Poveglia
written by: Emma Wells
The Black Death sent me to an island. Ostracised from Venetians, nobody cared for anything but prevailing life. Our kind, the cursed, were left to dwindle as charred hearts of fires, shrinking to forgettable ash.
A crude hospice now bears empty, echoic rooms. Ivy vines itself along exposed bricks, unspooling fleshy green membranes across faceless walls. Sometimes I rock on a disused bed, from which handcuffs and quietening instruments haunt from crumbling cupboards. Tools to suppress agonies of the sick and dying.
Shackled here, I bend with tidal waters, unravelling stored emotions as lined jam jars on the shoreline, spilling empty. Each one houses a different century of my endless, corded misery.
I’m a water-filled noose.
By day, I scour shallow waters, casting glassed eyes to Venice: a long-ago home that shifts, untouchable as a mirage. It hides from outreached hands, fearful of contagion that haunts my spectral fingertips.
Fuelled by tendrils of pain, I sew by night. Black cotton unspools like the Black Death itself, weaving tight patterns to my conscious needle. Silently, lost to unhallowed ground, I weave the darkest tapestries. Hollow-eyed women and men stare out, wearing obsidian crosses. I’ve stitched each mouth tightly shut, so I don’t hear screams. When I’ve been reckless or bored in the past, sometimes, I pulled the stitches loose, and hellish wails broke forth.
After learning my lesson, I closed the other mouths permanently shut, working my silver-steeled needle along hollow gapes. Wide Os belonging to the dead: plague victims, the insane and tortured from ill-practiced lobotomies. I have seen it all: cavernous depths of tragic endings.
Hundreds of years swim by. I have heard their merry din as lives unravel on the mainland. Young girls become mothers, then grandmothers and great-grandmothers, whilst I’m chained by ghostly handcuffs that will never unlock. The key is thick with lobster-hued rust, lost in thick, muddy seabeds, where versions of me whisper my forgotten name.
Once, I stitched my own lips, copying the pitch-black tapestry of asylum inmates. Then I became one of them. Again, a sheep in a countless, same-faced herd. Yet, I refused to give up my loose threads of autonomy: storm-sky ribbons are my only hope even when God’s eyes have closed upon me.
Dim-witted travellers try to visit, claiming fame on Instagram with ill-matched photos of Poveglia. Over centuries, not one has survived an endless night. Sick fancies besiege my mind, and I toy with them as puppets on strings, eyeing body parts that I can stitch shut with my timeless needle.
On this very night, a young man arrives. Alone. A singular traveller. Perhaps he has come to find me, or to dismiss myths as mere whispers, unholy and unfounded. My long skirts and high collared dress ensnare him as a nursing mother. He discerns my femininity as weakness, allowing himself to get too close. Taking my chimera of a hand in his, he begs for the truth, an explanation of the island’s history, who I was, and why after so many years, I still glide this isle. Dilated eyes widen in star-lit streams of moonlight as he bores into my soul, searching for answers, answers rooted in 1345. The year I was exiled, to these beautiful yet corrosive backwaters.
“Are you evil?” he dares to question. “Why does your soul linger here?” follows, as part of his impertinent probing of a husk of a woman, long dried and empty.
I let him encircle me, setting instruments of light at his feet.
“A torch,” he informs me as he swings nocturnal light, in and out of dripping shadows, irritating my ill-kept composure.
“Are you not frightened?” I ask. “For if you are not, then shine your light on my face,” I request.
A wan, waisted, and moth-eaten face turns to greet him. One devoured by plague swellings; each bursts forth with centuries old blood and pus, coursing down the remnants of a face. The face of a dead woman as she was when she died here in 1375, carelessly tossed to perdition.
Terrified, finally, by the exposure of my true visage, he stumbles backwards, falling into soulless waters. Spluttering, coughing fast, he thrashes in a dark broth of misfortune. Waters, where even fish fail to swim, intrepid of the glinting steel of my sewing needle. They know, too well, I will happily stitch their silver-scaled mouths perpetually shut, let them flounder to a slow death.
As the unknown traveller, kicks and toils, aiming to climb back into his fishing boat, I perform my last act. With my needle floating in mid-air, lacing under my direction, with thickened cords of sable silk, I unleash his doom. Moving merely the tip of one pointed finger, I direct the needle, up and down, shuttering his lips sealed, with a sombre weave. Transfixed by fear, his eyes bulge, strain, fighting hard to combat me, not allowing himself to be easy prey. Yet, I’m a honed professional, having done this countless times before.
“You knew this would happen, yet you came anyway. Boyish fool,” I inform him, sick of his human presence upon this isle, disturbing my ragged sense of sanctity.
Unable to speak, he thrashes in suffocating waters, endeavouring to swim to his fishing boat, bobbing as a lifeline on the surface. Leaving him to suffer, I decide to bind his hands and feet like an accused witch, unravelling more black-webbed net. He begins to drown, entombed by glooming silk as a funereal shroud.
I turn to leave, to gather once more with the dead, branded with sewed mouths and hearts. All is silence in my cast net. He eyes me as I trail back to my hospital asylum bed, rotting with age and tainted by unholy medical practices to the long afore living.
Two unspooling bobbins of inky cotton extend from my hands as spinnerets, releasing lethal silk. Empty cotton reels fall behind me, death toll bells, that carry my thwarted spirit as pallbearers, back into the maddening, diseased heart of Poveglia.
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