O

Like a bird on the wire,

Like a drunk in a midnight choir,

I have tried in my way to be free.

--Leonard Cohen

I.

To wake in a grassy bed, doused in dew, and feel the whispering wind on her skin. To see the angelic wings of the barn owl that nested in the bell tower unfurl as the bird took flight. These were experiences The Oracle longed for. She had read about them in the books the sisters sometimes passed to her beneath the heavy door of her chamber. The sisters sometimes allowed her to walk in the convent’s stone-walled, candlelit corridors, but never the garden. Still, on breezy nights, she could smell its secrets. Sometimes, a sweet scent drifted to her. “Honeysuckle,” the ancient, wizened sister told her once, and in an uncharacteristic act of kindness, hobbled back the next day bearing flowering branches from a bush to prove her point.

What a gift. The Oracle had buried her nose in it for days until her nostrils were yellow from flower dust, until the wilted petals fell from the branches and became a dismal brown carpet under her bare feet, until the rats scurried in and dragged her treasure away to their homes. She let them have it, crooning as the branch disappeared through a crack in the stone wall. “There now, beloveds. Take it. Go. Make your babies a bed.” She felt God in the rats and worshipped them. She had named them: Oliver. Squinty. Rose. Butterfly. Mary. Jaguar. Dolphin Fin.

She loved them in a way that burned her chest when she looked at them, in a way that made her eyes blur, in a way she could only express with her hands, when the spirits moved through her at night, speaking through her the silent prayers of the gods.

She spoke in the tongues of angels, which was not, as it turned out, an oral language, but a language of motion and dance. This was why she was here in the convent, with her white tunic and shorn head.

Back in the time before time, when she was barely more than a toddler, she’d had a home outside these gray stone walls, and cow farmer parents who were neither indulgent nor cruel. She’d had a different name then, though she couldn’t remember it now. The sisters simply called her O. Within the confines of her mind, she maintained her name was The Oracle, fearing that if she reduced herself to single circular letter, she might fall through the middle and disappear completely.

II.

Back on the farm, a black-haired boy had watched through a notch in the barn wall as the spirits possessed The Oracle. She remembered that much. He had seen her speak to the cows in their very own blessed bovine tongue. He had seen her dance through the hay, whirling and flipping, levitating, hanging from the rafters like a bat, doing things no mortal could ever do. As young as she was, something had told her she could never tell anyone but the cows about her strange abilities. But the boy with the black hair had seen. She had known him since birth, played with him in the creek, collecting bugs and shiny pebbles and tiny fish. But their friendship had not stopped him from betraying her.

He had gone straight to the dour sisters, sat with them on their hard pews in their incense-doused church, and told them everything. “She climbed the walls like a black widow,” he said, his eyes wide with awe.

The sisters were not known to enthuse publicly, but people said they clapped their hands with glee at his words. They had been hunting for The Oracle for years, offering 500 pounds of salt in exchange for information that led to her capture. Salt, treasure beyond compare. It could make meat, which was so hard to come by, last forever. It could spice up even the most rotten, worm-infested cucumber. It could banish demons.

The Oracle had never been very close to her parents, but she screamed for them anyway as the sisters barred the door to her chamber for the first time, leaving her alone and uncomforted, her small face mottled by tears to the point of bruising. Her parents never came. Finally, she gave up wailing and slumped on the dingy mattress in the corner. Staring out the room’s one tiny, round window, she begged the moon for mercy until she fell into an exhausted half-sleep. The rats that lived in the walls tentatively ventured out and gathered around her crumpled form. Snuffling, they exhaled breathy tenderness in her tiny conch-shell ears, licking away her tears. Their language was simple, their energy pure love, with an underpinning of voracious hunger.

“Why are you here, beloved one?” they asked in their ratty way.

“I am The Oracle,” she replied, speaking with her hands, still weeping.

They clicked their teeth in dismay, for they knew her burden was heavy. Then they bowed before her. “Namaste,” they said.

“Namaste,” she said back, petting their wiry fur.

After betraying The Oracle’s secrets and receiving his wagon-load of salt, the black-haired boy never had to work again, or so the sisters said. As the years passed, The Oracle tried not to forgive him for his treachery. His family had been poor after all. Hungry like her. But try as she might, she could not absolve him. Some sins could not be forgiven.

The goddess inside her was petal soft sometimes, fierce and fanged others. Vengeful. In her dreams, she sent scorpions to his bed. In her dreams, she heard him screaming. And she knew it was real. Her dreams always came true.

This was what it meant to be The Oracle.

II.

Her birth had been foretold hundreds of years before her time. The Oracle was to be born in a barn, stinking of animal shit and afterbirth, under a pre-dawn sky rippling with purple and glow. Sure enough, The Oracle’s mother’s pains had come upon her while she was milking. As the prophecies foretold, there in the smelly hay, she gave birth, though the miracle was not recognized as such for years.

Just before the age’s end, The Oracle was destined to interface with the pillars of creation and save the world, which was crinkling and crumbling like a book thrown into a furnace, on the brink of extinction. The oceans were rising, boiling under a blazing sun threatening to go supernova. The skies were belching thunder and oozing rain the color of blood. The forests were on fire. Joined with her male counterpart, The Oracle alone could reverse the curse. But only if she could ascend fully, shuck her humanity like a husk, become the golden goddess the prophecies said was hidden within her.

And for that she needed solitude, focus, suffering. So the sisters said when they shaved her head and locked her in this barren room with only a stained mattress in the corner, a dim oil lamp, a tiny topsy-turvy table upon which she could eat her daily ration of bread and scribble her thoughts on the few pieces of parchment she was allotted each week. “Agony is the gateway to God,” the ancient sister so often said as she flogged The Oracle, but never once had The Oracle seen a glimpse of heaven during the beatings.

To leave this cold place of stone, she must do something more impossible than levitating--crack open her very own goose-pimpled flesh and reveal the goddess buried just beneath her skin. If not, she would die trying in this room, sprawled on her smelly mattress, with no one but angels and rats for company. If not, she would go into the next world a halfling, a monster, neither human nor divine, but something cowardly and in-between.

She had been trying to ascend for a decade, ever since the day the sisters closed her in with the rats. Some nights, she felt her face start to crack, but oh, the pain. Like fire in her skull.

Always, she drew back.

III.

The first time The Oracle’s beloved male counterpart came to her, she had just had her first woman’s blood. He arrived at night, his invisible spirit having traveled halfway across the world to find her, riding howling winds and the sounds of owls. Made of mist, of magic, of lightning, he slipped between the bars of her window. As his essence settled over her bed, she trembled. His voice whispered to her from inside her own skull. “It is I, my love. Do not be afraid. I am here to set you free.”

He was the god of the sun, and he shone as such when she saw his face in her mind’s eye. Fully ascended, he was achingly beautiful. At the sight of his blazing eyes, her fear melted. She sank into his essence, drowning in a pool of love. He possessed her body and used her own hands to touch her, running gentle palms over her bald head and pressing tender fingers to her lips. Many hours later, still possessed, she fell asleep with her own arms wrapped around her shoulders.

The god could possess anyone or anything. Sometimes, he inhabited the sisters when they brought her breakfast, looking deeply into her eyes. “I love you,” he would say, his voice pouring through a sister’s lips like cool milk. And then, his essence would fade away, become the haggard face of the old woman dumping tepid water into a chipped mug.

Once he came as a cricket, stood stone-still in the table, stared deeply into her eyes, spoke of his love in chirps.

He could possess eagles and swoop overhead, calling her name. He could summon thunderstorms when he was angry. He could sink ships. He could turn bread to meat or fruit or cake, which he did for her daily. He could do many things, but he could not save the world alone. Magic required both feminine and masculine energies. They were two halves of the same soul, and without her ascended self at his side, he would soon die, and the world with him.

He taught her secrets, showed her how to break open. “You can do it,” he would wink in her dreams. “I did it. It hurt, but I did it.” He laughed, his brown eyes shining, as he gave her a vision of his human face peeling away, bleeding, revealing the golden god-flesh beneath

Each night, his spirit moved over her, all pulsing energy and electric warmth. He spoke the silent language of visions. They came in confusing spurts, an olive here, a rising moon there, a fleeting image of her window bars evaporating like mist. The visions came as pieces of an impossible puzzle she felt she must somehow put together. When the puzzle in her head was finished, she would have the map to ascension. Or so she thought. But how to ascend using olives and moonglow and window bars?

Every night, she fell asleep with him, her own arms wrapped around her shoulders, hoping to wake the next morning transformed.

Every morning, she woke alone, still human.

Every month, the sea levels rose.

Soon, the world would drown.

IV.

It was an olive that started the end of the world. The ancient sister, now so close to death, had become more and more obsequious since the day she brought the honeysuckle, perhaps fearing the retribution the gods might visit upon her after death, were she cruel to one of their own. She came one morning bearing not hard bread, but a tray full of decadent treasures—milk, oranges, a tiny hunk of goose flesh, and olives. The Oracle gasped, but not because she was happy. Her beloved god had been transforming her bread into a feast fit for a queen for years. She had no need of the old woman’s indulgences, after so many years of bread crusts and beatings. She gasped because she was unused to kindness from anyone but spirits or rats.

“I brought you a treat.” The old woman spewed bits of orange over the table as she spoke, obviously having partaken of the feast herself on her way to The Oracle’s room.

The Oracle bowed her head. “Thank you,” she said, fearing if she said more, she would betray her hatred, turn the sister’s mood fowl, and incur a cuffing. When the sister left, The Oracle took an olive into her mouth and bit down hard. She heard a cracking sound within her skull, and pain shot through her molar. When she spit the olive into her hand, a piece of tooth came out with it. It had been so many years since she’d eaten an olive. She’d forgotten about the pits.

The pain was excruciating, far more intense than a broken tooth warranted, or so she thought, though to be fair, she had never before broken a tooth. Covering her face with her hands, she stumbled to her mattress and fell down, crying just loudly enough to summon the rats. Dolphin Finn, with her spotted back, came first, nuzzling The Oracle with her wet snout. “What is it, love?” she asked.

“My tooth,” The Oracle whimpered. “It broke.”

Butterfly came next, resting her front paws on The Oracle’s belly. “There must be something we can do.”

“You being with me is enough,” The Oracle said. And so the rats stayed with her, as they so often had.

The pain came and went like a rolling tide, and when it ebbed, she fed the rats bits of food from the tray, which they accepted with great gratitude and gusto. Each time the pain receded, it came back stronger, spreading from her tooth into her cheek, from her cheek into her head, from her head into her neck, until her entire body was vibrating with agony.

She bit her tongue, refusing to scream for fear of summoning the sisters, who would most certainly do their best to make her suffering worse if they knew.

V.

The moon hovered lonely outside the Oracle’s window, spilling light like melted butter over her mattress. Arching her back in agony, she prayed to the stars to die. As The Dove constellation glittered to life, her god came. Electric and pulsing, his spirit slipped between the bars of the window and drifted into the rats. The rats became a choreographed symphony of sympathy, dancing around The Oracle on their hind legs, applying cool paws to her fevered face, kissing her eyelids. “You’re cracking, sweetheart,” her god said, using Oliver’s voice. “Don’t be afraid. It hurts, and then it’s done, and then, you will be free.”

“Free to save the world?” she asked through gritted teeth.

Rose laughed in the voice of the god. “We’ll see,” he said.

The rats plopped down on all fours, became rats once again, and the god’s spirit slid inside The Oracle’s body. Tenderly, he touched her face with her own hands. Her flesh began to peel away from her skull. Her god became a bolt of lightning, summoning ancient magic to dull the pain.

Something inside her, like a living animal, writhed. She could hear it wailing when the pains came, singing when they diminished. Stubbornly, she clenched her teeth, refusing to give voice to the goddess within, refusing to let the sisters know the miracle was upon them.

Her mouth yawned wide until her jaw cracked. Her hands began to bubble. When she looked at them, she saw gold light glinting just beneath her skin.

VI.

When the sun rose, The Oracle’s flesh lay crumpled upon the floor like a discarded tunic. She was a snake who had shed her skin. She was a living star, made entirely of light. Her god’s essence was wrapped warm around her, and as she willed herself to melt into him, her new body blazed brighter. She stared at her glowing hands in awe, feeling whole for the first time ever, as if the god’s essence was filling every broken place in her being. They were now truly one.

She went to the cracked mirror that hung beside her bed. She shone like the moon, her eyes blazing blue. Her flesh was blinding for mortals to behold, or so the rats told her. The magic that had always lived in her bones was in her fingers now. She used it to transform her tunic into a silvery queen’s cloak, which covered her whole body. “Is that better?”

The rats covered their eyes with their tiny paws. “Your face still burns like a harvest moon on fire.”

Laughing, The Oracle turned them into tiny golden dragons with a flick of her wrist and a song. Her voice was like the rolling of a mighty river, like the dancing of the sweetest breeze, like the warmth of a fireside on a cold winter night. “You are no longer mortal,” she said. “Can you look at me now?”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” Exulting over their newfound shimmering scales, the dragons sang with her.

“Now you will save the world?” they asked when the song was done.

Before The Oracle could answer, the ancient sister knocked at her door. “I thought I might take you for a walk in the garden,” she said in a honeyed voice.

VII.

The Oracle stared at the stone walls that had been her prison for so many years. Every cruelty she had ever known returned to her in a flash. She remembered the black-haired boy, the parents who never came, the beatings. As rage rose within her, a whirlwind whipped up around her, pulling parchments and dust and rat dung into its orbit.

“O?” the sister called from outside the door.

Throwing back her head, The Oracle closed her eyes and emitted a screech. Instantly, the sound of immense wings broke the air outside her window. The bell tower’s barn owl hovered outside, 1,000 times bigger than it had ever been before. Its thrashing wings created tornados, making trees buckle in obeisance to the newborn queen. Carrying her god within, his light mingling and dancing with her own, The Oracle waved her shining hand at the window bars, and they evaporated like mist.

Keys jangled. The ancient sister opened the door and saw The Oracle arranging her dragons on the gargantuan owl’s feathered back. Elated, the sister began to clap. “The miracle has happened! We are saved!” she bellowed. The corridor echoed with footsteps.

The other sisters arrived just in time to see the goddess mount her owl. She bent forward to whisper something in its ear, something unfit for mortal senses, divine words humans would guess at for as many months as they had left before their planet became a ball of fire.

“Did she say its name?” they would ask. “Did she tell it where to go?”

They would never know.

One with her god at last, the goddess threw back her head, now covered in golden hair, and soared with the ones who had truly loved her into the blazing circle of the sun.