Admission

Always, we must consider the price of admission.

Slowly, I peel the leather glove from my left hand, just as Grandmother taught me. Blue shadows play upon my newly exposed skin, imprinting upon me a strange cyanotype that I dare not decipher. I look away.

Shivering in a cloak of dirty lace, I make my approach to the toll booth on uneven footing. Garlands of Spanish moss scratch at my cheeks as I struggle to find my footing in the swamp’s disturbed terroir, the ancient peat a far cry from the ivory cobblestones of the village I left behind.

In the center of the cypress grove, the Teller waits in radial glory—a singular thistle bud buttressed by thousands of helical spines, pearly clusters of them arranged along the stalk in an orchestration of sublime peril. The heart of the immature flower is pink like a first love is pink. The spines are white.

In truth, it is a horror to behold.

But the women in my family are no strangers to horrors, nor are we strangers to beholding them.

I bow once before the Teller and present my finger, my hand trembling with something that isn’t fear. Admission, whispers the pale memory of my grandmother, and the word coasts through me like an unfinished prayer. My eyes sting with tears and whatever is on the wind. I take one final breath into my body and am stung.

The old myths say that one pricks their finger only to fall fast to the velvet of a sleeping spell, but the women in my family tell it different: there in the beating throne of the swamp I prick my finger on a thistle and come immediately into wakefulness, struck as a bell is struck—plunged into my own gilded consciousness, into the cacophony of untethered light.

I become a curtain lit from behind.

The wind twists around me like wild silk. I am a beautiful fool, the last descendant in a long line of beautiful fools, generations of us metabolic and bright, exultant and banished.

It is a sudden abdication, as though the whole of me floods out through the burning gate flung ajar on my fingertip, that small aperture through which whole spirits can spill and be spilled, unbolted, unfastened, and set alight like dry grass.

My admission, a single penny of my blood, rolls into the center of the thistle bud, swallowed deep into that most ancient symmetry. Suddenly the flower ruptures, the sensation of it twinned behind my own ribs. I gag; the saliva hanging from my lips mixes with red tannins in the shallows.

Mouth open, I succumb, the sudden roar of prophecy nearly bringing me to my knees in the silt—

My body fills with a rabid sermon of oxygen, with visions of the uncensored moon reflected in the bog’s bad mirror, with silver sawgrass, divergent sugars, the bleating of embryonic blood, wild irises rearing from the muddy banks, orb weavers, ghost orchids, the smell of midday lightning, distended jaw of a cottonmouth as it swallows a still-singing frog, cypress knees rising above black floodwaters. I see God curled in a heron’s hollow bone—

And the endless pilgrimage of brackish water—through sweat, through sewer, through heaven, through blood, through root, through rain—water moving through the mycelial plain of thistle spines surrounding the old stone well where my grandmother’s grandmother drank deep, where she took into herself a living contract, a single thistle spine piercing the soft inside of her cheek.

I return to myself, or rather, I return to the house of my body in which the furniture has been entirely rearranged. The Teller is desiccated, its thorns shriveled in a scorched crown, its once vibrant florets replaced by a shapeless coagulation of white thistledown.

Flexing my still outstretched finger, I bite back what remains of my nausea and replace my glove, remembering to tuck a ration of thistledown into my breast pocket as per Grandmother’s careful instructions.

With the village at my back, I move with a newborn’s asynchronous grace away from the clearing and deeper into the sovereign green, my admission paid in full.

As did my ancestors, I carry with me a small, bright scar embroidered upon the tip of my finger, which I will one day raise aloft before my daughter and my daughter’s daughters, as though in warning, as though making the shape of a thistle’s inviolate spine.