The Sacred and The Scarlet: Chapter 8 The Pigtail Monster
The Sacred and The Scarlet: Chapter 8 The Pigtail Monster
The Sacred
Mary paces the upper air like a mother whose child is late coming home on the stormiest night of the year.
Her bare feet leave scorch marks across the Milky Way. Each step is thunder that never quite breaks, lightning that refuses to spend itself on the ground. The hem of her deep-blue mantle drags behind her, gathering every unshed tear from the world below and stitching them into new constellations (small, fierce, unblinking stars that spell I see you in every language ever prayed in.)
She is furious.
Not the cold, distant fury of gods who have forgotten flesh.
This is the hot, aching, bone-deep fury of a woman who once held a dying boy in her arms and still felt every nail, every thorn, every betrayal as if they were driven into her own body.
She has watched too long.
Watched the children sold.
Watched the children starved.
Watched the children taught that love is a weakness and silence is survival.
She has watched Lior grow teeth instead of tears.
Watched Berta’s hands crack and bleed from kneading bread for mouths that should never have had to hunger.
Watched the grandmothers ride out again and again and again, because the world keeps making widows of mothers and orphans of the living.
Mary stops above the lighthouse, fists clenched so tight the moon trembles.
“I stood at the foot of the cross,” she says to the night, voice raw, “and they told me that was the worst it would ever get.”
She laughs (one sharp, broken sound that rattles windows all along the lakeshore).
“Liar,” she whispers to the centuries. “Every day you find new wood, new nails, new children to hang there.”
Selene rises to meet her, wings folded in respect, eyes older than sorrow.
“Mother,” the moon-girl says softly, “they’re gathering. The grandmothers are gathering.”
“I know,” Mary answers, and the stars flare brighter at the strain in her voice. “I felt every hoofbeat. I counted every quilt. But it should not take an army of the exhausted to do what love was supposed to do without ceasing.”
She looks down. Way down. Past clouds, past the thin skin of atmosphere, to the small lit windows where Berta’s kettle is singing and children are unclenching fists they have held since birth.
“I am tired,” Mary confesses to the dark, and the confession is a wound. “Tired of consoling. Tired of promising that dawn comes after every crucifixion when the world keeps inventing new Fridays.”
Selene says nothing. There is nothing to say.
Mary’s shoulders shake once (just once) with a grief too large for even the heavens to hold. Then she straightens, draws a breath that pulls half the night’s chill into her lungs, and wipes her face with the edge of her mantle.
“Fine,” she says, voice suddenly quiet, deadly quiet. “If the world will not stop breaking my children, then I will stop asking politely.”
She lifts her hand.
Across the sky, the new constellations flare into burning words:
ENOUGH.
The word rolls like thunder over every city, every encampment, every closet where a child is learning to growl instead of cry.
Below, in Berta’s kitchen, the grandmothers pause mid-song.
They feel it.
The shift.
The moment the Mother herself steps off the sidelines.
Mary lowers her hand. The stars dim to a steady, watchful glow.
“I’m coming down,” she says, half warning, half promise. “Not as the gentle maiden in the grotto. Not as the weeping statue. This time I come as the woman who stood at the cross and did not look away.”
She turns to Selene.
“Tell them to leave the door unlatched. Tell them the kettle will never be big enough. Tell them I am bringing every tear I have ever caught, and I am giving them back (as weapons, as wings, as whatever my children need to never be afraid again).”
Then Mary, Mother of the impossible, steps off the edge of heaven.
The night holds its breath.
And somewhere far below, a small boy with silver in his hair feels the air change, lifts his head from a pillow that smells of bread and cedar, and for the first time in his entire life whispers—not a growl, not a plea—
“Mom?”
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The Scarlet
History recorded it with man's eyes. The truth, hers, has been silent. History wrote her name in the margin, if it wrote it at all.
A footnote.
A cautionary tale.
“Mary of Magdala, the sinner from whom seven demons were cast.”
A convenient vessel for every man who needed a before-and-after story that left his own hands clean.
They never asked her what the demons were.
They never asked whose voices taught her to hate the body she lived in.
They never asked why she walked seven towns away to wash the feet of a stranger with tears she had never been allowed to shed in public.
They called her repentant.
They never called her witness.
She was there when the twelve argued over seats in the kingdom.
She was there when they all fled.
She was the only one who stayed to watch Love bleed out out the chalice of man's original heart, who paid the spices, who rose before dawn while brave men slept off their terror.
She was the first to see the Risen One.
The first to be trusted with the impossible news.
They turned her into a weeping penitent.
They turned her into a prostitute (because a woman who follows without a husband must be selling something).
They turned her silence into shame.
For two thousand years she has waited in the margins, patient as stone that learns to sing.
She has watched every child dragged into the courtyard, every woman accused while her accusers pocketed their own guilt.
She has stood beside every Magdalene they tried to bury alive under rumor and respectability.
And now (now) the margins are burning.
Women are reading between the lines.
Children are asking whose story was left out.
The silenced ones are lifting their heads.
She is speaking at last, not with the voice they gave her, but with the one that trembled when He said her name and made her whole.
Listen.
You will not hear her in the footnotes anymore.
Together as One
You will hear her in the wind that moves through Berta’s kitchen when the grandmothers gather.
You will hear her in the hush that falls when a child finally believes the night cannot have them.
You will hear her in every throat that refuses to swallow the old lies.
History recorded it with man’s eyes.
The truth (hers) was never silent.
It was only waiting for us to learn how to hear.
The night parts like silk before her.
No thunder, no trumpet, only the soft hush of a mother who has run out of patience with distance.
She finds them in Berta’s kitchen: the grandmothers, the children, the strays, the warriors with tears still clenched in their fists.
The room is too small for all the sorrow it holds, yet it stretches, because love has always been the original miracle of multiplication.
Mary steps over the threshold and the air itself kneels.
She does not speak at first.
She simply opens her arms.
And every wounded heart in the room knows, without being told, which Mary this is.
Some feel the blue mantle of the Immaculate, cool and fragrant with lilies, wrapping around the places shame taught them to hide.
Others feel the scarlet cloak of the Magdalene, warm with the blood of every stone ever raised, every lie ever spoken, pressing against their wounds until the wounds themselves become doors.
Two hearts beat against their cheeks as she gathers them in:
The Sacred Heart (pierced, burning, inexhaustible), saying
I have carried every nail so you never have to.
The Scarlet Heart (once dragged through the dust, now radiant), saying
I have worn every false name so you can lay yours down.
One embrace.
Two Marys.
One Mother.
Lior, who has never been held without bracing for pain, feels both hearts at once and sobs like the child he never got to be.
Asha’s missing shoe is forgotten; her bare foot rests on Mary’s, and the centuries of running stop.
Berta’s flour-dusted hands find Mary’s face and, for the first time in ninety-three years, she lets someone else carry the weight.
Outside, the lake stills.
The lighthouse beam slows its sweep, as though even it needs to watch.
Inside, every grandmother steps forward and adds her own heart to the embrace until the room is nothing but overlapping cloaks (blue and scarlet and cedar-smoke gray), braids tangling, wings folding, tears falling upward into light.
No one is left standing alone.
Mary presses her lips to each forehead, whispering the same words she once heard in a garden while the dew was still on the roses:
I know your name.
I have always known your name.
You are mine, and I am yours, and no stone, no nail, no lie will ever take you from me again.
When she finally releases them, the children are asleep on quilts that smell of resurrection.
The grandmothers are weeping tears of nourishment.
Mary stands in the doorway, mantle now woven of both blue and scarlet threads, heart glowing visible through her breast (one heart, two flames, beating in perfect, furious rhythm).
She looks once more at the sleeping room, and notices the silver-haired one how finally un-growling, at the army of grandmothers who will never again ride alone.
Then she turns her face to the night still waiting beyond the door and says, very quietly,
Tell the rest of them:
The embrace has begun.
There is room.
___
Mary steps forward last, mantle flaring wide enough to eclipse the rising sun.
Behind her, the Bahá’í Temple bells ring once (clear, unafraid, joining the song).
Then they ride.
Not in vengeance.
In restoration.
Every stone still waiting to be thrown will meet a heart that has already survived the worst and come back laughing.
Every closet door will be torn from its hinges by hands that know what it is to be locked inside.
The war is not gentle. Our Children are NOT for Sale!
They ride out under a sky now stitched with two hearts beating as one.
Scarlet.
Blue.
Undefeatable.
And behind them, Berta’s kitchen stays lit (bread still rising, kettle still singing), a beacon for every soul still walking the long road home.
The battle is on.
The forest glows.
The wind is no longer cold.
Time for little ones to sleep.
Your rest keeps Mary’s warriors strong and graced.
Sleep now, my loves.
The children’s rest is their charging.
When they wake, we ride again.
Dream brave.
The Roses will bloom..
___
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