Page 6 of Lust
“Do it, Mercy. Come join me. Down here in the cold depths of your despair. Together, we can forfeit the world.”
Mercy tugged on her ear. Was it the chill? The voice? Perhaps she wasn’t destined to say.
Mercy swore she wouldn’t stay past five-thirty, so she did herself one better by getting out at exactly five. If she avoided Arnold, all the better. That would leave Mercy Devereux in the enviable position of having nobody give a shit that she was leaving without doing a little more work to make up for missing the morning.
Well, almost nobody would care.
“Heeeey.” Bill hovered outside her door, coat slung over his arm and hand in his pocket. “Hope you don’t mind that I came by to say good evening. I heard you talking to Arnold earlier about being in a bad mood again.” The way he saidbad moodput yet another foul taste in Mercy’s mouth. “Just wanted to say that Itotallyunderstand what’s going on, Merce. I, too, have been through a bad breakup or two in my life.”
She furrowed her brows. “If you know that’s why I’m not feeling hot. Then you also know that I was in a relationship with a woman. I’m not really interested in guys.” Bill had been tragically “flirting” with her since she was first promoted three years ago. He only had a year’s worth of seniority on her, but he acted like he knew the whole office inside and out.Let’s not forget when I waltzed into the office with my box of personal items and he stepped up to “help me with that heavy box.” It had two picture frames and some pens in it.Mercy wasn’t one to turn down genuine help, but everything Bill did screameddesperate.Like now, when he hovered outside her office door to… what? Creep on her?
“This is just between friends,” Bill attempted to reassure her, “but I thought you might like to go grab a drink. Maybe some dinner. Depends what you’re up for once we get there.”
“Sorry,” Mercy replied with clenched teeth. “I did a little too much drinking last night as it is. Think it’s better if I go home and have a hot bath.” She probably shouldn’t have added that part. Now Bill was going to think about her in the bath.
“No worries. Maybe tomorrow, huh?” Bill cocked his head up as he took a few steps back. “Stay cool, Merce. See you in the morning. Maybe? Huh? Haha.”
Mercy remained where she stood until she was sure that man was out of the office.Stay cool? Merce? Good God.She didn’t usually mind it when people called her “Merce.” Hell, her nickname during high school softball had been “Mercenary,” and her seventeen-year-old self wore it like a badge of honor.
Yet, somehow, coming out of Bill’s mouth… wasn’t great, huh?
Mercy cinched her jacket around her abdomen before heading toward the office door. She was polite enough to say goodnight to the secretary every day, since the poor woman was stuck there from eight to six, with an extra day off every Friday. Mercy often wondered if it was worth it, working such a thankless job for so many hours a day. Sure, the corporate overlords also worked that much (usually,) but they made millions. Lucia at the front desk made twenty bucks an hour.
Only that wasn’t Lucia at the front desk. And the only reason Mercy realized that was because of the small vase of white lilies on the corner of the desk.
“Good night, Lu…” Mercy stopped, her hip almost knocking into the glass vase.The same one as on my table back home?She whipped her head around, expecting to see the raven-haired secretary with scary-long nails and lashes powerful enough to blow a woman out the door.
Instead, she saw another face. One almost familiar enough for her to place.
“Good night, Ms. Devereux.” Acedia tucked her brown hair behind her ear and continued to write nonsense on the pad and paper before her. “May you have an interesting time at home.”
“You…” Mercy nearly dropped her purse by the handle. She looked around, and while there were plenty of other people in the office still, none of them were perturbed by the lack of Lucia at her desk. In fact, a woman in a blue pantsuit flew by, calling,“Night, Lucia!”as if she hadn’t seen someone completely different sitting at Lucia’s desk. “Holy shit. I am hallucinating.”
“Maybe.” Acedia picked up the stapler and conspicuously attached two pieces of unrelated papers together. “Maybe not, but I’m looking forward to seeing you later tonight.” Her smile was wide, her cheeks ballooning and her dark eyes glittering like she was in a star-studded romcom. Yet the moment Mercy blinked, she forgot what the figment of her imagination looked like.
“What is it?” Lucia asked, sitting where Acedia had been only two seconds before. “Did you forget something?” Her long, blue nails picked up the papers Acedia had stapled together. “Need me to call… what the hell happened here?” Both of her hands braced against her desk. “What is going on? I think… I think I need to go home.”
Mercy scuttled out of the office as quickly as she could. Although Acedia’s words – of, what, warning? – rang in the back of her mind, Mercy couldn’t get out of there quickly enough. She was seeing things. Perhaps the whole day had been nothing but an illusion. Maybe shewasdead, and this was some strange purgatory meant to lull her into a false sense of security before she was dumped into that Hell Acedia told her about.
She didn’t look back. She was too afraid to see anyone but Lucia sitting at her desk.
—-
For the first time in a hundred years, Acedia split herself apart.
It took considerable effort. Naturally. Even an immortal deity with the power to change a human’s life only had so much energy to expend. In ancient times – when she was young, since lesser deities such as herself could age, too – she served many women at once. Her bountiful energy always went to the common good, whether it was inspiring a maiden to look forward to a lifetime of experience, or reminding a middle-aged matriarch that there was much for her to love. Acedia never thought about it. As soon as she heard the cries of a woman bearing too much through no fault of her own, she not only transformed. Shebecame.
Mythologists somewhat familiar with her existence often debated what Acedia reallywas.Besides a myth, of course, because how dare anyone genuinely believe in entities like her any longer, hm? Yet whether they read Ancient Greek, Babylonian, Egyptian or Latin, such scholars concluded that she didn’ttransforminto other entities. Who did she think she was? Durga? Everyone knew that ancient goddesses, be they of fertility or war, kept to the precious plants and animals if they wanted a new form. The concept of her containing multiple aspects of her personality made no sense to stuffy old scholars in their towers of knowledge. All they knew about Acedia was that she had been booted from the canon of deadly sins. All because a few translators didn’t truly understand her power.
She couldn’t fault them for it, though. They were mortals, after all, and no modern writings spoke of her healing. That’s how long she had gone without success. Dormant. Listless. The personification of her very name.To not know love. Care. Concern. That is who I am.Acedia was the final step of a tragic woman’s healing process. She was the amalgamation of the seven deadly sins, the one burdened with their necessary existence.To be human is to sin. To be alive is to sin. Why must it be a terrible thing?Only when a person embraced those seven sides of themselves could they truly know Acedia – the act of unloading the burden of the world from one’s shoulders.
Mercy was a tough nut to crack, however. She wasn’t like some of the lovely ladies Acedia had assisted before. Acedia could not simply cut herself into seven and send one avatar after another to the crying child inside a grown woman’s heart. Mercy lived in a different world from the slaves of Rome or concubines of a Chinese emperor’s court. She wasn’t anything like the Incan priestesses or Malian peasant girls. She was a woman of the modern Western world, whatever that meant. Acedia hadn’t really stayed on top of history for the past few hundred years. It wasexceptionallybad once the industrial revolution took over. There was little thought for entities such as herself. Why would there be?Godwas uttered upon lips, but the world rarely meant anything anymore. The revering of the natural world had been set aside for modernization. No wonder Acedia hadn’t been in a hurry to return, no matter how many cries for help she had heard during her slumbers.
Now was not the time to think about that, though. Now was the time to focus on a woman named Mercy Devereux, who sorely needed Acedia’s assistance.
Creating an avatar of herself and sending her out into the world did not hurt Acedia. It tickled, a little. Her true self was still tethered to whoever stepped away from her, but one would not be incorrect to call the feminine shape emerging from Acedia’s aura anything more than her sister. Or, perhaps, her daughter.
The world was a canvas. The moon the ultimate source of light. That made Acedia the prism, the translucent nature of her very existence splintering not only her soul, but the moonlight into a gradient of fantastical colors that briefly covered the city. Not that anyone noticed. Nobody ever noticed.
