Mère Supérieure
My rewards for murdering Mère Supérieure were her wristwatch and a trip to Villefranche-sur-Mer. I find beauty in the watch with every little detail: its thin slices of steel for hands; its cool, clear face; even the nicks in its chain and specks of my own blood that hint at the previous owner’s violent disposition. It would be a little too feminine for a guy like me under normal circumstances, but I think its trophy status rectifies that issue.
Enjoying my trip has been more difficult; I chose an overcast week in January to visit, and my fiancée is moping on the sand dunes.
“It’s not even real cold here. I miss New York.” Her voice is lilting and almost washed away by the waves as she calls down to me.
“Baby, I hate that you have holes in your coat.”
“What?” she shouts. I’m always telling her to get her hearing checked.
“I hate that you have holes in your coat. You look like I don’t take care of you. I could steal you another one.”
“My daddy sent me this coat, remember? And we don’t need you getting caught over some petty crime.”
I scoff, even though she’s right, because you can never let a lady have the last word. The salt water stings at my ankle wounds where Mère Supérieure had really gotten me with her shiv.
What would you do if your girlfriend admitted something to you that she had never told anyone else? If she said that when she was sent overseas to a Catholic boarding school by her French father, who got her in the divorce, that she was berated and beaten and even touched by the headmistress? Would you just rub her back? Get her some spanakopita and a therapist? With what money?
Don’t get me wrong. I did all of those things to the best of my abilities. But I also saved up every weekend’s pay at the auto shop, flew to France, and took down Mère Supérieure in her very own courtyard, where she’d reached up under my girl’s plaid skirt. I got that bitch on the ground and didn’t even flinch when she slashed at my ankles with a hidden knife. Maybe she’d done this to hundreds of girls and was just waiting for one of their dads or husbands or brothers to try to serve justice. Or maybe she knew, in some deep-seated way, that I, specifically, was coming. I like to imagine that. At every jolt of pain, I kept picturing the baby pictures that the French father had shown me. One tooth is missing. Lopsided pigtails. Dirt-scraped knees and tomato juice on her dresses. I came down on Mère Supérieure harder and harder and harder with a branch from her beautiful cherry blossom tree.
Then I flew my girlfriend out to Villefranche-sur-Mer and took her right hand with my left hand—the one embraced by the wristwatch—and got down on one knee on the historic Rue Obscure. I told her everything about my impromptu “business trip” and also that I wanted to marry her. For a moment, she hesitated. I wanted to look into her eyes, make her understand, but she was standing a couple feet back from me, out of the glow of the lanterns. The night was eating her expressions alive.
“We’ll find a ring when we get home,” I whispered, in case that’s what was holding her back. A small crowd started to gather, blocking both of our exits. The women were chirping with excitement. Impatient kids tried to dash forward and were held back by their fathers’ steady hands.
Whatever the issue was, she shook it off. “Of course. Oh my gosh. Yes. Of course.”
Now that a few days have passed, though, her mood is declining. She’s wearing her drabbest clothes, I guess to be inconspicuous. She barely lets me leave the hotel room because she’s afraid I might get caught. We didn’t even have sex this morning.
The salt stinging my ankles becomes unbearable, so I reluctantly leave the shore and trudge back up to her. Her form is almost swallowed by the dunes that roll around her, and the pinks and blues that make up the sky play with her features. She looks bored, and I feel flushed with love and frustration. Why isn’t she grateful?
“Don’t know how you can stand the water. So damn cold,” she mutters, pulling the horrid coat tighter around her. It is moss green and puffy in all the wrong places.
“It feels good on my cuts,” I lie.
She winces. “I don’t like when you talk about that.”
I suck in a deep, impatient breath. “C’mon, baby. Don’t be mad. You know I love you.”
The sun is dripping down onto the horizon, washing us orange. I lean over and nudge her head till she tilts it towards me. I kiss her softly, without insistence, and after a moment, she melts. When her hand comes up to thread through my hair, I imagine the metal of a wedding ring grazing my scalp, and I groan into her mouth.
“C’mere,” I say. I pull her to her feet and drag her over between patches of sea lavender. All of our layers must go. Her body is warm and pliable in my hands. As the sky darkens and my vision grows more limited, I seek out her sound, her touch, her taste.
I don’t know how long we spend there, refashioning each other with our mouths and hands, but I do realize how thick the darkness has become when a blinding flashlight cuts through it.
“ARRÊTEZ! POLICE!”
We scramble apart and begin putting on clothes, none in the right order. I end up in my briefs and that terrible coat, which won’t even button over my chest. The light narrows into a single beam with a large white face behind it.
“Est-ce que vous parlez français?” he asks.
“Pas bien,” I say. My fiancée has enough sense to stay quiet.
The officer frowns. In the unnatural lighting, he looks like a pasty jack-o’-lantern hovering midair.
“This is a public beach,” he says. His accent is sing-songy. It’s hard to take him seriously. I can guess from the flushed look on his face that maybe he heard us earlier than he clicked on the light. I get it.
“I’m so sorry, Monsieur. We just… We’re getting married soon. Young love. It won’t happen again, I promise.”
He looks back and forth between her and me, judging our character, I suppose. Mère Supérieure’s face keeps swimming before my eyes, frozen in the first moment she saw me and my branch. Her little button nose. One mole by her eyebrow. The widening of her mouth, ready to yell, still convinced she would get the chance to. I am itching to check the watch again.
Finally, the officer snorts. “Guess there are worse things two kids could be doing, huh?”
I nod solemnly. Next to me, my girl’s been struck with a fit of giggling. Both the officer and I turn to look at her as she slumps over, making sounds that are caught between a snicker and a sob. I nudge her, as if to say get it together, but it’s no use.
“Oh yes,” she says between peals of laughter, tears streaming down her face. “Oh yes.”
Audrey Jiggetts is a twenty-year-old writer from the East Coast. Amidst getting a degree in English and Africana Studies, she is working on a novel and devoting her life to her cat Mary Anne. You can find her in BULL, Nowhere Girl Collective, and The For(e)thought Collective, or at her Substack, @audreyjig