Saint
by Leath Tonino
They burned her alive, pretty standard, and soon after a cloth-and-stick effigy was constructed, carried to the town square, and committed to the flames of a new fire. Burned her dead this time? The ashes were spat upon, pissed upon, scooped up and thrown down, and additional bodily fluids were gleefully discharged. Then someone had an idea: Mix the ashes with hay and clay, build a sculpture, cut its head off! The crowd did this repeatedly, five executions, six executions, seven executions, and stopped only when the point was convincingly argued that too much recycling had diluted the essence. This prompted a lengthy debate about the meaning of the word “essence.” Questions led to more questions, and more questions, and more questions, and the anger fizzled, the energy drained away. A sleepy boy mutilated a rabbit. An old stooped man tidied the town square up in preparation for the Sunday morning market. All of the above occurred many years before she was canonized, obviously. The surprise, I suppose, is that everything started over again in response to her canonization, i.e. nothing really changed, nothing except this: The boy with the rabbit was now the man lugging the bucket, the old stooped man almost sort of dancing, under the full moon, late on Saturday night, across the ancient cobblestones, the moony cobblestones, with his disgusting mop.
Leath Tonino is the author of two essay collections: The Animal One Thousand Miles Long and The West Will Swallow You. A freelance writer, his prose and poetry appear in Orion, The Sun, New England Review, Outside, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and many other magazines, journals, and anthologies.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Saint”? I was reading Ian McGilchrist’s book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. There was some fascinating stuff about the Protestant Reformation and the destruction of religious images. I started there—and soon enough the sentences were running away with themselves!
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Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
05/04 • Leath Tonino
05/11 • Chris Pellizzari
05/18 • Chris Clemens
05/25 • Clayton Eccard
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