This Halloween You’re Dressing Up as a Nun With a Gun
by Raja'a Khalid
Kate Molloy, Over, Under (Installation) oil on canvas, oil on board, 30 x 30 cm, 20 x 26 cm, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.
This Halloween You’re
Dressing Up as a
Nun With a Gun
Raja'a Khalid | FEB 2025 | Issue 42
Ummi wants you to look your best. She's rented the habit from a professional costume store and even bought you the sheer black tights from the French lingerie shop you still blush to go inside. With her cool, steady fingers, she smears her own red Chanel lipstick on the glossy bulbs of your mouth edge to edge so you can look like Zoë Lund from Ms .45. Like Zoë your smile is big, too big and when Ummi finishes, it looks like a howl of crimson ready to swallow the whole world in one piece. You are a baby demon now, vulgar and strangely exquisite at the same time. Never be afraid to go over just a little, Ummi says, holding up the lipstick like a crayon. Just a little. A girl has to get just a little messy sometimes, she says, putting out a cigarette in the ashtray. Everytime she watches you getting dressed, she offers you this little wisdom on how young girls should be—in her words—wild and dangerous. She says this again as she tucks a loose strand of your brown hair back beneath the veil and then she does something she has never done before. She lifts your chin up to her and kisses you on the mouth and your lips leave a faint stain of pink on hers. How long, you wonder, before this subtle smudge fades from her, or have you—you consider the possibility—tattooed her forever with this unusual goodbye. She’s done it—you reckon—to give you some of her lethal spirit, to pass to you that streak of independence she has always possessed and you are yet to exhibit. You are stepping out alone for the first time in a year and this kiss is to be her guarding talisman. You look in the mirror and smoke rises from your charcoal eyes as they fall on your painted face and you think of the women in those fashion magazines Ummi leaves scattered around the house. When you were younger you had torn the pages and cut out the arms and legs, eyes and lips and manufactured for yourself a series of Frankenstein monsters, little paper puppets which spoke nonsense words and sang nonsense songs but you stopped the pastime when their grotesque forms began to appear in your dreams. You close your eyes as Ummi presses Baba’s Beretta into your fingers and you see, not the dreams with the misshapen creatures but Baba’s face as you remember it. Black beard and thick eyebrows. Like a bear. With giant hands big enough to crush a skull. And then he morphs, face, paws and all into the wolf and you recall the gait of the wolf, the long strides, the cologne and smart leather shoes, how he tapped you on the shoulder and asked how things were at home after Baba succumbed to the fire in his veins. We’re here for you the wolf had said not once, not twice but a dozen times, pressing his fingers on your shaking knee. The sun spilling in through the window used to hit his watch and make flighty, fleeting stars on the classroom walls and sometimes these specks of magical light fell on your notebook and on your wrists and moved feverishly across the page and you’d taken them as a sign. The wolf still lives in the city and maybe, just maybe he’ll be at the party tonight, perhaps dressed as Alex from A Clockwork Orange, a glass of milk in one hand, a cane in the other, and perhaps he’ll slip his arm into yours and lead you through the crowd of bodies glittering with sweat to a quiet corner of the villa lit only with the dim halos of red and he’ll call it too, an inner circle of hell. Maybe he’ll press his lips to your cheek, leave there a ring of fire and say my oh my I can’t believe how much you’ve grown. You’ll recall all that he taught you, SOHCAHTOA and the names of all those shapes and you’ll remember the cigarette and Americano on his breath as he used to lean over to draw your attention to a mistake you made on the test, always helping you in a way he never helped the others. Maybe you’ll press the gun to his chest, say bang bang and he’ll play along, slump over, hands on his heart. You can be top of the class, he used to say, if only you work hard enough. With rasping breaths, he’ll feign a slow death and you’ll think of that one afternoon when he peeled down your layers till you were only a shell. I want to hear the sea inside you, he said, his mouth close to yours and you never dared to ask who precisely had sanctioned this proximity because in a way you wanted it so bad. Baba the bear was gone so you gripped onto the wolf with all of your might that day and gave him gifts you didn’t even know you were capable of. Ummi stood you under the shower when you came home that afternoon. With your blank stare alone, she knew. We won’t go to the police, she said, combing your wet hair. They won’t help. They’re a pack of wolves themselves. She told you to take your time and you haven’t left the house since that day but maybe tonight you will see the wolf. Maybe you’ll tell him the gun is real, that it’s loaded, maybe you’ll squeeze the trigger, not once but six times into his beautiful body and maybe he’ll be blasted off his feet, head tilting back, looking like a stunning Saint Sebastian with the blood pouring from his wounds and you’ll lean in and call him just that. A stunning Saint Sebastion. You’ll recall the postcard book he pressed into your hands once. His gift to you from Rome. A collection of twelve Saint Sebastians. He’d told you his favorite was the Perugino and so it became yours too. With the Perugino in your head, Ummi’s words will begin to ring in your ears, a girl needs to get a little messy sometimes. Maybe you’ll laugh at the mess you’ve made.
You open your eyes and look once again into the mirror and see Ummi standing right behind you, smoothing a crease in the black fabric. The Beretta is cool, too large and unwieldy in your small hands but you grip hard and bring it to your lips to blow away the smoke that is not there. Ummi has got her wish. You are a natural born killer.
Raja’a Khalid is a Saudi-born, Dubai-raised (and based) artist and writer with an MFA in Art from Cornell University. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee (2025) and her stories appear or are forthcoming in Vestoj, Jet Fuel Review, HAD, Maudlin House, SAND Journal and Yalobusha Review.
Kate Molloy (she/her) is a practicing artist and facilitator based in Dublin, Ireland. Her practice engages with painting, clay and installation work and explores the feelings of uncertainty and intuition that develop during the creative process.After graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 2014, with an MFA in Contemporary Art Practice she was shortlisted for the Beers London Contemporary Visions VI in 2015. Having exhibited work throughout Ireland and the U.K, in 2019 Kate’s first international solo exhibition Controlled Emotion opened at Skinroom, Hamilton, New Zealand. In 2023 received the Arts Council of Ireland Agility Award. Previous member of Engage Art Studios, Galway and Wickham Street Studios, Limerick. Current member of A4 Sounds Studio, Dublin.