Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune
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Excerpt
When Joan first comes to Claribel, it’s in a vision. The bells hum. The saints slide around like strange vampires, their mandibles clacking fervently. Joan is made of hellfire. She’s a child in armor. She’s a woman with nothing left to give. They are both so far from home, Claribel and Joan, here in this little town in Ohio, here in this spring of 1926.
Joan opens her arms, such a plaintive gesture. She says to Claribel with eyes full of want, “Don’t I deserve this? Just the smallest taste?”
Claribel’s in a cemetery, but she wasn’t here before. The bells are humming, until they aren’t. Everywhere, the warm fungal musk of graves after rainfall. It’s dark. The saints are gone. Joan, gone. Just her, Claribel, with her own unlit body, which might as well be a furnace without any coal. An icebox in full melt.
Get up, Claribel says to herself. She gets up. There’s something squirming on her, wetly alive. She makes herself touch. Mud. It’s only mud, wormy, delirious.
Senaa Ahmad
Senaa Ahmad is the author of The Age of Calamities, a short story collection forthcoming in January 2026. Her fiction has previously appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Best Canadian Stories. She’s received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, and the Speculative Literature Foundation. Her work has also been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the Sunburst Award, and a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Fiction.
Patrick Ryan on “Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune”
I love a good ghost story—especially one where the haunted person is trying to figure out why they’re being haunted, and the ghost is slowly letting them know. “Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune” is just such a tale, but it takes that formula and sets it on fire, and from the ashes arises a wholly original kind of ghost story.
Claribel is a housecleaner living in Ohio in 1926. She has many clients (meaning, many bosses), works very hard, and her existence is a day-to-day challenge. One evening, the spirit of Joan of Arc appears to her—not to beckon the young housekeeper to war (as Joan was once beckoned) but to open her arms, indicating Claribel’s very existence, and say, “Don’t I deserve this? Just the smallest taste?”
What unfolds is a story of possession. Also, in a strange way, a story of collaboration, for Joan begins to inhabit Claribel’s body when Claribel is sleeping. Accompanied by a band of ghoulish saints, Joan prowls the night, and Claribel, having tacitly agreed to this arrangement, finds herself waking up in the town cemetery, or in her own bed but covered in evidence of Joan’s nighttime adventures. That evidence, sometimes, is terrifying.
It’s the why of it all that drives this story. Why are Joan and the saints pursuing Claribel? What does Claribel expect from this arrangement? I read “Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune” on the edge of my seat, worried for Claribel and concerned for Joan, even while her ghost proves, at times, to be something of a brat. One Story is delighted to be publishing this wildly inventive story, which might, in light of the holiday season, be considered Dickensian.
Q&A by Patrick Ryan
- PR: Where did you get the idea for this story?
- SA: I have a folder with little scraps of ideas I’ve collected over the years, one or two hastily jotted lines about a premise, and that’s what I started with (someone lets a ghost possess their body, they wake up to variously alarming situations, much of the plot happens during their blackouts).
In 2018, I began working on a collection of speculative stories that featured historical figures in unusual settings. When I re-discovered this scrap of an idea, I knew I wanted the ghost to be someone from history. Joan of Arc brought the story to life; in particular, she described having visions of saints and angels at the age of thirteen, which was apparently a revelatory experience for her but seemed harrowing to me, the realm of religious horror.
Like so many stories, this one is influenced by a big pile of other things: Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, reading about the understanding of mental illness throughout different points in history, Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Gene: An Intimate History, particularly its description of the eugenics movement of the 1920s, which had an unsettling parallel in the rise of white supremacism and the anti-vax movement of the 2010s and 2020s, the movie The Babadook, somehow, and small pieces of personal and family history. - PR: How long did it take you to finish a draft you were happy with?
- SA: I wrote the first draft in January 2019, set it aside for a couple of years, then revised it over several drafts, with the persistent feeling that it was almost there but not quite. It took until 2023 to feel like the story was doing what I wanted it to be doing.
- PR: As Joan and the saints begin to “use” Claribel’s body, Claribel doesn’t completely understand what’s going on. Much of the story’s tension results from this confusion. Do you think Claribel completely understands Joan and the saints’ intentions by the end of the story? And, to your thinking, how important is her level of understanding to the story?
- SA: I think living in a prolonged state of agony has numbed Claribel’s sense of what she should care about and why. She’s been feigning normalcy for a very long time, well before Joan meets her, as her life slid into an inescapably bleak place.
To me, she’s less interested in what the saints’ intentions are and more concerned about how it affects her directly. It’s an echo of when she sees the Klansmen outside her window, or when she attends the lectures on eugenicists in her “old life.” In some ways, her hazy understanding has operated as a protective veil for herself, even at the expense of others. - PR: Can you tell us a little about how you arrived at the way to render Joan? Not just her physical undoing, but the visual presentation of her?
- SA: One of the seeds for this story was the idea that Joan might’ve lived through the horrors of her life, only to be trapped in eternity with these whispering and malevolent spirits. I imagined her flinging herself from emotion to emotion, trying to save herself from drowning, without realizing the devastation of her actions.
I wanted her to have a frantic, choppy quality, someone who’d been coming apart for centuries. Her appearance as a crumbling ghost was an unexpected source of humor and strangeness for me. I also wanted to emphasize her youth—she was eighteen or nineteen when she died—and I was tickled by the idea of her talking like a quasi-modern teenager while the saints spoke in a more archaic and stylized manner. - PR: Would you call “Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune” a horror story, a love story, a ghost story, or some other kind of story?
- SA: I always envisioned it as a horror story, starting off in a place of dread and slipping further into outright nightmare.
- PR: What are you currently working on?
- SA: The collection of speculative histories I started working on in 2018, The Age of Calamities, is being published in January 2026! It includes “Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune.” I’m also writing a novel about a town that’s haunted by the many ghosts of a teenage girl. That sounds a lot like “Our Lady,” but I promise it’s not.
- PR: What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
- SA: Over the years, I’ve accumulated a lot of half-remembered advice of unknown provenance. Reading poetry is an excellent way to loosen the brain before writing. Time away from a story can clarify its intentions. Fear of failure can asphyxiate the work. Find peers who are so good at what they do that they push you to become better, too!
