02-26-2011, 04:42 AM
She had lived by herself for some time now, having learned the art of slaughter through watching her father on long afternoons, as he fashioned crude weaponry from firewood and flint. Not possessing the same male strength, she relied on her wits to gather her food, rarely engaging in combat, and never with creatures larger than her. This absence of ego, how she prioritised survival over pride, wasn’t a quality she shared with her dad, who, a trifle mad with syphilis, had in his dotage decided to prove that he was as capable as any young man, and took on a furious bear, whose cubs he had slain simply to provoke the animal. Realising this was the end for her dad, she scampered from her hiding place behind a nearby tree and fled to the sounds of tearing and screams. He sounded like a baby, she later mused, like the last baby she’d borne with her now dead parent. All in all there had been five. The first was a stillbirth anyway, but the other four her father killed by quickly and remorselessly slitting their throats. While he was alive she had been his, and he had raised her to be taken by him as soon as she was old enough to accommodate a man, her mother having died in childbirth. Throughout her girlhood he took out his lust on the corpses of animals he then harvested for their meat, or any woman they happened to pass. When she was six they stayed as the guests of a peaceable tribe on a hill above the woods, and one night he raped the leader’s daughter, an eighteen-year old long past her prime. At the coming of dawn he took his daughter and fled.
She distrusted people, especially men, and took as companions small animals, rabbits and squirrels and such, feeding them from her leftover store. Those males who tried to take her as their own were no match for her wit, and as soon as they fell for her submissive act, she pounced on them and slit their throats with a crude homemade knife she concealed in her hair. Longing for affection, she had tried simulating the sexual act with women she met on her path through the woods, several by force, like her father had once done with her. But as soon as she saw the fear in their eyes, or the disgust at what they’d allowed themselves to do for the sake of curiosity, some unnameable thing made her back off, abandon the cave or clearing where she’d lain and run without rest for miles. The only affection she now sought was non-sexual with the animals she kept, holding them against her breast like she might a suckling babe.
Once, however, a young man had almost found his way through the wall of her reclusiveness and inside the cells of her heart. He was sixteen and slow in the head, always daydreaming and rarely speaking, even in the primitive language of his time. She had happened across him one day while collecting firewood, when with his head in the clouds he crashed into her. Suspecting a potential rape she’d pulled her knife and almost struck when she saw his face crippled in fear, strange liquid pouring from his eyes, crouching with his hands up in feeble defence. Seeing he was some new kind she hadn’t seen before, the mind of a child in the body of a man, she’d taken pity on and took him aside, sliding the knife back inside her hair and producing some meat from a bearskin pouch she kept tied round her waist, feeding her new charge tenderly, placing the food in his mouth and watching as his jaw began to work. She knew that he must have wandered off from some tribe, that his father would no doubt assume he was dead once a few more days had passed, no doubt relieved that he was no longer responsible for this slow-witted embarrassment, and his mother would be inconsolable until his father slept with her again, giving her another child, so rather than find his parents she thought she might keep him for herself, like the rabbits and squirrels she shared her camps with. This arrangement worked for many months, and she taught him how to collect firewood, passed on her hunting and slaughtering skills, and held him at night under the pretext that it would keep both of them warm. But soon, like all men, his lust outweighed his loyalty to her, and she was forced to kill him. She had found him watching her one day as she washed herself in a nearby river, one hand around his penis, working it gingerly, as though he wasn’t sure what to do with it, but still felt the need to respond to its call. Reluctantly she pulled the same trick she had on her old would-be-rapists, and burying him at the site of her camp, collected her things and wandered forth through the woods, shedding no tears for the boy she had killed, like she had shed none for her father when he died.
She distrusted people, especially men, and took as companions small animals, rabbits and squirrels and such, feeding them from her leftover store. Those males who tried to take her as their own were no match for her wit, and as soon as they fell for her submissive act, she pounced on them and slit their throats with a crude homemade knife she concealed in her hair. Longing for affection, she had tried simulating the sexual act with women she met on her path through the woods, several by force, like her father had once done with her. But as soon as she saw the fear in their eyes, or the disgust at what they’d allowed themselves to do for the sake of curiosity, some unnameable thing made her back off, abandon the cave or clearing where she’d lain and run without rest for miles. The only affection she now sought was non-sexual with the animals she kept, holding them against her breast like she might a suckling babe.
Once, however, a young man had almost found his way through the wall of her reclusiveness and inside the cells of her heart. He was sixteen and slow in the head, always daydreaming and rarely speaking, even in the primitive language of his time. She had happened across him one day while collecting firewood, when with his head in the clouds he crashed into her. Suspecting a potential rape she’d pulled her knife and almost struck when she saw his face crippled in fear, strange liquid pouring from his eyes, crouching with his hands up in feeble defence. Seeing he was some new kind she hadn’t seen before, the mind of a child in the body of a man, she’d taken pity on and took him aside, sliding the knife back inside her hair and producing some meat from a bearskin pouch she kept tied round her waist, feeding her new charge tenderly, placing the food in his mouth and watching as his jaw began to work. She knew that he must have wandered off from some tribe, that his father would no doubt assume he was dead once a few more days had passed, no doubt relieved that he was no longer responsible for this slow-witted embarrassment, and his mother would be inconsolable until his father slept with her again, giving her another child, so rather than find his parents she thought she might keep him for herself, like the rabbits and squirrels she shared her camps with. This arrangement worked for many months, and she taught him how to collect firewood, passed on her hunting and slaughtering skills, and held him at night under the pretext that it would keep both of them warm. But soon, like all men, his lust outweighed his loyalty to her, and she was forced to kill him. She had found him watching her one day as she washed herself in a nearby river, one hand around his penis, working it gingerly, as though he wasn’t sure what to do with it, but still felt the need to respond to its call. Reluctantly she pulled the same trick she had on her old would-be-rapists, and burying him at the site of her camp, collected her things and wandered forth through the woods, shedding no tears for the boy she had killed, like she had shed none for her father when he died.
"We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges." - Gene Wolfe
