Fuzzy eyes, stale air.  This is my new reality. Entombed in earth, but knowing I’ve done no wrong.  Earthen walls tremble with footsteps above, but still I haven’t relinquished my parchment.  A cruel companion, exactly that which sent me down here in the first place. No sun and no food or water, I shiver from fear and the unnatural doom accompanying me here.  It’s clear my corpse will keel over here soon, so it’s all I can do to release what’s pent up inside. My childhood self flickers in the glow of the candle I snuck in.

Scurrying in a tunic, I arrive at my parents’ feet.  My father is back, his toga praetexta hanging in folds dripping with sweat and dust from his parade around the city.  Today is special for two reasons. My father basks in his Gallic victory and I am now six.  I can’t tell anyone that, I am warned, because other little girls don’t get to celebrate the anniversaries of their births.  Waiting in the peristylium is a toy chariot, its colors glowing in the noontime sun.

The laughter fades and echoes until the unnatural silence is restored, inside my head and smothering me from all sides.  I force my hand across the page, scratching out words I would have liked to fire at my fellow priestesses, or even my father.

Not a day had passed since I opened the chariot, when my father stopped me in the fauces, as I tried to make an escape to meet my friends and chariot.  “Aelia, we’re going to see Vesta.” Those words struck fear in my tiny heart, I shrieked as soon as they reached my ears.  Mother warned me about this: “Sometimes little girls from nice families like ours got the chance to serve,” “they have to live away from home for 30 years,” “they don’t get to have families, but it’s a huge honor.”

I knew then that even without the extended pit stop at the Temple, I’d only have a few more years at home before I was married to start my own family.  But at six, an immediate prospect is infinitely more scary than an a worse fate (as I now see, much later) several years off. I landed where I landed, and now I’m here.  I extinguish the candle because I don’t want all the air to leave, and I count the minutes until I can see again. I’m showered in dust as shifts change yet again in the temple so close above my head.  It’s only been two days, but at the same time an eternity.

But I really do know the feeling of an eternity.  Embarking on a decade of lessons in procedure with the prospect of just as long spent tending the flame and equal time instructing new priestesses before a lonely reintegration into regular society is daunting and sobering.

This sense of peace regarding my temporary sacrifice for the pantheon and the numina infiltrates my every action even so many years in, but seems so futile now.  Now I’ll never teach, never finish serving, and never return to real life. My life ending in ceremony: whether I’m satisfied or despondent; it's impossible to tell.  No more parchment now, my head is pounding. Was this place always so dim?  I contain this dialogue to the wall now, my fingers scraping the words I can’t bear to let die with me.  Die, die, die.  I’m dying now, and I’ll die here.  Fear suppressed by virtus, I cry that I can’t even dig my way out.  This has been a major part of my mental dialogue: digging up is punishable by molten lead down the throat, digging up will leave me suffocating under a mound of earth studded with iron, sitting here will leave me just like the complacent women around me I scoff at.

Clara is poured into a pit adjacent hers, and the three remaining don trowels and stoic expressions, prepared for the worst.

I hear scuffling above that doesn’t stop for what seems like over an hour.  But then not just from above, wails and thuds drift in from the left.

Breaching the roof, a rank odor of human waste attacks these three women attempting to right their wrong.

Voices.  Losing food and water must be worse than I thought.  I ignore them and keep thinking my words across the parched walls.

Eventually, they find a ladder and an explanation.  They tentatively lower both down to Aelia.

The light is fading, but now it’s coming from above.  My room is spinning, and I know the time has come. With one last push, I flail my wasting limbs against this suffocating earth and what little light remains fades to nothing.  Strangely, my last thought is of hands. They grasp my arms and jerk me up. Salve, Charon.  Here is your coin.

But what they see down the ladder is a pitiful mess of words and suffering, a nest around their swooning comrade.  Guilt is powerful, and it lets them yank her up into the fresh air. It speeds their motions as they tip water down her throat, cover her parched and baking face in cool cloths.

I still can’t see and I can’t sit, but with flashes of consciousness comes a sense of calm.  Resolution that I did not in fact sneak out to marry Marius, that it was really Clara. Clara, who has now replaced me.  But pounding and to the left, with no words left inside. Her last words framed on that scrap of parchment, the very same that blew under my bed.  Its signature smudged, only now could our compatriots decipher the truths of her treachery. For she is not a true servant to the goddess of the hearth.

toga praetexta - luxurious purple toga only worn by generals on triumph

peristylium - central garden in an upper-class Roman home

fauces - literally “jaws,” but here used in reference to the entrance hallway of a Roman villa

pantheon - the collection of all gods worshipped by Romans in the state religion, each deity representing a different aspect of life

numina - Roman animism, where each object was thought to have an associated spirit within

virtus - an idealized Roman sentiment evoking duty to country, service, and courage

salve - a greeting in Latin

Charon - ferryman who brought departed spirits across the River Styx to the Underworld, in exchange for payment