The Unworthy

The narrator writes from her cell in the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, a convent that was once occupied by an order of monks. She hides the pages on her body, under her tunic, or sometimes underneath the floorboards. The narrator can hear someone screaming in the dark. She hopes it is Lourdes; she sewed cockroaches into Lourdes’s pillowcase to torment her.

During a ceremony in the Chapel of Ascension, three of the Chosen— “beautiful” Minor Saints—approach the altar, but one is bleeding because Mariel did a bad job sewing the woman’s eyes shut. The man behind the altar, referred to only as “He,” is hidden behind a screen. The “unworthy” women have never seen Him; only the Chosen and Enlightened have. He tells them that they must “relinquish [their] origin” and rid themselves of “the nocturnal filth that drags itself slowly and invisibly through [their] blood” if they want to become Enlightened (3).

The Minor Saints sing in the divine language of God that only the Chosen are allowed to learn. They sing the Primary Hymn until they all begin bleeding. Mariel pulls out a chunk of her hair to keep from screaming. Her scalp is patchy, and the narrator wonders why she is committed to “disfiguring herself” when she arrived at the convent so beautiful and “free of contamination” (5).