Big City Lit: the rivers of it, abridged

Jul/Aug '03 [Home]

Short Prose

Monstrocity
by Holly Woodward

Every city gets the monster it deserves. In the town of M-, it began as a rumor. Homeless men said that a child with a serpent head rising from her chest lived in the old tunnels. At first, people dismissed the beggars' words. "Madmen and addicts," they muttered. But the rumors kept surfacing.
          Tired of prank calls, police searched the labyrinths. After three days, the chief called a news conference to display a small squirrel skull and chewed spare ribs on black felt.
          "If it ever existed, here's proof that the monster is dead," the chief said. Afterward, he told the mayor, "The creature won't survive long among the rats underground."
          "A thorough search would only turn up more horrors," the mayor said.
          But the curious kept hunting the abandoned caves to find the serpent girl. Dim pictures and reports appeared in the press. The town split into those trying to prove it existed and the faction trying to discount the monster stories. Some would never believe, no matter the proof. Others would never admit that the creature could die. None could agree on a name for the two-headed beast, so it went nameless. (What the snake and child called each other, nobody cared.)
          Meanwhile, the snake licks beads of water from the wall and eats whatever flits past; the girl takes strength from him—but he's called the parasite. Men want to free the beautiful girl from the serpent coiled around her neck, but when approached, the snake hisses, baring fangs.
          A mob gathered one night, chanting, "Kill it," to the girl, throwing knives. She hid in the snake's embrace.
          A medical team studied how to cut off the serpent without hurting the child. But they saw that severing the snake would kill the girl—only he has a heart.
          The high priest said, "She must have sinned, and the snake must be her punishment." "It is not for us to come between her and the gods." The mayor mock-washed his hands.
          The serpent rises from the girl's chest and curls around her neck. He whispers in her ear, and though the snake alphabet has only one letter, S, the child understands. While she sleeps, he keeps watch, curled over her chest; serpents have no eyelids, so he cannot be caught.
          At night, while M-'s citizens sleep in high glass towers, below, in the raveling dark, the serpent slithers across her skin, caressing. He sings to the child:

My father was the world's start,
your mother is the end of time.
In the darkest part of the heart,
the blood is beaten for its crime.

We are castaways of the dead,
nightclouds will carry us away.
I am the dreams that go unsaid,
you are the fears no one will say.

(Holly Woodward's fiction has won firsts in Story and New Letters contests. A long story took second place in Literal Lattè's contest. Another was nominated for an E2 award. A longtime resident of NYC, she now lives in Hoboken.)