A Monster, Grown

I first spit out a tooth after lunch one cloudless day, when I’m getting ready to go to class. A lump had risen in my throat, blistering and sudden, and I panickedly thought I was going to puke. 

I did not. 

The first thing I notice is that it is not mine. My teeth are straight and white and do not come from the chest. This tooth, though, is yellowing, and sharp enough to cut. Before I remember disgust, a feeling darker than excitement curls deep in my gut. It looks like a tiny golden dagger, and there is something inexplicably fascinating about the thought. Of strangeness resting under my skin, just waiting to be called forward. 

Then my friend Bethany asks, “What is that?” with a tone that bites. Her gaze is tilting. She is a predator ready to pounce in a pleated skirt and headband. Fear seizes me. 

I tell her, “Nothing.” I throw the pretty thing in the nearest trash can, and it disappears under a sea of half-eaten apples and empty milk cartons.

A scale comes next. It nudges its way from under my skin and shines on my wrist, looking like a beautiful, intricate tattoo. When my mother sees it, her eyes go cold, and she ushers me to confession. 

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I plead through the confessional wall. Still, I am compelled to hang my head until my hair falls in my face and lace my hands together until my knuckles are bloodless, bones jutting out. Utterly devout.  

I have known Father John for a long time. He attended my Baptism and my First Communion. My grandfather’s funeral and my aunt’s wedding. And now, the mere thought of his torpid, unchanging eyes suffocates me more than my wooden surroundings ever could. “No one is without sin,” he says, not unkindly, and I wonder if he's right. If the guilt that darkens my chest is the human birthright and the sin —could it really be sin?—that marks my body is our legacy. 

I learned shame before love. 

My earliest memory is being made to sit on a stool in my dining room, not allowed dinner as punishment for something I’d done. I don’t remember what, but I remember the tears burning down my cheeks like fire to skin, wondering if my parents would forget about me. Wondering if I would stay there, a portrait of pigtails and despair, for the rest of my life. 

Since then, I have done my best to avoid punishment. I do not speak more than I need to in my classes. I keep my hair straight and my nails tidy. My clothes, modest, skirts never cutting above my knee.

 This is how I keep them from noticing.  

A wing sprouts from my back in the middle of a math test. I glance around to see if anyone has noticed the tent in my shirt and when I don’t pick out anyone looking back, I smooth my hand over it. It is soft and warm and feels like it belongs to a bat. I am almost proud. 

When I arrive home from school, my father rips it from my back the same way he pulls weeds in our backyard, his thick fingers steady and hand fisted.  He has always hated imperfection, both in gardens and daughters. The wing flutters weakly when he first touches it, resistant, and I try to move away, but that does not deter him. 

The pain is like nothing I’ve felt before, overtaking my senses for a few seconds as I scream and scream and scream until he yells at me to stop. He tells me to be grateful that he has fixed me. He is saying: All of this is your fault. I desperately tug on the memories I have of him, happy and loving, and find myself looking at a stranger. 

Afterward, he does not apologize. His mouth is set. My mother watches on with her lips parted. Does she wish he would soften? Or has she come to terms with the self-righteousness sown in his planted feet and hard eyes? Does she too bear scars from wings clipped, from too-strange limbs amputated? 

Will I look at my husband the same? 

I am still breathing through my mouth, heaving, the ache from the attack not yet subsided. A quiet kind of terror filling me when I realize the moisture sticking my clothes to my skin isn’t sweat, but red-hot blood. 

The look on my father’s face tells me to leave, so I don’t say anything. I just go.

I tell myself this is a thing he learned from his father, and his grandfather, and it is a thing he never unlearned. It is a thing I cannot teach him: how to look past his ideals and see me, how to loosen his jaw and ungrind his teeth.

I do not doubt he loves me, but when the bleeding starts up again near midnight and I have to venture to the bathroom to rebandage the wound, I doubt he understands me. And, looking at myself, with dark circles like spilled ink, I wonder if I understand me either, or if that is another impossible thing. 

There is a girl in my English class who is like me. 

Her name is Jude, but I doubt she remembers my name. We’ve only spoken a few times and from these instances I didn’t discern any desire in her to converse further. I don’t blame her. She bursts out her answers in class with such passion you can’t help but believe her, even when the words spill from her mouth scrambled with enthusiasm. She wears bold eye-makeup but leaves her freckles showing. The tips of her hair are dyed. 

And atop her head are two beige horns. They’re symmetrical and unmistakable. She wears them like they are another arresting accessory to behold. I think they look like a crown. Bethany and the others call her, freak. 

I run into her after school while I’m trying to find my way to somewhere private, where I can figure out what to do with the talons that have sprouted from my left hand. Distracted, we bump into each other, and I reel back. 

“Sorry,” I mutter, curling my hand in front of my chest to hide the irregularities. My cheeks are warming. 

Jude shakes her head, unconcerned. “It’s all good,” she says. Her smile is small, a first-quarter moon, and I notice a chip on her front tooth. She moves to go past me at the same time I do, but we choose the same direction and find ourselves facing each other once more.  

She laughs. “We’re dancing,” she tells me, and I allow myself to relax a little. Then, her gaze drifts down and she gasps. I follow her eyes.

She’s looking at my suddenly lax hand. I realize my talons are visible. 

Reason leaves me. In its place, there is panic. “It’s nothing,” I rush, loudly, because if she sees she will know, and if she knows I will be knowable. “I—”

“Hey, it’s alright,” Jude interrupts, all overly-familiar and overly-concerned. It does not help. There is shame in the fact of her comprehension and there is elation in her kindness because she is looking at me and she is not scared. She is peeling back my skin and peering at my ghastly bones. She is preparing to pick her own out, hold them together, and show that we are the same.

And she is not the only one who is already too comfortable— Afterall, she is Jude in my mind and not classmate, nor freak—I notice her and I know I should scorn how she wears what she’s been given proudly, because I should know stories about curving horns, hoofed feet, and temptation more than anyone. 

But I don’t. I admire her, despite everything. 

My mind betrays me. My shoulder throbs. My wrist aches. 

So I leave. She shouts something after me, and I ignore her. When I am safe in my room, I become a storm of talons fisted in pillows, cheeks wet, and I imagine flooding the whole world in my sadness and starting something anew. 

I do not usually take baths, but today I do. I imagine my scaled wrist feeling at home as I lean back until my hair fans out in the water around me and I am weightless. 

Listen: I am no Sleeping Venus. I am no soft-faced Mary with a halo of gold behind her head. I let thorns grow up my legs and roses bloom at the creases of my hips. Leaves cluster around my face. 

It feels more natural than breathing. 

I cannot hide, laid bare like this. The truth is, if I could be the very best at anything, it would be at this, at acceptance, at washing my mind clean of purity and allowing myself to be imperfect. Monstrous. Free.