Tagged: Trembling With Fear

Chapter Three: Hand-Fasting

Three days have passed since Marmos. I’ve barely slept, have not eaten. This evening, the eve of my hand-fasting ceremony, my betrothed will join us for dinner. Mother made me piece together a makeshift bed in the living room. There, he will sleep alone tonight. We are forbade to touch until hand-fasted, so celestial law states.

Tomorrow morning, in the top field where the stone circle of our dead sleep, under the watchful eye of the village council, my betrothed and I will be wed, then he and I will return to the home in which I grew up and he will sleep in my room, with me. By tradition, consummation will occur. Tomorrow night, I will experience the pain before the bliss. I do not even know his name.

*

Mother, from her chair, hurls out commands: how I should wear my petals, how the table should be laid, what we can and can’t ask my betrothed of his wealth and background. 

 “Do not forget to turn the meat.” Mother’s voice, trill. “Put Alora in her prettiest frock, the white one. The short sleeves which show off her quills.”

“Stop fussing, woman,” Father says. Mother shrinks. Father pours himself an ale, pulls out his seat, head of the table, and sits.

I polish and lay out cutlery. We’ve borrowed fine porcelain from next door. Father insists we give off the impression of wealth, hoping it will beget wealth. 

In the kitchen, I turn the piglet on the spit. Cooked pork tang fills the air, a smell that normally whets my palette. 

I wash and dress myself and Alora and we sit and wait.

A knock at the door.

My heart bolts. 

I let him in. “Hello,” I say. Here he is: broad, oxen-like. He grunts hello back, his greeting punctuated with a deep wheeze, and enters. 

I muster a half-smile and guide him through our home. He walks with a thuggish limp, his left foot dragging slightly. I take his coat, careful not to brush my skin against his as he passes it to me, hang it up, and direct him to the table where my family sit.

*

I serve up the meat, the soup made from parsnips from the garden. Father fills our glasses with wine, downs his in three, fills it up again. 

“Glad to have someone with grand connections taking on our daughter,” Father says. “She’s not perfect, but her skin is smooth.” Father raises his glass in my direction, swigs from it, maintaining eye contact with our guest.

“Yes.” My betrothed speaks, drawing breath loudly. “Your daughter is a fine flower—I see by the scars on her hand she works hard— ” 

They discuss me as if I’m not there, am but an object. Heat rises in my belly. But fast, the conversation veers from me as our guest turns to his right and pats my sister on her petals. 

“And Alora. Alora has something about her.” My betrothed pauses, looks at me again, lust dripping like honey from his tongue, then at Alora. “An innocence.” I watch on, like a pinned victim of sleep paralysis, as his eyes drink her in. “A rose with thorns.” He swigs on his wine. “Dangerous, yet beautiful, don’t you think?”

Father rests his fork, grabs at the tuft of white petals that crest his scalp, then picks up his fork again. With a wavering hand, he stabs another piece of meat from the central mound and pushes it off onto his already full plate without uttering a word.

Mother drops her knife. I pass her a clean one, enclosing the handle of the sharp silverware between her arthritic fingers, and directing her hand back to her plate, 

Father grunts. “Eat.” He shovels pink meat into his mouth.

The tongue of the stranger slithers between ridges of pork. He makes primordial sounds as he feeds. Yet all the while I stare at him, disgust pulsing in my belly, he sucks and chews and stares—the white of his eyes exposed—at Alora. Still covered with spines and thorns, dolls and sea treasure her sources of joy in life, he watches her while she eats.

I blow steam from my bowl, rearrange my napkin, sip on soup I do not hunger for, find anything to do at the table except be in my head. 

Bones stack like grim firewood on our guest’s plate. “Delicious,” he says and pushes his plate forward, then leans back in his seat. He strokes my sister’s quills with the back of his hand. My sister—her plump, pale arms far from adult softness, her small fingers clumsy—giggles. Her childhood spines bounce as she laughs. “Tickles,” she says.

My betrothed releases a slow sigh. Too far away to push his hand from her, I cough and kick a table leg. Cutlery and plates jump, clink. My betrothed looks across at me and removes his hand from her. My fingers flinch and move towards my meat knife. I wrap my right hand around the blade’s stone handle so tightly my knuckles shout in whiteness.

I can’t face another mouthful. “May the Celestials excuse me,” I say, and rise and take my full bowl to the sink. He follows me into the kitchen. I skirt around him like a glass chess piece on a board, I, a queen alone, all my pieces captured; him, encroaching, gearing up for checkmate. He grabs me. Firm, dirty fingers poke hard into the crook of my waist. “You are not my usual type,” he says, his hot breath a miasma of dinner and no self care, “but we will wed regardless.” 

 “Don’t touch me,” I say and pull myself from his grip. “You know as well as I, those betrothed must not touch before hand-fasting. What’ve you done? Get off.” My waist smarts from his aggressive grip. I brush away the kinks his forceful hand crimped into my smock and continue to brush long after my dress lies flat. 

He mirrors my actions, mocking me. “Cheer up,” he says and heads back to the table. 

In the kitchen, I scrape plates, wipe crumbs, contemplate a brittle marriage. A ghost pain strikes me in my side where his fingers have undoubtedly left their foul mark. I rub the area where my thorns once were to ease the discomfort and wish for the freedom of youth, quills and thorns.

Father calls me to the table. I return, squeezing Mother’s arm as I drop into my seat. She doesn’t respond. No one speaks. The rattle of my betrothed’s laboured breathing is all I hear.

“Alora, do you know the penny and handkerchief trick?” the stranger asks. He pulls a coin and dirty rag from his pocket, my sister captivated by his faux magic. Father, half-cut since sunset, offers this beast of a man something a little stronger, to which my betrothed nods and  the two men head to Father’s study.

*

Alora and I sort the kitchen. Mother knits in her chair, feeling each stitch onto the needle. A grey scarf drapes and puddles onto the floor by her feet. 

The click clack of her art, although hypnotic, is not enough to distract me from the anxiety in my bones. I keep busy, keep Alora busy. We do anything that keeps a wall between us and the men.

Mother calls my name. “Take me to my room,” she says. “Then put Alora to bed. You both need sleep for tomorrow.” A hollowness rings in her voice. Her eyes, catching the light of the candelabra, shine with a blank iridescence. Oil on water. I’ve never seen her look so old. I help her from her seat, her frail body a sad lightness to it, and she says nothing else. I want to express my trepidation to her, but these feelings pop like bubbles in my sternum, way before they birth into words.

*

“To bed, Alora,” I say after I’ve guided Mother to hers. I poke safe fireplace embers, then check on Father and the guest to bid them goodnight. 

Father sleeps in his chair, his jaw hung open. I drape blankets over him and direct our guest to his makeshift bed. He sways as he walks loudly, knocking paintings, and swigs the remnants of Father’s sherry. 

“Those are for you,” I gesture at the blanket stack, turn on a lantern for him so the room is dimly lit, and leave to get Alora ready for bed without looking him in the eye.

*

I read to Alora, brush smooth her petals, her quills. “He’s a nice man,” she says as I put down the book. “When he speaks closely though, I breathe like this.” Alora inhales and exhales through her mouth. “Remember the carcass we found on the beach? The ripped dolphin?” She mock-vomits. “He told me my thorns were beautiful though. Said he’d never felt such sharp tips.”

“He did?” Dear Celestials. “They are not his to touch, Alora.” She blushes. Pride slips from her face. “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to raise my voice.” I pull her quilt up, and kiss her forehead. “You are gorgeous, what’s inside you is beautiful.” I point to her heart, blow another kiss, then leave. Closing her door behind me, I scurry to my room.

Chapter Two: Marmos

The journey isn’t far, just steep and rocky underfoot. Mother and I venture slowly up the mountain to where the village’s prophet resides. 

Marmos’s place is desolate and demarcated by a semi-circle of pampas grass brush and weathered stone pillars. Each pillar is etched with incomprehensible rune arrangements and topped with a lit fire staff. I’ve never been here before, but Mother has, before she met Father.

A low chant rises and falls on air currents as we move closer to the building. Mother complains about volume, plugs her curled fingers in her ears, but to me, the music’s barely detectable. 

The front door’s wide open. Mother tells me I must go in first, must present the offerings to Marmos, will probably be taken deeper into the building without her. She follows me through a tunnel roofed with billowing silk scarves. The air is rich with incense, a floral kind. Heady. We enter a small room, warm and lit only around its edges with flickering tallow wax candles in shades of crimson and gold.

Marmos sits humming, cross-legged, buckled forwards on a red velvet rug, his head hung. He wears a kilt of linen, the rest of his large body otherwise unclothed. There’s something chelonian about this ancient man. His skin’s the most leathered I’ve ever seen. A carapace covers his shoulders and back.

He appears to be lost in thought, maybe searching for his soul in his upturned hands. A misplaced step lands my foot on something crunchy. He stops humming, glances up.

Unable to hold his gaze, I look down at my own hands, in them clutched my sack of loosenings, the bag much lighter than it should be. My heart clacks fast. I worry. Will he notice? 

He draws me in closer with one slow arm movement. No hellos, no introductions. A wild sound bursts from his mouth, a noise that forces some of the darkness of the room into a hard ball that lodges in my stomach. “It’s time,” he says. I’m unsure if this is a question or a statement but all I want to say is, no, I am not ready, it is not time before grabbing Mother’s hand and running for the exit.

Marmos grins, exposing grey, toothless gums. The sight takes my breath like the driest wine. He stands and snatches the bag from my hands and coerces me into a side room. Mother trails behind. “Wait here,” he instructs her. 

Mother’s eyes are as empty as death, twin white pearls revealing nothing. Does she not care? Can’t she come with me? I run my hands down the sides of my arms in an act of self-comfort to find no quills, no thorns. I am, I realise, for the first time truly no longer a child. 

A fire crackles in the hearth. Sweat beads collect on the nape of my neck. Here must be the heart of the house, if such a house has any heart at all. Suspended over the fire, a copper pot on a hook rocks, squeaks, as Marmos tips the contents of my bag into it, then stirs the contents with a ladle. 

As the dropped protrusions that mark my youth tumble out, in my head, I regress. I recall my own entrance into the world, green placenta vine coiled dangerously around my neck, cut free by the doula, I hear my newborn scream. 

“Your offering is short.” His deep voice echoes like a clap in a cave. Once empty, he tosses the bag on the floor and stares at me, the only sign of lightness in his eyes, the reflection of licking flames.

“I’m sorry.” My voice quivers. “Some may’ve been lost.” 

Marmos growls. “Bring the rest when it is found.” 

He lifts the kettle from its suspension, tips its bubbling contents into a bowl. Offcuts of me thicken the liquid.  

 “Sit.” I sit. “Expose your spine, the skin of your back. Curl into a ball.” I untie the fastenings at the back of my smock, push my sleeves down, and huddle over on the sticky stone floor.

He gulps down the potion then looms over me. I press my cheek flat on the ground. The hard skin on his legs ripples. Dark brown, grey, then youthful shades: orange, pink. Then, like the mysterious near-telling of the ocean earlier, unobtainable images flash, twirl in and out of focus on his transmogrifying flesh. The shifting patterns on his skin slow. I focus on his ankle, his calf. There, I see, I feel, childhood memories. 

Mother holds me, a tight bundle, in her arms, her eyes bright and clear. She smiles at my father. He is humming for her, first and last time I ever hear Father sing. Mother inspects my thighs, counts the four nubs where my thorn tips will break through when I am off the breast, searches for a fifth. Her smile drops. 

With his palms inches from my spine, Marmos pushes and pulls air, yanks invisible strings. My organs distort. I dry heave as Marmos stretches and melds my liver and lungs into new positions, all without contact, like I’m a ragdoll.

He babbles in celestial tongue the patternations on my arms and back which suggest my future while I see my history flash by in his. A curl of vomit pulses up into my mouth.

Warm currents snake up my spine as Marmos weaves the void above me. This touchless violation hurts, yet it is not a sentient pain. This can’t be the pain that leads to bliss. I have not felt an ounce of pleasure, and no man has laid a hand on me.

Marmos growls and steps away. Relief. Distance between us. “Your offering was very short.” His words cut like razors. “Stand. Dress.”

My fingers fumble as I re-tie the ribbons that held my dress closed. 

*

Steam from the remnants of the broiling potion fills the room. Candlelight dusts the steam, makes kingdoms of glowing cloud, and Marmos steps through it towards me. He stretches out his arms, becomes the shape of a lightning-struck tree, as his joints and bones crack with indecision. I cower. Even though I’m now clothed, he sees through me, into me.

Marmos’s chest of leathered skin swirls with vivid, warmer sunset shades of youth. His eyes roll back, another guttural growl, one that scares the clouds of mist away. 

The surface of my flesh ripples, sharing information with Marmos, but I can’t translate the messages my body reveals. I stare, afraid and amazed, as Marmos’s skin patterns dance, shifting in time with mine, in response.

There it is, the face.

On Marmos’s chest, an undulating image. The face of my betrothed. The man I’ll be hand-fasted to before the next new moon. The vision is like a whip to my throat. Deep-set eyes, teeth like weathered gravestones. A large nose, askew—has it been broken in several places? A silvered scar stretches from his ear to his neck. Much older than I and with nothing familiar about it, I know this is the face of my betrothed, even though I’ve never seen him before. 

The mirage slips, glitches. His eyes narrow, and a grin too big for his jaw cuts into his mandible. A cruel face.

I stagger, tripping over my own skirt as I move, and fall backwards. Marmos collapses into a heap, the colour fading from him fast, his old, hard skin returning. I get up and run out of the room, find Mother, and leave.

Chapter One: Before the Bliss

I sit on sloped shingle and toy with my last keratinous protrusion to try and quell the itch. This thorn, barb-rooted to my femur, anchored to the meat of my thigh by a red cable, is part of me and has been there, growing, since birth. It stings. But soon, it’ll detach and fall, and I’ll be peach-smooth all over. All woman. 

In front of me, Alora crouches awkwardly so as not to hurt herself on her five small hip spurs. She rummages through her rucksack and takes out handfuls of something from where childish treasures—shells, sea glass, dead moths—are usually stashed. “What’s in your fists?” I ask.

“Nothing.” Doe-eyes. My little sister smiles sweetly, then runs off, into breaking waves. I shrug at Emmanuelle—my friend beside me—and yawn. At least we’ve the beach to ourselves this evening and the sun, low in the sky, feels warm on my skin. 

I stop twisting the thorn and, instead, hold it in place and imagine the snapped ligaments deep within my thigh re-attaching it to the bone of my leg. If only I could slow time. What lies ahead terrifies me: womanhood, the consequential trip to Marmos.

*

 “Don’t swim past the outcrop,” I shout after Alora. “Ah, do what you like.” Leaning back on a cobble bed, I snag my sore spot. “Ay—This one hurts.”

Despite my desire to remain a child, the perseverance of this fourth and final hip thorn—my fifth never emerged—frustrates me. It’s sore.

“But you’re glowing, ripening well,” Emmanuelle says. 

“Apart from this thigh and my tatty hands.” I show her my knuckles and palms, calloused from labour. But Emmanuelle’s right. Velvety dappling, swirls of tangerine and russet now cover my body, and for this, I’m grateful.  

I run the back of my hand over my lower leg. Of recent, something within me, my groin a bag of honey bees, finds enjoyment in self-touch. The flat terrain of adult, spike-free skin, the way my shoulders, waist, hips feel. New sensations ripple within at night, when I caress myself in the dark, alone, under my quilt. 

A twinge in my thigh. My fingertips return to my hip. I twist the thorn again, in time with the breaking waves. The irritation eases. Perhaps I do long for total smoothness, to be adult. Maybe I do want this last thorn out.

*

Alora, still so young, a bundle of spikes and quills, tumbles and splashes through wave crests and wades further into the ocean, giggling all the while. 

“Why can’t I remain carefree, like Alora?” I ask. Emmanuelle stares ahead.

And why must I work so hard? Since my first quill fell away, I’ve laboured each day, levering a diamond-tipped chisel in and out of the quarry face. All shedding adolescents stand and chip there, together, liberating precious resources from a millennia of geology for our leathered elders. And before and after each long shift, I care for Alora. 

*

I stare at the ocean. With each breath of the tide, a pattern hinting at what my future may hold, a heedance, comes into fruition on the ocean’s surface, then, before I’ve a chance to interpret it, the missive disperses back into loose liquid form, blue and white froth, and the vision becomes lost. 

*

“You’re bleeding.” Emmanuelle’s face contorts. Smooth for over a year, memories of shedding for her, I expect, are forgotten, like childhood dreams. She pushes my picking fingers. “It will drop when it’s ready, when you’re ready,” she says. 

Will I ever be ready? My body? Maybe. But, my heart? I yearn to play, skip, and swim in the water like Alora, not labour and care for others. What happens after Marmos petrifies me.

Emmanuelle squeezes my hand. She smiles, closed-lipped. “And you’re nearly ready, darling. The future’s nothing to fear.”

“But what about the pain?” 

“Pain? This final thorn will hurt no worse than the others,” she says. She must know it’s the other pain I ask of, because there’s something hidden, a whisper behind her eyes.

 “I mean the pain that comes after Marmos, before the bliss—” 

Emmanuelle takes my chin in her hand. “That pain is a gift. A blessing from the feminine celestial.” Her warm breath graces my cheek. “It’s more of a universal, all-encompassing . . . deep discomfort. At its peak, the sensation is almost . . . sentient.” I swallow hard. For a moment, the quickening of my pulse and the rush of blood around my cranium drown out the insidious alternative story the waves have been whispering. “But as with all in life, dearest, there is balance. Polarity.”

“Go on,” I say. 

“When the pain is nothing but a memory, a thing of no mass or matter, there will be pleasure.” She caresses the markings which dust her upper arm, then strokes mine. “My husband lies with me and thrusts as he sings until a bliss like no other fills my soul. Between his melodies, I hear the beautiful truth of his love.” 

A bolt, a longing, shirks down my spine to the place where bees buzz at night. She draws my face kiss close. “Womanhood brings equal measures of joy and despair. You’ll embrace it, darling girl, the pain. You’ll cope. Women do.”

She reaches for her water flagon. My fingers return to my thorn. Sharpness. It comes free in my hand. Warm red gushes down my thigh. “Dammit,” I say, and show Emmanuelle. “It’s out.” 

Root now exposed, the thorn’s longer than my palm is wide. The hole in my thigh gathers at its edges, puckers, starts to seal. Fresh epidermal tiles tessellate into a new holoscar of orange and pink. 

I’ll pass the thorn to Mother. She saves all my shed protrusions—countless flaked quills from my back and shoulders, the three thorns from the infantile frills that once decorated my thighs. Currency for Marmos.

Emmanuelle pays attention to my thigh. 

“I am now a woman?” I ask. 

A line forms between Emmanuelle’s brows. She speaks slowly, holding each vowel too long. “You’ll get there,” she says. Her eyes remain on my leg. “Patience.”

Where the sun touches the water, plums and oranges mottle, like the patternations swirling into place where my thorn shed from. 

“Listen to the waves.” Emmanuelle’s dulcet words. “There’s balm in nature’s rhythm.” She strokes the back of my neck and hums gently. 

And like this, like reaching a cliff edge, the path behind you having fallen away, my childhood is over. What will become of me? Relentless spring tide waves crash in.

*

 “Alora,” Emmanuelle shouts, stands and strides towards the water. “Where’s Alora?”

I stand too. “I can’t see her,” I say. Rushing towards the shoreline, one hand hat-peaked against my forehead, my other arm eagle-winged for balance, I scan the expanse of ocean all the way to where sea becomes sky. “She’s there,” I say and point. 

In the distance, the top half of my baby sister, smaller than she should be, too far out, her body a spiky mark against the shifting sheet of sea. Alora throws her arms in the air. An arc of water rainbows above her head. 

“She’s swum out past the rocks. How many times…” I tsk and cuss and cup my hands around my mouth and shout instructions to my feral sibling to get her sorry ass back to shore. 

“She’s okay,” Emmanuelle says. “She’s paddling back. All this exercise before supper is great to release her energy.”

I side-eye my friend and in exchange, Emmanuelle gives me another knowing smile. “Release her energy?” My voice high-pitched. “Alora is young, without a worry in the world, of a time before responsibility and fear. She does not need release, she’s already free.”

*

When Alora sets foot on the beach, I reprimand her. She apologises, then sulks. Emmanuelle says goodbye and heads home to her new husband.

I yank free a thick towel from my sister’s bag and hold it out for her. It ribbons in a breeze which marks the onset of evening. Her teeth and quills chatter as she reaches for the edge of the fabric. Wrapping the towel around herself, her protrusions catch. The tip of one of her baby hip thorns tears a hole.

I sling on my old sandals. A redness spots up on my ankle where the broken strap of my footwear rubs. I think back to the sentient pain Emmanuelle spoke of, the pain which must come before pleasure—could it match the agony of lugging a wriggly, quilled and thorned child several miles home, along a beach, wrecked shoes?

I lift Alora up, her thorn spurs jabbing into my waist, and carry her home for a supper I will have to fix.

*

I prepare a simple meal. After we’ve eaten, Father slinks to his study, I tidy away dishes and instruct Alora to ready herself for bed. Then, I guide Mother to her rocker. 

“Mother.” I show her my dropped thorn. “It fell.” Mother eases herself up and grapples for the thorn in my hand. 

“We go now,” she says. 

Tonight, I will be Mother’s eyes, hers aged, milky from too much sun, and she, as tradition states, will be my chaperone. “Your loosenings are in the cloth sack. A lantern is prepped in the hallway.” She gestures at the door. “I knew by the song on the breeze, the call of migrating swans, tonight would be the night, but first, put Alora to bed.”

*

Sat on the stool in Alora’s room, I call out instructions. She brushes her teeth and quills, tidies her petals, gets into her crib. Alora’s shelf is crammed with glass jars packed with puerile booty. Green and brown seaglass chunks glisten by the light of her bedside lantern. 

“I don’t want you to go,” she says. She beckons me over, wraps her arms around my neck, and kisses me on the cheek. 

“I must.” Her arms drop as I pull away. She passes Thalia, her favourite teddy, to me. 

“I know.” She breaks eye contact, then shuffles down beneath crumpled sheets. “And I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? For what?”

A silence follows. She squirms. 

“Marmos.” Alora finally speaks “And for losing you.”

“But none of that’s your fault.” I kneel by her, and stroke the spines on her shoulders flat for comfort. “It’s inevitable. Written in the ebb and flow of the sea. My skin patternations dictate my future, as yours will for you. What’ve you to apologise for?”

“Today. At the beach.” She pauses, sobbing gently. “I took a bunch of your quills and one of your thorns from under Mother’s bed and fed them to the ocean.”

I withhold a gasp. An odd gulp emits from my throat instead. “I see.” 

“It was all I could manage in my bag pocket, in my hands,” she says, and then more firmly, “I’d have taken them all if I could.” Alora pouts and yanks the sheet back over her face. 

“That was wrong, Alora, but . . . I understand. Please sleep.” I pocket the threadbare teddy. “I’ll be back later tonight to tell you a story, if you haven’t soothed yourself.” All I hear are muffled tears as I back out of her room, shutting her door in my wake.