Alba Ala-Pietilä
Hollow
Saint Herman of Solovetsky is a saint whose body does not decay.
His body does not decay, and yet the icon of Herman is stolen from the convent, where everything—from the people to the very foundations—is largely a hollow, an empty space for the sacred to rush in.
Our thief has no regard for the sacred—or even the semblance of it—so he thinks, and that is the truth. He probably didn’t even plan the theft, but his fingers are mischievous and strangers to one another, a gang of ten wart-covered imps. One Tuesday, the middle finger of the right hand and the index finger of the left make the decisive decision to steal, and despite the impractical carrying position, the rest of the body follows suit.
In the thief’s apartment, Herman stares with his egg-white eyes, looming overhead and brooding with a holy gaze. The thief can’t stand the stare—there’s no one here to stare back! No eyes to meet his! What a stench of fried eggs, ugh.
On the first night, he dreams of a pool full of yellow, fatherless monstrosities. Plop, plop, skkksssst. Between his fingers, yuck.
On the second night, she dreams of a reddish egg with a hole opening into the rectum. The blessed lady presses her lips against it, turning the egg into her facial growth, but soon a tavern built of grass rises from the depths of her mind, and she no longer dreams of the pious woman.
Nothing in this story is true, but Herman—who is illiterate and therefore tends to listen intently to the narration—might enjoy it. It’s impossible to say; I suppose even in this case, you can decide for yourself what to believe. Just to be safe, you might want to read the ending aloud.
The nuns with holes in their heads eventually come to retrieve the icon. They carry stone rifles and use gravel as ammunition. The thief waves the icon—his white flag—from the window. The whites are saved for such acts of submission.
But giving up is pointless. Just keep pumping, and eventually even the gravel will give way, as we desperately long for the return of Saint Herman to the monastery.
Even today, the thief is crying out; you can hear his wailing all the way over here if you press your middle finger against your right ear and your index finger against your left—aijjjjaaiijjjii, over and over again, because “O” would be too much like it. The only, momentary relief from the pain is squeezing egg yolk into the holes, but not into the eyes—never—or they too would turn into gaping holes.
He doesn't know that only then, only after the hollows in his eye sockets have been filled, will he see Herman again.
Sometimes he mistakes the beating of his heart for a rifle. The ventricles are almost empty, yet it pumps ceaselessly into the thief’s veins, for obedience once seeped deeper than his fingertips. What is pumped is the yellow of the yolk, for the red of flowing blood was surrendered to the egg cracked by mercy.
Alba Ala-Pietilä is a poet and literary critic whose debut collection, *Säiliö* (Bokeh 2025), was awarded the Young Poet of the Year prize. The collection was also a finalist for the Helsingin Sanomat Literary Prize .
Ala-Pietilä’s text explores manifestations of the sacred and the profane—the pathways through which they find their way to us. Ala-Pietilä has had little experience of the sacred, but believes it is intertwined with language. He will continue to explore this theme and the possibility of decreation more broadly at the Lavaklubi poetry evening on Thursday, October 29. The Lavaklubi poetry evenings are the National Theater’s and the Young Power Association , bringing poetry to the National Theater’s atmospheric Lavaklubi in the form of multidisciplinary performances.
Ala-Pietilä is currently working on a piece that also revolves around the themes of the sacred, alienation, and the loss and reconstruction of language.