Medusa

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, roll up, roll up, and step this way! Yes, if you’re interested in the weird and strange, if you crave the bizarre and frightening, you’ve come to the right place! Yes, step inside and see freaks from the darkest corners of the darkest countries in all the wide world! Roll up, pay the toll, step through the curtained gate, and you’re there, my friends, in the presence of the freaks who haunted your childhood dreams, and haunt you still! Forget the pinheads, the mermaids, the wolf-children! Forget the boneless girl and the headless boy. You’ve seen all of those things before! Don’t waste your dime on things that you’ve already seen. Pay here, pay me, and step through the door. Do it now. Don’t miss the show! Roll up, roll up! Extinguish all smoking materials at the door. Forget what you think you know of the world. Roll up! Hurry, hurry, hurry, ladies and gentlemen. Come one, come all, and stand in her presence, if you dare!

You’ve seen the Bearded Lady! Now come see the Serpent Queen, the saddest girl in all the world!”

They kept her in the dark for so long that her eyes grew skin, closed forever, and, dawn-blind, she waits. She presses herself against the dirt floor of the cage, her palms and cheek and breasts and belly and cunt, and she listens, and she waits. They’ll come; they always come, one way or another, are led or sent. They all look the same to her, with their pale smooth skin and their fine, fly-away hair. Her hair lies dull and lifeless, blunt against the dark dirt. She is still, and so are they. The insects that she catches when they skitter across the floor are barely enough to keep her alive. She swallows them whole, and they pull at the stitches in her throat as they squirm the way down into her belly. They throw her cabbage leaves and spoiled fruit, things that stink of earth and rot. Khthon, she whispers. She forgets the exact meaning, but it had something to do with harvests and graves. In the dark, she is her own grave. Her healed over eyes make no tears. Once upon a time, there was ritual sacrifice, and it was babies that they left in the holes in the earth for her to find.

She licks her lips. Her forked tongue tickles the corners of her mouth and tastes the air. She tastes copper and shit and oil fumes. There’s a rat in the cage with her, somewhere, and she gropes for it. When she catches them, she swallows them whole. It reminds her of sex, her head thrown back, the undulation of breasts and throat as she forces it on down, and then the dead sleep that follows.

She misses this one. She sucks at her lips for the taste of the last one. There’s barely anything there.

Outside, the shouting starts again. In the old days, the good bad days when she was Guardian and Protector and Queen, there were prayers. She doesn’t understand the words, but she wonders if the meaning might be the same. Devotion, desire, and one day you’re fucking on somebody’s altar and you’ve signed your own death warrant. Some deaths take longer than others. All these years, she’s been waiting.

Something changes. A cockroach skitters across her face and up over her open-closed eye. It’s just trying to get away from the light. She presses her ear to the floor and listens to the trembling of footsteps in the dirt. She can’t see, but she knows what’s happening. If nothing else, she’s learned how long it takes for things to change. There’ll be a mirror, high on the wall. There’ll be a boy with fine golden hair. In her youth, her hair was golden too. There’ll be no sword. They don’t carry swords anymore.

What one god takes away, another finds a way to give.

Slowly, she sits up, but she keeps the palms of both hands pressed against the floor, the better to feel him with. She lifts her head and feels the whisper of a hundred forked tongues against her cheek. She whispers to them, and tells them to be patient. Obligate, she needs meat to thrive. They come to her like babies, toddling, their eyes unfocused. They see her blindness, and don’t realise how quickly she can move. A bead of venom forces past the rim of one blind eye and trickles warmly down her cheek. She wants him so much that she can taste it.

In the old days, they dug holes like graves and left the babies there for her, with words of ritual. They placated her with blood. They kept her at bay with tender flesh, easier to swallow whole, until their hero could make is way up to her mountain with mirror and sword.

Old story. Unsatisfying.

The sirens, though, were from the earth too, the earth’s daughters, and they taught their sisters how to sing. Khthon, they said, because even beautiful things must eventually come to rot beneath the earth. Gravedirt caked under her fingernails. In the dark, the years and years of dark, she taught herself to sing in harmony with herself, a hundred and one flickering forked tongues. She can’t see, but she knows that he’s watching her in the mirror, and she knows that men can’t resist this song without a mast to bind themselves to. He’ll turn. He has to. He doesn’t have a choice. The shouting outside gets louder, so she doesn’t have much time, before they come in here to find another one made stone, but not before she has his blood to warm her. There’ll be another one through the door any minute, come to see the Serpent Queen, saddest girl in all the world, with her blind eyes and her poison tears.

She stretches out her hands to him, and she sings, and she sways, and she smiles, and she waits.