I seem to have trouble sticking with the stories I've started...
-Beast
They called me the Beast.
Oh, how I hated that name.
"Have you heard the tale of Beauty and the Beast?" they'd say. "Oh, you must have heard it. It's a wonderful story."
They think, in their silly, irritating, foolish way that they know all they need to know about the story. They think they know everything. The tale of Beauty and the Beast: a beautiful girl who falls in love with a man, and saves him from a life of darkness. The end.
But they didn't know the prologue.
Nor did they know the epilogue.
And how can you have a story if you don't know what happened before and after? What do you have if you only have the middle?
They tried, oh yes, they tried. They made up beginnings and endings. They even came up with two phrases to discourage any questions about the before and the after of the story. They start with "once upon a time" and ended with "happily ever after".
To them, to those normal people, that was all they needed. They had their story.
And I had mine.
My mother was beautiful. She had pale, smooth skin and a full mouth. Her eyes were blue. Her hair was blacker than night.
I never saw my mother. Except for the day I was born, I never even laid eyes on her. After she gave birth to me, she handed me off to a midwife. Then she disappeared. They never found her.
I knew what my mother looked like because of what others told me. The described her eyes, bluer than the sky, bluer than the sea. They described her hair, black and wavy, smooth and silky, thick and dark. They told me how she sang to birds.
They told me more than I wanted to know about my mother. They told me nothing about my father.
I had my mother's black hair. But my eyes weren't blue.
I was not a "beast", as they called me. I was never a beast. People spoke of how I was eaten up by darkness. I was savage and unmerciful. I did things for my own reasons. I'd lived in darkness for so long that I'd forgotten what light was like.
They were wrong, those people. I was not brutal, the way they told of me in the stories. I did not live in darkness. I was not full of anger and hate.
I was alone. I stood alone. Alone I had been since my mother had left me. Alone I would remain for the rest of my life. I was cold, I was like ice. My life was nothing to me. To live was the same as not living at all.
When she left, my mother took part of me away with her. What was left of me was nothing. As a child, I did not speak. I did not feel. People avoided my eyes. They were not afraid of me; they simply did not understand me. To them, I was unfathomable.
What makes a person human? Is it how they look, whether they have hands and feet, whether they walk upright or not? Or is it their abilities, whether they are intelligent, whether they are capable of speech? Whether or not they can feel?
If you can't define a human, then how can you define a beast?