Vulcanalia

A short story that I wrote a while back and entered into a competition; nothing much came of it, so I decided to publish it here!

There is nothing natural about Vulcanalia. We have made a tradition of bringing light to even the darkest of summer evenings, of setting the evening sky alight with rippling ribbons of fire, of delighting in the way trails of smoke curtail the celestial from monitoring the proceedings.

No– there is nothing natural or God-ordained about the festival we’ve thrown in His honour, nothing written in the stars above about how we must devote ourselves to the mighty Quietus. But priests and vestal virgins have synonymised the fiery spectacle with our unearthly love for Him, and no one has ever stopped and thought about the strangeness of dictating how a deity–one we’d loathe to infuriate–would like to be celebrated.

To understand the horror of Vulcanalia is to witness the metamorphoses of my neighbours as they dance and laugh and watch the city catch fire with an almost arsonist gleam. Last year, I had been among them; my eyes had been glazed with the same feverish glint as I watched the flames rise with wild abandon. Now, though, it feels as if I am the only one who notices the acrid, grey snake of smoke slithering through the alleyways. I keep my hand over my mouth as I hurry down the street; a woman shepherding her family towards the pyres inhales it all through her slack, gaping jaw.

Everyone is especially keen to appease Him this year, spurred by acerbic rumour that, when inhaled, chars reason and chokes the brain into frenzy. Last year, the people of Pompeii and Herculaneum had sacrificed too little, and the charred, ash-coated consequences were immediate. Bodies were buried beneath the wrath of Quietus. All that remained was a warning scorched into the ruins. The rumour, of course, had hurtled through the people like a swarm of locusts until they were starved into visions of our municipality reduced to a plain of sepulchral soot.

Behind every whisper, every nudged shoulder, and every cupped hand, a fluttery, barely-there reminder of how “we wouldn't want that, would we?” flickers low. So naturally, they have come to a consensus. We must sacrifice even more this year to avoid the fate of those stingier, stupider, and less spiritual than us– so I watch as their mouths hang open, their lungs blackened by a clawing desperation to do better than the duplicitous degenerates who dared to slight Him.

Naturally, they– and I mean my mother, my sisters, and the neighbours I’d watched so keenly but moments ago– expect me to follow suit. Naturally, I should— because I am a widow of the searing wrath, of a humming acropolis obliterated in the transient moment between blinking eyes and compressing chests. I was the one who had lost Julius’ marigold locks and bronzed arms to His supposed dissatisfaction.

Never mind that Julius had merely been attending to business in Pompeii– my mother-in-law, grieved as she’d been by the loss of my husband and her son, had insisted that he’d been fated to stand in the path of Quietus’ crimson, viscous tears. Somehow, Julius had deserved to be swallowed by the sky-darkening clouds of dust He’d conjured from nothing.

“A good man he was,” my mother had told me, when I was returned to my father’s household like a cow unfit for slaughter— like livestock. Like I was nothing. “But no one is good enough to escape the wrath of the Gods.”

And then my sisters had insisted that my husband, whom they’d fawned over but two weeks before, had been far too short for me anyway, and that the mighty, masterful Quietus was a distributor of blessings in disguise. “It’s best that you forget him,” they’d whispered. “Give Him everything he wants, and He will help you find someone better than Julius. He is your friend, sister. Do not fear Him.”

Then, our local priest had approached me at Julius’ corpse-less funeral.

The priest, who had anointed me in childhood and sanctified the day of our wedding as auspicious, had told me that I must sacrifice a red calf, for He would be waiting for any excuse to reunite me with my husband. I had to let Him know how sorry I was.

“For what?” I’d asked. And then he told me that Julius’ supposed inability to sacrifice appropriately last summer was a fault of mine. A curse bestowed upon me through marital extension. The calf would cost my family a certain amount of denarii, of course. I would foot the bill, of course. All this he demanded in the tone he’d used to ask after my mother but minutes ago.

It was in this moment that I lost what little faith I had left. I like to pinpoint that conversation as the moment I turned my face from the all-powerful pantheon and its mortal executors.

For this is the narrative they tell me– that the white-robed, holier-than-thou priests tell us. Like any other God that lounges in the sky, He expects sacrifices. If He were mortal, He’d be described as nothing short of avaricious, but He is a god, and so He is exacting. He is expectant; He is eager to see the fruits of our labour— fish, and wheat, and valuables— smoulder in piles. He wants this, and nothing is as domineering as what a God wants.

He wants nothing more for us than to reel in nets of fish from the sea that could line the men’s pockets with gold, harvest bushels of wheat that could feed the emaciated beggars lining the streets like forgotten refuse, rear thousands upon thousands of starry-eyed, rust-pelted calves and snuffling boars, and torch them on pyres, delighting in how they smoke. And if you fail to please an insatiable, inconsiderate hunger that is only acceptable if it belongs to a being celestial and omnipotent, then there is nothing to be done for you and your soon-to-be burning home.

Vulcanalia, then, is one mammoth sacrifice of wealth, food, and resources; a spectacle composed of disjointed voices grovelling, and deft hands igniting piled pyres. It looms over me now, this celebration that supposedly wards off inflammatory catastrophe for another year.

I had wandered so far through my reverie that my feet had carried me towards the fiery square. Here, the pyres seem to breathe as they shake in the warming wind.

My eyes, blurry from the slate-grey cataracts that have hardened my irises, smoulder from the same damning smoke that slithers into my lungs. In the chaos, someone has shoved a calf into my hands; a weighty, rust-pelted, slain calf, with blood leaking from its neck and its irises glazed with the bliss of an untimely death.

But I think I’ve sacrificed enough.

Don’t you?

I can see it all, now. Vulcan– that bearded, hammer-wielding, insatiable giant in the sky– had sickened of fish and wheat and highly sung praises; instead, he had looked beyond and hungered for my husband and everyone else populating Vesuvius’ path.

Vulcan must have seen how Julius cupped my face between his hands; how he had kissed the supple skin where my jaw met my neck and told me I was to him what stars were to a navigator. Vulcan had seen all this before He’d ripped Julius from my arms in a fit of blinding, red-hot pain that seared through my senses.

Vulcan had watched as the world continued revolving around my paralysed self. He’d luxuriated in the demand to give Him more when I had already lost the only thing that mattered. And he had feasted—oh, he had feasted— on the inevitable, salt-laced collateral of grief that sprung from my soul.

The calf’s head lolls in my hands; its blood runs down my fingers, warm and fresh and inhuman, a remnant of the life it had carried and a precursor to the death that awaits it. Vulcan does not need this life. He does not need this. He only wants. And what He wants, He takes.

They call for sacrifices from the ones whom Vulcan has spared. I hold the rust-pelted calf. Men, women, and children step forward, each bearing an offering, each bearing an apology for their existence; for the lives He has spared, and the ones he took. My fingers dig into my calf’s marigold-like hide.

I will not give Him what He wants.

The other calves burn. Vulcan devours them. My calf bleeds into the white of my toga.