Merciful Ziah

You stand before a crowd. You stand before them something mighty; an agent of calamity or calm you’ve yet to divulge to your onlookers. You flex your fingers and the air around you stills; not because of magic, but because every living thing holds its breath for just the increment of time it takes you to pop your index finger.

The snap of your joint is met with a gust of wind, released as relived gasps in fluctuating notes from the stargazers below.

You feel power.

You feel it in every inch of you—a flame, a burden—as it thrums recklessly through your veins, a potential catalyst to so much damage.

You quell it with something as simple as a sigh; all that raw potency simmering into a tingle at the edges of your fingertips, your consciousness.

You do not want to hurt these people.

Maybe before—maybe when you were a weed, fragile and angry and resilient to a fault, crushing yourself against concrete. Maybe then you would have gripped them in your stems and wrapped delicate chords around them until they could reconcile their cruel intent with their current situation. Maybe then…but not now.

Now, you want to help.

As your fingers flex and curl, again and again, the lack of violence a positive sign in their favor, their collective breaths send memories swimming through your head. Memories of mercy in a different form; different stakes met with different isolating factors, some that canceled out just the right emotions in just the right person at just the right time.

In that time, they named you Ziah. As Ziah, you had learned something. Something these brittle, mortal beings below would come to recognize as compassion. Something they’d come, in these very next moments, to celebrate as glorious, enigmatic fate.

Ziah, lifts her hands, webbed, rosy, and full of primal potential…

*         *         *         

“Look at them—they’re webbed!” The woman says this in a squeaky sort of whisper, pushed out behind an inept palm barely shielding thin lips from the target in question.

“Yes, darling, I see that.”

“Well…”

“Yes?”

“You don’t suppose she’s a…”

“I fail to see what else she could be if not such a creature.”

The wail that rips from the woman is hard to decipher; she seems either very sad or very hungry to you. You empathize with both. In a shy attempt to impart as much, you lift your upper lip and curl the corners with a tasteful flick of your mouth. This, you know, means kindness for the Earthtoned Ogres. (This is a funny term to you, because you understand it immediately now. The way the man and the woman stand before you, so close to the sand and the rocks and the sky and the trees, you can see how their skin tones—his, a murky brown, hers an earthy red like clay—match so well with the earth to which you all belong.)

Oh. You see.

Just now, you understand.

Her wail is probably due to how you compare to these very things—the sand and the rocks and the sky and the trees—your skin a shocking, brazen pink. Not pink like the flush you’ve heard blooms in the paler Earthtoned Ogre’s façade when their red blood rushes to meet their cheeks due to external stimuli. Your skin is pink like a wound; a scar in the brown earth opened up and made real.

You are no passing thought; you are the entire idea.

This is no good thing. This you have been taught.

Frantically, with an almost uncanny resemblance to the adult creatures around you, you assume a “reasonable” countenance. You’ve seen this in your own mom (a foreign expression you’ll learn later—soon after this moment, in fact), the one before this time. The one you recall only when you sleep. She’d worn just such a face before you lost her to the world. A mess of languages and signals and scary beings that had torn you away from her before you could recall the word for what these beings call mom.

But now, here you are before them. Small, scared, but ready to adapt to an environment you’ve learned wants to swallow you whole. Perhaps these strange Ogres would devour you where you stand if not for your ability to mimic their expressions perfectly.

“What the calamity is it doing with its face?” The woman alters between whisper and shriek, her fear and shock just short of tearing her open. “Is it even a she?”

“I doubt it’s a he,” grunts the other. “Nothing in the pants.”

You do not know what this means. What should be in “the pants” and why don’t you have it? Is this dangerous?

The woman smacks a palm across her head and exhales sharply to herself.

 This woman is older you guess, judging by the locks of gray that intertwine with the black. Your people do this as well. Pictures of one like you, elder with lines drawn naturally along her face, bombard you like a soft rain. This person is easy salve and warmth and her touch is feather-light from either restraint or wisdom. This picture fades, as liquid as it arrives. The ripples run through you for just a second and you use this time to breathe deeply.

But not for long.

The ogres are looking at you with their strange-almond-eyes and many-white-teeth.

The woman references the man using a word you do not know, so ignorant are you to these customs. “She can’t…if we’re caught harboring a…one of them…”

…

“I know.”

It comes late. Slow. Quiet.

You panic.

“I—” you end your own sentence, aware that the sound you intend and the one that breaks free are not the same. You rattle where they sing. They stare. You clear your throat and try again. “I want…I look…have more? For me?”

With this, you gesture to the copper pot behind them. This wasn’t your first intention but it’s what comes out. In it sits a warm stew that sends thrills trickling through you like acid rain, burning you up from the inside. Hunger to you is different from them, you know. You know of their bellies aching, their tongues drying from thirst—you’ve heard from the weavers among your kind. But hunger for you is a dying of thought and mind before body. Hunger aches in a part your body does not inhabit. Hunger is something in the air as much as your limbs and to feel it is to not know yourself. Hunger drives you to the pot and to your knees as you shovel the spiced meat and rice into your mouth.

You expect them to stop you. To yell or swing their long arms.

But they do nothing. And you eat.

That was the first time you tasted mercy. It tasted like stew and the dissipation of a craving you sometimes think imagined. You still taste it from time to time.

“What should we do?” The woman again.

A deep sigh. A grunt followed by the weighty squeal of old wood as it gives to a hefty force. The words: “I won’t.”

“Nasim…” His name, you guess. Names as they give one another here, in this strange place. If you had paid attention to yourself then, you’d have noticed your skin milken with just a touch of excitement, soft dew coating the otherwise smooth salmon surface of your palms. A name, you might have caught yourself thinking—before the much bigger, much more potent thought took its place: Her face is like the ones the Ogres made before your mom was lost. Never to be found. You shiver.

“I’m telling you—I can’t! Not another; not again.”

“Nasim, just what the calamity do you suppose we do then? What else?!” The way she cries it makes your stomach hurt, maybe how their hunger hurts them. It feels deep, like an echo, bouncing around you until you feel queasy. You go to retch but the low hum of the man’s voice distracts you.

“I know the consequences just like all the rest, Hel. I just…you don’t understand.” Greif. Raw and unnamed but familiar in a way you wish you didn’t know. This taints his language and, in turn, taints your hunger. You toss the meat aside and lay on the cold of the floor, their fire doing little to flatten the bumps on your pink membrane. This too, you suppose, marks you as the same.

“It’s a monster,” declares the woman with such finality you accept it on impact.

“She’s a girl.”

“What happens then, if they discover it—and us as caretakers? What happens to our family—all we’ve built?”

“And what of me? What of my character and integrity? What have I become if not a slayer of children?”

This sucks the air from the room, a silent cyclone that sweeps through and takes everything it touches. You shiver. This draws their attention, though you wish it didn’t.

“Don’t,” snaps the woman. Snap because the word bites the air around it like teeth and you roll into the carpet to escape its stamp. She folds you back with a nudge of her foot and you lay on your rear staring blankly at the ceiling. It’s muddy and bits of earth drip from the center at inconsistent rates. “Don’t pretend like you feel.”

This surprises you. You’re not sure what it means exactly but the implication of something much greater tugs at you in a way you hadn’t known until now.

All of a sudden, you begin to cry.

And you suppose the way your ears, pink and softened, spew clear liquid and the way your palms turn white with the sweet milk of your existence, is not so endearing to beings known only to wet from one orifice during grief. Your eyes too, of course, pour cloudy streams that burn the forgiving fabric at your feet. To think, these kind souls had invited you in under the guise of feeding a poor orphan, only for your cloak to fall and reveal your true monstrosities. To have betrayed your saviors so swiftly…

You snort and your ears and eyes expel its substances double-time.

Maybe not endearing…but, pitiable nonetheless.

Striking some dissonant chord in the man, you are in one moment then the next before your senses can make up the difference. Alone and afraid—whoosh—swaddled and looked upon by dark eyes that frighten you with their unfamiliarity. You wither and shake and growl with the earth and your hunger and this sounds like something their infants do, you think, from a distant memory you have of seeing one; this seems the most likely reason the next thing happens:

He takes you further into his arms and begins a silent and hypnotic trek to a place that ends in wooly blankets and pillows of scratchy fabric stuffed with hay. You sleep like your people do; heavy and with your fingertips touching the earth, making sure you’re always in prime position to defend yourself.

This means nothing, of course, as you have not rested against something soft in so long. You can’t pick a date because you don’t remember. But it must’ve happened once before…you sleep and sleep and sleep and do not stir until your body indicates it has the stores to do so. At such a time, you stretch and yawn and sniff…

And freeze.

The next memory you have could be no memory at all, but a vision spun from your own anxious webs; the very same ones you’ve been casting since your mom was lost. You see the woman as you saw her before, lines and curls and disapproval…but now you see her in shadow as you’ve never seen her in light.

This woman is not cruel. This woman is not hungry.

This woman is sad.

She is so sad, in fact, that the edge of the sharpened blade against your neck does not hover as a warning, but presses to you with such resolved restraint that you know she has only just stopped herself. This too, you feel, bubble up as obvious and confounding as the feeling before, causing your palms to milken. But you do not cry this time.

This time you reach out. You reach as she will come to reach in time; when the deepest of her distress comes to heel and she can see you as you aim to be rather than what you may represent to her now. You reach and you touch her face…just so.

The woman looks at you hard. You are still so small and so different but you also feel the trembling of an unnamed power kickstart in your stomach and the gravity of it alone tells you she is right to be scared. Despite all of this, you do not want to harm her. In fact, you still feel that she can harm you worse. This is false, of course. But because you are so small and so uninformed and cannot quite comprehend the bigness of such matters around you, you do nothing.

This seems the correct choice.

Your next memory is falling asleep, losing yourself to the darkness as your people are want to do. Time passes as streams river through rocks and you open your eyes in a new season. The wool scratches as it always has and you wake to a spread before you. Delicacies hard-won from the earth; potatoes pulled and boiled, bread from wheat grown in the yard around you, butter churned by skilled arms. A labor of kindness.

This you tasted on the spuds, the dough, the cream, the air—it was the first you’d every tried: Mercy.

You have not forgotten.

And when she visits you another night, a shadow in the chair near the door, she says only one thing to you and you hold it close as it’s the only truth she’s ever confided in your presence. It feels like relief but something else you have not come to know yet. You embrace this feeling.

 “I had a daughter once,” she whispers to the dark and to you. “Her name was Ziah.”

“Ziah…” you repeat to her shadow. This gives the name a sort of reverence that entrances you both. You stare, the both of you, seeing everything even as you see nothing at all.

“Would you…like that name? As your own, I mean. Your kind, I know…they don’t—” she stops herself. As if she’s said something vulgar.

A name, you think.

And your palms milken with excitement.

“Yes,” you try out the word. “Yes.” You say it again. “Yes. Ziah.” This time, you feel it, the power you squash between your knuckles when you sleep. It softens around you and becomes you a little more.

But that’s neither here or there. You, Ziah, lay back down because you are small and young and tired. You sleep with no thought given to the lesson brewing in your blood, gifted to you one night and rewarded a people who never saw it coming much later.

Nasim’s voice is the last you hear that night as he speaks to his wife, his voice delicate as it had not been when he first refused her. “I’m glad we…we tried something else this time.”

“Yeah,” the woman, begrudging but not resentful. “I suppose…I suppose, we shall see.”

Ziah, newly formed yet not truly awakened, sleeps peacefully for the first night in many nights.