Miracles

This week’s comic is pretty short and random, mostly because I’m knee-deep in moving boxes. In less than three weeks I’ll be living alone (with split custody of my daughter) for the first time in my life. I’m a little anxious about it. (But also, yes, excited beyond measure. But it’s new!)

My first year of middle school (5th grade) I didn’t have a lot of friends, which meant I didn’t have anyone to sit with in the cafeteria at lunch. I usually took my Lender’s bagel with cream cheese and hid out in a music practice room, one of those little cubicles for quietly wailing on the sax off the main choral/orchestral practice zone. While masticating, I read little pocket books about Christian saints. I was not Christian (atheist, like my mom), but I loved the stories. The saints endured much worse than middle school bullying, and they did alright.

Saint Lucy was my favorite. She decided she would marry God instead of a man, and give her dowry away to the poor. Her mom was sick and worried about Lucy’s future, and out of that anxiety arranged a marriage. Lucy tried to give the dowry away anyway, which the betrothed guy found out about and was not cool with. Somehow the governor gets involved and sentences her to be defiled in a brothel. The governor was not of the opinion that sex work is work.

When the guards came to take her, they physically could not move her. They tried everything, even hitching her to a bunch of oxen. They gave up and piled a bunch of wood around her and tried to burn her in place, but that didn’t work either. Lucy was magically fire retardant. Finally one of them cut her throat open with a sword and that did the trick.

Missing from the earliest versions is the story that she either had her eyes gouged out by a guard as a kind of torture before death OR gouged them out herself because some guy who was otherwise not involved had a thing for her and noted the beauty of her eyes. Imagine that! Some dude stops you on the street and says “damn you have such beautiful eyes,” (or you’re Taylor from Love is Blind Season 8 and your husband you met 5 seconds ago Daniel gets your peepers tattooed on his chest) and in response you just gouge your own peepers out with a dagger and say “fuck you.”

My new Hinge profile pic.

This week’s comic is dedicated to some lesser known Saints, who performed slightly less ostentatious miracles. I found out about them through Eliot Weinberger’s terrific book Angels & Saints, which I enthusiastically recommend if you like this kind of stuff too. (Did you know that Milton’s angels have SEX? And DIGESTIVE SYSTEMS??? Like, fully capable of both getting down and ripping farts.)

Onto the miracles!