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praying to every demon in the underworld.
    .   .   .
    It became apparent a week later that our prayers hadn’t been enough. Vitus had abandoned us, but Comito had managed to persuade the owner of the taverna to let us keep the room so we at least had the bread dole. My older sister was never around anymore, but I’d seen her talking to Mother, and later I’d heard her voice in one of the upstairs rooms, followed by the grunts of the owner. I didn’t ask questions.
    I awoke in the middle of the night to Anastasia’s convulsing. It was cool in the room, but she was burning up. She whimpered as Mother lit an olive oil lamp, illuminating the wall frescoes of men and women in various compromising positions. A line of drool slipped from the corner of my sister’s mouth to her chin as her muscles twitched in a terrifying dance.
    My mother poured a clay cup of watered wine and held it to Anastasia’s lips, but she wouldn’t open her mouth. “Sweet pea, this will make you feel better. Please open up.”
    My sister only cried, her jaw locked tight. We were up all night, and the spasms became so strong my mother feared Anastasia’s arm had broken, the bone on her upper arm bent at a painful angle as my little sister screamed through clenched teeth. The muscles in her back moved of their own accord, and she arched into my mother as she lost control of her bowels, the stench of blood and feces filling the room.
    “A demon has possessed her,” my mother said. “There’s nothing I can do.”
    Comito returned with the first light of dawn, blanched at the scene before her, and pressed a kiss onto our sister’s forehead. “I’ll fetch the saint.”
    My mother muttered prayers as I took Anastasia, her hot little body bent like a bow as her birdlike hands fluttered on my lap, her eyes closed as I sang over her gasps, a jumble of hymns and taverna songs. Her eyes rolled back into her head, only the eerie whites staring unseeing, and her lips pulled back in a horrible grimace, her tiny teeth bared like a dog’s. Then she was still.
    “Anastasia?” I hoped she had gone to sleep, but there was no slump of relaxation, no even breathing. There was no breathing at all.
    My mother tried to take her from me. “Anastasia?”
    She shook my little sister, but it was no use. She was gone. The saint Comito brought to save Anastasia said her last rites instead, anointing her forehead with cooking oil from the taverna’s hearth below as we stitched her stiff body into a moth-eaten blanket.
    We had no money for a coffin and nothing to tuck next to her body since I had hidden her one-eyed doll under my pallet, wanting to keep something she had touched. Through her tears, Comito plaited Anastasia’s hair like a patrician’s daughter, looping the braids around the mottled flesh where her ears should have been. We buried her close to our father the next morning in the churchyard outside the city walls and piled her grave high with wildflowers, the stench of fermenting fish still permeating the air.
    That night I slept with Anastasia’s doll tucked under my chin, the mattress soaked through with my tears. I wished I could take her place—it was my fault Vitus had attacked her, my fault my little sister was cold in the ground while I lay warm in her bed.
    Vitus had the decency not to show himself again. I prayed the devil found new ways to torture him.
    .   .   .
    None of us wanted to face the next day, but the keeper of the taverna called on us before the sun had risen. “I need this room for paying customers,” he said, avoiding our eyes as he wiped his hands on his stained tunica. “You’ll have to leave by this evening.”
    “Tonight?” I asked.
    He opened his mouth to answer, but Comito pushed me out of the way. “We’ll be gone tonight,” she said, slamming the door in his face.
    “Where are we going to go?” I gestured to our filthy room with its stone bench and risqué frescoes. Pigs lived better. “Without this