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Prelude / We hereby conduct this post mortem. [ TW: Physical violence/assault. ]
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WITCH: Draw a monster. Why is it a monster?
The first monster I create is a man.
He is brought forth before the witch and I in trembling strokes of graphite. I draw him not from memory, but from stories the older girls on the island have told me. He is ordinary and terrible; both the knife and the hand that turns it. From his paper confinement he leers at me, his skin a sickly yellow like the rot of cigarettes and stretched tight over sharp bone. The afternoon sun casts shadows through the window panes, splitting his face in halves.
He has one hand reaching out to me through the paper. Still and unmoving, I stare back at him, at the twin chasms he has for eyes, where I'd colored in black because I could not withstand the thought of being seen by him.
He cannot hurt me here, I remind myself. Here, on Aeaea, he cannot touch me. This is where wounded girls go to for shelter; I know that no man who stepped foot on the island has ever made it out alive. What happens to them, I do not know, and the witch tells me it does not matter so I bury my questions like they bury their men.
And yet somewhere out there I know he is real. He is the young boy that grows to become a collection of sharp objects, the angry father slamming the door and the husband who checks in and out of his home like it's a hotel.
"Look what you have done," says the witch.
There is nothing scalding in her tone and still it pricks at the shame sitting dormant on my skin. I crumple up the paper. I cannot bear to stare at the monster I have brought to life in illustration.
Every girl on this island has been hurt by a man. They show up in their torn dresses, wounds leaking blood all over the shoreline, and they fall at the witch's feet and beg her to save them.
Goddess, they say, tears pouring through the cracks in their skin, have mercy.
Goddess, Goddess, Goddess. I watch them, tucked behind a marble pillar, and I mouth the words to myself like a prayer I have forgotten to recite but still remember the shape of. It had meant something to me once, I know it. I just don't remember.
At times during dinner I sit at her feet and she strokes my hair. Goddess, goddess, goddess. The notion of godhood suggests superiority. I look up and she has never been as distant as she is now, presiding on her high chair at the dinner hall. The entirety of the island lies weeping before her and perhaps it would be humiliating if she weren't such a saint. Goddess, goddess, goddess.
