From the highest point of his castle, I watch him leave until he disappears over the curve of the earth, and I wonder, if each man begins again when the sun rises, what manner of man my husband will be when he returns.
Our home is vast, and with no door locked to me, save one, I delight in spreading my arms and twirling in the endless china rooms, the rooms lined with swords and other instruments of war, the guest rooms with spiders nesting on thousand-count sheets. It is easy, when there is so much to look at, to forget for a time how hungry I am.
The servants quietly leave trays of oatmeal and peeled grapes and small squares of chocolate, but they run through me like water. Nothing sticks.
Soon, I no longer think of my husband or his wishes, but only my desire for heavy food. I write to my father: Do you still tie the knot on your smock too tight? I remember your hands were so lumpy that they would pull just far, and only my nimble fingers could release the cords. My fingers are even more nimble now, Father, like those small bones you softened in your stews and I would suck all the marrow until they snapped in half. Such bone-thin bones.
And I write: Father, you always forgot to clean your hands after you slaughtered Luc or Pierre or Maurice or Yves. Your hands were always so red, bright red, the red of blood that has not settled nor died. That is why I used to untie your smock for you, so that the red would not settle onto your clothes and bleed through to your skin and stain your body. It would be terrible, Father, to be forever marked, even if it was the thing you are so good at.
I receive no answer from my Father, so I write: Father, you would be so proud of my husband, for he is a good match. You have never seen your daughter consume so much bread and brie, and so much sherbet. But there is nothing here that tastes like what you make, Father. It is not that I am unhappy, oh no, but simply that we cannot forget where we come from, can we? Perhaps, if you have a few seconds to spare and some paper and twine, you might send me a bit of Yves, for he was always my favorite.
I write one more letter. Father, I write, send me Yves. Slice his throat. Hang him from his spine and tear the chunks of meat away from him until all that is left is white bone. Prepare it with salt, or smoke it, or bury it in the ground to preserve it, but you must send Yves to me. When you do, make sure it comes in to the back of the castle, for it is not that my husband is unkind or rules over me, but only he has a sensitive nose, and his stomach would turn at the smell of the thing I love. If you must, send me Maurice. I am not finicky. And I love you. Do you not know that I only ask this because I miss you so?
Each day that I wait for Father to send me the cattle named for my forefathers, I wander my husband’s house, for nothing else keeps my hands from shaking, and only the sound of my hurried steps covers the sound of my belly. Too soon there are no rooms save those in the west wing, and because my belly shouts and I dream of rivers of flesh and black, blinking eyeballs (so succulent, so rare), I wander west, though I had promised myself I would not.
I think I imagine it at first—that I so miss my father and the way he showed me how to love—that my nose hallucinates. Behind the one locked door, the one that only the knuckle key fits, I smell blood.
Once, when I was very young, I stayed in the woods with my grandmother while my father took a summer to carry my mother from his bed into the belly of the dark earth. When I ate through my grandmother’s summer preserves of smoked fish and fatty pork she sent me back to my father’s home. It had been so long that I had forgotten the way through the forest. On the air I smelled the thick, rich scent of freshly spilled blood, and the particular salt residue I later learned was the taste of my father’s grief. I have only tasted it once more, when Father made me pot-au-feu for the last time, the night before I married my husband. I will never forget the smell that led me home.
The air outside the locked door tastes like a salt lick, and I know this is a room of memory.
How is it that a knuckle-bone key can be so heavy? Yet, even if were made of real bone, or gold, or cold iron, it could not weigh so much. It rests in my hand like inevitability, and that is the heaviest substance. I enter the room forbidden to me, and there in front of me is all I have wished and longed for.
How did I ever doubt my father’s love? It is Yves, sweet Yves partly wrapped in white linen on a stone table, his lovely body stretched out, his red and black muscles exposed and so very hot. I wave my hand above the offering and it is almost as if the tendons are still pulsing, like when a snake is gutted and its skin ripped off in one smooth strip, its long muscle of a body will still pulsate and writhe electric. There are lilies in all states of bloom and decay around the body. So strange, I have never been fond of lilies, Father, yet they look so pretty here, like little gay tongues.
Tenderly, since now that the feast is before me my desperation recedes, I tear a little bit of the flesh from the thigh, and what a thick one it is. I will not cook my first bites; I will eat them as the freshest tartare, so that none of the juice disintegrates into the air around me.
It tastes sweet and tangy, such tenderized meat. Father, you do love me best. You do you do you do. I never doubted it.
What a strange game my husband played with me, to forbid me from the room where he kept my father’s love.
And what an odd room, for it is circular and along the walls is smooth mirror. I watch myself, as a familiar voyeur, placing those delectable morsels on my tongue. They drop like stone in my belly, and fill me up after the endless days of hollow bread. The blood smears on my lips and cheeks and chin, but what does that matter? If it fills me, I would smear red all over my body for the fleeting fullness of it.
I imagine it is rain, yes, rain, that falls on my head and rolls down my face. But the mirror shows it is red, and it slices my face through middle like a thin knife. There, hanging above me, are women’s bodies in white dresses, strung up like scarecrows, each in a strange macabre pose. Stretched out, their necks hanging on hooks, parts of their bodies missing where the sirloin or flank would be cut. Long, lovely hair, golden hay, and chocolate drips cover their faces. I see, on their fourth finger, the sister-ring to the one around my own. Twenty or more women bleed above me, and I see an empty hook at the end of the line with a trail of scarlet covering the curve of the blade, down the wall, and up to the flat stone table.
For a long time I stare at the red tattoo on my face and call you Yves, sister-wife, but you are only my family in fate.
As I wait for my husband to come home I feel the familiar pull in my belly. The small taste of you was not enough to fill me, Yves, so I reach and tear a long strip of you. You fall apart so easily, like sliced smoked salmon, and you taste as tender.
Father, if I had a mother, or seven tall brothers, I may never have known what delicacies are hidden away behind closed doors. Soon, my husband will return to me, and he will look for me in the kitchen, then in his bed, and he will find me on my knees before his altar. My arm will reach towards him, and he will see the red trailing from my mouth. Father, you do not have to worry about your little daughter, for my husband and I have been laid out raw before one another, and he will love these fresh stains on my body.
Three Times Red
In Bed
The beast told her to take off the frock and knickers, those extra human skins. But leave the cloak, such color, like cherry pie or tart flesh or a wound. Toss each piece of cotton and silk into the hearth and let it erupt. Come under cover and let me smell you, girl, let me smell your cloak, let me smell you.
The girl slipped her hands across the coarse fur of the imposter’s massive and inert form. She grazed her fingers across the shallow belly and felt a familiar row of teats, like the ones that sprouted on her mother’s breasts after bathing, or in winter after the fire went out. Surely, thought the girl, monsters could not nurse, could not nurture. The beast raised its heavy torso and the girl slid underneath.
Her mother had warned her before she ent
ered the forest: be wary, little love; all things change in that darkness. Boys photosynthesize and girls erupt from the pupa, all thin wings and tongues peppered with nectar, and you can’t ever go back into a cocoon. The walls have been ripped apart and cannot be sewn together again.
The girl’s tongue flicked out and tasted the strange milk, a mother’s milk, sweet and a bit salty, like a good cry. The beast whined in the low, soft way, like the girls’ mother did at night when the window shutters shook and the bedroom was cold. It was cold every night since her father had gone into the forest and had not returned.
Photosynthesize, her mother said, looking out the window on those nights, her eyes reaching. It means you become a part of something greater. You can’t go back.
The girl closed her eyes and drank the quick stream of sweet wetness that erupted from the beast. As she pulled on it, all the other teats began to cry, soaking the girl in thick, nourishing tear, and the beast wept as well.
Where does a monster feel loss, the girl thought—in the cavities of its jaw, or in its breast?
As she drank from the beast she tasted memory in that milk, her own and not only her own: earlier that day when the sun was high and before Grannie’s house, she came across a string of pups, little more than stains, caught between a woodsman’s steel teeth. Their necks were nothing more than sinew, long wet yarn.
She released the teat from her lips and reached under her naked back and fingered her cloak, wondering what dye had given it such lovely color, and whether she too could be made into mere stains.
In Belly
I wish we were face to face, Grannie, in this fleshy compartment. Instead, the long nail of your pinky toe, the one you adamantly refused to clip, as if it contained all your magic, curls around and in the soft skin of my nostril. When I breathe I can smell and taste all the places you have walked. You are still wearing your nightclothes, Grannie, that tired old gray shirt with the frayed edges. The hem rubs against my breasts like it did when I was a little girl, and you pulled me, naked as I slept, to you in those hot summer nights when I woke, drenched in wet salt, from nightmares.
The she-beast gulped me down with only my skin adorning me. Do you know she made me shave off all my hair, pluck every ingrown strand with black tweezers (I had to dig so far that I bled, Grannie), so when she swallowed me I slid down her throat like a skinned anchovy?
If you would speak to me, I imagine you would say what a funny place this is, where the walls are so warm as to burn, and the water is acid on our tongues. That’s how you were, making light of what smothered us.
There is only one bit of softness in here, and that is—how you would hate it—your breast, slipped from your gray shirt, as wrinkled as your cheeks and as veined as the raised lines I used to trace on your feet as a child. And when I grew up you told me to stop, stand on my feet, not my knees, and sleep with heavy nightshirts, and a towel wrapped tightly between my legs, because all manner of wetness could pour out of me when I slept. How I loathed growing up in those summer nights around you, Grannie, when I feared all of me would seep out.
I trace the lines on your breast while the walls of the beast clench and release and clench, and I feel you sliding away from me, Grannie.
Don’t leave me alone in here, Grannie.
And then I, too, am pulled towards that tight opening, shat out onto the cold ground, leaves and dirt sticking to my face. Strange, only now I realize that I am covered, completely, in the inner slime of the beast’s body.
Grannie, you’re melting into the earth. Your old skin is falling off, your bones are becoming water and seeping into the mud. Will I too go quietly into the earth, as if I had never walked on its surface?
Yet the beast is tender, and before the sting of the sour from her belly makes me disappear like my poor grannie, she puts her tongue to my lips and moves up and down, cleaning me off, cooing as best a beast can coo. And when she is done, she spits, once, and looks at me in a way I have never been looked at before, like I am something new and something wonderful.
In Book
No matter how many times a girl has her story told, she will never be fully told up.
In one telling, our girl is shat out with the rabbits and dirt and the ragged flesh of her grandmother in one constipated pile. The beast buries her without turning around, simply kicking mud onto her face and shoulders, and wanders off. That one makes us ache in the spot our milk teeth fell from, and were abandoned, scattered under pillow or on the ground.
In another, the woodsman gutted the she-beast for food and warmth while his fair-haired daughter peeked from behind an oak with her eyes slit, for daughters never get used to the necessary violence of their fathers. When he saw the naked, hairless girl curled up in the beast’s cavernous belly, he thought he had killed a pregnant werewolf. He grasped the smooth girl to his chest and would have torn her apart as he had her mother, but his daughter watched him and she did not blink. Instead, he took the girl into his home and fed her all the things he had slaughtered, while his daughter stared at the wolf-girl, watching each hair grow back on her body like corn shooting out of the earth, and wondered, her hands grasping her thighs, when the wolf-girl would sprout thick fur over her face and the back of her hands and devour them in the night.
In our favorite, the one we dare not tell, the girl rips herself out from the belly of the mother-wolf with her teeth and nails. Weeping, she shoves her grannie back into the belly and stitches it up until there is no seam. She curls into the mother-wolf and promises never, never to leave, and as she does, the mother-wolf turns into her own mother, a human mother. Together, they chase all woodsmen from their woods, and howl in a language we think we might understand, if we heard it.
But this is the one that was written, and so this is the one we tell to the shaking pigtails of our daughters and the fluttering eyes of our sons: A girl goes into the forest and is tricked by a man wearing a beast’s fur coat. Because of this she loses her family, loses her innocence, and is saved by a man with a bloody axe, which is another sort of innocence lost. Then we do not know what becomes of her, whether she was happy to be torn out from under the beast, or whether she wished the bloody axe cut through her neck instead. Our children will make up their own endings, whether the girl becomes a witch or opens a cupcake shop or builds a bridge the color of gold. But we hope, in one of their minds, our beast-girl will find her gutted mother wolf, and using her hair as a thread and a curved toenail as a needle, begin to sew.
Let Down Your Long Hair
and Then Yourself
My auntie said I should never know sharp things, because I was a sharp thing. I was made to cut, she said, not be cut. That was why she never allowed my hair to be shorn and let it pile up in the curves of my round room, on and under my bed, in the flowerpots on the sill. She never allowed me to leave the tower, because everything in there was soft. Beanbags. Blankets. Teddy bears. I would have liked to cut my fingernails with scissors, but since I was not allowed I bit them and swallowed the stale morsels. I spent hours stretching my skin and my muscles so that I could bite my toenails and taste the memory of where I had walked around my room, stepped on my hair, and where I could lick my sole.
My auntie said my hair was a coiled golden anaconda, sleek and cruel. My eyes were vultures. My teeth were as sharp as a wolverine’s, my lips as red as the blood around its muzzle. I thought these words were sweet nibbles, because all I had known were soft objects and the cool palm of my auntie’s withered hand on my face when she soothed me to sleep. I imagined these animals swallowing small soft things: little rabbits with their sinew bleeding out their necks or a beak as broken as a saw, carving into a dead baby bear cub, its eyes glossy and glass and dead. Such thoughts excited me when there was only velvet and linen to touch.
I strained outside the only window in my room and, in the distance, I could hear the world eating itself, tearing itself apart. I shivered, and
I desired.
And then the man stood beneath my window and taught me what sweet words really were.
He called up, Hey bunny lady, you’re a rare bloom. A rare honeyed butterfly with sun-tipped wings. You are peach fuzz. If you were my baby blueberry pie, I’d spend hours licking whatever drips between your pretty pink toes. Throw down your yielding hair so that I may wrap it around my tongue and only speak kind words forevermore. Throw down your hair and then yourself, lovely songbird.
What a handsome man, I thought.
My auntie wept when she saw me gathering my hair for him.
You are like your mother, she hissed at me.
I did not know her, I said, but I kneeled at her feet and touched her hem. Tell me about her. Was she sharp, like I am?
My auntie laughed high and cold. She was hungry, you wicked child. And when you were in her she ate every green thing she could see, even your father’s eyes, which were as green as grass. And as she ate her bones stretched out her skin until she tore herself up from the inside.
Auntie, I sighed. I cannot stay.
She slapped me, but not hard enough to leave a mark. She was weak, at her age. Stab me, she said, stab me, you vicious, biting thing. Don’t leave me alone with your hollow memory.
But I had nothing sharp except my teeth, so I bit down at her wrists and tore the flesh there. She bled all over my face. It was a strange, unsoft thing, her blood, all spice and sorrow. I held her until she died, and then I buried her in my beanbags, my blankets, my teddy bears. I threw down my hair and let the man yank my head all the way up.
When he saw the blood at my lips he said, your lipstick is smudged, my sweet hummingbird. Let me lick you clean.
When he pulled away, he licked his lips and stared at me and said, my dear, you taste like a warmed sword. When he said this he frowned.
Magic for Unlucky Girls Page 6