Mimmi and the Saints
Searching on the internet for the worst torture methods, Mimmi comes across various practices that bother her without truly making her hair stand on end. At the top of the list are the Bull of Phalaris, the one where Mimmi vaguely remembers Christians being thrown in and cooked by the Romans, and what those high school students, sons of the Yakuza, did to that poor Japanese girl, sealing the horror by pouring a layer of concrete over her corpse.
There is no reason why she’s looking for them. Sometimes she thinks they find her on their own, to gather all the disturbed minds in one corner of the web. We are like two identical buttons, one still attached to the edge of the shirt and the other hidden among the other thousand in the sewing box, that’s what they would say if they could speak. But subreddits are not sentient entities and cannot make themselves be found; it must be her own doing. The sentient entities that make up those subreddits are instead overweight thirty-year-old Americans smelling of KFC chicken from the suburbs, or Russian teenagers who eat pickles with vodka and have carpets hanging on the walls because it’s cold and they need to defend themselves from bears. And Mimmi reluctantly acknowledges that they, too, do not wish to be found.
However, she is neither one nor the other, and although she would like to consider herself the unique observer in terms of appearance and values compared to others who frequent r/watchpeopledie and bestgore, perhaps there are other adultescents who are victims of the thrill of knowing more. If there is more. But the desire to know hurts. Every time her fingertips glide swiftly across the mechanical keyboard typing r/vintagegore into the search bar, her stomach churns. Yes, there is something wrong with her.
Aside from the oversized ’70s serial killer glasses and the hump that no one wants to understand is a genetic defect and not a posture issue, she means. On 4chan, they call it the femcel phenotype; a description
that Mimmi believes fits her perfectly as images of mangled men, in the darkness of her damp, pre-packaged noodles-scented room, reflect from the screen into her large, yellowed lenses. Yes, it is something deeper.
Mimmi lifts her gaze from the screen, her forehead itches. The flash-imprinted red eyes of her mother clinging to the chubby body of an infant being baptized (it should be Mimmi, but she no longer recognizes herself in the curly blond hair and rosy cheeks) stare at her in indignation.
What are you even looking for? She would tell her. What are you looking for so desperately all hunched up? Stand up straight. Mimmi straightens up, presses send, and blames her mother for making her do it, because it’s always the mothers’ fault when it comes to daughters.
Perhaps, though, mom only did half the work; the rest had been done by the sacred paintings with which they bombarded her brain during catechism. Who would show children, who are climbing the social ladder to become altar kids, a cartel video of a half-naked Mexican pierced by dozens of arrows while tied to a tree? No one. What a scandal it would be! The culprit would end up on an FBI watch list and couldn’t get near schools anymore. No one would do it unless the one showing it were not catechist Angela and the Mexican were not a white man named Saint Sebastian. That is where Mimmi’s impure thoughts began. Her erotic fantasies about Saint Sebastian were sufficient to lead her to deem herself unfit for the church (how do you explain in the confessional that the sight of a bleeding man stirs your loins?) so she gave up prayers at the age of twelve, and God took revenge for the next ten years. Rightly so, says Mimmi. A martyr must suffer, and if mom prayed enough, God might have repaid her by giving her a daughter tormented by torments and visions. To secure a good place in heaven, at the right hand of Christ.
As a former-fat-kid with braces and greasy hair, for Mimmi middle school was challenging enough without having to endure the guilt of neglecting God and having wet dreams about one of His loyalists. She still has doubts about whether abandoning religion was the right decision. During those years, in her nightly prayers, she would ask Christ, using the same words every time, to wake her up at eight-thirty in the morning, and Christ always obeyed. Once, while eating off-brand cereals for breakfast, she decided to push it, and prayed for MTV to play Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl video. Ding, wish granted. Thank you, God.
But when, late at night, kneeling in her mother’s disused nightgown (the one that, from the tales and bloodstains, seemed to be the very one in which she had given birth to her) she had finally found the courage to beg the Virgin Mary to make her stop having those strange dreams about the Saints, appearing to her with
open palms and upturned eyes, Mimmi had remained unheard. In fact, God gave her that very night a lovely vision of Saint Catherine, standing in her grandmother’s house by the radiator next to the floral sofa. Mimmi, looking out from the hallway to the dining room, having carefully avoided the room where her grandmother had said the old woman she was nursing had died and that, before she croaked, could hear the voice of the child she had let starve to death, saw her. Saint Catherine, dressed in a tunic and with bloody fingers, motionless foaming from her mouth like a junkie. Thank you, God.
So much anger toward God. But Mimmi could not stop praying; on pain of torture: she imagined herself already, with her breasts exposed and her eyes gouged out and served on a plate, just like Saint Lucy. She was awful and scary as she stared with her rosy and white breasts from Mimmi’s brother’s Dragon Ballsticker-stained closet beside her bed in the dark. Her mother referred to them as blessings, ecstasies, miracles, and visions. Every bloody hallucination involving Father Pio and his hands pierced from side to side by phenolic acid was rewarded with a kiss on the forehead and a prayer to the rosary.
Those affectionate gestures upset her quite a bit, as if she were receiving a reward for every unwelcome thought. Mimmi then discovered that it turns out that the mediumistic visions; thoughts of violence, and any sexual remix between the two were not just the result of an over-imaginative psyche. Instead, it turns out; they are symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Thank you, Reddit.
Her mother must have ingrained some kind of Pavlovian principle in her mind with those kisses on her forehead and those “my little miracle girl”; in fact, as she grew older and the visions faded away, she searched for saints and their gruesome martyrs everywhere. Going through her grandfather’s collection of holy cards – which he always made a point of showing her whenever he visited – she managed to steal a few figurines. Before going to sleep, she would gaze into the eyes of Saint Bartholomew as he was being flayed alive, fixate on the face of Saint Eulalia, trying not to stare at her turgid breasts as she was being disembowelled and cooked, and examine the eviscerated, crimson and shiny guts of St. Erasmus. But nothing, no dream, her mind was blank, her eyes moved from side to side behind closed eyelids without ever visualizing even a single drop of blood.
Finally, a surge of the familiar excitement coursed through her veins when, one Sunday at her grandmother’s house where Saint Caty had appeared, sitting right on the floral couch, she discovered that Simona, her little ginger cousin and autistic daughter of her aunt who voted far-right, had a habit of turning
around all the sacred figurines scattered around the house. I have handed the flare to her, thought Mimmi with envy. God chose her.
The crippled mother of her uncle’s fiancée, self-invited to the Sunday lunch, had advised that the neo-fascist aunt spray holy water on the child’s back when she wasn’t looking, or pour it on her pillow before she fell asleep, so she would have tearful dreams about Christ instead of the devil. And if she cries, she said, that means it’s working. If she is struggling, it is working. Mother Hope used to say: a love that does not warm and burn is not love. It burnt Simona pretty good: when Aunt Antonescu finally surprised her by splashing her with holy water from Lourdes, the little girl began to squirm and bolt, ending her sprint by howling incoherent phrases and rolling around on the blue kitchen tiles as if she were on fire. She is possessed, had been the final verdict, so Simona was dragged to the little church in the hills to be washed up with exorcising prayers and smoked down with incense like a ham. She had remained, unfortunately, autistic and possessed all the same.
Mimmi’s grandmother therefore had resigned herself to turning back to front the figures of Saint Anthony and the Virgin Mary whenever the little girl’s sinister hands went to perform the sacrilegious act. After all, if it does not burn, it is not love. Mimmi wonders why it no longer burns. God left her on her own and took away the warm embrace of the tortured. She had lost her touch; God had closed her third eye and condemned her to a life of dull ordinariness. If you want to see dead bodies and torture, go look it up on the Internet, he must have said.
Anna Catharina is a 25-year-old Italian writer currently studying literature and communication.