Rough-hewn white stucco walls, so cool to the touch she thinks they're damp. When it rains the walls sweat.
The uneven plaster and rain stains edged with delicate filigrees of mildew give the walls the look of an old Italian palazzo. They remind her of how she imagines Venice to be: the lap of water below long narrow windows, the plash of gondolas - sinking Venice - drowning in its own tears.
She spends hours in the dark church, enthralled with the saints in their ecstasies, imagining their arms opening for her - their wounds like mouths, opening to kiss her.
She loves the village church most of all: the painted frescoes of saints make her pulse throb. The chanting litanies, spiraling falsetto of altar boys, the musk of incense, the banks of flowers and smoke of candles burning.
The worshippers press against one another on the narrow pews. The heat of the candles fogs the stained glass.
Sometimes when she drinks the altar wine she imagines she is drinking blood. It is thick and tastes of pennies, of the sea.
In the garden behind her house she builds an oratory with grapevines & seashells.
She weaves the vines between the limbs of four pear trees to form a thatched roof and carpets the floor with moss. She builds an altar from beach glass and here she kneels to pray.
She makes little prayer books - handmade paper sprinkled with flowers, paints watercolors of angels and scrawls purple calligraphy poems she pens to saints. She is betrothed to a man, an old man from the village. She has no love for men, only angels and saints, she wants to run far far away.
On the dawn of her wedding day, she dons her silk frock and lets down her hair. She walks through the village and up the hill to the highest bluff overlooking the sea.
She stands on the hilltop. Her silk slip flutters in the wind.
Her muscles tense, then she is an arc of silver against the sky, her dress - a mermaid's tail as she slips into the water.
Some say she flung herself over - into the sea, for she never again descended that hill. No bones washed up on shore. Those the wiser say an angel floated down from the clouds - swept her up in its embrace and flew up to heaven with her.
Sometimes I see her in the night swimming in the sea - the moon swimming in the water beside her. I imagine the tendrils of sea grass entangling her legs. She floats on her back. I see her hair fanning out around her head, around her body. A flower blooming, unfolding.
I am that sea grass snaking round that calf, sneaking between those thighs. I am the black water. I am the moon reflected in its depths, I am that black mirror in which she floats.