He figured that since he was there, and she was sharing her hardly sparse meals with him, he should help. He combed and sheared her alpacas for her. As a man who knew fabric from his trade, he had never seen fur so fine and soft. He brought the fur to her and watched as she shaped it into wool, her hands and fingers moving la lana con una destreza que solo una bruja pudiese tener.
He asked if her skill was because of her witchcraft and she just laughed. The warmness of her laugh made something stir in Eduardo’s chest.
Pero eso no es amor.
That was just camaraderie. He liked to hear her laugh, and yearned to make her laugh again. When she finished, she explained that no, ella no era una bruja. Y que los campesinos de alrededor no concevían come una mujer le gustava vivir sola y por eso llamaban “Bruja”.
-Bueno, yo no voy a llamarte ‘bruja’ entonce. ¿Como te llamas? - Pregunto Eduardo.
-Me llamo Marta. -she said, con una sonrisa.
Paso el año y Eduardo and Marta were no longer living apart. He moved into her casita and they lived together on that mountain. Eduardo incorporated Marta’s wool into the hats he sold. He smiled more than before, but he no longer had wandering eyes for the maidens of the different villages. After every trip to the valley to sell sombreros, Eduardo would find himself eager to come back to Marta. Often, when he was around her, he felt that little stirring in his chest. Sometimes she would look at him and he would know that she felt it too. They always felt better together.
The years went by and Eduardo was no longer the young, handsome gentleman before who had determinedly scaled that mountain. His back was bent from carrying su sombreros y su pelo estaba gris. La cara de Marta estaba arrugada, su cabello lucia como el color del cielo por la noche y con una nubesita blanca. Yet, despite being old and frail, their hearts still fluttered around each other.
Porque éso si es amor.
Love was not one singular feeling for Eduardo and Marta, it was the combination of all these wonderful feelings they had for one another. It was the closeness and necessity of togetherness and companionship that did not falter, but grew with age.
Y ellos vivieron felices para siempre.
Mutatio
The Swamp King
1
Once there was an old, rickety house between a large orange grove and an ancient, hidden swamp. It was a small cottage perched on stilts to account for the times the nearby river flooded. It always seemed a little unsteady. If a hard storm came, the walls would creak, and the house would sway this way and that. The people who lived inside could live and die by the strength of the storm, always fearing that a harsh one would blow them over.
This cottage sat next to the orange grove, so when the wind blew west the air would smell like sweet fresh citrus. But when the wind blew east, it would be the hot moss-ridden breeze of untamed wet air and decay. The swamp had a fierce reputation for the people who lived near it. It was filled with poisonous snakes, alligators, and predators of all kinds. If the rain came, there was no safety from the climbing waters. More than one hunter had disappeared in that swamp looking for game, and search parties were often too afraid to search inside. They said that in that swamp was a cursed king, who reigned over the wilderness and kept people at bay. It was said that this Swamp King traded in the fearsome and unruly magic which was endemic to the swamp.
In that rotting little cottage lived Silvia and her stepfather. While most fathers love their daughters, and most daughters love them back, Silvia and her stepfather carried no such affection. Silvia's father was as cruel to her as he had been to her mother when she was alive. When Silvia's mother dared to try to leave, promising Silvia that she would come back to her, she was found frozen by a mysterious spell a mile away from the cottage. In her worst nightmares, Silvia still remembered her mother's horrified face behind that strange block of ice that refused to melt in the heat of summer. Silvia desperately wanted to escape herself too, but she feared she'd be frozen as well, or worse. That fear kept her imprisoned by her stepfather, frightened of the beasts and wild magic that lay in wait.
That’s how it remained until the day that fear of the unknown beyond the cottage was no longer enough to keep her chained to lingering gaze of her stepfather. In the years since her mother had passed, Silvia had grown into a beautiful young woman. She had delicate long limbs like the roots of a mangrove and lips as red as a scarlet snake's collar. Her dark hair trailed behind her like the branches of a willow as she swept and did the cleaning. Silvia had a habit of sneaking off and climbing up the orange trees like a spider to gorge herself on the fresh sweet fruit. One day, with the juice of the fruit on her chin, while the wind blew east, Silvia's step-father grabbed her wrist, looked her in the eye and said “You know, you look a lot like your mother when we met.”
That night during the large, low-hanging full moon, Silvia decided that she needed to get away. Despite the overwhelming threat of rogue curses or fearsome creatures, she crept out of the cottage and gazed at the shadowed lands. If she went east into the orange grove, she could easily end up caught by her wicked stepfather. In the west, the swamp's moonlit pine trees beckoned. Those branches seemed to call to her as they swayed in the warm night.
Silvia set out into that vast swamp, less afraid of the poisonous critters than of the shadow of her stepfather. She walked for miles, avoiding snakes and dangerous pitfalls. Every few steps she heard a new and more frightening noise, like the lingering hoot of an owl or call of a turkey vulture. Vines hung down in the hammocks, seemingly clawing at her in the dark. She waded in the shallow waters, sawgrass cutting at her suntanned skin, making a million little incisions. Mosquito-bitten and exhausted, she stopped in the early morning light at the cradle of a cypress tree and, nestling herself there, fitfully fell asleep.
When she awoke it was to a low sound like that of a bullfrog. But it was not a harmless amphibian. Instead, staring at her from a few feet out across the water, was the largest gator Silvia had ever seen. She looked around as the creature swam closer and closer, its tail undulations sending ripples to the shore of the small lake. Silvia wanted to get up, she wanted to run but something in the gaze of that gator kept her fixed in place. The knees of the cypress, which last night cocooned her in a comforting embrace, had become a prison. The gator made its way to shore and climbed up to the nook where Silvia cowered. He opened his massive jaws, jaws that could swallow Silvia whole and said...
“What are you doing in my kingdom, girl?” The gator's voice was a deep croak.
“I was running away from my stepfather, who wants me to take my mother's place,” Silvia replied, suddenly regretting her decision to run.
“And so you ran into the swamp, where my subjects can eat you up and use your bones like toothpicks.” When the gator closed its maw, she could see he had human-looking eyes—blue irises surrounded by milky white corneas—and that along the top of his head were jagged lumps of scar tissue that looked like a rough crown. She had thought the tale of the Swamp King a fantasy, but now here she was, face to face with that very legend.
“I had nowhere else to go. Are you going to eat me?”
“You've entered my home during a full moon, uninvited. Our laws are clear that you are fair game. How lucky for you that I am a kind king and have just eaten.”
Only then did his uninvited guest notice that several anhinga feathers were stuck in the alligator’s teeth.
“Thank you, your highness,” Silvia said, forcing herself out of a momentary daze. “How do I repay this kindness?”
“A human wishes to grant me a favor then?”
“Yes,” she said, not knowing what exactly she could do for the king.
“What is your deepest wish?”
Silvia did not even need to think. “I want my father gone.”
The alligator thought silently for a moment. He slammed his tail one, two, three times and two small ibises came to chirp in his ear. The ibises bowed low to the Swamp King and flew off. He thought a moment l
onger, reading something invisible in Silvia and said, “I can give you my skin to use, to destroy your father, if you would grant me a favor.”
Silvia took a second to consider the Swamp King's proposal. She wanted to be free of her stepfather, but she was wary of the kind of bargain a fearsome Swamp King would offer. In the end, nothing seemed worse than the possibility of being caught and dragged home to that evil man. “What is the favor?”
“That will happen after I give you my end of the bargain.”
Silvia took the risk with a nod of her head.
The Swamp King let out a roar that shook the very ground and shed his skin. The Swamp King's skin became a large greenish and brown spotted coat. In his place was an old man, with a white beard that fell to the ground, boney knees wobbling as he stood up. He had an ancient, rusted crown atop his head and he sat down in the crux of the cypress after handing over his skin. The Swamp King looked up at her and said, “To use my skin, you must put it on after the moon comes up. And you must return to me before the light comes. If you do not return in time, the swamp will make its displeasure known.”
Silvia agreed, and turned and marched back east to the little cottage. It was sunset when she reached her home. Her father was nowhere to be seen, so she hid behind a ripe orange tree and waited. When the sun finally set and the large moon climbed over the treetops Silvia shouldered the coat. For a moment nothing seemed to be happening, but in the next Silvia sensed a great tingling all over her body. She looked down at her hands to see that she no longer had them but lethal-looking claws instead.
She went into the cabin to find it empty. Her massive footsteps made the stilts of the cottage creak under the pressure. Looking into the mirror she did not see the gator she expected, but something beastly in-between. She had the skin, maw, and tail of a gator, but the stature of a great black bear and the claws of a panther. Silvia had become a grand, powerful monster and she no longer feared seeing her stepfather.
Silvia's stepfather came home well past the stroke of midnight. In the dark, Silvia could see his form by the light of the moon. He seemed smaller than she remembered, and for a moment she almost felt pity. But she recalled how he had dragged her away, screaming, begging and crying, from the frozen corpse of her mother.
She swung her massive tail, hitting the lecher straight in the stomach and knocking him over before his eyes had even adjusted to the darkness. He screamed and tried to hit Silvia the beast with his fist, but she was too fast and slashed off his hand with a single swipe of a claw. She saw the fear in his eyes, and the beast in her smiled a crocodile's smile. Silvia wasted no time chomping him in half and tearing him apart. She dragged what was left of his body to the orange grove and buried it beneath a fallow tree.
But it was getting light and Silvia remembered her promise to the Swamp King. She ran, fearing she would be too late. As her heart quickened, a feeling of incredible lightness came upon her, and she slowly realized that she was no longer running but flying. The Swamp King's coat had turned her into a grand heron and she made it to the King just moments before sunrise.
She hesitated before removing and returning the coat, wishing to keep it. She had never felt such power, or safety, as she had in the disguise. It allowed her to be what she needed to be — what she wanted to be. The Swamp King took the feathered coat in his crooked hand and looked up at Silvia.
“Are you ready to make up your end of the bargain?”
She looked at the old man, whose limbs twisted and creaked, and she nodded.
“You must break this spell that keeps me here. I have been the ruler of this swamp for three hundred years, and now I am old and tired and no longer wish to be king. I hope to rest here forever. But you must willingly take that burden and that power.”
Silvia looked at this frail old man, whose flesh had grizzled from age. She thought about how she might never see another person again, forever tied to a swamp. But she also remembered the freedom she felt in flight, and the power she'd felt in her monstrous form. Her decision was clear. Silvia held out her hand and the old King handed her his crown. In her hands, it became a wreath of orchids. With that, Silvia became the Queen of the Swamp.
In time, that little cottage by the orange grove was overrun with ivy and disappeared into the nature surrounding it. Now the swamp has a new reputation. When the wind blows east, it carries with it the scents of magnolia and jasmine. They say that the Swamp Queen is loved and respected by all the swamp creatures, from the tiniest gnat to the spoonbill to the panther. Even the humans nearby look upon that swamp differently. They say that the pure of heart, if they are brave, can cross the swamp in peace. If they are in trouble, they can even ask the Swamp Queen for a favor. But villains who trespass may find themselves between the jaws of a gator.
Change
The day it had been confirmed, seven years prior, Flor's mother Ilda had smiled and clapped. That night, Ilda had cried herself to sleep. Few families had the honor of even one vessel in the line, but Flor's line had been blessed with two others. It was something Ilda had celebrated in their ancestry until it came time to recognize her daughter as one. All the stories of their ancestors, especially the auspicious ones, disappeared when the mark revealed itself on Flor's lower back.
Such was how the mothers of the vessels past had often faced this hurdle. They celebrated it in public and mourned in private. Ilda, no matter how hard she tried, could not keep her grief hidden from Flor. This unnerved Flor, who should have spent her final years as a mortal celebrating her life, instead she had wound up torn between her mother's pain and her own. Flor could feel it, underneath, biding its time, waiting to be released. She scratched herself absentmindedly, at the skin holding the being back. She wanted to meet it, to know it, to destroy the goddess inside. But she feared the loss of herself, not to mention the release ceremony itself.
In the time before there had been the Jel, who lived in Valley of the Seven Rivers, and they worshiped many gods. The Jel did not live peacefully or turbulently, they lived rather ordinary lives. Then came the Hickt, who had wanted for much. They had wanted land, power, pain, riches. The Hickt brought a few other nations with them: the Sligyl, the Fatori, and the Entune. They subjugated the Jel and set up a complex hierarchy. They tried to remove the old gods and give forth the new. Little did they know that the gods would talk with each other, and that they would come to an agreement.
As time went on, those hierarchies degraded. The Jel, Hickt, Sligyl, Fatori and Entune melded, aided by a goddess who would appear every hundred years. The goddesses were from the many different cultures, each inhabiting the body of a girl until she could be released to reign. Some years it was a goddess with a penchant for fertility, and the calves would fatten, the crops would flower and the population would soar. Other years it would be a goddess who enjoyed conflict, and there would be blood and chaos. Sometimes it was a goddess who fancied the arts, and she who would usher in an era of enlightenment and innovation. There were many goddesses above and in-between.
The Melyn, or "Free People" as they called themselves, born out of bloody, complex histories, moved closer to peaceable society. For this they praised the goddesses that did come, even the turbulent ones. The goddesses marked their hosts with a silver trail of dots along the back. They needed to be known before bursting forth from the bodies of their vessels.
Flor did not feel anything when the marks first appeared. She had been swimming with friends in a creek tucked away in the trees. As she climbed out of the water, a friend screamed.
What the Melyn did not realize was that benevolence is a fixed characteristic. Some goddesses were kind because it was in their nature to be kind. Others were cruel by design. Once a goddess had chosen a vessel there was no amount of adulation that would modify them. If they came to be kind, they would be kind. If they came to be cruel, that was but the nature of things.
Flor spent much of her youth in silent skepticism. She did not believe that a goddess was inside, incubating
until her time to come forward. It was a few months before her seventeenth birthday, before the ceremony that would set her free, when she finally began to feel it. The first sign was subtle— burning, tingling sensation in her hands that she could have easily excused as something else. There was a pain, from her bellybutton to her groin that followed. Next came spasms of pain, extending from navel to groin—sharp, sporadic—pain that grew more acute as time passed.
One night, her eyes burned as if she had a fever, but she had no fever. She awoke the next morning with new eyes: eyes, she realized, that let her see things that others could not. At first, she thought these visions were tricks of the light. Strange shadows made by moving branches or the wings of an insect that had streaked off too fast to see. As the days went on and the images cleared and took shape, she witnessed what appeared to be her grandmother walking through their home. The image could have been solid, the woman's long elegant fingers carrying a bowl of soup to a young child. Flor had never met her grandmother, who had passed years before her birth. She had only seen this woman in pictures, and this image in front of her was younger than that. That was when Flor realized that she was able to see the past.
As the days continued, she would see more images; of buildings that were solid to the touch in disarray; of people with strange faces and thrillingly unfamiliar technology; images of older faces imposed on the living people that were actually physically there before her. That was when Flor realized that she was also seeing the future, and that she was seeing past, present and future all overlapping and playing out before her strange new eyes.
Finally came the voice. One night, only a few moons before the ceremony, as Flor laid curled up in her bed, her head aching from the all the stimulus she had been bombarded with, she heard it as barely a whisper.
Monstrosity Page 4