A Kind Voice

There was an art to it— to letting go— and Regina had lost her touch.

She no longer enjoyed it, this luring in hearts, treating them softly and then pushing them away, leaving an ache— or sometimes a wound—  as one leaves a parting gift for a childhood friend.

She remembered the last one, a trickster god centuries older than she was. What a smile that one had; it still made Regina laugh to think of it. It made her laugh to remember how they used to dance among the stars, his joy coursing through Regina’s veins like fire.

Regina stood up from where she sat on her stool, watching the flames and thinking. She retrieved a blue clay teacup from a cupboard, filled up the kettle and hung it over the fireplace to boil. Then she went to her pantry and started hunting for the tea.

“Where are you? Where are you?” She muttered. “Where did you go?”

Where had it gone, indeed? She used to bewitch them with her beauty, with her smiles and her stories, and make their lives impossible. Make them live through the most exquisite hell they’d ever experience… until they gave up their quest for her and fled.

Regina pinched leaves from five different pots and gathered them in a pouch for her tea. The kettle keened and she removed it from the fire and let it cool on her wooden stool.

She leaned against the kitchen counter and stared at the fire again. The nymph she was fifty years ago would have been appalled at her performance with the trickster god.

Then again, the nymph she was fifty years ago would never have considered him a worthy prize. The nymph she was fifty years ago wouldn’t be living under the roots of a cypress with a hearth and a fire, making tea like a mortal.

She had a different voice now, her companions said. A different gaze. They had both grown far too kind.

“Maybe it’s time for me to die,” she mused, only half-joking. She knew she would outlast them all, her litter-sisters, the trickster god, the very cypress she used for a home… her living would rival that of the sun and the moon.

After the tea, which warmed and tempered her, Regina climbed out from under the watery cypress to hunt.

She came home near sundown, making several trips to the swamp and back for her prizes: several snakes, an alligator, three birds and an otter. There was no thrill to the hunt now, only the comfort of habit.

On her last return to the cypress, the alligator hung over her shoulders, she found three nymph-mites hiding on her doorstep.

“You again?” She grumbled.

“Dark soon,” said the smallest of the mites piteously, batting her dark eyelashes and showing Regina her bloodied hands.

“You come to my home with nothing to offer?” Regina scorned, but her words had no bite.

They’d been coming to her for months now, baby mites who’d been bullied out of their nests— many times by their own mothers. They were never the same, but Regina’s home had become a sort of hub for them, where they could spend a night in comfort before striking out on their own, or find shelter if they were badly wounded.

Regina had to admit she was getting used to it.

These three weren’t related—one was from moss, another water, and the biggest one duckweed.Their skins were soft and slick, their claws and teeth just barely starting to grow in. The one who’d spoken— the moss creature—had a deep, soft voice, like the sound of a warm night.

The mites held out their hands to her— they were full of blooms,milkweed, water lilies, irises, hibiscus.

Regina bared her teeth. 

“You parasites will fill my home with weeds.”

Nevertheless, she opened her door, as the mites knew she would. They were careful with the flowers, careful to set them by the door, in the nooks and crannies of the tree where they would best be seen. No nymph in her right mind would accept flowers as a gift; they were weeds that stood still for the taking, and thus unworthy offerings. But Regina was old, not in her right mind, and fond of bright colors.

Regina put the snakes, birds and otter away where the mites would not find them. She started skinning the alligator, and the mites sat impatiently at her feet, staring with their big, insect-like eyes at the dead animal.

Once the skin was off and the organs out, Regina slit the animal into three equal pieces and left them for the mites, who devoured it within minutes.

Regina watched them and thought of the trickster god, how he would heap the best food on her plate and watch her eat as if satiating her hunger gave him greater pleasure than eating his own prey.

He wanted to play, she thought fondly. He was good at that, at playing games.

And she used to be good at it, too. But this one, she had simply boasted of her brokenness to him, and chased him off that way. Don’t come any closer, she’d told him, with what was left of her sarcastic grin. You won’t like what you see.

She stitched up the wounds of the nymph mites, wrestling them into submission when they bit at her and hissed. Afterwards, the three curled up on her kitchen floor to sleep, wrapped around each other for warmth. Regina searched inside herself for her hunger and could not find it; though it had been there, savage and loud, when she’d left to hunt this afternoon.

Regina went to bed on an empty stomach. She dreamed of her trickster god, and then dreamed of herself when she was younger and wilder. She wouldn’t have cared, then, about his leaving. She would have found another pair of arms to crawl into and let him fade from her memory. She had no tenderness, then, no patience for the broken inside of her, no longing more significant than that of her bottomless appetite.

Are you lonely? She asked herself, and laughed. Lonely is a mortal emotion.

She woke up to the sensation of three pairs of hands grabbing at her hair. They’d undone her braid, the little parasites—it took Regina a few minutes to realize they were threading their offer-weeds into her swamp-brown hair.

They did up Regina’s braid again and crawled around and over her, like cats. They settled around the crooks and crannies of her body and went to sleep. 

When daylight woke Regina, the nymph mites were long gone.