Petrified

You would never have noticed it if you weren’t looking for it. That was precisely the point.

The instructions given in my embroidery group had been clear enough: After nightfall, take a stroll on the second lane past the bakery, look for the unlit lamppost and turn down that dark alley, they said in hushed voices, as the pianist began playing in sudden loud fervor, by coincidence. Then you will see a mossy stone staircase, which you will descend, and at the end of it there is a dim hallway. She lives through the set of green doors on the left.

The doors are tall and French like my husband’s mistress, but peeling and weathered. I can tell they were once painted a lovely shade of emerald green. Half of that green paint lies in small piles of flakes on the cobblestone. I debate knocking, and decide instead to reach with false confidence for the rusted copper handle. It turns downward easily. A small bell rings and echoes.

Welcome.

On the posters she is grotesque, an example of how time and sin turn a person sour, but in person she has the kind of enduring beauty you can’t tear your eyes away from.

Do come in darling, don’t be shy. Contrary to popular belief, I don’t bite. Although I can’t say nothing here does.

Her voice is like a wind chime, melodic and resonating, barely brushing over the crashing waves of her words. I wonder if I’m here too long if that voice will drag me out to deep sea. Or did that only work on men in the myths?

Take a seat, love. Yes, there is perfect. Would you like a cup of tea? Well, it’s never too late for tea, is it now? I enjoy it late into the night myself, but maybe you’ve been raised more proper than that. Here.

The cup is warm, not hot. If she noticed my shaking hands when reaching for it she didn’t say a word. It takes more than a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the warmly lit room after a dark and shadowy street.

Among her many talents, it cannot be said that she was a good decorator. The shabby boards of the walls are empty but for an assortment of faded newspaper clippings from the highlights of her anonymous career. Obituaries, mostly. A tattered blue curtain with tassels hangs behind the armchair she’s perched in, dividing off part of the room. Eccentrically painted shelves house arrays of books and bottles of objects my gaze prefers not to settle on. She would have been called a witch for her collections had she not already acquired numerous more colorful nicknames by the public. The only item of some value is worn loosely around her slender wrist - a heavy and ornate gold watch. The kind of thing that would make a petty thief's day to see glinting underneath a man's sleeve in the street. She catches me admiring it and smiles thinly, holding up her arm up to eye-level.

Isn’t it a beauty? It was my first husband's, this watch. On the tenth anniversary of his death, I’m going to smash it to bits and melt the gold into a necklace for myself. I deserve a little gift from him, I think.

Her laugh unnerves me, but I find myself too curious to be afraid. I politely say my condolences for her husband’s death.

Oh darling, don’t be sorry that that man is dead. The one good thing he did was to be the inspiration for the charity work I do. I haven’t always done this. I used to be an actress, you know, a leading lady of the stage. Men would come from all over the city to see my shows, for I was beautiful then. Sometimes after the shows they would approach me, usually blind drunk, complimenting my dress or what was underneath it, asking for a kiss or a drink or a night. And sometimes they didn’t ask. My husband became my husband not because he asked but because he damaged me, and he was rich enough to get away with it and clever enough to know that marriage was my only option.

She smooths down the skirt of her maroon dress, then looks up at me with a solemn expression I can’t fully read. It isn’t hard to believe she was once a sought-after woman. Though sunken in age, her cheeks are smooth and her face looks as though it was hand-carved out of porcelain by God. Her hair is twisted into a dark crown atop her head, secured with metallic pins. Her eyes are like a cat’s, but not a house cat, no, definitely not. Like those of a tiger that has been left to go hungry for far too long. I will her to continue talking and not look at me with those eyes again. We sip our tea in unison, upholding our masquerade as ladies. She takes in a breath.

He said he loved me, and at the beginning I believed it. He may have loved me. He certainly desired me. I think mostly he loved seeing the desire and jealousy of other men when he told them I was his wife. But that got old fast. So did I, in his eyes. When it had been a year and I still had not given him a child, I turned ugly to him and he acted ugly accordingly.

One night, he came home from the pub talking about how the other men’s wives had filled their houses with children by now. He spoke of babies like cattle. Then he threatened that he ought to tell the whole town that I was secretly a whore and leave me. I should have kept quiet and obeyed and smothered him in his sleep, like a good wife. Instead, I promised him that as long as I was alive I would never let a child be born cursed enough to have him as a father. I’m sure you know what happens next, or otherwise you wouldn’t be here, my darling.

She traces a scar on her chin that I hadn’t noticed before, extending along her jaw to the start of the delicate bones of her neck. I imagine it snaking around the rest of her throat in a ring, strangling her pale skin, and my breath catches. It looks as if lightning struck her. She was struck, though not by something as rare as lightning.

I instinctively touch my collarbone where I know without looking there is a ghastly bruise. My modest neckline covers it, but somehow it feels like she knows it’s there, my mark of pain. I hope it goes away quickly so my husband does not think me unsightly. But then again, perhaps that will not be necessary. I nod at her meekly to show that I do know what happens next.

I can’t say whether he truly meant to kill me. But to hurt me, to wound me, to make my thoughts and words disappear in flames, he meant that with all his heart. The funny thing is it was him who made my words true. Of course, he couldn’t have known that I was with child. Even I did not know then. After, no one would ever get to know. I made a gravestone, although there was nothing to bury. And then a month later I buried my poor sick husband next to it, marked only with a slab that did not bear his name. Wealthy and beloved as his gold in his life, in death he became only stone. The disease had taken him so quickly that there was no time for anyone to save him. Shame on chance to take him from this world so young. Got him like…well, like poison, essentially.

The porcelain around her eyes cracks faintly in amusement. I have nothing to say in response, my mind stuck on the picture of a crude gravestone smaller than it should be.

Now, love. How would you like your tragedy to occur?

The widows in my town all chose differently. Most agree that the worse methods are only to be used for the worse husbands, but sometimes there is no rhyme or reason to it. After all, all’s fair in love and war. Millions of second and third and fourth thoughts crossed my mind on the way here, but now those voices are silent and there is only mine. Mine, and hers, and the input of the hissing wind outside.

Well? What will it be?

In two weeks it will happen. On the way home after a day of work, my husband will feel a bout of hopelessness that gives him a nudge to hurl himself off of the local bridge. The river below is not a kind one, especially to those who never learned to swim. He will have been drunk, since he often is and everyone knows how he gets when he’s drunk. No one will discuss a death as taboo as taking your own life. My children and I will cry and wear black for weeks, though no longer than what is expected. At the same time the black of our bruises will fade.

He won’t be missed very much, really. Perhaps that French woman will miss him, but she would have met the man that I knew soon enough. I will decide to raise my children in the countryside alone, and we will be happy. I cannot say yet whether I will regret it. The final time I will see the woman’s wild tiger's eyes, she will tell me that not once has she regretted anything in her life. She will say that it was a pleasure to do it, and fearfully I will believe her.

Oh, it really is getting late, love. Your family must be at home expecting you.

I reply that they are, and I thank her for her kindness, nervously reaching to shake her hand. How much blood has coated it? On the posters they say she has killed three men, but I know these were simply the times she wanted it enough to make it gruesome. The posters also envision her as grotesque, which means that they have not ever seen her, or the mark on her jaw from her fall after being struck by lightning. The posters know nothing. The men know nothing.

We women must stick together, yes?

The image of my young daughter appears and consumes my mind. I would do everything in my power to ensure she never has to know the instructions to get here. There will be no scars for my girl to trace, I will make sure of that.

I nod and drop the woman’s unassuming porcelain hand. Beneath the sound of her wind chime voice is a softer noise I hadn’t paid attention to before, almost like a breeze rustling through dying trees, overlaid with the humming of the Earth. It is separate from the wind and the rushing of my blood. She notices my piqued interest, and rather than say anything, stands, chuckles, and regally draws back the tattered blue curtain behind her. In view now is a cage, filled with twisting and writhing scaled bodies, hissing and competing with each other for air. They move as one, a trembling monster of green. I step back in sudden horror. She isn’t looking at me, but I see her eyes flash ravenously.

You don’t have to worry about them, darling. Their venom is reserved for the venomous.