“I realized that night what my destiny was. I could see there were things out there that needed my help.”
People, you want to correct him. Monsters are people too. People can be monsters. Sometimes you don’t know where the difference lies.
He opens another door, and then you see Phoebe.
She lies on a pristine white–sheeted gurney, her hands wrapped in gauze, her mouth stuffed with cotton. Her eyes stare blankly at the bank of florescent lights above.
You’re at her side before he can stop you. “Phoebe? I’m here to take you home.”
“Not yet.” He stands by the doorway, sagging under the weight of his jacket. “She needs rest. Therapy. She needs rehabilitation. We can provide that here.”
Your sister’s eyes focus—so, so slowly—and she blinks at you. Tears drip down her face.
She lifts her hands, staring at the gauze, and already you can tell her hands are smaller, stubbier. No claws.
You’re afraid to see what’s inside her mouth.
“I can help them all,” he’s saying, far away. “My father tried to do the same. But medical practices have improved now. There’s less chance of a procedure going wrong, or infection, or…”
Hair itches against your horns, and the wing nubs burn under your shirt.
Your sister’s body shakes, sobs muffled against cotton. She thrusts her hands at you, pleading. How can she paint without her claws?
“…she’ll know where others are,” he’s saying, “and we can fix them.”
Make all the monster girls normal.
“…we can’t guarantee all will survive,” he’s saying, “but it’s better than what they are now…”
And he’s saying your name, and then his hand is on your shoulder, and he’s trying to pull you away as Phoebe cries.
“You’re not as bad,” he’s saying, “minimal surgery would be all you need to fix you, make you better, cure you of this…”
What’s wrong with monster girls?
“…you can’t live in normal society,” he’s saying, “not like you are…”
What’s wrong with monster girls?
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
“No,” you say.
He gapes, his mouth ajar. “What?”
“I said no.” You shake off his hand and unbuckle the straps holding Phoebe down. She paws at her mouth, and you begin pulling cotton free of her lips. “You won’t touch her. You won’t touch any of us unless we give you permission.”
“You’re not well!” He grabs your arm. “None of you! Don’t you get it? Monsters are dangerous!”
You’ve always been stronger than you look. You seize his wrist and pry him off. You lift him off his feet by the arm. “I told you not to touch any of us without permission.”
His face flushes red. “You are not taking my patient!”
“She’s not yours,” you tell him, and Phoebe spits free the last of the white fluff choking her. “None of us are yours .”
Your sister’s mouth is raw, gums bloody, but there are still teeth visible. He couldn’t pull them all. She bites away the gauze on her hands.
“Security!” he yells. He flails at you, catches you in the ribs with a knee. “Help!”
You drop him with a grunt. He scrabbles across the floor away from you and pulls a syringe out of his coat pocket.
“Can I help you?” you ask your sister, and she nods.
You unpeel the gauze and lift her hands in yours. Her bones are splinted, smaller, and her claws are cauterized nubs. Your chest squeezes tight. No one should be hurt this way. Melanie shouldn’t have had her shadows excised.
There is room in the world for girls of all kinds. Monster girls and the girls who love them and all the others who’ve ever lived.
“I’m so sorry,” you whisper. “Let’s go home.”
Phoebe smiles wide, and it doesn’t make you sick this time.
“There’re others here,” she says. “I saw them before he did this.”
“Then we’ll take them all away from here,” you say, and help your sister to her feet.
Your ex stands in the door, needle in hand. “No one is leaving my hospital.” His voice remains even. “You don’t belong out there—freaks shouldn’t be seen.”
“You told me I’d die,” Melanie says behind him. She stands in the hallway. “You said I’d die if you didn’t operate.”
“I said you wouldn’t have a life worth living!” He whirls, arm raised. “And it’s true!”
“No it’s not,” Phoebe says. “There’s nothing wrong with us.”
“I liked my shadows,” Melanie whispers.
You hear feet pounding down another hallway, coming nearer. You glance down at your sister’s hand—and gasp.
Her claws are growing back, long and heavy and sharp. “Mama was right,” she tells you, smiling wide. “When we’re happy, we don’t hide. But also when we’re angry.”
The man spins to face you again, and now his skin is sallow, sweaty. “That’s impossible. I cut them off—I fixed you!”
“You hurt me,” Phoebe says, and she prowls towards him, lifting her arms with slow, steady grace.
In the hallway, blanketed in florescent light, Melanie’s shadows begin to unfurl from her skin. “You hurt all of us .”
You shake back your hair and think of all those years combined when you shaved down your horns and clipped your wings. All the pain. For men like him , for all the men who refused to accept you. You think of your mother, dead because someone feared her. Of your aunt, who hid behind scars. Of all the monster girls you’ve never met and who Phoebe was waiting for.
Your horns are hot as a welding torch—arching out and into massive, beautiful darkness. Your shirt rips as you stretch your wings.
Melanie and Phoebe corner the doctor.
You unfurl your great wings and step into the hall to meet the security.
Kassy waits outside the hospital, standing by her open car door. Her breath huffs in great steamy clouds. Her headlights pin the glass doors, fogged up on the inside.
Dawn is close, and the clouds are peeling away from the gray sky.
You take a breath before you step outside. Behind you, all the imprisoned monster girls—and the monster boys, and the ones who are neither—are waiting. Following. Hoping there is more outside than terror and a mob with pitchforks and torches or police cars with sirens.
You’ll take them all home, to your castle. Let them heal and rest. Show them how to hide if they wish, but not through mutilation and pain.
Phoebe shows your new family the wilds behind the castle and the paintings they recognize themselves in. Some wish to stay; others will journey on. Everyone can return, welcomed, if they wish.
Kassy comes with you to the castle.
She doesn’t flinch when she sees your sister smile, or clasps hands with her. She laughs and grins and dances with the other people now filling your home with joy.
You tell her, and Phoebe, that you’re keeping your horns and your wings whole. They hug you tight. You are a monster girl and you are learning how to live.
You ask Kassy, “Will you stay with me?”
She says yes.
( Editors’ Note: A. Merc Rustad is interviewed by Julia Rios in this issue of Uncanny Magazine .)
© 2017 by A. Merc Rustad
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A. Merc Rustad is a queer non–binary writer who lives in the Midwest United States. Favorite things include: robots, dinosaurs, monsters, and tea. Their stories have appeared in Lightspeed , Fireside , Apex , Uncanny , Escape Pod , Shimmer , Cicada , and other fine venues, with reprints included in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 , Wilde Stories 2016 , and Transcendent 2016 . Merc likes to play video games, watch movies, read comics, and wear awesome hats. You can find Merc on Twitter @Merc_Rustad or their website: amercrustad.com .
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Goddess, Worm
Cassandra Khaw | 1858 words
&nbs
p; Three lies:
One: Silence is permission; quiescence, acceptance; yes is yes means always yes.
Two: This is the way of gods and beasts, a tradition of power. The men take, the woman is taken, her boundaries malleable, her desire negligible. This is cultural, universal, axiomatic fact. Mythology is unkind, deification teeth–marked by sacrifice. If there is hurt, if there are screams buried in spools of silk, if there is grief, it is purely accidental.
Three: It is her pleasure too, this communion of flesh, this loan of agency, this borrowed might. After all, without men, what is a woman? She is only mud, only the sickle–grin curve of a rib, only an afterthought, a diversion, a vessel, empty until filled.
“Goddess.”
Flinch. Eyes dilate. Her look is not the frightened regard of a hare, but a broken–backed glare of a thing defeated but undiminished.
“Don’t call me that.” When she speaks, she can taste silk, like strands of damp hair but more viscous still, a choking flavor, semen–salty, spuming from her lungs.
“Goddess—” Flinch again. “—we are sorry. It’s just we—”
“Leave.” Snapped, the word, and jagged with teeth. Her retainers—a spirit of ink and courtly poetry, a guzheng turned maiden—comply, bowing, bowing again, before they exit with a hiss of silk. She shivers. She loathes the sound.
Cotton is the only material she can tolerate on her bare flesh, cotton and nothing else. Not even wool, which reminds her too much of—she rips herself from the memory, begins to pace the dimensions of her room.
In the last few weeks, Heaven has lost its understanding of her and gained instead a kind of pity, not selfless as it should be, but rooted in accusation. Poor child, they say. Broken child. Ruined child. Stupid, ungrateful child . How hard others have fought to earn this status, giving away breath and bone and blood, all for a sliver of place in these courts of undying jade. And yet, she would slough it away, like a snake that had tired of its skin, and take him with her too.
A sigh escapes, coils into a growl.
Him . Always him. As though she was extraneous, a cancer grown on the face of a god.
They can all go to hell, she thinks, savage. She does not care. But there is one thing she does miss, does long for: her name. Only the shape of it remains now, winnowed to nothing by the passing millenias, a ghost of syllables. Occasionally, she wonders if she might compromise, might beg to be returned the appellation that Heaven had endowed in that fugue when she was merely function, neither woman nor worm nor horse.
Her lips, blood–red, curl into a sneer. No, she thinks. Never again. Even if they make her remain nameless forever, rootless, like the spectre she’s become.
Double doors open. Light cuts through the room’s penumbra, spills white–gold across her simple dress, its pattern borrowed from peasantry. She tips her chin up, unbowed. They will not have her pain.
The figure silhouetted in heaven’s radiance is new, cadaverous, unmistakably male, arms bent in the manner of a mantis. “It is time, Goddess.”
Flinch. Snarl. She provides no rebuke, chooses instead to spin a fantasy where she devours him, a piece at a time, mandibles cracking bone. She thinks of brain matter, of how it must taste, jewelled softness glimmering pink in the bowl of his skull.
A deep breath. Drawn, held, surrendered.
“I am ready.”
Three truths:
One: A promise is not absolute, a singular object without nuance or end, to be consummated without question. Sometimes, it is nothing but desperation reworded into a mistake; a girl’s fear for her father, entrusted and betrayed. Sometimes, it is rewritten with an alphabet of bruises and cut lips and when that happens, how could anything be expected to stay the same?
Two: A person is not one thing, is not defined by memory or obedient to tragedy, is not a story to be folded into paragraphs, edges blurred, inconvenient truths cut out. A person can be a victim, and they can also stop being a victim, just like a woman can cease being a goddess, can start instead becoming something entirely new.
Three: This was not your fault, was not your wrong, was not your error of dressing, or glibness of speech, not your lack of foreknowledge.
All of Heaven is in attendance. The Jade Emperor, larger than life, presides on a throne carved into a nest of dragons, armrests scaled and iridescent with gems. At his side, gods without number, resplendent in martial attire, filigreed bronze and enameled plate, weapons tasseled with ribbons of red.
The goddesses sit opposite, gowned in white, faces impassive. Around them, all the rest: celestial maidens and demigods; cats that would be men and men condemned to being cats; dragons halfway into transcendence, still finned and wet from the ocean; fox–women, insolently splendid; thousand–year pottery, freshly incarnated as nubile girls with countenances of clay.
She walks into the divine milieu and breathes, inhales the peach–stink that eddies from their pores, a sweetness to sicken. She will be glad when this is gone, when it is clean earth again and warm rain in her palms, and sunlight beating hot against her sweat–drenched brow. Will there be descendants for her to find in the land below? Great–grandnieces, ten times removed, birthed by sisters she has never met. Her father. Will she discover traces of him in them? A certain bend of the mouth, a knowingness in the gaze. It doesn’t have to be much. Just a glimmer. That is all she wants and needs.
“—you will give up all this for what really was a minor offense?”
Startled, she looks up, tongue thick in her mouth.
“Goddess.” The magistrate at her side. She wrestles the compulsion to snarl. “His Magnificence is speaking to you.”
She knows. How would she not know? Why does he think it necessary to explain? The air shakes with his puissance. But she knows better than to argue. The Jade Emperor is waiting.
“My Lord, I must humbly disagree. It was not a minor offense. He stole me from my father, transformed—”
Another interruption: the defense, hair cranefeather–white, mouth banded in scarlet. “If I recall correctly, he stole you from poverty, a lifespan measured in difficult births. Besides, you promised him—”
“I was a child crying to her only confidante!”
“Even so,” the defense continues, unruffled, “even so, you offered the terms of an agreement and he fairly accepted. A lesser creature would have simply ravaged you. Instead, he caused you both to be elevated.”
“I was a worm.” Taste of silk again, suffocating.
She remembers:
One last glimpse of the earth, seen through a slit in a swaddle of cured skin. One last gasp of clean air. Screaming, as he floated them into her trees. Screaming, as he and her became they, became one, became—
That first twilight when she cut herself free and became her again, just her. Mucus–slick and shivering, body glistening worm–pale in the waning light. Staring as a puddle of skins—horse–hair and membrane and white–mottled fur—writhed across blood–blotched wood.
Nights in the latrine, holding her own hair, vomiting acres of glimmering fibres, until at last they became blood–stained, gore–streaked.
“I was a worm with the head of a horse. I spun silk for the court, over and over, for thousands of—”
“And we all appreciate it.”
Murmurs from the gods, silence from the goddesses.
“You boiled me alive for the silk. I didn’t appreciate it.” She doesn’t quite shudder, although horror frissons along the column of her spine. She has little recollection of that time and for that she is grateful. She has nightmares enough.
“Even so.”
She ignores him, turns to the Jade Emperor. “Your Majesty, I appreciate all that Heaven has done but I would be go home and, if I may be so brash, would see my tormenter suitably punished.”
“We cannot.”
Her heart seizes. “Why, Your Majesty?”
“Because of your benefactor—”
She bites down hard on her tongue, floods her mouth with copp
er, all to keep from screaming. Benefactor.
“—did Heaven a service by introducing silk to the world. Without him, kings would still wear robes of cotton. Without him, we would have never known this luxury, and humanity would have never learned this trade. We cannot forget his contributions. We cannot cast them aside, just like we cannot cast aside your allegations of torment.”
Allegations. Her nails dig crescents into her palm, find blood there too. “Your Majesty.”
“Having said that, we will provide a suitable sentence, one that balances both his crime and his contributions to this world.” His tone alters, subtle, informative transitions to dismissive. This matter is closed. “His form will be restored.”
“Your Majesty, no.” So soft, so frail her entreaty. How she loathes its mealiness on her tongue. But she cannot help the noise that whimpers free.
“He will serve in the armies as stallion and stud, obedient to Guan Yu. He—”
“You can’t. This is not fair. Your Majesty, what it —” It. Not he. She will not gild her monster. “ —did was a violation.”
“—will be evaluated for a position in heaven after a suitable duration. As for you—”
“No. No. No.”
But the Jade Emperor is inexorable. “—we will grant you your heart’s desire. Find Meng Po and she will prepare you for travel into your next—”
“Your Majesty,” Dry, her mouth. Dry of words, her throat. How dare they? How dare they? How dare they? After all this, after everything that had happened, this is the judgment that they fit into her hands?
“I refuse.”
A ripple of answering noise.
“What?” The Jade Emperor, brows knitting together.
“Your Majesty, I appreciate your generosity but I have changed my mind. I will remain here. I will be a goddess.” She shivers, but she is not afraid. She is done being afraid. “I ask that you give me jurisdiction over the small and the hurt, the ones with no voices, the forgotten. I ask to rule the quiet places where the frightened weep, to be the ones who answer their prayers.”
“That is simple enough. But I must know, why the change of heart?”
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