The Seven Arcs — Bi Mark Preggo
Writing premise. The seven characters share ■■■■■■■■■■■: a deadly sin, the Zorath impregnation, ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■.
Character
Sin
Narrative form
Viktoria
Pride
Chorus of the neighbor women (first-person plural)
María
Gluttony
Kitchen log (entries by what she eats)
Svitlana
Lust
Testimony of her sister Irina (first person)
Halyna
Greed
Ledger book (accounting language)
Oksana
Wrath
Interior present tense, fragmented
Darya
Envy
Retrospective: begins at the end
Tetiana
Sloth
A single room, in real time
Canon respected: ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
Viktoria's Arc — Pride
Block 4
Form: a chorus of the neighbor women of Block 4, who survived to tell it.
We never loved Viktoria Pavlenko, and we're not ashamed to say it. She walked our corridors as if the Soviet concrete didn't deserve her heels. A model in Kyiv, they said; she came back on a whim, to reign without effort among those of us who scrubbed the stairwells. "Look at them," she'd toss at us with that smile. And we looked, yes. With the envy she wanted.
When they took our men, she didn't even come down to weep with us. We saw her at her window, untouched, touching up her skin while the whole block emptied of voices. We thought: the end of the world slides right off that one.
We had the order of things wrong. It didn't slide off her. It only came late.
The first to notice was Halyna, the bread woman, who saw her taking out the trash in a dress that no longer closed at the waist. She told it as gossip. By the second week it was no longer gossip: it was a woman hunching against the railing, hidden in the wide housecoats of her dead grandmother — the very ones she would have so despised. She stopped going out. We heard her through the wall, talking to the mirror, repeating that that thing was not her.
And here is what none of us expected: we stopped envying her. Not all at once, not in triumph. One morning the queen simply wasn't there anymore, and in her place was one of us, pale and frightened, clutching her belly like anyone else. Some felt it was justice. The older ones, who had already buried wars, only felt cold. Because if Viktoria, who was untouchable, had been touched, then there was no shield left in all of Zoriya.
What came out of her that last night, we did not see. We only heard it, and then we ran. By dawn, Block 4 was empty, and it remains so. No one has gone back in. Sometimes, at night, one of us looks toward those dark windows and remembers the woman who believed herself a shield, and prays not to end as she did: alone, perfect, and devoured from within.
María's Arc — Gluttony
Block 9
Form: the log María kept of her pantry, recorded by what she ate. The dates blur out as it stops mattering to her.
Day one without the men. Thick borscht, two bowls. Stuffed holubtsi. Yesterday's apple cake. I note that I have flour left over: more for me alone. God forgive the thought, but at last no one tells me how much I eat.
Day six. One of those creatures came to my window. I went still with the bag of rolls against my chest. I woke up in bed. I didn't write down what I had for supper, because I don't remember having supper.
Day nine. I have a strange hunger. I ate twice as much and it's still there, like a well. Bread, butter, salo. Nothing fills it. I blame the fear.
Day fourteen. The red-flowered blouse no longer closes on me. I used to laugh at that. Today I didn't laugh. The hunger is no longer mine: it belongs to something that eats through me and never says enough.
Day nineteen. I tried not eating. I held out until midday and nearly fainted on the kitchen floor. The thing inside kicked, furious, as if punishing me for closing my mouth. I went back to chewing, crying, tasting nothing, out of fear alone. Me, who used to make a feast of food. Now I swallow so as not to be punished.
Day —. I no longer weigh the flour. What for. What grows in me does not eat bread: it eats me. My arms, my face, the strength to wash my hair. The neighbor women avoid me in the corridor because I walk slowly, gasping, one hand beneath my belly and the other always searching for something to bring to my mouth, though nothing tastes of anything anymore.
The widowed women doctors of Block 9 sealed her door. They say hers will be the largest on the whole island. María no longer writes; she only eats, and waits, and prays between bites that it will all be over soon.
Svitlana's Arc — Lust
Block 2
Form: told by Irina, her younger sister, the one who admired her.
I wanted to be like my sister. That is the first thing you have to understand. Svitlana would walk into a room and the room would change; the men straightened up, the women lifted their chins. She had a power I didn't have, and she taught me her secrets in the cellar, laughing, as if she were handing me a kingdom.
When they took Petro and all the others, she didn't even cry for her husband. "Now there's no jealousy and no one to answer to," she told me, and went on flirting with the very shadows. I admired her even in that. I thought nothing could ever reach Svitlana.
It reached her in the cellar, during one of our gatherings, hidden under some sheets. When she woke in her bed, I was at her side, and she was still joking: "I need a good lover to burn this off." We both laughed. It was the last time I heard her laugh.
What came after, I don't know how to tell it prettily, so I'll tell it as it was. Her body, which she had used like a key that opened any door, became a door locked from the outside. What had made her move with that cat's grace now buckled her on the stairs. She'd let me care for her and a moment later throw me out in a rage: "I was the one everyone wanted, and look at me!" I'd bring her herbal teas. She'd throw them at me. I came back. I always came back.
One night she grabbed my wrist with a strength she no longer had anywhere else, and made me promise her. That if that thing was born, I would destroy it. That I wouldn't let it steal the little that was left of her. I told her yes. I would have told her yes a thousand times, because she was my sister, and I loved her more than she ever knew.
The others in the group met without her now, whispering that her lust had made her vulnerable, as if this were a punishment and not a calamity. I hate them for that. Svitlana was not punished. Svitlana was taken, like all of them, only she'd had more to lose, or so she believed. I sit at the edge of her bed every night, holding her swollen hand, waiting for the day I'll have to keep what I promised.
Halyna's Arc — Greed
Block 1
Form: ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■.
ASSETS. A three-room apartment, the best in Block 1. Under the kitchen floor: gold bars, tins, flour, salt. At the throat and the wrists, gold even to step out for bread. Other people's debts that double every month. All recorded, all mine, all under control. "What comes into my house is mine and mine alone."
ENTRY 1. The creatures arrive; the men vanish. I do not record it as a loss. I record it as an opportunity. I go across the island gathering the dead's belongings: tools, fine clothes, watches. One person's tragedy is another's inventory. The chests fill up. The balance, never so high.
ENTRY 2. An abandoned factory. A humming. A heat in the belly. I wake on my sofa with the bags thrown all around me. I record nothing, because I don't understand what has shifted in my accounts.
NEW LINE ITEM, unnamed. Something begins to be tallied inside me, and I did not authorize it. The waist I used to cinch with golden belts is widening. I order a corset and pay double for the seamstress's silence. It doesn't work. The expensive dresses stop closing. I move on to my dead mother-in-law's housecoats, pauper's garments I despised all my life. The jewels no longer fit over the stretched skin; the rings pinch swollen fingers.
RECONCILIATION. Here are the books that won't balance: I have gold and cannot wear it. I have reserves and the hunger is sated by nothing in this world. I have a fortress full of treasure and it serves me for nothing in the one thing that matters. What grows in me accrues — my body, my face, my strength — just as I accrued what belonged to others all my life. It is the one debtor I cannot collect from.
FINAL BALANCE. I try to put on the pearl necklace, the one I bought with a ruined neighbor's boat. The clasp won't reach around my neck. I throw it to the floor. For the first time in my life, sitting among my treasures, I pray in silence that someone — anyone — will come and take from me what is worth the most, even if it means losing everything. I own nothing. Not the gold, not the power, not my own womb. Greed, in the end, collected me.
Oksana's Arc — Wrath
Block 2
Form: present tense, from inside, in fragments. Her fury has no time for long sentences.
Four months. That's how far along I am with that bastard Dmytro's child — he swore me a family under the stars and the next day took the ferry. Four months hating him, hating this thing kicking inside, hating myself for having believed him.
And then they come.
The drunk neighbor falls off his chair in the clinic and stops breathing. I shake him. Nothing. Outside, the green sky. Inside, the men dropping like dolls. I scream at the ceiling: "cowards, all of you!" The ceiling doesn't answer.
Weeks. I patrol the corridor, furious about the food that isn't enough for my unwanted child — because even unwanted, I defend him, that's how I am. And one of them appears at my door. I hurl a jug at it. It passes through it like smoke. "Out, monster!" The humming splits me open. The heat in the belly, worse than any rage I've ever felt.
I drop to my knees. And I feel it: it doesn't replace the pregnancy. It does something worse.
I wake swollen as if I were six months along. And inside there's a war. Human kicks — my son's — and something else, a cold pulse advancing over them. I understand it all at once, and the understanding is what truly breaks me: the creature doesn't mix with my baby. It eats him. It hunts him, reaches him, snuffs him out, takes his place. Day after day the human kicks grow fewer. Until one day there are none.
I beat my belly until my knuckles bleed. "Get it out, get them out!" I try the clinic's herbs, the falls down the stairs. The creature holds fast. It feeds on my rage to grow; the more I scream, the stronger it gets. My own wrath fattening the thing that killed the only part of me that was in here.
My mother tends me in silence. I scream her out and she comes back. The neighbor women, who used to fear me, now look at me with pity as I drag myself down the corridor. And I, who was pure fury, have no fury left. All I have is a whisper, at night, with my hand over this belly that is not mine: kill me before it's born. Not for me. For the boy who's gone now, the one I didn't even let arrive.
Darya's Arc — Envy
Block 7
Form: it begins at the end. Reconstructed afterward by Anastasia, the older sister.
I found her bed empty at dawn, and I knew before I even looked. I went down to the cliff. She wasn't there. The Black Sea was very still that morning, as if nothing had fallen into it. My sister was eighteen.
I want someone to understand why, because the neighbor women will say it was the horror, and it was something else first.
Darya grew up believing I had everything. To me — the ordinary one, the practical one — our father gave money for books and praised my "responsibility." Her, the cleverer of the two, they scolded for daydreaming. Our mother sewed me dresses "because you appreciate them," and Darya got the scraps. I saw what they didn't: that my sister would have given anything for a single afternoon of the affection that rained on me unasked. She stole my things, spread rumors about me in the block. I never got angry. I knew she didn't hate me. She hated not being me.
When our father died with the nets in his hands, I became the pillar of the house. I organized the meals, comforted Mama, and with every word of praise I received I felt Darya shrink in the room we shared. "She has everything and I have nothing," I'd hear her murmur. I wanted to tell her it wasn't true, that I would have traded my gray life for her light without a second thought. I never knew how.
The night we fought in the corridor, she screamed that she hoped something horrible would happen to me so I'd feel what she felt. And at the far end of the corridor, drawn perhaps by all that pain we were throwing into the air, one of them appeared. Darya, in her rage, walked toward it. She didn't run. She went straight at it, screaming, as if she could beat that too.
After that I only cared for her. I watched her lose the one thing she felt was hers, that beauty she had never even learned to use for good. She pushed me away with venom — "you stay the same, perfect, while I rot" — and I brought her herbal teas all the same, because she was my little sister and always would be.
It wasn't the creature that killed her. It was believing, to the last day, that she deserved none of what she saw in me. She threw herself into the sea before that thing could be born. "If I can't have what she has, then nothing," they say she murmured. I would have given it all, Darya. I just never knew how to tell you in time.
Tetiana's Arc — Sloth
Block 5
Form: a single room. The prose never leaves it, just like Tetiana.
The threadbare sofa in the front room. That's where almost everything about Tetiana Shevchenko begins and ends — eighteen years old, the laziest girl in Zoriya. While the other women of Block 5 hauled water from the well, she stayed, as always, without moving. "It'll pass," she murmured at the ceiling, and rolled over to cover her ears with the pillow.
The humming came in through the corridor. She didn't get up. A door gave way — a creature two meters tall, pale-furred in the half-light — and she, who had never gotten up for anything, didn't get up for this either. Only a feeble "go away." The heat in the belly found her exactly where she had always been: lying down, still, waiting for the world to sort itself out on its own. When she woke on the floor, she tried to drag herself to the door to call for help. She didn't make it. Exhaustion overcame her halfway, and she stayed there, in her own room, weeping without even the strength to scream.
And here comes the cruel part, because the room does not change, but she does. The one who avoided effort all her life now longs to move. She wants to run, to fight, to rise from that bed that has become her prison, and she cannot: the weight anchors her, the weariness drags her down. What grows inside feeds on exactly that — on her stillness, on her energy hoarded and never spent; it fattens on the idleness she cultivated for eighteen years. Every attempt to sit up ends with her gasping against the same pillows. "If only I'd done something... anything...," she says to the ceiling, the same ceiling as always. The womb answers with a kick that sinks her deeper into the mattress.
Her mother comes and goes from this room with tears and broth. She is the only one who moves in here. Tetiana no longer eats on her own, doesn't comb her hair, can't reach the broken mirror on the far side of the room where she would barely recognize herself anyway.
They took her away in an emergency to cut out what was growing. It was the only thing that ever got her out of this room, and it was on a stretcher. They say the creature burst through the hospital window and is loose on the island now. They say Tetiana was no longer alive by then. In Block 5 they tell it this way: the girl who never moved ended up trapped forever in the one place she ever wanted to be, and that there is no worse sentence than getting, too late, exactly what you spent your life avoiding.