expression softened and his hand came to rest on your shoulder. "I'll tend to you myself."

"You won't tell anyone?"

"No. No, of course not. This is between us. You and me."

"And God."

He nodded, brow furrowed, gaze resolute. "And God."

End note: I can't finish this without acknowledging the inspiration from The Devils (1971), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, the poem 'Conversation with Mary' by Gabrielle Bates, and the various writings of Saints John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. Anyway, I need a t-shirt that says 'I 🖤 self-flagellation' at this point.