(Would that Athena had cursed her with the true face of a hag instead of this, but that would have been a kindness. And that wasn’t Athena’s style.)
She takes a deep breath. And another. Everything will be fine. It will. She won’t panic. She grabs her sunglasses and stands at the door for a long time. How long has it been since she went out into the world with her real face exposed on purpose? Years—many, many years.
I can do this, she thinks.
She has to. A quick trip to the shop for fresh herbs and oil. Maybe she can experiment with the mixture a bit. After so many years, perhaps she’s built up a tolerance and now she needs to add something else.
She puts her hand on the doorknob. Maybe it won’t be so bad. Takes her hand away. Maybe she shouldn’t go out. Does she really have to go? But if not, then what?
Maybe she should order what she needs online and pay for overnight shipping; then she won’t—
Stop it!
“I can do this,” she whispers, tugging her scarf tighter.
Between the scarf, the sunglasses, the shapeless clothes, it has to be safe. The shop is only a few blocks away. Her heart races as she steps outside.
At the end of the street, she passes a group of men. They’re speaking loudly. Laughing. She doesn’t like the edge of their laughter. It’s hard. Like a fist, like the words bitch and cunt. Her back goes straight, her mouth dry.
The serpents stir. She takes a deep breath. Walks past with eyes down. Don’t look at me, don’t look at me, she thinks, but she feels their gazes crawling all over her back as if she were wearing nothing more than stiletto heels and a smile.
But they don’t follow. They don’t say a word. She turns the corner. Passes a woman in a business suit who gives her a quick nod. Another woman, younger, this one busy with her cell phone. Then a man emerges from a doorway, but he passes by without looking as well. She allows herself a small smile. Not much farther now.
She turns the last corner and runs into someone. A man. Hard enough to send her sunglasses flying to the ground. She drops her eyes, but it’s too late. His eyes are wide. Dark. Fixed on hers for only a second, but it’s a second too long and he’s smitten. Yes, the first part of the curse happens that fast. Her heart races madness. He reaches for her arm; she pulls away.
“Hi,” he says with a smile.
She says nothing. Takes a step back, pulling her arm away, and bends down, her fingers scrabbling on the pavement for her glasses. He bends down, too. His hands reach the glasses first.
“Here, let me help,” he says.
She shakes her head. Steps to the side. He does the same.
“It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?”
She steps again. As does he. Can’t he see the frumpy dress? The heavy-soled shoes, for the gods’ sake? (But of course, it’s too late for the camouflage. He saw her face. He looked into her eyes.)
“Please, let me pass,” she says.
“Why don’t you stay and we can talk for a while?”
She shakes her head again.
“So what, you won’t talk to me?”
She takes a step back, away from the edge in his voice.
He steps forward. Grabs her arm, his fingers digging in hard.
“Why do you have to act that way?” he says. “I just want to talk to you.”
She looks up. It doesn’t matter now anyway. She sees the stone set of his eyes—the second part of the curse. All the breath rushes from her lungs. The serpents shiver.
“Please leave me alone.”
“Please leave me alone,” he repeats in a sing-song voice.
She turns. Breaks into a run. Hears a name (one of those names) carried on the breeze, and quickens her step before it can echo in her ears.
The serpents wake. See what happens? they say. See what you make happen?
“Stop it,” she whispers. “Please.”
Your fault.
She locks her apartment door behind her and covers her ears, but still, the serpents whisper sharp-barbed reminders she doesn’t need; she knows all too well where the blame falls. Where it’s always fallen.
All your fault. You shouldn’t have smiled at Poseidon. You shouldn’t have been there.
She curls up in a ball on the floor, praying the serpents will fall to silence, but of course they don’t.
Poseidon said he wanted to talk. He lied.
“It’s not my fault you’re so beautiful,” he said.
But what about when she begged him to stop? When he pressed his hand over her mouth to hold in her screams? When he ripped open her tunic?
After, she went into seclusion. It was for the best. A few months later, when she braved the world again, her eyes, her face, safely hidden behind a veil, she heard the first whispers.
Serpentine and human both.
The intercom buzzes. A moment later, a gruff voice says, “Delivery.”
“Leave it at the door,” Medi calls out.
When the footsteps retreat, she brings the box inside and slices open the tape. The serpents press against her scalp as she crushes and grinds and blends, holding tight to hope.
She sits on the floor in the corner of her kitchen, amid a scatter of leaves and berries and drops of oil. Nothing has worked. Nothing. She rests her face in her hands, her shoulders slumped.
The curse has won. They have won.
Silent tears slip between her fingers. Doesn’t she deserve peace after all this time? Hasn’t she paid enough for Poseidon’s lust?
One serpent curls around her ear. Your fault, it whispers softly.
But why? What has she ever done but exist?
She rocks back and forth while the serpents whisper again and again. The towel can only muffle so much.
Once upon a time, she was a young girl, a priestess in Athena’s temple who wanted nothing more than to wake each morning with the sun, to assist with the rituals, to drink from the sacred spring.
Medi tosses and turns beneath the sheets. In the darkness, she remembers the weight of an unwanted body against hers, a mouth pressed hard against lips fighting to scream, wrists straining beneath the iron grip of a hand as the ugliness, the guilt, spilled out of him and into her, marking her as sure as a brand.
Pariah. Anathema.
She chokes back a moan, pushing hard on the scarf wrapped tightly around her head, but even so, she can hear the serpents’ reminder of the how and the why. She sits up, gasping for air, drowning in waves so high, so violent, she’s sure they’ll pull her under.
On trembling legs, she staggers into the bathroom and stares at her reflection, her eyes filled with hate. She opens the medicine cabinet and there on the shelf, a straight razor waits.
Will this make them happy?
She grips the handle tight, the blade glimmering in the overhead light, and touches it to the delicate skin of her wrist. The blue veins beneath her flesh point the way like tiny lines on a map leading to an exit ramp.
A serpent slips from beneath the scarf. Coils. Uncoils. Its tongue flickers cool against her temple.
Your fault, it whispers.
She presses the blade. A tiny wound opens. A single pearl of red runs free.
Your fault.
This is the only way to make them stop, isn’t it? She watches the red run across the pale of her skin, drop to the sink, and slide down the porcelain into the waiting mouth of the drain.
Her lip curls. Hasn’t she bled enough? Hasn’t she given up enough? She rips the scarf from her head, grabs a serpent, and forces its maw open. It hisses and writhes in her fist.
Your fault.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
She cuts out the serpent’s tongue. The pain is like a fire raging unchecked beneath her scalp, a thousand brutal words slamming against her skin. The blade slips from her hands, and she covers her mouth to hold in the scream.
The tongue sits in the basin, dark against the white. Like an exclamation point. Like an accusation.
She takes her h
ands away. Shrieks. Grabs another serpent. Grabs the blade.
“Not my fault.”
Another tongue falls. She reaches for another serpent.
“Not my fault.”
Again, the blade. Again, the pain.
“It was never my fault.”
One by one, the tongues fall, and when the last is gone, she drops the razor on the floor. The serpents are writhing, their hateful words now the sibilance of rage, of warning, of something else she cannot define, though it feels right and sure.
The pain slowly fades to a dull ache. Perhaps it will remain, perhaps time will turn it to memory, but it doesn’t matter. She stands tall. Smiles. Brushes her hair away from her face. Her eyes are full of tears—a sign of the pain or of triumph or perhaps a little of both. Her skin is still smooth; her face still a maiden’s. If the visage captures a man’s fancy, if it turns his heart to stone, so be it. She will not apologize for who, for what, she is anymore. It’s time to reveal the truth and rewrite the story, her story, the way it was meant to be written all along.
Once upon a time, she wasn’t the villain.
© 2013 by Damien Walters Grintalis.
Damien Walters Grintalis’ short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Shimmer, and others. Her debut novel, Ink, was released in December 2012. She is also an Associate Editor of the Hugo Award-winning magazine Electric Velocipede and a staff writer with BooklifeNow. She lives in Maryland with her husband and two rescued pit bulls, but you can find her online at damienwaltersgrintalis.com or follow her on Twitter @dwgrintalis.
The Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue
Holly Black
There is a werewolf girl in the city. She sits by the phone on a Saturday night, waiting for it to ring. She paints her nails purple.
She goes to bed early. Body curled around a pillow, fingers clawing at the bedspread, she dreams that she’s on a dating show, a reality television one. She’s supposed to pick one boyfriend out of a dozen strangers by eliminating one candidate each week. After eliminations, she eats the guys she’s asked to leave. In her dream, the boys get more and more afraid as they overhear screams, but they can’t quite believe the show is letting them be murdered one by one, so they convince each other to stay until the end. In the reunion episode, the werewolf girl eats the boy who she’s picked to be her boyfriend.
That’s the only way to get to do a second season, after all.
When she wakes up, she’s sorry about the dream. It makes her feel guilty and a little bit hungry, which makes her feel worse. Her real-life boyfriend is a good guy, the son of a dentist from an ancestral line of dentists. Sometimes, he takes her to his dad’s office and they sit in the chairs and suck on nitrous while watching the overhead televisions that are supposed to distract patients. When they do that, the werewolf girl feels calmer than she’s felt her whole life.
She’s calling herself Nadia in this city. She’s called herself Laura and Liana and Dana in other places.
Despite going to bed early, she’s woken up tired.
Nadia takes her temperature and jots it down in a little notebook by the side of the bed. Temperature is more accurate than phases of the moon in telling her when she’s going to change.
She gets dressed, makes coffee, and drinks it. Then goes to work. She is a waitress on a street where there are shirt shops and shops that sell used records and bandanas and studded belts. She brings out tuna salads to aged punks and cappuccinos in massive bowls to tourists who ask her why she doesn’t have any tattoos.
Nadia still looks young enough that her lack of references doesn’t seem strange to her employers, although she worries about the future. For now, though, she appears to be one of a certain type of girl—a girl that wants to be an actress, who’s come in from the suburbs and never really worked before, a girl restaurants in the city employ a lot of. She always asks about flexibility in her interviews, citing auditions and rehearsals. Nadia is glad of the easy excuses, since she does actually need a flexible schedule.
The only problem with her lie is that the other girls ask her to go to auditions.
Sometimes Nadia goes, especially when she’s lonely. Her boyfriend is busy learning about teeth and gets annoyed when she calls him. He has a lot of classes. The auditions are often dull, but she likes the part where all the girls stand in line and drink coffee while they wait. She likes the way their skin shimmers with nervous sweat and their eyes shine with the possibility of transformation. The right part will let them leave their dirty little lives behind and turn them into celebrities.
Nadia sits next to another waitress, Rhonda, as they wait to be called back for the second phase of the audition for a musical. Rhonda is fingering a cigarette that she doesn’t light—because smoking is not allowed in the building and also because she’s trying to quit.
Grace, a willowy girl who can never remember anyone’s order at work, has already been cut.
“I hate it when people stop doing things and then they don’t want to be around other people doing them,” Rhonda says, flipping the cigarette over and over in her fingers. “Like people who stop drinking and then can’t hang out in bars. I mean, how can you really know you’re over something if you can’t deal with being tempted by it?”
Nadia nods automatically, since it makes her feel better to think that letting herself be tempted is a virtue. Sometimes she thinks of the way a ribcage cracks or the way fat and sinew and offal taste when they’re gulped down together hot and raw. It doesn’t bother her that she has these thoughts, except when they come at inappropriate moments, like being alone with the driver in a taxi or helping a friend clean up after a party.
A large woman with many necklaces calls Rhonda’s name and she goes out onto the stage. Nadia takes another sip of her coffee and looks over at the sea of other girls on the call-back list. The girls look back at her through narrowed eyes.
Rhonda comes back quickly. “You’re next,” she says to Nadia. “I saw the clipboard.”
“How was it?”
Rhonda shakes her head and lights her cigarette. “Stupid. They wanted me to jump around. They didn’t even care if I could sing.”
“You can’t smoke in here,” one of the other girls says.
“Oh, shove it,” says Rhonda.
When Nadia goes out onto the stage, she expects her audition to go fast. She reads monologues in a way that can only be called stilted. She’s never had a voice coach. The only actual acting she ever does is when she pretends to be disappointed when the casting people don’t want her. Usually she just holds the duffel bags of the other girls as they are winnowed down, cut by cut.
The stage is lit so that she can’t see the three people sitting in the audience too well. It’s one of those converted warehouse theaters where everyone sits at tables with tea lights and gets up a lot to go to the bar in the back. No tea lights are flickering now.
“We want to teach you a routine,” one of them says. A man’s voice, with an accent she can’t place. “But first—a little about our musical. It’s called the Aarne-Thompson Classification Revue. Have you heard of it?”
Nadia shakes her head. On the audition call, it was abbreviated ATSCR. “Are you Mr. Aarne?”
He makes a small sound of disappointment. “We like to think of it as a kitchen sink of delights. Animal Tales. Tales of Magic. Jokes. Everything you could imagine. Perhaps the title is a bit dry, but our poster more than makes up for that. You ready to learn a dance?”
“Yes,” says Nadia.
The woman with the necklaces comes out on the stage. She shows Nadia some simple steps and then points to crossed strips of black masking tape on the floor.
“You jump from here to here at the end,” the woman says.
“Ready?” calls the man. One of the other people sitting with him says something under his breath.
Nadia nods, going over the steps in her head. When he gives her the signal, she twists and steps
and leaps. She mostly remembers the moves. At the end, she leaps though the air for the final jump. Her muscles sing.
In that moment, she wishes she wasn’t a fake. She wishes that she was a dancer. Or an actress. Or even a waitress. But she’s a werewolf and that means she can’t really be any of those other things.
“Thank you,” another man says. He sounds a little odd, as though he’s just woken up. Maybe they have to watch so many auditions that they take turns napping through them. “We’ll let you know.”
Nadia walks back to Rhonda, feeling flushed. “I didn’t think this was a call for dancers.”
Rhonda rolls her eyes. “It’s for a musical. You have to dance in a musical.”
“I know,” says Nadia, because she does know. But there’s supposed to be singing in musicals too. She thought Rhonda would be annoyed at only being asked to dance; Rhonda usually likes to complain about auditions. Nadia looks down at her purple nail polish. It’s starting to chip at the edges.
She puts the nail in her mouth and bites it until she bleeds.
Being a werewolf is like being Clark Kent, except that when you go into the phone booth, you can’t control what comes out.
Being a werewolf is like being a detective who has to investigate his own crimes.
Being a werewolf means that when you take off your clothes, you’re still not really naked. You have to take off your skin too.
Once, when Nadia had a different name and lived in a small town outside of Toronto, she’d been a different girl. She took ballet and jazz dancing. She had a little brother who was always reading her diary. Then one day on her way home from school, a man asked her to help him find his dog. He had a leash and a van and everything.
He ate part of her leg and stomach before anyone found them.
When she woke up in the hospital, she remembered the way he’d caught her with his snout pinning her neck, the weight of his paws. She looked down at her unscarred skin and stretched her arms, ripping the IV needle out without meaning to.
She left home after she tried to turn her three best friends into werewolves too. It didn’t work. They screamed and bled. One of them died.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 36 Page 14
