the ecstasy of eleanor abernethy

by Tif Robinette

Eleanor Abernethy did not lift her eyes to the round-bellied Shetland ponies grazing the rolling green hills and did not stir when the tour bus groaned to a halt at the bluffs, where the others poured out to gawk at the puffins. Instead, she drew a carefully folded magazine clipping from her slim purse, as if it were a relic meant only for eyes worthy of its veneration. Her hands, skin thin as Bible parchment, veins like bruised scripture, unfurled the glossy paper. As she gazed at the image, her mouth watered, loosening the already precarious grip of her dentures.

Eleanor did not measure her life by the predictable markers of love found or lost, nor the child that passed straight from her body into the grave, nor her fifty years as a mid-level manager at the Hostess cake factory. No, she told the story of her life as a series of diets, each decade with its own gospel of salvation through deprivation. To each, she was a convert with the zealotry of Saul on the road to Damascus, struck by the divine revelation of a fresh chance of calorie dumping redemption. Every new diet book was the voice of a prophet sounding from the wilderness: make way for the fat you will shed.

Her mother knelt her at the altar of the cabbage soup diet as a young girl, a penitential broth of vegetables and powdered onion mix that left her perpetually dizzy and prone to fainting spells punctuated by thunderous sulphuric farts. By fifteen, she followed the conviction of Weight Watchers, their point system her Levitical law, cataloguing every morsel and mouthful as if atonement could be attained through tallying her sins. In her twenties, she found her faith in Fen-Phen, pills that delivered satiety like manna until they corroded hearts and were cast out from the marketplace like moneychangers from the temple.

The doctrine of liquid salvation of Slim Fast came next, chalky shakes that promised reprieve from the desires of the flesh. In the nineties, the Atkins Diet thundered like a prophet, calling her to forsake the profanity of carbohydrates in favor of sacred proteins. It was easy to believe in the gospel of ancestral redemption next when the Paleo Diet urged its flock to abandon dairy and grains as though they were the false gods of decadent modernity. Eleanor chewed her way through lean meats and raw vegetables, her jaw aching, and teeth eventually all cracking.

Now, in her twilight years, her body was a temple where alkaline smoothies of kale and probiotics worshipped at the altar of her gut health, the acidic sins of meat and dairy forsaken. Intermittent fasting, emulating Christ in the desert, gave her now cancer-knotted stomach reprieves from the painful shock of sustenance.

While her friends back home in Emporia, Kansas placidly enjoyed heaping ambrosia salads at the church potlucks, their wrinkles plumped like soaked raisins, Eleanor’s flesh draped like the raiment of saints, hallowed her sunken cheeks, and veiled her heaven-turned eyes.

When the bus driver tooted the horn in three gentle nudges, people filed back on. All Americans, like Eleanor, most with last names, like hers, endemic to the Shetland Islands. But she didn’t go in for their flimsy genealogical attachment to motherlands. If her ancestors left this place, carrying only their good name, there was a good reason. The mince an’ tatties sodium laden slop they called supper, for starters.

Eleanor reverently folded the magazine clipping back in her handbag as a mother and daughter plopped down beside her.

The little girl, so pale that the flush on her wind-chilled nose looked like the cherry on a cheesecake, wriggled in excitement, “Puffins are my second favorite cutest thing now. Will we see more ponies next?”

“Maybe on the way to the next stop. A museum, I think,” the mother answered.

“I hope it’s a museum about ponies, or even puffins.”

It wasn’t. Eleanor’s stomach flip-flopped like a landlocked fish. She swallowed hard on a lump forming in the back of her throat.

The mother tugged a crinkled paper bakery bag from her enormous cloth purse and plunged in her soft hand, rummaging the contents. She pulled out a couple triangular griddle breads dusted in powdered sugar and handed one to her daughter. She turned to Eleanor.

“Want one? They call them Bannocks.”

Eleanor raised her palms as if to ward off a spiritual attack and shook her head. “Three-hundred and thirty calories. Not for me, no.”

For Eleanor’s mother, there was no worse configuration of a lady's physique than being squat. And the woman planted in the seat beside her was nothing if she wasn’t squat. Her daughter, though, even in a garish fleece beanie covered in frolicking horses that drooped over her bald head, was shockingly dainty. Eleanor admired her spindly arms and how her pinched cheekbones elegantly protruded between her sunken cheeks and gaunt eyes. A beautiful child, Eleanor’s mother would have said. When Eleanor was five, splashing in the bath, her mother squeezed a roll of baby fat, squishing her elbow as if her long red nails could puncture her squeaky pink skin and release the trapped air like popping a balloon. “We’ll try the cabbage diet next,” she’d said.

As the bus swerved around an escaped bawling sheep in the road, Eleanor knocked the Bannock out of the girl's hand and planted her white orthopedic heel squarely atop it, grinding it into the rubber floor. The girl’s eyes widened and pricked with tears.

“Eat things like that and you’ll be too fat to ride ponies,” Eleanor hissed in her ear.

The mother heard her and bolted up. “She has cancer!” They shifted to another seat.

“That’s no excuse. So do I.”

Minutes later, as the bus rounded the bended road above the seaside cliffs, Eleanor noticed a smudge of white on her thumb, powdered sugar from the pastry she mercifully batted to the floor. No good deed left unpunished. She dug a tissue out of her pocket, spit, and rubbed it clean.

The smell of sugar surged bile up her dry throat. She spent fifty years at war with the devilish stuff. The air inside the factory was calorie laden, swirling with sneaky carbs and airborne lipids that clung to her graying eyelashes, caked in the fibers of her billowing blouses, crept in the crevices of her shriveled skin. Conveyor belts rolled past her eight hours a day in an unending procession of refined sugar iniquity: donuts glistening like golden idols, miniature pies oozing lurid jellies, honey buns lacquered to an ungodly sheen, and cheese Danishes rupturing their cherry-red jam like a blasphemous mockery of Christ’s wounds.

All day, saliva surging under her tongue, and demons growling from her shriveled stomach, she murmured: Lord, grant me the faith and appetite of a mustard seed. Guilt like hellfire seethed in her vacant bowels when her tongue darted over the tempting sweetness of her powder sugared lips as she clocked out each evening.

In the last temptation of her lengthy career, they brought her a cake to mark her retirement, a false god slathered in decadent chocolate icing with heaps of powdered sugar like the ashes of civilization after the second horse of the apocalypse laid waste. Get thee behind me, Satan.

But it was only after she retired that she discovered that constant and overwhelming temptation had been vital to her lifetime of abstinence. Without perpetual seduction, her faith faltered. She began to hoard confectionary and baking magazines to lasciviously pour over in between meals of kale smoothies and dry salads.

When she confessed to her priest her pornographic lust for carbohydrates, he told her that while her habit was strange, it wasn’t a sin. What did he know of caloric piety, when his belly was the first thing to greet partitioners every Sunday morning? But she was not one to voice criticisms of other’s weight, whispering to herself instead, “There but for the grace of God go I,” when a thick rump or flabby arm passed by her saintly vision. It is a matter of discipline for a true believer to attain the earthly blessing of a heavenly body. Leave judgement to the Lord.

The false prophet Ozempic was heretical to her honed and hoarded lists of daily caloric intake. A third of the congregation of her parish were seduced by the blasphemous ease of the syringed lie, and their Sunday best steadily sagged over their slimmed shoulders and hips. But the Lord blessed the faithful, and when doctors shook their heads as they showed her the x-ray of her stomach, more tumor than tissue, her dentures flashed in triumph. More tumor than stomach. Her flesh, through devoted denial of fats for eight decades, finally submitted to divine purpose and would work with her and not against her. The effectual and fervent prayer of the righteous accomplishes much.

If she could breathe air or soak in sunlight for sustenance she surely would. Consider the lilies of the valley and how they grow, Christ said. Instead of photosynthesis, she was cursed by Eve to count calories. An apple contained ninety-five, but the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil contained far more, Eleanor suspected. The Eucharist, a half ounce of consecrated wine and translucent wafer, contained only a merciful nine calories.

On the first Sunday after her diagnosis, she sat in the echo of her barren kitchen and calculated in the margins of First Corinthians how many times she would have to take communion to consume the entire transubstantiated body of Christ before she died. She tallied with the meticulousness cultivated by decades on diets, that one pound of lean pork loin held one thousand and one hundred calories. It may be sacrilege to compare the holy flesh of the Son of God to butchered hog meat, but Eleanor had spent her life calculating the calories in pork loins, not prophets, so it seemed the most practical approach. She knew that her assumption of a one-to-one ratio of earthly calories and transubstantiated calories could be gravely faulty, but since both her priest and her Bible made no distinctions on the matter, she was satisfied to assume.

From there she made the crucial decision to guess Christ’s weight. She studied the crucified wooden statue above the altar in her church: the concave of his abdomen, the striated muscles on his outstretched arms, toned by the weight of the sin of the world. One hundred and forty pounds, she reckoned. She multiplied Christ’s weight by the calories in a pound of pork then divided it by the nine calories in the wine and wafer. By her math, it would take seventeen thousand one hundred and eleven measured servings of the Eucharist to accomplish a total consumption of The Word made Flesh’s immaculate hundred and fifty-four thousand calories.

She wrote that number down neatly, underlining it for emphasis. She had taken communion every Sunday after her First Communion for seventy-five years. Multiplied by fifty-two weeks, that only came to three thousand and ninety servings. A lifetime of habitual devotion and still she had only taken in less than a quarter of Christ.

She stared at the column of numbers for a long time. A little taste of salvation doled out in crumbs, just enough to keep her hungry for the next Sunday, never satiated, never complete, even if she lived three more lifetimes. One hundred and fifty-four thousand calories of the body and blood of her Lord. The insurmountable number writhed in her cancerous stomach until she discovered a small article in the back of one of her culinary magazines: the clipping in her handbag, a photograph of the venerable relic and sole focus of this pilgrimage to Shetland.

The afternoon sun tilted over loping green hills as the bus crunched into the graveled parking lot of The Old Haa Museum. The building gleamed in stark whitewash. Thick stone walls built in the sixteen hundreds to withstand nor-easterly winds and driving coastal rains. Eleanor filed off the bus, elbowing her way to the front of the other tourists as they stretched their legs and moseyed through the manicured garden. She knew the constant dull whine of hunger, but the mounting thump of her pulse in her throat and tightening in her jaw felt ecclesiastical in craving. She swiped a thin strand of drool slipping out of the creased corner of her mouth.

The only employee at the museum, a buttered biscuit of a woman in a cable knit sweater, a mug of lukewarm tea permanently attached to her hand, greeted the group as they congested the narrow artery of the entrance.

“Welcome to The Old Haa Museum. Follow me for the tour. And mind your shoulder bags and fingers. We only touch with our eyes here.” She looked at the little girl.

Eleanor hung back as the group followed the docent around the corner. She heard her thick Scots brogue pointing out the usefulness of encased historical bric-a-brac. Eleanor quickly shuffled from room to room, then up narrow stairs, avoiding the others, until she found it, enshrined in a glass case, surrounded by iron age fishing spears, stone age knives, and rudimentary tools.

An enormous hunk of bog butter, partially wrapped in a shroud of crudely woven sheep's wool, rested in a glass vitrine on a pedestal in the center of the room. The orange setting sun beaconed a beatific glow over the peat preserved lump of ruminant dairy fat, recently pried from the earth. She knelt in front of it on her brittle knees, her hands raised in prayer, her eyes transfixed.

A didactic laminated nearby noted the bog butter’s composition of predominantly saturated fatty acids, mainly palmitic and stearic, its age of two thousand and thirty years, the perfect conditions of low temperature, low oxygen, and high acidity of the peat bogs where it was buried for preservation, and where it was recently unearthed by some farmer nearby in Yell.

But Eleanor Abernethy already knew all of this, it was all written in the magazine clipping in her purse. What wasn’t written was that the bog butter was formed at the very hour Jesus broke bread with his disciples, saying, “Eat this in remembrance of me,” and at forty-seven pounds, that it contained one hundred and fifty-four thousand calories. The exact number she calculated for Eucharal completion.

The tour wound up downstairs and she heard the chatter of voices disappearing back onto the bus and then heard it rumble away without her. But she did not move from her obeisance to the bog butter. It was only when dusk began to filter the room in pink, that the docent, turning off the lights and closing up, found her.

“Och!” Her mug of tea fell and shattered on the floor, tea splattering. “Your tour bus left, did you know that?”

Eleanor did not break her veneration of the bog butter and did not flinch when the docent shook her shoulder. Saliva rolled out of her mouth, soaking her blouse, pooling on the floorboards.

“Are you not alright? Should I call for emergency?”

But as she pulled out her cell phone, Eleanor, without a word, leapt up, snatched a fishing spear off the wall, and drove it into the woman’s side, piercing under her ribs and through her stomach.

The woman fell with a soft, “Och aye.” Herbal tea and blood poured from her wound.

Eleanor Abernethy stood before the vitrine, and as she raised the bloody spear in the air, her reflection wavered faintly in the glass, shrunken and wide-eyed, another face, the face of Christ, shone back at her. With zealous whack, she struck the glass, and it shattered. Her hand trembled as she reached through the shards with a stone knife, skimming it against the flesh and blood of her Lord, and slicing off a translucent sliver.

She placed it on her tongue. It dissolved, plunging her taste buds into rapture. Her gums ached against her dentures, so with a swift motion she yanked them free, letting them clatter to the floor. She flashed the knife again, now deeper into the butter, no longer timid. She hacked and ate, until finally plunging her hands into the golden mass, scooping fistfuls into her mouth.

* * *

The next morning, when another tour bus of historians stumbled across her body, Eleanor Abernethy lay in prostrate rigor mortis, her belly grotesquely distended, her withered hands clutching the empty shroud where the bog butter had been. It was gone, all of it, even the last greasy smears sucked off the woolen fabric.

One of the historians, a tweed-vested man with a notebook in hand, leaned over her body. Her face, mouth slack and gaping, neck lolled, eyes rolled upward toward some unseen revelation, struck him with a sudden uncanny familiarity.

“She reminds me,” he said in hushed reverence, “of that Bernini statue in Rome. The Ecstasy of St. Teresa.”

Photo of Tif Robinette

BIO: Tif Robinette was raised in a fundamentalist sect in West Virginia, homeschooled along with her eight younger siblings. She now lives with her partner and critters in an off-grid tiny home she built in the mountains of northern California. Her work has been published in various places, including The Southeast Review, Phile Magazine, Gingerzine, Black Hare Press and Feign. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize (2025). She is represented by Sam Edenborough at Greyhound Literary.