...and vipers.

“Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,

— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!”

—Charles Baudelaire, “Au Lecteur”

Inspired by Charles Perrault’s fairytale “Les Fées”

I wake from a dream of her with a silent scream aching upon my lips. 

In the first moments I must check, be sure—no vipers have sprung from my lips in the darkness, my husband sleeps on the opposite shore of our bed, and my stomach is hard and full over the child within. 

Forcing my breathing into submission, I rise with care not to wake either sleeper. 

In the stillness before dawn, I try to find my image in the mirror hanging on the bedroom wall. A heavy, ungracious object. It is better for finding flaws than elevating graces. I search its darkened surface with more memory than moonlight, examining my reflection with a surgical scrutiny. 

I do not need light to find my mother, can feel the shape of her stretched across my skin when I am not looking. I am her semblable, her imperfect mirror, and the features I wear cannot truly belong to me. 

My husband does not know, yet, that our child is to be a daughter. He does not dream of her every night, does not breathe dread into his lungs like sulphur. The midwife has said that our baby is healthy and that I am bearing it well. When she comes to see us she looks at me but speaks to him, taking my mute tongue as a sign of deaf ears. 

I have told no one what I dream; that sleep is merciless in giving me visions of our child’s life. A baby girl, her mother’s daughter, her grandmother’s granddaughter, with eyes from her father that are beautiful because they do not look like my own. And when she cries, toads and vipers spill from her lips, choking her, scaring her, marking her with Guilt that should be mine alone. 

The creatures she will speak into being would not hurt her. I know this from experience, from having asps drop from my tongue and leave me unbitten, from the poisonous frogs that have filled my mouth and left only disgust. 

It’s people she would have to fear. A newborn keeps no secrets, there would be no chance to keep the Guilt hidden. 

If I had to flee this village with her, would my husband follow us? Or would the horror of the affliction, passed from mother to daughter, make him hate us both?

I was seventeen, and my mother’s daughter. 

My sister, truest daughter of my dead father, anathema in nature to her mother and sister, was the blessèd one. My mother tormented her, and I tormented her, and she was the dog and we the master, and every day my complicity in the abuse.

When a fairy blessed her lips beside the well, it beatified every virtue that had endured through years of our cruelty. She was made perfect. And in this perfection, it was diamonds and pearls which dropped like falling stars with her every word. 

Worth beyond measure. 

Perhaps you know the story, and you guess the ending. When my mother, diamond-eyed, sent me complaining to the well I was the ungracious one. I did not, as my sister, draw water for the woman I found waiting there. My mother had told me what to expect, had set me on the path to riches and instructed me to give water to an ugly old beggar woman when I met her beside the well, because that is how the fairy had appeared to my sister. Are not all fairies disguised as crones and not princesses? I refused sacrament with this fairy because I did not think she was the one I was waiting for, the one who was to pour dowries from my lips as from those of my sister. I ignored her, drank deeply, felt the cool water slip from tongue to heart and valued it not as I waited for an old crone to appear so I could give her transactional charity.

As if she did not know my heart the moment she saw me. 

And knowing me, the fairy cursed me, such that as a soul in torment my punishment was my crime. And as I rushed to my mother to tell her my mistake, the first viper sprang from my lips, and I learned what it was to see love turn to loathing in my mother’s expectant gaze. 

Well. I was my mother’s daughter. Her perfect mirror, which was showing her cracks.

I had to flee from her anger that day, crying words of toads and serpents and for the first time I was hateful in my own eyes. 

And the stories will say I died that same day in a corner of a dark wood, and that my sister married a prince upon the afternoon, and neither are so clear or so simple as they sounded. 

Hers is not my story, I leave it here. 

At seventeen, at eighteen, I found myself turned from every door, run from every town. The horror of my nature, of my Guilt, showed itself in every scale and slither born from my speech, and nowhere could I even beg without showing myself for what I am. 

Toads, and vipers, and myself. Hateful beings. 

With time, I learnt silence. Or, silence grew upon me as I learned to forget my own voice. For fifteen years I have been a mute to the world, signing and gesturing and accepting misunderstanding. 

The good things of my life have surprised me. I found work, for my intimacy with the creatures which crawled and slithered from my tongue bred an unwilling knowledge of them, which some find useful. I found a home, far enough from my birthplace to grant anonymity. I found my husband, whose ability to love me is of no less surprise to me than my own ability to love him. 

But I was not prepared to be surprised by a child. 

I turn from the mirror’s accusations, my breathing washboard-ragged. My husband is still asleep, unknowing, unburdened by dreams and dread and shame. 

But he is no fool. For seven years I’ve kept my nature from him, clung to the life between us, striven to mirror those things most good and true in his nature, lied with every sign and gesture that tells of muteness rather than Judgement. For seven years he has not asked for more than the narrative I’ve created for myself. But since the pregnancy I have known that it cannot last, and I know he is beginning to doubt and to guess. Since the pregnancy, I have begun to face the prospect of the end. 

And so I distance myself from him when I can, trying not to depend upon love that the truth may destroy, trying to learn to live without him even lying beside him. 

He doubts, and he guesses, but he cannot guess rightly. 

In irony, I suspect he thinks that I no longer love him. 

Staring at the place in the bed by his side, already grown cold in my absence, would it be better if I were to leave now and spare him the discovery? If the birth of our daughter was, for him, a vanished future instead of a sudden, obliterative horror? 

Hands shaking, I dress without lighting the lamps. I feel sobs trembling at the gates of my mouth and I cannot set them free in the house. I leave no note for my husband. I will not leave him behind yet. Perhaps I will not bring myself to leave until I have only days before the birth, selfishly drawing out the time I have with him until the last moment. 

The world is black and grey but I know the village as well as my own hands. The worn path that carries me into the woods is an old companion, and I know every root before it tries to trip me. 

I reach a clearing, deep in the woods, where the bones of many small animals have nourished the banks of a small dark pool. I come here to make noise and frogs. I’ve barely reached the water’s edge when the first sob catches up to me, shuddering through my body and flinging a truando, broad-headed and rusty, onto the mossy bank. It’s followed by a natterjack, eaten by a northern water snake, and I lose track of my grief, doubling over and letting webbed hands push slimy bodies from my mouth, scales twisting from my throat to fall at my feet. I haven’t let myself make this much noise in a long, long time. It hurts, pushes at me, drains me, leaves me gasping and shaking and raw. 

Mother, mother who made me in her image, who made me her hateful mirror, I am lost. 

My sobs abated, I stay still by the water and listen to the croaking, the snapping, the splashing. The child has awoken, kicking the walls of my stomach. I want to hold her, now, not later, and listen to her breathing. 

I cannot go on like this. I stopped seeking a cure long ago, stopped waiting by wells in vain hope, dipping my fingers into blessed water for absolution. 

I know that if I open my eyes the approaching dawn will offer me my reflection in the pool. I keep them closed, inward, blocking my mother’s features from reminding me of the darkness we shared. 

She loved herself, gave herself all her admiration, her pride. So I became her, I reflected her, and she loved me.

When I open my eyes, there’s a horned frog on the cusp of being devoured by an adder. I lean down and pick the dumpy creature up, lifting it from the danger. As I rise shakily to my feet, a few salamanders that had become caught in my dress tumble to the damp ground. 

I don’t know where to go.

“Fanchon!” 

The cry catches me off guard, and I stumble back, almost tripping over a grass snake. It’s my husband’s voice. What is he doing up already? Still holding the frog I hurry through the trees, putting distance between myself and the clearing still burdened with the physical evidence of my cursed weeping. 

My husband is a ways down the path. He does not know the woods as well as I do. But he knows I come here. The worry in his eyes strikes me, and I falter, my steps slowing on the rough path. He’s dressed hurriedly, has thrown an overcoat over his nightshirt and yesterday’s breeches. 

It hits me like a blow. He thought I was leaving him. I had considered leaving him. His dark eyes flicker down to the frog in my hands. “Fanchon—what’s this?” His voice. Tired, strained, painfully vulnerable. 

I hold out the frog to him. I had been going to bring it to him. He’s always gentle with small creatures. He’s always gentle with everything. 

He looks at the frog for a long moment, then his shoulders slump. He sinks to sit on the side of the path. I sign to him, but he doesn’t seem to see it. 

Have I broken this before he even knows the truth? 

I slowly sit down next to him, sharing space with him. My throat is still raw from my weeping. In the growing light, he looks older than his years. I swallow once, painfully, waiting for him to say something. 

“Where were you?” He’s never asked me that before when I go to the forest. 

I gesture vaguely back the way I’ve come and he runs a hand over the sleep creases on his face. 

“Do you not want this baby?” He asks it so quietly it’s almost inaudible in the breeze. But my heart stops. 

Half-panicked I reach to grab his arm, but I stop with my hand just above the sleeve of his jacket. I look up at him, feeling sick, feeling our child kicking. The child he wouldn’t want if he knew the truth. 

“Fanchon?”

I can’t go on like this. The truth of it pounds in my veins, trembles on my lips, bites at my chilled fingers. I can’t live and die in this fear, in this Guilt. Another moment, another moment and he’ll hate me. But if I keep lying, keep avoiding the darkness, keep making him afraid that I don’t care about him, he’ll hate me anyways. 

“I want our baby more than anything.” My voice, which has been silent for all but sobs and screams of frustration for over a decade, rasps against my lips. Two toads. A slender vine snake. A poisonous tree frog I snatch and toss into the bushes before it touches him. My heart is beating, it’s impossible for it to stop beating, but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel breath, or cold, or pain. I watch him, frozen as I see his eyes widen in fear, see him leap back from the snake, which isn’t venomous—though he doesn’t know it. 

“Fan—what is this?” Panic in his voice, fear—why is he reaching a hand out to me? He isn’t supposed to do that. 

“Don’t you see?” Another snake, venomous, that I kick away from him, “I’m broken—I’m cursed—” three frogs, hitting the ground at my feet, and I haven’t taken his hand yet. “And our baby—our daughter—she’ll be cursed.” I’m not looking at the creatures now except to keep them back from him. 

He’s frightened. I can’t deceive myself, can’t undo it. Why isn’t he running? Why isn’t he screaming at me? 

“Our daughter?” His voice breaks, he starts to step forward, hesitates. “What happened?” 

Frightened, but not leaving. 

“It’s my fault,” I sob. I’d thought I cried as much as I could today. I hadn’t. “And she’ll be hurt by it and it’s my fault.” I haven’t spoken this much in fifteen years. Words are strange, painful things on my lips. 

“Tell me!” My husband’s hand is still hovering in the space between us, even as croaks and hisses fill the air. Why is he still reaching out to me? I can’t take his hand, not yet, not until he knows it all and turns from me. I couldn’t bear the feeling of him pulling his hand from my grasp. 

My words are broken by sobs and warty skin and long cool bodies that tumble from me, forcing themselves into the air. I tell him everything, tell him the darkest of it, spare nothing. 

I abused her, I was complicit in my mother’s hatred for her, and she was blessed as she deserved. Diamonds and pearls and toads and vipers, and the ground around us is heavy with the evidence of my Guilt. I confess, and I bend to lift the snakes that would bite him and fling them into the woodland, and I kill an asp as I tell him how my she was my father’s daughter and I my mother’s. and he’s scared but he’s staying. And finally I have no words left and I’m sobbing, gasping into my hands and I’ve dropped the frog I meant to take home with us, and everything is an animal cacophony that feels like the most desperate silence. 

The deafening silence deepens, stretches, coils. I have my face in my hands and I do not dare to look at him. I wonder if he’s left—as he should leave, as anyone should leave. 

There is warmth around my shoulders. He’s putting his coat around me.

After a moment I realize that he’s speaking—he’s been speaking for several seconds.

“…Fanchon!” He finishes by crying out my name, shaking me gently by the shoulders. I look up, bewildered, tearstained, a sob still on my lips. 

A sob. Nothing more. My mouth is aching, stretched and sore from the guilt I’ve recounted. But there’s nothing forcing its way through my lips.

I let out a shuddering gasp, then a scream, and my voice is the only thing between us. My voice, and his words, and the increasingly distant sounds of toads and vipers.