In Cold Blood - A Short Fairytale
Once upon a time, there was a girl.
Her oaken skin was as cold as frost, her eyes dark pools of silt and sorrow, and her bowed lips always downturned as if contemplating a secret grief. It was rumored a clear glimpse of her could be seen in clearings of the forest ringing the edge of town, her earthly flesh iridescent as she bathed in warm pools of sun or cool beams of moon. She was as free as the night, lips blue with the blood of the stars she plucked from the open sky, fingernails dull and dark with the meat of the earth.
The townspeople whispered that she was a witch–that she had sold her soul to a devil, that she walked naked and unashamed with the wild things, that she wore the shame of humanity like a warm cloak and rejected the melody of the divine.
Children dared each other to steal into the trees, sneak into her cabin, and return with a lock of hair from her wooden comb that would grant them any one wish. Men dared each other to hunt her down and bring her skin as an offering to their sovereign, proof that magic was still left in the land. Women whispered of the scandal of a woman living in the filth of the forest alone–that there was no magical witch, just a woman gone mad and haunted.
The rumors and stories wound themselves about the town like silkworm string on a spinning wheel, the fear of the village witch dipping in and out of their hearts like a working needle. They could see pieces of her at the edge of the woods sometimes–dark eyes, a white serpent, singing toads or a slice of black moon. Watching but never doing, as untouchable as true love and unknown as death, always at the brink of their vision.
And then one day, she wept.
Her cries echoed across the treetops, poured into the town like rotten honey. The day prior, a hunter had ventured into the forest and returned with a sack of snakeskin–the spoils of a rattlesnake den. The guarding mother had been easily dispatched and the hatchlings beheaded and pulled apart until nothing but spindly bones and maggot ridden meat remained in their dusty old hole in the ground.
“They’re her familiars!” The townspeople cried, and children cowered in fear. Even the old village women, having long grown tired of the folktales and jealous of the witch’s supposed otherworldly beauty, began to grow restless. The witch had always existed at the cusp of their lives, nothing more than fleeting glances and nighttime warnings. A beautiful, ugly, wild bedtime story.
Not anymore, not after the huntsman.
The witch’s cries rung heavy for three days, the townspeople weeping with the reflection of her pain, their hands shaking with the echo of her insurmountable grief. Finally, the hunter wrung his hands and wiped his tears, saying, “Well, I think it’s about time this nonsense stops. Who would cry for nothing but a den of venomous adders? Only a witch would feel such a drive for the serpent, and I will not let her darkness cast a shadow over our good town any longer!”
And so the man did what he did best–he hunted.
He followed the sound of her sadness through the trees, finding her in a clearing where she seemed to melt and dance between the sunbeams as she wept. The hunter was enchanted by her beauty–the soft slopes of her flesh, the tangled curtain of her hair, the starlight glimmer of tears cascading down her cheeks and beading on her ever blue lips. Even her despair, thick and alive, was like something from an old poem. Something spiritual.
She straightened, turning to meet him with broken eyes. “They were my friends,” she whispered, and it was the sound of breaking glass.
“They were but serpents,” he said. “Do you be the witch?”
“I am not a witch,” She said. “I am merely home.”
“Lying woman.” He smiled, all teeth. She was beautiful, even for a devil. He took a step forward.
“You are stronger than me.” Her voice was little more than a breath. “But if you hurt me, I will call on my friends. I have done nothing to hurt you, while you have taken everything from me. Even now, after all you have done, I will let you walk away.”
Her skin was the color of oak and earth, but colder than the coldest winter when he grabbed her wrist.
“Please.” She begged. “Do not hurt me. Tell me what I have done?”
“Please.” She begged. “Do not hurt me. Tell me what I have done?”
“Please.” She begged. “Do not hurt me. Tell me what I have done?”
He removed her knickers and chest bindings, his fingers gliding and then digging deep into soft flesh. Lustful wrath overtook him, and the image of the skinned rattlesnake hatchlings danced across his vision as he pressed his lips to her living skin, the thrum of her fear singing to him. He thought of winter blood and leftover guts and prestige, the honor that would follow him as the conqueror of the forest, the land’s greatest huntsman–once he returned home with a tamed, deflowered forest witch as his wife.
“I warned you.” She smiled sadly, and her eyes seemed to glow as blue as her lips then, the blood of stars flooding them with the coldness of space, an icy intensity the hunter could never hope to understand. The forest seemed to bend with a new weight, going inward until the huntsman could not breathe. In the absence of the girl’s weeping, a choir of hissing, croaking, slithering life began to encircle the twisted pair.
The air was red with threads of fate.
“You are a witch!” The hunter cried, eyes searching frantically in the shadows for the encroaching enemy and pulling the trembling girl closer to him in his desperation. “Stop this!”
“You kill what is different than you without asking yourself why it angers you so. You are greedy and take what you want without consequence only because you can. You speak cruelty because you have never allowed yourself kindness. You fear the free because you are doomed to be caged by shackles of your own design. You refuse to see the beauty of the whole because you cannot escape the ugliness of your soul.”
The forest was upon him. Adders and vipers and serpents and all manner of cold, night dwelling things covered the hunter from head to toe–all teeth and claws and venom and ice. He screamed and writhed beneath the girl, begging the witch for mercy. Crocodilians tore at his meat and venom flooded his veins, and all the ugly things of the world dismantled every inch of his carefully constructed human beauty and ignorance.
“I am no witch,” the girl whispered, his snake-hide gloves heavy in her hands. “I am but a friend to the cold blooded, the forgotten and the other. I am but a girl in her home.”
She turned from him, the gloves cradled to her bare chest, close to her heart. She seemed to melt into the fading sun, becoming long as the milky way and as bright as hope. She bent herself to the ground and joined her kin, the cold blooded other, hissing out a prayer of farewell for a broken man.
They headed back for the stars nestled in the trees, their homes that lie in the gaps between what the normal knew and forgot. The always sat at the cusp, unable to melt back into a world that had forgotten them, but always ready to help them understand. To be different–warm and cold–together. To be a part of that whole, a complete puzzle of correspondence and unity.
That day could not be today.
The girl let her heart bleed and prayed deeply for the world, for the lost, for the broken and damned all the same.
She was simply a girl at home. And no matter what the town whispered, it’s where she would stay.
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