About the Author: Caitlin Fisher

Caitlin is a third-year MFA Fiction candidate and first-year writing instructor at Emerson College. When not teaching and writing, Caitlin can usually be found leading ghost tours in downtown Boston or blasting ‘80s hits in her yellow Volkswagen Beetle. From Haverhill, MA, her writing tends to fuse her love of weird Massachusetts history and magical realism.

Mary Magdalene Talks About Her and Her Boyfriend’s Sex Life

by Caitlin Fisher

It’s fine, I guess, except that He only ever wants to fuck in a ring of salt. He swears by it. Something about purification, something about surrounding Himself with Lot’s wife making Him more human. It makes it easier for Him to get off. (I wonder, sometimes, how Lot’s wife feels about this, in her afterlife as a seasoning.)

He says it is less of a safety risk for me, in the ring of salt. Once He masturbated in the woods when He was thirteen and His divine ecstasy emitted such a bright light that it blinded a nearby mole, and that’s why they all burrow so deeply underground, now. He says the ring of salt will make sure that I won’t be blinded or maimed or smote or turned into a pillar of salt myself. I believe that He means this, but also there is always salt in my ass and in my vagina now and it burns when I piss.

There are as many moments where I realize that He is God as there are moments where I realize that He is just a man.  Just yesterday I asked Him why His godliness doesn’t perform a miracle when He comes, why doves don’t fly above us carrying purple silk banners embroidered with Aves and Hallelujahs, no streams of blinding light or rumbling earthquakes, no defiance of earthly laws (except once, when we floated midair, briefly, above our ring of salt, when I slipped a finger into the left wrist’s stigmata).

This was as we laid in our purified ring, in the cave where I found Him when He came back from the dead, where we always sleep. He was lying face-up, his curls framing his face, staring at the ceiling, his brows scrunched together in concentration, and did not answer me right away. I worried He was speaking to His father, or, perhaps, to Lucifer, who we happened upon, sometimes, out here. The salt was his idea, I think. Both usually visited Him invisibly, so it was difficult to know when we had an audience.

Embarrassed, I tried to deflect the question with humor, and made a crass joke about the Second Coming that only made me feel even more like the harlot history would make me.

Finally, His gaze shifts to mine, and His dark eyes glitter with true starlight—a pattern of bright freckles in the shape of Orion’s belt glows are easy to glean across His pupils. It is so beautiful, the cosmos in his warm eyes, that I am sure He will tell me some tragic and impossible truth about being a human god.

Instead, He says, “That only happens when I wrestle with angels,” and there it is.