Saints and Sorrows

A gaunt Maria, half-saint, half-scarred pilgrim, drifts through a pine cathedral where every needle drips with inherited guilt. Her father, once a seafaring storyteller, now slumps inside a cabin that creaks like an old confessional, nursing a bottle that has replaced the Bible on the splintered shelf. Between bouts of delirium he whispers of shipwrecks and sirens; between his snores she hears the forest itself inhale her childhood. The seasons revolve like Stations of the Cross: a winter of frozen washbasins, a spring when sap bleeds like fresh mercy, a summer thunderstorm that baptizes the roof with liquid pewter, an autumn when mushrooms push up through the floorboards as though the house itself is trying to digest its occupants. When a traveling Lutheran pastor and his consumptive daughter lose their way, the cabin becomes a cramped ark: five souls, one lantern, zero illusions. Maria trades verses for bread, psalms for firewood, yet each act of kindness feels like licking honey off a blade. The pastor’s cough soon paints the snow crimson; his daughter’s lullabies grow fainter than the wolves. In the hush that follows, Maria’s father, suddenly sober, mistakes the girl for his long-drowned wife and reaches for her throat instead of her hand. She escapes barefoot into the darkness, leaving footprints that resemble ellipses on the manuscript of fate. At dawn she finds the pastor’s Bible frozen open at Lamentations; she tears out the page that speaks of sorrow being good for the heart and tucks it inside her petticoat like a promissory note from God. Years telescope: she becomes a seamstress in a coastal village, stitching wedding gowns for women who will never wear them, while her father rots in an almshouse, his beard white as unspun flax. On the day she finally returns, the cabin has collapsed into a mouth of moss and timber teeth. She kneels, plants the saved page beneath a sapling, and walks away barefoot again—this time the snow does not burn; it simply forgives.