MARY & MAGDALEN: AFTER THE CROSS by Mikisbi

Writer: Mikisbi

Subject: MARY & MAGDALEN: AFTER THE CROSS

Link: ReligiousFetish.com / 01.09.2026

Mary & Magdalen: After the Cross

I. AT THE FOOT OF THE WOOD

The hill was almost empty. The soldiers had gone down with their dice and their laughter. The body still hung, slack, the head fallen to one side, the mouth open as if a last word had been stolen mid-breath. Flies had already found the wounds.

Mary stood close enough to smell the iron and the dust. Magdalene stood closer still. For a long time neither of them spoke. Then Magdalene laughed, a short, ugly sound that did not belong to mourning.

“Look at him,” she said. “The king. The lamb. The son. He looks like meat left out in the sun.”

Mary did not tell her to stop. She looked at the hanging body and felt something in her chest go loose, as if a knot she had worn for thirty years had finally slipped.

“He promised he would not leave us,” Mary said. “He left. He left me with a title and a hole.”

Magdalene stepped nearer to the wood. She reached up and touched the cold foot, then the calf, then higher, as if checking whether anything in him still answered.

“Nothing,” she said. “Not a twitch. All that preaching. All that wine into blood. And now he cannot even keep his eyes open.” She spat into the dust at the base of the cross. “Some god.”

Mary’s mouth tightened. Then she spat too. The spit hit the wood and ran down a crack.

“Say it,” Magdalene whispered. “Say what you never said while he was listening.”

Mary looked at the dead face. “You were a son. You were never a husband. You took my years and gave me a story. I am tired of the story.”

“Louder.”

“I am tired of being the vessel,” Mary said, and her voice rose. “I am tired of being untouched and holy and empty. You died and left me clean. I do not want to be clean.”

II. MOCKERY

They circled the cross like two women around a market stall. Magdalene pulled at the loincloth until it tore and hung. Mary watched, then helped. The dead flesh was pale, already changing.

“Behold the man,” Magdalene said, mimicking a soldier. “Behold the limp little king. Behold the mouth that fed five thousand and cannot suck a finger now.”

Mary put two fingers to the open mouth. The tongue was still. She withdrew them and wiped them on her robe.

“He used to speak as if the world bent for him,” she said. “Now the world does not even bother to close his eyes.”

Magdalene climbed a little on the wood, enough to put her face near his. “Rise,” she told the corpse. “Come down. Save yourself. Save your mother. Save the whore who washed your feet with her hair.” She waited. Nothing. She slapped the cold cheek, not hard, just enough to make the head rock. “See? Even a slap does more than prayer.”

Mary laughed then. It startled her. She put a hand over her mouth and laughed again, lower.

“If the women in the village heard us,” she said.

“Let them hear,” Magdalene answered. “Let them hear that the mother and the sinner stayed after the men ran, and that we did not kneel. We inventoried him. We found him wanting.”

They stayed until the light went red. They said every pious sentence backwards. They called him carpenter’s mistake, preacher’s corpse, god who leaked. When they were empty of mockery, they were not empty of hunger. That came next, and it did not look at the cross anymore. It looked at each other.

III. THE TURN

They left the hill before full dark. The city below still smelled of smoke and animals. Magdalene knew a room that could be locked. A widow’s spare chamber. A lamp. A bed that was only boards and a cloth.

Inside, Mary stood with her back to the door as if the dead son might still walk in. Magdalene took the veil from Mary’s hair and dropped it on the floor.

“He is not coming,” Magdalene said. “You can put the mother down now.”

Mary’s hands shook when she opened her own robe. “If I do this I cannot take it back.”

“Good,” Magdalene said. “Taking things back is what priests do. We are done with priests.”

They kissed the way people kiss when they have been waiting through a funeral. Mary’s mouth was unsure at first, then not. Magdalene bit her lower lip and Mary made a sound that had never been used in a prayer.

“Say my name,” Magdalene said against her throat.

“Mary.”

“The other one. The one they spit.”

“Magdalene.”

“Again.”

“Magdalene.” 

IV. THE ROOM

Clothes came off without ceremony. The lamp made their skin look like warm clay. Magdalene put Mary on the cloth and looked at her the way she had looked at the body on the hill, except this body answered.

“You were told this flesh was only for giving birth,” Magdalene said. “Tonight it is for taking.”

She put her mouth on Mary’s breast. Mary’s hands went into Magdalene’s hair and stayed there. When Magdalene’s fingers found her between the legs Mary’s hips lifted as if they had been waiting for permission from no one.

“Look at me,” Magdalene said. “Not at the ceiling. Not at heaven. At me.”

Mary looked. Her eyes were wet and dark. “I thought I would feel damned.”

“And?”

“I feel awake.”

Magdalene went down her body with her mouth, slow, talking between kisses. She named the parts the priests never named. She said the son had never touched her like this because the son had been a story, and stories do not use their tongues. Mary’s thighs closed and opened. When Magdalene licked her in earnest Mary’s voice broke into something raw.

“Do not stop.”

“I will stop when you forget you were ever called virgin.”

V. WHAT THEY DID

They took turns. Mary was clumsy, and then she was not. She learned the taste of Magdalene, the way her breath changed, the way her hands pulled. They used mouths and hands and the press of hips. They said ugly holy words into each other’s skin: vessel, whore, mother, temple, empty tomb, full mouth.

At one point Mary laughed again, breathless. “If he could see.”

“He cannot,” Magdalene said. “That is the point. The dead do not chaperone.”

Mary put Magdalene on her back and tried to give back everything she had just been given. She was less practiced and more hungry. Magdalene guided her with a fist in her hair and a running commentary that would have burned a chapel down. When Magdalene came, she did it with her eyes open and Mary’s name in her mouth, the sinner’s name and the mother’s name tangled until they were only two women on a cheap cloth in a locked room.

They did not sleep at once. They lay sticky and talking, still half mocking the hill, still half touching. Mary said she would not go back to the role. Magdalene said roles were for people who needed an audience. They had already used up their audience. He was still hanging in the dark, and they were here.

VI. BEFORE DAWN

Before the light, they did it again, slower, as if to make sure the first time had not been only shock. Mary whispered things she had never been allowed to want. Magdalene answered by doing them. When they were finished, Mary picked the veil up from the floor and did not put it on. She held it, then let it fall again.

“What do we call this?” she asked.

“Not a sacrament,” Magdalene said. “Not a sin either, unless you still need that word to feel the edge. Call it the night the mother stopped waiting for a resurrection and took a living mouth instead.”

Mary nodded. Outside, somewhere, a rooster would crow and men would start a story about an empty tomb. In the room there was no tomb. There were two bodies that had refused to stay in the places assigned to them.

They dressed without speaking much. At the door Magdalene kissed her once more, not gently.

“If they ask where you were,” she said.

“I will say I watched the cross until I understood it was only wood,” Mary answered. “And then I left the wood to the flies.”

They went out into the thinning dark separately, so that the city would not yet have a new story to kill them with. Behind them the lamp died. The cloth kept the shape of what they had done a little while longer, then did not.

THE END