Saint Ligeia’s Head

The winter that year was soft, soft like old wool, and it came without snow. I was rearranging the wings in the parlor when the bell rang�"a clear, shallow sound, like glass tapping against itself in a dream. I’d just finished wiring the hawk’s eyelids closed.

The man at the door said nothing. He carried a bell jar in both hands as if it were a sleeping infant. He wore a bishop’s ring and shoes that left no sound on the stone. I didn’t invite him in. He entered anyway. When he left, I had the jar.

Inside was a head�"a woman’s head, pale and severe, with hair that floated gently in a colorless liquid. Her mouth was stitched shut, her eyes half-open like a saint in a baroque painting. The tag read: Ligeia. Virgin. Confessor. Martyred by drowning.

For three nights, I placed her beside the stuffed ibex, near the fireplace. I said nothing to her. I offered her dried violets and a pear.

On the fourth night, she spoke. It was a secret about my Father�"something she couldn’t have known, and I will never repeat. Her voice came not through the jar but inside my own skull, like a vibration sewn to memory.

I didn’t scream. I turned to the ibex and asked, “Did you hear that?”

The ibex, as usual, said nothing.

People say I decorate with blasphemy: angel wings on jackal backs, rosaries looped around weasel tails. But they don’t understand. It isn’t sacrilege. It’s taxonomy. I am classifying the divine.

After Ligeia began speaking, I built the chapel. Not in any formal way. I pushed back the parlor walls, hung veils of lace in the windowpanes, placed a pew where the sofa used to be. A fox with gold-leaf eyes guarded the door. And at the center: the head, under her jar, elevated on an old washtub altar, wrapped in a bridal veil.

Soon people began to randomly turn up.

A woman brought a boy in a velvet box. He was asleep, or something near it. His lips were pale, his hands delicate as dried leaves, and she told me that he hadn’t spoken since the eclipse.

“I want him to dream,” said the woman, who wore too many rings. “He’s been silent so long it’s become hereditary. His father died without finishing his last sentence.”

I placed the boy before Ligeia, on a cushion sewn from my own shawls. I lit a candle made of lamb tallow and black string. I sprinkled ash on the floor in a circle and rang a bell shaped like a swan’s foot. For three days, he slept beside her. On the fourth day, he woke up screaming in Latin. That was the day I noticed something peculiar. The liquid in the bell jar had grown darker, thicker. Her stitches had loosened. Her mouth, which once stayed politely shut, now hung slightly open�"as if she were about to say something cruel in a confessional.

She said: "You built me a chapel, but not a church. I am not your pet.”

I apologized. I rearranged her veil, washed the glass, placed a sachet of lavender near her jaw. That night, a moth flew into my mouth while I slept, and I woke up weeping salt.

After that, I spoke only in whispers. Loud sounds made her agitated.

People brought stranger things. A woman brought her father’s spine wrapped in red silk and said, “He always wanted to kneel.”

They always asked to stay longer. Some moved in. A girl slept beneath the pew and woke with feathers on her neck. An old bishop refused to leave. I found him sitting on the floor, cross-eyed and smiling, eating the hymnals page by page. When I asked him why, he said: “She told me they’re sweeter this way.”

She spoke more now. She gave me advice. Instructions. Recipes for spiritual Alchemy. A list of names who had once tried to burn her. She remembered everything. She began to say my name with gentleness, and then with hunger.

One night I woke to find the jar warm. The veil had slipped. Her eyes were wide open.

“I want to see the sky,” she said.

I told her I would try.

I wrapped the jar in my old mourning shawl and carried her into the garden, where nothing had ever grown properly. The rosemary had rotted in place. The marigolds had bloomed once, then turned their faces to the ground and refused to open again.

The sky above was milk-colored, indecisive. A sky that couldn’t commit to weather. She said nothing. But her lips parted, as if in prayer or warning. I thought of removing the jar’s lid, just for a moment. But I didn’t.

The next morning, the liquid inside had turned a shade darker. And there was less of it.

I checked the seal twice. Nothing had leaked.

She didn’t mention it. She seemed pleased.

From then on, she asked for the sky by name. “Take me out at first frost,” she said. Or: “Tonight there will be hail. I want to feel it.”

I carried her into fog, into wind, into something close to snow. I carried her out in the dead of night, and once at noon, when the sun hurt her and she hissed like water poured on iron.

I did what I could. She was very clear: “I want the sky that knows me.”

She began giving me instructions. What to wear. What to bury. Where to hang the borrowed dreams �"I chose the rafters. "Red candles only, she said. No more salt. No more lavender" She had changed.

Pilgrims still came. One woman brought her brother’s lungs in a velvet sack. “He used to sing,” she said, and left them at the threshold.

A boy stood in the yard for three days holding a jar of bees. He wouldn’t come in, but he watched the chimney and said he’d seen her there.

People stayed longer. One woman braided her hair into the pew and refused to unweave it. I let her. I let most things happen. I had to�"Ligeia had grown louder. More insistent. She remembered everything now, not just her own life.

She remembered mine.

She began to say my name the way no one had since childhood�"before my voice changed, before I learned to lie politely.

“I want to walk,” she said.

“You don’t have legs,” I said.

“Borrow some,” she said.

I ignored it. I lit the candles. I arranged the hymnals in the shape of a vertebra. I placed a linen sheet over the jar.

After that, I stopped sleeping through the night.

I would wake with my feet stained blue. My hands trembled. I dropped needles. I stopped stitching entirely. The wings in the parlor curled inward like dying leaves.

The girl who had once slept beneath the pew was now mute, and wore only black. She followed me from room to room, holding a cracked hand mirror. She never raised it, but I knew it was meant for me.

Then, one morning, Ligeia was gone.

No jar. No veil. Just an indentation on the altar where the weight had been, and a faint sour smell, like something that had fermented in light.

The parlor was quiet. The chapel was still.

Outside, the garden had begun to sprout�"nettles, mostly, and a single black rose curling from the root of the rosemary.

I walked the house. I checked the rafters. I looked under the pew, behind the curtains, inside the bell jars and the mouths of the taxidermied doves. Nothing.

But then the girl held out the mirror.

In it, I saw myself holding something round and glassy. My hands cupped as if in prayer. I was smiling. My eyes were not my own. Behind them, something waited.

That night, I dreamt of her walking.
She had no head.
She carried mine under her arm like a dish for a bouquet.