But this Endora nun wasn’t like other nuns; her piety carried a dangerous otherness. She had the jaw and strength of a man.
Something entirely erotic to the mind of a child.
Oh, I know other children would have experienced horror and abjection. As you know, I was not other children.
But, cousin, this is no simpleton’s story of a girl toggling between virgin nun and sex-craving whore. That story lacks complexity, lacks even a subject. That story frames women as objects of a desire not their own. Take heed: if that thought is beginning to tendril around in your brain, as you are reading this, I will feel it — and make no mistake, if that is what you are thinking, I swear on my vulva that I will make you wait an entire year for your next fulfillment. And I know already that your longing will be too puny and impatient to stand in wait that long. You will die from your own longing. And how would that be? So consider yourself warned.
No, my oscillation between two callings — woman of god and woman of sex — came from one thing: my bone-deep understanding that spiritual agency and capital agency each give women mobility and subjectivity in the world. In the case of the former, that mobility was tied to the feet of a holy man. In the case of the latter? Well. Women have been outsmarting their counter-genders since the dawn of time.
I do wonder, though, when women will tire of their part in the story and revolt. I imagine the bloodbath.
But here is the scene — for I know I have now activated the eros of storytelling in you. The first person I clapped eyes on, after we disembarked the Frisia and stepped onto our new country’s soil, was a creature so convulsively and magnificently free I nearly vanished the nun’s existence in a single intake of breath. I forgot her even as she stood by my side — let go of her hand! That protective, maternal nun, the person who could deliver me safe to this new world!
Remember that cleft on my lip? With my now-free hand, I fingered the scar and smiled, remembering the blood between us. You and I, blood-bound for life.
There she sat in her carriage, this creature, like a crowned bird of her own species. Powdered ever so slightly, rouged with small faint circles of pink, like two aureoles — or perhaps areolas — on her face. A perfect specimen of beauty and, I recognized, of perversion.
A man walked up to the side of the carriage, intent on making a quick and easy transaction. He held money up toward her. I understood the action to be obscene. He looked puny. Just from the impact of her gaze, looking down on him, he stumbled the slightest bit. When he tried again, she flogged him head and shoulders with a horse whip.
The horse did not move. The man fled.
That’s freedom, my dear.
Love,
Aurora’s Children
(1885)
To Whom It May Concern:
Before I begin, two items of note. First: should you someday find me gone, please use the following as a mortality document: “Aurora Boréales, successful businesswoman, aged forty-three, mysteriously disappeared from her residence on the tenth of May while she was meant to be delivering canned goods to the less fortunate. A week ago, her body was found in the Narrows. The face was terribly mutilated, and the body indicated that a fearful outrage had been committed on her person. No clue of the circumstances of her death has yet been discovered.” You’ll know how to place the story.
A juicy murder mystery. I’d like that.
The second item of note. What I intend here to write is my anti-obituary. That is, I intend to write myself back to life. Let these letters, between myself and my cousin the genius sculptor, draw me back to life.
Should I disappear, watch out for an unexpected object. A gift.
And now the story.
—
They came to me first because of my leg. I think children were enchanted by the idea of a woman who existed in pieces. An adult like a doll, with a removable part!
The first child who came to me approached as I stepped into an alley to adjust a strap on my leg. The street clattered with the syncopated clop and rattle of hooves and carriage wheels, and as I turned back around, I was confronted with a mess of a boy, standing so near me I thought sure he meant to rob me. Not that he could have, mind you, but I thought he might try.
The alley smelled of piss, the boy not much better. He had the face of a creature unused to bathing. Instead of attempting to snatch my pocketbook, however, he watched me lower the curtain of my dress back over my knee, down below my shin to my ornamental shoe. His eye traced the path with an intensity that interested me. Under his gaze, I could almost feel a foot where none existed.
“Please, ma’am, may I see it again?”
I took a closer look at him, and that’s when I saw it: he was missing an arm. My cheeks flushed from the idiocy of my earlier thought. There hung a little lump of flesh, the right arm of his dingy shirt short enough for me to see it. His right side announcing an absence where an arm should be.
The look in his pale-blue eyes and his night-dark scruff of hair suggested that he was not originally from the city. “Where have you come from?”
“Ireland,” he said.
“By the belly of a steamer, I’d wager. Packed in with the cargo?”
“Yes, ma’am.” His eyes returned to my leg. “May I see it? Please?”
He removed his hat, or what passed for one, to further his plea.
Slowly — and I do know how to perform a task with seductive patience — I began to raise my skirt. His eyes moved me. His eyes reminded me of my beloved cousin Frédéric’s. The only gaze that has ever truly moved me, even when we were children.
Is it wrong to say that his stare meant everything to me? The way he gave my body his full attention as I pulled my skirt up over my prosthetic; the way I felt a leg, a foot, captured inside his stare? The way I imagined his absent arm and hand lifting my skirt to reveal my absent leg and foot?
Despite the new labor laws, child workers were everywhere. I’d see them emerging from factories and mills at all hours, day and night. Children were of high value to industry — and there were so many of them. The manufacturers knew they needn’t pay them anywhere near as much as adults. In fact, adults often sold their children’s labor to the factories and mills. Even today, my reformer friends tell me, the changes they seek are vehemently opposed by parents, industry — even by children who live in their own care, and who remain steadily in need of employment and food. As sentiment hardened against the work mills and factories, a desperate backlash evolved; owners began to speed up the machines and overpack the rooms laborers worked in, you see. The children were of even higher value now, due to the smallness of their hands, but often the children were unable to keep up with the whir and bite of the machines, and the runaway technology tore through their body parts.
What is the worth of a child in this era of industrial multiplication? It’s a question I think about often, as a childless woman with a womb so barren that if one were to peek between my legs you might find yourself looking up a long vacant tunnel straight to my brains. Every day that I walk my own city streets, I see plainly that the machines and their product are valued infinitely more than the battered, dirty, often maimed, always hungry children I see departing their shifts, day and night — like small ghosts, really. Their mechanization as valuable workers erases them as humans. They become the same as the commodities being produced — no, maybe less, the same as the raw materials used to make the products. The child body at the cannery is worth less than the tin can she stamps.