MOLLY STURDEVANT

FIVE MOMENTS, UNLOST

eternity too is full of eyes

— Paul Celan

541 CE

From the tower, Procopius watched dust clouds pushing east. He twirled his stylus. He tapped the stylus on the wax tablet, then wrote: the plague is like dust, insisting on its own omnipresence. He was good with words. Bothered him though— the uselessness. Who’d want to know? He traced the fresh elementa he had just etched. How else could people imagine it— the wailing, the armpits bleeding. That night, servants lifted the gown of a shepherd. A swollen bubo pushed the shepherd’s limp, puddled penis to the side. The bubo pussed. It might have hissed. Procopius dropped his stylus to the ground.

1349 CE

The balcony of a window over the canal is not too high to see each carved detail. A sailor’s eyes are drawn up towards its stone underside. The water through which he passes is opaque. When he looks down, he sees his face in the mirrored green. Quarenta quarenta he cries. It has to work. Transfigure me he prays. It must. The city becomes smaller as he weeps. His vessel is anchored. He is left there, alone, under pain of death. Each night on his boat he scratches the count into the wood. At forty, they will come back. At forty, his quarenta will end. After a week, a rat bares its teeth. He kicks at it from where he lay. Someone will come. XXVI. Someone will come. XXVII. Someone.

1422 CE

The infant screams, toothless, its small tongue shaking. The girl holding it says it’s a good sign. The boy agrees. He’d like to finally father something with a bit of life, but the noise grates. He walks out the door. They’ve had the baby two weeks. They first said it, a few times she. The girl rubs its hard gum with wine. They’ve already put two poxed babies in the field and packed soil all around them— asleep under the rye now. They’ve learned to wait. Naming is a strong bond, a promise. She pulls the fuller breast from her shirt and grabs the nipple, massaging it, then rubs it where she rubbed the wine on its gum. It latches. She tries not to watch.

1519 CE

Unconscionable grief seared the island. It spread to other landmasses. A friar, having observed the ruin, the pain, got an idea. He unhinged the platform of his vargueño and unrolled a swath of paper. ‘A sign!’ he wrote, to the King of Spain. ‘It has pleased Our Lord to bestow a pestilence of smallpox on the Indians.’ A month later, the friar died, alone. His own bacteria roamed him, puffing him up. The putrefaction soon summoned a phalanx of flies who laid eggs in his slack mouth. Their maggots spread like a quivering cloak. A dog sniffed the floor where his colon had been casted by worms. The smell was too much, for even her.

1677 CE

‘One who seeks true causes—’ the scholar wrote. He coughed into his sleeve. Blood. ‘not to wonder at them like a fool—’ he stirred the ink well, ‘—is generally considered an impious heretic.’ More blood. It was the glass factory, he had no doubt. So what if they hung him, then. He kept on, about the reasonable person: the scientist, philosopher, doctor, they’ll be ‘denounced by those whom the people honor as interpreters of Nature and the gods.’ He crossed out gods, wrote God. But, fuck it, he thought in Dutch, then in Hebrew. He wrote gods again.

*Inspiration for writing about the first four of these moments is found in Elizabeth Kolbert, ‘Pandemics and the Shape of Human History,’ The New Yorker, April 6 2020.

*The scholar’s thoughts in the fifth moment are based on Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, trns. Edwin Curley, Princeton University Press, 1994.

BIOGRAPHY

MK Sturdevant's poetry and prose often blend philosophy, science, and art. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Orion, Flyway, Newfound, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, The Great Lakes Review, The Westchester Review, and elsewhere. She is a fiction reader for The Maine Review, a philosophy instructor, and a freelance editor. She was a finalist for the Montana Prize in Fiction 2019, a Pushcart nominee in 2020, and she lives in the Chicago area.