by Katie Fleming
At fourteen, she had what most girls wanted: a mouth wide enough to consume treetops, teeth enough to pull meat from bone, and a long crimson tongue to lick delicious crevices. The height to see beyond the hilltops and into the valleys, the strength to hold a bear like a baby. She had a library of wings plucked from dragonflies, butterflies, birds, and small aircraft nose-deep in undergrowth. She had long earlobes that swayed sensually and kissed her scaly shoulders; her hair was like Spanish moss. When she sang, the frogs in the ponds went belly-up and the ravens buried their heads in the dirt.
At fourteen, she had eyes like molding lemons and a tail the length of someone much older. It could pull down trees and knock boulders tumbling down mountainsides. Once, before she ate her boyfriend, she dangled him off a waterfall’s edge with her tail and watched the rainbows in the spray that came off his body. When she walked through the forest, wolves knelt and hawks bowed. When she walked into town, the townsfolk scattered, such power she had. In her language, the word they used for what she was is untranslatable; the closest we have are cyclone and earthshaker.
One morning in summer, as she cast her hair into the river like a net, a terrible scraping sound echoed through the forest. Closer and closer it came, scattering the grackles and rabbits, rustling the trees, until a silver-bodied giant emerged onto the riverbank. His metal plates ground against each other. His red eyes stared. She stood, salmon thrashing in her hair.
“Who are you?” she asked.
He grinned, red eyes gleaming like open wounds. He jumped across the river in one leap and vanished into the woods, heading for where her brothers and sisters lived.
He told them she was weak and ugly. That her songs were bad and her tail was too long. That she was too scaly, too lemon eyed, too much mouth. That her earlobes were obscene. No matter what she said, her siblings didn’t hear. They were transfixed by the light reflecting off the giant’s silver body, believing him to be lit from within.
One evening she swung alone through the canopy, feeling a dull pain in her heart. The granite and the pines and the wind were her parents. So she asked them, “What should I do?”
Seek, came the reply.
She left that night. She jumped nimbly from summit to summit until she was out of the mountainous forest. She waded across rivers as wide as the sea and rolled along dry canyon beds until she was covered in red clay. When it rained, she tipped her mouth open to the sky. When it froze at night, she curled up in her long, mossy hair. The creatures did not know what to make of her. There were no wolves or hawks; the rattlesnakes and vultures did not bow. When she sang, coyotes howled over her. She felt something reaching its tendrils through her veins, down along her mighty arms and legs, and though we have no word for it in our language, it was a blend of loneliness and want.
The moon and the sun traded places many times while she sought, yet she found nothing to stop the spread of the tendrils. With each mile she felt the magnitude of what she had done. She craved her parents, her siblings, the feel of lush treetops between her teeth, the smell of salmon blood. She missed her wing collection and the fear of the townspeople. She began to lose herself little by little, like sap oozing from a wounded tree. The earth slowly stopped speaking to her. A storm rolled through and she cursed the red-eyed giant, whipping her tail and keening over the thunder, frightening the bats when lightning caught in her jagged open mouth and silver claws. She started sleeping in the desert sand when the sun was high. She felt the legs of large insects scuttling across her face, and she did not care.
She was about to turn back when, one morning, on the horizon, she saw smoke rising.
The tips of her earlobes tingled. Perhaps, she thought, I have found what I seek.
Between her and the smoke lay a prairie. She raced across it, her webbed toes compressing the waving grass, until she came to a small wooden house on fire. Watching it from a safe distance was a little boy holding a gray cat in his arms. He looked up at her. His eyes were dry.
“What has happened here?” she asked, but he did not know her language. He said something that she couldn’t understand.
She stood beside him, watching with him as the house turned to glowing red embers. He, too, has lost everything, she thought. Perhaps he will be my brother. She could break him like a fish bone and use his ribs to pick her teeth, but his soft, glossy hair reminded her of the river algae she liked to pet. The swifts spun in the purpling sky. The wind caressed her and carried off the last of the smoke.
The cat flicked its tail and narrowed its green eyes. The sun slipped away and the coyotes began to sing, so she sat down on an old wagon and made a bed of her hair. She patted it. The boy came over and, his ash-stained face exhausted, sank into it, curling his body around the cat. She slept soundly and dreamt of granite cliffs and looming pines.
She woke at dawn, covered with dew, happy. She held herself still so as not to wake the boy. But the cat stirred. It blinked open its eyes, tiny galaxies being born, and stretched. It held her gaze. Then, in one swift motion, it drew a single claw across the neck of the boy, slitting his throat.
The boy’s eyes snapped open and bulged as he gasped and sputtered, breathing blood instead of air. She watched, fascinated, horrified, as his white teeth turned red and his blood soaked her hair. In a fit of grief and rage, she shot out her clawed hand to skewer the cat, but it leapt off the wagon and out of reach.
Then the boy began to writhe, snarling. His skin began to crack, breaking like pottery, falling away, revealing the slimy, pink skin of a worm. His arms and legs fell off and turned to dust as they hit the earth. The stench of death, like a rotten tide, made her vomit. Soon, where the boy once slept, a bruise-colored worm with several mouths of concentric circles of jagged teeth thrashed about, getting tangled in her hair.
She shoved him off, avoiding the mouths, and stood over him as he writhed on the ground, growing drier and weaker with each moment. The cat came and sat next to her, and she found they could speak without talking.
I’m sorry I tried to impale you, she said.
The cat brought one of its front paws to its mouth and licked it. Many have tried, it said. She liked the flash of its small, pink tongue.
Thank you, she added, for killing that thing, as the worm’s body had fallen still.
You were not the first he tricked, said the cat, now licking the other paw. He set the fire that burned down the house. The ashes of the timber are mingled with the ashes of his foolish family.
What was he? she asked.
The cat paused, paw still lifted, and looked at her. A boy, it said.
Ahh, she said. Behind her, the prairie grass rustled; above her, clouds slunk across the sky. When the cat offered no elaboration, she said, Forgive me, but I thought he was some sort of worm demon.
Incorrect, said the cat, resuming its licking. When vultures began to circle overhead, they moved a short distance away and watched as the black birds descended and tore into the worm. They hopped like marionettes and flung chunks of fatty flesh to each other.
She felt the tendrils of loneliness creep back into her veins. I thought it was him I was seeking, she said.
Why would you seek someone else? asked the cat.
Because I was told to, she said.
Why? said the cat.
Because my brothers and sisters, who once loved me, have grown to hate me, she said, but the cat had elongated its body and seemed to have stopped listening. She watched as it stalked toward the wagon, tail twitching, and pounced on a mouse, which screamed before falling still. The cat returned and dropped the dead creature at her feet.
Doubtful, it said, and she was about to ask which part, exactly, was doubtful—that she was hated or that she was loved—but before she could speak, a vermilion stream began to flow from the silken body of the mouse. A new smell filled her nostrils: metallic, raw, intoxicating. Like cold Atlantic spray and a just-split pomegranate. The stream became a river; far more blood than the mouse could possibly contain poured out, blood enough for a rabbit, a fox, a wolf, and it swirled with the dry earth and began to catch fire. It rose off the ground in wide ribbons and wove together, helices of flaming blood all around her, and they flowed into her claw tips and webbed toes. She felt the tendrils in her veins catch fire, and in a moment or two—that was all it took—she felt the warmth of a sun expanding in her chest, flooding her enormous scaly body with yellow and orange and red, and it was strong and liquid, and her infested-lemon eyes began to water because she felt a joy she had not felt since the moment before the silver giant interrupted her salmon fishing. She felt her parents’ embrace: The granite and the pines and the wind put their shivering arms around her, and she was, again, herself.
I understand, she said to the cat, who had curled up in a tangle of grasses nearby and started napping. It blinked open its green eyes at her once, then twice, then stretched and went back to sleep.
She took off across the prairie, ecstatically setting fire to it as she ran. She bounded through the deserts, leaping over the coyotes and snakes, sending legs scuttling for the bellies of rocks. She skimmed across the rivers like a stone and turned them loose into the canyon beds and rode the flood as though it were a stallion. When she reached the edge of the forest, she ate a white oak and a sweet gum tree and washed it down with a young buck, stripping the velveteen fuzz from its antlers for dessert. When she reached the village, she bared her teeth at the townsfolk and chased them down their streets back into their homes. She sang as she leapt from mountaintop to mountaintop.
When she reached her home, she found her siblings crowded around the shining giant in a clearing, listening openmouthed as he spoke words that sounded like metal scraping against metal. Her siblings could not see it, but she could: the very fine silver thread that encircled each of their necks and strung them together like beads. It bound them to the giant’s waist.
She leapt over her siblings and landed on the shoulders of the giant, severing the thread with one sweep of her claw. The thread vanished. The giant roared, red eyes flashing. He batted at her, but she locked her tree-thick legs around his metal chest and hung her hair over his eyes. Blinded, he thrashed around the clearing, and this was where she had to be decisive: Her siblings were not yet completely free from his spell, and they would soon attack her to save him.
She bound his body with her tail and shoved his silver head to the side, exposing a small crack where his silver jaw met his neck. She slipped her tongue in the crack. He twitched, screaming in pain. She smiled and extended her tongue to its full length, plunging it deeper into him; she caressed the steel machinery and savored the taste of her own blood when she licked a saw-toothed gear. She wrapped her tongue around his hot metal brain stem, and with all of her strength, she pulled.
The silver giant’s eyes were sucked back into his skull as his head toppled over and off, landing with a thud on the ground. His knees buckled and his arms went slack. She spit out his brain stem as he clattered to the earth. She stepped over the pile of metal and retrieved the head; she picked his eyes like cherries and strung them on a vine, which she hung around her neck.
Most of her brothers and sisters began to cheer. The few who did not approached her with malice, as the spell had not yet lifted from them. So she wrestled them all at once and pinned them against rocks and trees—three with her hands, two with her legs, and one with her tail—until she saw that they had returned to themselves. She took a deep breath and began to sing one of her old songs, and everyone joined in, their voices lifting her song to the canopy and through the spaces between the leaves to the sky.
Katie Fleming is a writer based in Waltham, Massachusetts. She went to Williams College and became a teacher. She got a couple of graduate degrees in New York City and the Bay Area before moving back to MA for true-love reasons. She worked in Boston Public Schools for eight years and is now a program manager for Harvard University. She loves cooking, reading, and being outdoors. Spotify’s autogenerated playlists for her are usually titled things like “Oboe 1600s Tuesday Morning” or “Intellectual Harpsichord Friday Evening.” Despite this, she has been known to cut a rug. This is her first published piece. She has also written a novel, which she is in the process of querying. This story is dedicated to the memory of her cat Roger, who was her fairy godmother figure.
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