amy zimmerman's i am an amateur witch/medium...

(How to summon the ghost of Anne Boleyn)

• Develop a strong opinion on religious abuses. Read a treaty. Write a treaty?
  

• Pour a vial of poison into Bishop John Fisher’s soup.
  

• Spend a year at your family estate in the countryside because you’re sick of all the petty drama. Tell everyone you’re doing SOME GREAT THING, like making a business plan or coding or writing well- reasoned letters about Catholic gluttony and consolidating power with your many allies when really you’re just lying around in a daze, thinking about everyone who’s wronged you and eating wax.
  

• Learn French so that you can walk around the party and not have to speak to anyone because they are speaking English and you speak French.

• Commit high treason.

• Sleep with your boss’s husband. Sleep with your brother.

• Sleep in a room with four other women—play whose dad is the most powerful, whose waist is smallest, who’s going to get married first?
  

• Go to Riverside Park at 6:30 AM and steal the first hunting hound you can find. Scream at the hound, “faster, faster.” Run after the hound. Weave through bushes and trees looking for big game. Post up and down as though you are straddling a galloping horse. Ignore the screams of the wounded deer and bereft dog owners. Do not stop until you taste venison.

• Don’t clean your body for six months. If anyone asks you if you’re okay, just tell them you don’t have the plague, and that’s more than they can say.

• Never hold a paying job in your entire life.

Search incest on PornHub. It’s not gross/exploitative if you’re communing with the dead. Rub ice over your nipples until they’re hard and open all of your windows so that the interim super who hangs out by the recycling cans can watch.

Wait two weeks until your sheets are absolutely filthy. Filthy like it doesn’t even matter that you started using a top sheet, because both of your sheets are absolutely filthy, the color of morning light against a white wall. Take all of your clothes off and bunch your yellow sheets into a dense clot. Push it between your thighs like you’re 13 at summer camp. Which video do you want to watch?

This isn’t about picking the one your boyfriend will get hard to. This is about historic integrity. Look for casting couch clips that were shot around 1536. Look for video girls who haven’t showered in a month and are slowly lead poisoning themselves with white makeup powder. Skin like flour and waists that ooze open with a firework of fleabites. Daddy, I’m already corroding.

When she fucks him she knows that she will die for it. She has already accomplished so many incredible, imaginative things with her pussy. She wants a love that will separate her head from her body. Fuck her until mom comes home, choke her until her neck snaps.

Don’t worry if she has anachronistic body modifications or bleached hair. Don’t listen to the dialogue. All that matters is: are their eyes the same color? Is she scared? Does he love her?

You will know when you have been possessed by the Ghost of Anne Boleyn in your gut—it’s like the feeling of getting an IUD inserted but it never ends, just pressing and turning, looking for the right spot. Is your mouth full of pop rocks or is that just the sound of ten joints cracking for the first time in four centuries, a ghastly hand pressing on your gag reflex from the inside, reaching up to try and wrench open your jaw? On the bright side, you’re going to vomit all the time.

(I am the ghost of Anne Boleyn—early life)

Your name is Anne Boleyn and all you’ve ever wanted is to be a good country woman, to be kind to your serfs and introduce new produce strains like lettuce from Spain or some kind of nutritious root that they can put in hot water and slurp through their brown, rotted gap teeth. Ok, fine, maybe you want more than that. Maybe you had an orgasm riding front saddle when you were 12 years old and maybe you’ve always thought that says something about you, in that way where we pick five disparate points from our childhood and stare at them for so many years that a through line appears, and the other points become outliers and then fade into fiction. The point is, you are the girl who fucked the saddle and liked it, and that truth is the asterisk by your name in all the stodgy history books.

Except maybe you are still waiting on those biographies. Maybe you are Anne Boleyn only so far as you have an active imagination. Maybe when you were 15 you met a man. Maybe his name was Francis I—more likely, it wasn’t. He may as well have been the king of France for how little he thought of you. For all of the times you’ve cum on a horse, you don’t actually know what it means to want something from your synapses to your asshole to your toes. You realize this the afternoon you walk into the library at lunch and see Francis fucking your sister, Mary Boleyn, against a shelf of encyclopedias, her shirt pulled up and one nipple pressing against the wood, his cock wet and methodical, pounding out the seconds until fifth period.

In the young adult book I read about this period in Anne Boleyn’s life, 1514-1522, the dick was a candle stick, and Anne walked down a dark corridor and caught a reflection that was not meant for a child. A mirrored surface like a portal or a portent, she saw another whore pushing the wax into Mary’s pussy to the hilt, a writhing mass of powdered bosoms, scented cunnies, etc., a million old-timey British-isms for gangbang. Francis watched on with a hand on his crotch, and at a certain point the King and the 15-year-old who would one day fuck England wide open caught each other’s eyes across an expanse of polished gold and sweaty asses. He had no idea that he was being written in as a relatively minor chapter in a YA book that would be published hundreds of years later, for horny and bookish teenage girls with very little respect for the French monarchy. (This memory seems insane now, this book that I remember as YA must have been written for grown-ups).

When you are a French monarch you do things like call yourself the sun king, and then you realize that the universe does not in fact orbit around the sun. She is the center of gravity, and you are the old pervert who squanders his divine right pairing up household objects with human orifices.

Anne Boleyn, the horny and bookish English nobody, wonders if Francis, the most powerful man she knows, did all of this for her. She thinks that nothing will ever feel as good as this feels, but she is wrong.

(I am the ghost of Anne Boleyn—love)

From the first scholarly biography of Anne Boleyn: “She was well aware, she said, that there was an old prophecy that in this time a queen of England was to be burned, and she loved him so much that she did not fear even death if she could marry him.”

The Thames looks surprisingly similar to Coney Island; children run their greasy fingers through the water and men cast fishing rods into the murk and wait for luck. Anne Boleyn stands by the banks of the river or she is carried past them all on a private boat, her famous face peeking out from behind a heavy curtain, damask against her cheek. Just a royal mistress, she surveys London and sees buildings rise from the dirt as if summoned by a higher power. She predicts a seismic break between the monarch and the pope, a rift that will pit Henry directly against his people, and his God. The country will be broken apart and put back together again, metamorphosis but not by way of centuries or elements, forces beyond our control—she will do it. She will fuck this fat, stupid, obscene and fetid King into the future.

The water lulls, and she remembers them as they were: the first time she kissed the red stubble on his chin and tasted his mouth. The saliva of a man who had never had to think past any single second, who was destined for immortality from his very first breath, his life condensed into Important Facts and Figures and passed down through the generations, his legacy stretched out as far as empire.

Or maybe she remembers the night when she finally came to him. She could already feel the weight of the crown on her head and she wanted something she could hold, now, some physical proof of the world that she had already begun to manifest. What started as a game had become something else entirely. She is so turned on by her own calculations that she has become undone. After years of teasing and a long scroll of promises between them, curling behind her like the train of a wedding dress, she approaches his chamber in silence.

From Anne Boleyn’s execution speech: “I have not come here to preach a sermon; I have come here to die.”

There is no precedent for this, not in the history of England and not in the history of Anne and Henry, which is passionate and petulant and combative and sharp. She kisses every part of his face like a child and he bends his tall body towards her like she is the sun, and closes his eyes like she is the sun, and the same song plays over and over again or maybe she’s not listening anymore. Richard Siken wrote, “Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.” I’ve never had the kind of sex where Siken felt applicable. Of course, in the end, poetry helped get Anne Boleyn murdered but she didn’t know that yet.

(I am the ghost of Anne Boleyn—love)

Everyone told me that if I was a witch you would never leave me. Not in so many words, but it was implied.

There are at least two women inside my body, maybe more. I literally could not be more woman. On top of all of that, I am a queen and a criminal and a doomed lover with a sexy death wish. I am standing here with my head in my hands, offering it to you.

You think that history started with the first time we kissed, or with your parents in the War of Roses/the suburbs, their decisions your inheritance, these lives so neatly cordoned off and so easily predicted. But I feel like Eve every time you come to me in my thrift store corsets and like Adam every time you leave, a rib pulled out of me where you journeyed out into the world on stolen breath. Every step you take I feel it in my side. I will give up any limb, any organ, to avoid the severance of whatever sentiment is still between us.

(I am the ghost of Anne Boleyn—decapitation)

Years pass. Different men come into power and masons break down one crest for another. You see your initials everywhere, AB, on the façade of a townhouse bubbling up from the Thames, on scrolls of poetry they read in the courtyards and outside your door, on royal contracts and edicts. You’re married now. He’s disgusting and cruel and keeps you in heavy corsets, tits up, pearls foaming at your ears and neck, so that when you are naked and alone you find that your body is red and covered in welts. Luckily, you’re never alone.

Years pass. If somebody loves me enough to go to hell for it, why am I still bored? Everything that used to feel sexy—hunting, affairs, sitting outside on the fire escape naked instead of going to mass—is just exhausting. To feel something, or so they tell me, I have sex with my brother. He is gentle and kind, watches me with my father’s eyes, and holds me in this shame. We are terrified. Why would I do something like that? Which sick historian put me here, in this dirty corner of the castle, fucking my brother for an heir/attention/an orgasm/ just because I can?

Eventually, I become resigned to the fact that people will do what they want to me, and I have visions of kings and fathers and scholars eternally exhuming me,

twisting my bones into unnatural shapes and leaving their conjectures and words in puddles of spit at the door of my crypt. Meanwhile, England goes to war again and one day my husband moves me from a palace to a prison, which is also a palace. He kills every man I ever loved. When I eventually put my neck against the marble to wait for execution, I am comforted by the knowledge that my mind is, and has always been, separate from my body.

My name is Anne Boleyn, and a little known fact about me is that I am not only headless but heartless. I cut out my own heart when I was 14 years old, and was technically a corpse at the time of my wedding, consummation, and coronation. I took a knife and cut out my own heart because I am braver and more fully realized that any of you pussies could ever imagine. After that, everything I ever did was the smartest thing I could have possibly done, ruthless and clearheaded. And nothing hurt me anymore, not my brother’s death, not my miscarriages, not the man I dedicated my life to loving looking past me—not even him looking at her. And least of all, a thin sword slicing through my neck.

I soar above the Tower of London and see in every direction. I plunge deep into the Thames, I taste iron, I shoot into the stars and feel cold, and longing. I look down on all of you who feel too much and do so little with all of that feeling. I am disgusted by the wet farts and lovelorn sighs of your distractible hearts.

(I have successfully summoned the ghost of Anne Boleyn)

Anne Boleyn comes to me in my darkest hours, her head in her hands, decomposing lips set in an eternal, seductive pout. When I’m impossibly bored at the bar and fear that I will be bored forever, she takes my two longest fingers and presses them into her neck stump, where there is blood and fat and also dust, probably. When I am lonely we lie on my bed together, fully clothed, and I reach over every so often to change the song, brushing my arm against her chest in a hyper-charged second of silence. In summer the smell can be unbearable.

As my ghostly stand-in, Anne can haunt all of the people who have left me behind. When my boyfriend breaks up with me on a park bench in Riverside, then has the audacity to remain seated on the bench that I had just assumed I would live the rest of my life and then eventually die on, I am forced to vacate but leave the rotting corpse of Anne Boleyn behind me.

In the dusk, retreating past bagel stores and bustling book shops, I can just see the outline of a medium sized white boy and a 16th century noblewoman. Strips of her bloody nightgown float in the wind alongside flaps of loosened skin. Worms and flies creep out from hidden crevices and attack his Fjallraven, crawl inside his nostrils and shimmy into the softest parts of his brain.

“My heart is outside of my chest—here, I am holding it out to you,” we say. The river is sallow and grey, the tower is silent. The bench is empty, but you knew that already.