Page 7 of Chaos
“I was lost the second they took her.”
Jacquetta perches her hip on the edge of my map. “You need to start considering …”
The words are lost to the louder sound of the front gate’s horn.
A loud, warning blare.
And then a second.
Just two.
A stranger has come to Thornewood.
2|Croocroooo cuckroooo
FRANKIE
THERE’S A CHURCH IN ROMEcalled Santa Maria della Vittoria.
Inside it, is a chapel called the Cornaro, and in that chapel, is a sculpture calledThe Ecstasy of Saint Theresaby a very famous artist named Bernini.
It was an engineering marvel of its time.
I visited it with Jee. I was the pre-Jimmy Frankie, sullen, angry, mourning my mom, enraged by life. She dragged me up the hot steps in my golden sandals, with my too-heavy black eyeliner and a colossal chip on my shoulder.
Hurry, she said. We will meess it. The sun is coming.
How can you know the sun is coming?
I just do.
She was right. Jee was always right about art worth seeing.
We scanned our ticket codes and stepped inside where it smelled of sorrowful lilies and prayer candle smoke, and made our way to the crowd of sweaty tourists clustered before the marble sculpture of a woman lying on a sofa, an angel beside her with an arrow in his hand.
He’d just stabbed her in the heart.
I swear, outside the church, the clouds must have parted just for us to light the hidden window, the magic trick that makes the statue famous.
The golden shafts behind the lifeless gray saint turned abruptly from sullen shadowed gold to molten firespears.
Like tinker toys and the stars in the sky, I don’t think one could truly appreciate it in the post-electric, pre-apocalypse age. Magic.
Theresa, touched by the light of god, is consumed by ecstasy, oblivious to the murderous, smiling angel.
That smile always haunted me, but it doesn’t anymore.
Bernini saw a plague too. He knew the truth: the plague wasn’t the worst part, it’s what it does to the survivors.
I keep thinking about that day, those pigeons, plagues, the people who died, my mom, as I stare up at the scant shaft of light that shines through the single crack in the ceiling in the shitty cell Ben’s trapped me in.
Waiting.
I need that light.
When it comes, it will be morning, and they’ll bring me food.
I’ll be ready.