Alleb dna Drawde
Moeity
I am to be wed, to be wed. On the morrow. It's an exchange - one virgin, said virgin being me, for an ox. A good ox, as I am a good virgin.
My husband I will meet at the altar, and if he be fine, 'twill be a fine day in the village of mMahna. There are precious few fine days here, and precious few fine men.
The spinster-dowager Sohali has been making me ready, performing the cleansing rituals. She has a device which gently squirts warm water into my ears. After my ears she performs the same procedure with my nose. For days, she has been making me swallow a length of cloth, which she then pulls out of my mouth. It is not seemly of me to mention the rest, but be assured I am very clean.
The ceremony is to be held in the council hut, where all civic business takes place. Afterwards, at the house of my father there will be a great feast. My bridegroom, weeks ago, delivered the carcass of a deer which he had killed himself, to prove his manliness. My father butchered it, to demonstrate the strength of our bloodline, and I salted and sweetened it, in readiness to prepare the first and only meal I will ever cook for my husband.
Lately I have soaked the chunks of meat in water with a touch of vinegar for softening, and fermented fig juice for flavor enhancement. I have built a firepit, and wrapped the venison in great leaves with wild fruits and nuts, burying it in the earth with hot stones, creating a banquet that will serve our small population for three days, as this is how long weddings last.
And who is my husband, my husband? I know not. I was not permitted to see him when he delivered the dead deer. All I know is that he will beget a child upon me, which is done by mouth-to-mouth contact. The wee one will pass from him to me, small as a pea, as men cannot grow a baby and women can.
I spend the last night of my maidenhood sitting with my friends - indeed all the womenfolk of our town, friends or no, and there is singing and merriment and carousing. We don't every one of us marry, of course we don't - because if we did, who would do the work?
In the morning my hair is parted from the centre of my forehead, across the top and down to the nape. Woven-sung into one side are the wishes for my child-to-be, and into the other the wishes for me. Some brides have but a single plait on either side - what have they asked for? Courage for themselves, and strength for their baby? I request grace, vision, faith, joy, patience, courage - there are many plaits on the left side of my head. On the right is just the one. I have asked for fortitude. I would ask for liberation, but such a thing is not possible.
It is the hour for the final preparation, and the spinster-dowager Sohali has summoned two others, Yila and Arame to aid in this, the most important thing for the bride-mother. They have heated resinous fiber to soften and stretch it, and they commence the binding, starting at my feet. I will be wrapped all the way to my throat, leaving just my neck and head free. The resin will set within an hour or so, and my body will not move again. This stillness is needed for the successful incubation of the only baby I will bear. It is to be hoped that I will have a daughter, as we need so many more girls than boys for our people to survive.
I am carried to meet my husband, the one who will set in action the course that will result in my death, and my path is strewn with flowers. He faces away from me, but I can see from his outline that he is like all the others, he is sturdy and small and covered in dark hairs. On my approach he turns, and he is fine enough, I suppose, to be the one who kills me.
The decreed and proper words are said, the ox is led forward and presented to my father, and I am handed to my husband. He smiles, and between his lips is the murder weapon, the tongue that carries the seed. Tradition demands that he kiss me immediately, and this he does. His tongue uncurls into my mouth, bearing the precious cargo that will grow tiny teeth within hours, and bite its way into my uterus, even as the villagers grow drunk on the fierce alcohol soaked into the deermeat they are consuming. As they celebrate my marriage, my death is already beginning. The creature will grow, feeding on me until I am wasted and have nothing left with which to sustain it. Having leeched minerals along with its other nutritional requirements, its teeth and nails will be strong enough in six months or so for it to claw and gnaw its way out, unaided, killing me in the process. I will be praised and mourned; the village will raise its newest member joyfully, and so the cycle continues.
The prompt had been "cocoon". I finished reading my composition to the class, some of whom looked at me in horror, some of whom looked bemused. Nobody spoke.
"Superb, Bella, thank you very much. I will now lead a discussion on the multiple themes presented in this dark work, among which are women's endless labors, marriage as constraint, and motherhood as death. Anarcho-feminists have argued these ideas for decades..." Ms Carmen began to drone.
I got a few more looks then, involving eye rolls, and "Thanks a lot, Bella"s.
"That was one sick story, Swan. You are a scary girl," Edward Cullen said, stopping on his way past my desk as soon as the bell rang. He'd never spoken to me before. He was too busy chatting up the prettiest girls, and if the rumors were to be believed, he was very busy screwing them. I'm not pretty, and all semester so far I had faded into the background and been unnoticed by anybody. Until I turned in this story and Carmen was so impressed she made me read it aloud.
"You do know oral contact doesn't make babies, though, don't you?" Edward added with a smirk.
He was everything I disliked about time-wasters who come to college and then spend their time on an informal education, getting high and getting laid. From his clothes it was obvious he had a silver-spoon background, while I had worked damned hard to be here - waitressing, cleaning in hotels, bar work - whatever I could find. Edward Cullen looked like the son of some ugly tycoon who had used his vast wealth to secure a trophy wife, and then hadn't known she was fucking the handsome swimming pool cleaner. I wasn't here to be distracted by some arrogant, ridiculously good-looking moron. Those of us who harbored actual ambition were keeping our heads down, just getting on with it. If he thought I was scary - good. He could continue to keep out of my way. Not that I could possibly be in line for his particular brand of attention.
Despite not wanting to engage, I couldn't hold back a retort, annoyed at his smugness. "My story is fiction. You do know what the fiction component of the word fiction means, don't you?"
He snorted at me. "Ooh, sarcasm. You are aware there's another process altogether, involving body parts below the waist whereby babies are conceived? Why did you bypass that in your story?"
"What's it to you?"
"In binding your bride the way you did, not only could her husband not touch her, she couldn't touch herself. I'm wondering if you created that situation consciously or not. Could it perhaps hint that the author is a little repressed?"
He was grinning snidely, like he thought he'd arrrived at a very clever conclusion.
"Are you asking me if I'm repressed, Edward? As in pressed, and then pressed again? Certainly I've been repressed many times, and I've even repressed myself," I said. "It's something I'm very fond of doing."
He turned a dull red as he got my meaning, and I stood up, gathered my books, and left him standing there.
In hindsight, it was a stupid thing to have said, because after that he wouldn't leave me alone. Tell a guy you masturbate and he follows you around like a duckling that thinks you're its mother.
"What do you want?" I asked him, and he shrugged, and answered, "The point is, Swan - what do you want?"
I couldn't be bothered, and I didn't reply. However, I had acquired a shadow. Whenever I turned around, he seemed to be there, and he even went so far as to sit next to me in class. I resolutely ignored him.
He must have been re-grouping, because a couple of weeks later he spoke to me again.
"Your man-bashing diatribes, passing for creative writing," he began. "Are there any more in the wings? Should those of us in the class who have a penis be worried?"
"Are you trying to draw my attention to the fact that you have a penis?" I asked him, looking pointedly at his crotch.
For all that he was trying to act so self-assured, he went very red again. "No, I'm asking if I need a shield to protect myself from the slings and arrows of your outrageous pen."
"Don't worry about it, Cullen. Nothing can help you."
That wasn't quite the case, though. It was more the reverse - nothing could help me. By being aloof and unfriendly I'd managed to ensure that no-one ever came anywhere near me, so I could work hard without fielding coffee invitations, and requests to sit with other students at lunchtime. However, Edward refused to be intimidated or put off by me. He hung around, saying provocative things, seemingly just to get me to talk to him. It was getting all kinds of irritating.
"Do you know my mom used to listen to an English singer with the same name as you?" I asked him once, to pre-empt whatever his opening gambit was going to be this time.
"No. Really?"
"Yeah. Edwyn Collins."
"You must be hard of hearing. That's not the same."
"It is to me."
He shut up for once.
.
.
.
.
I am a compulsive starter. There is more of this... and there'll be more again if I can whup myself enough. Shall I bother?