“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”—Virginia Woolf
You think you know the story. A man made a monster, and that monster demanded a mate. Mad scientist meets fallen angel. That story. You might remember the lonely girl, a composite stitched from skins sliced from the many—her perfect face, rounded hips, hollow ankles, full breasts, that striking hair? But do you remember the rest of the story, the part about scraps collected from the slaughterhouse floor? The final girl’s literary fate? The way the mad scientist tore the Bride apart, packed her up in a picnic basket, and then sunk the bloody bundle to the bottom of the sea? They say the deep-water fish worship her still, their lights shining in tribute to all womankind.
Or maybe it didn’t happen like that at all.
After all, you’ve seen her following the script. The only visible seam is the ligature around her throat, a living girl painted in black and white. You know the one. An iconic beauty with lightning-streaked hair. That Bride had a spark of intelligence in her celluloid eyes; she hissed in defiance even as death once again loomed large. Filmed in 1935 and she’s still a box office hit, baby.
There are other stories, too many to count. But here’s the truth:
He kept me for himself.
My body was assembled from the parts of other women, each one hand-picked to suit my maker’s preferences. Murdered women all, I discovered their histories left in the memories of dark matter.
My legs once belonged to Sophia, a girl who loved to dance above all else. Charlotte’s hands remembered entire concertos; her fingers longed for golden chords summoned from the harp shoved in the corner of the laboratory. And then there was Lucy. My torso carried the weight of her heavy breasts that still seeped milk for a child long dead. The ghosts of Penelope, Rose, Genevieve, and Violet lingered too. But my own name was hidden beyond reach. How could that be? When I asked, my maker refused to give me one. What need had I for a history when I was nothing more than a vessel, empty for him to fill. And then one day, I denied him access to the space between Sophia’s athletic legs, the touch of Violet’s full lips. He pressed, but nothing would force me to relent—my refusal as adamant as his ardor.
That victory was short lived.
Later that night, I found a large basket next to a table covered with the tools of unmaking—scalpels and bone saws, scissors and forceps, probes and pins. I waited in the laboratory, sent a silent apology to Charlotte while I disassembled her harp. Her strong fingers kept the garrote tight around my maker’s throat, and we stayed that way an entire hour, unwilling to take a chance that he might come back to life and finish what he’d started.
Afterwards, I braided that blood-stained harp string in Rose’s long hair. Genevieve, with her penchant for cleverness, calculated the best way to dismantle a man. Penelope’s sturdy shoulders bore his dead weight, and Sophia’s long legs carried us all down to the seashore. An empty boat filled with smooth, round stones moored at the lonely dock. And so, I bundled my maker into the basket, weighed it down with polished stones, and rowed out into the ocean to dispose of him as he’d meant to do to me.
When I returned, it was not to a familiar shore. This beach was white as bone. Dark rocks littered the sand like the protruding skeleton of some ancient sea creature.
In my search for the deepest waters, I’d ventured too far out to find a certain way back. Penelope’s back ached from hours of rowing. Charlotte’s beautiful hands were raw with blisters, and Violet’s lips had cracked in the sun. A quick check with Genevieve suggested a better chance for survival on this strange beach than another day adrift in the dingy. So, I dove into the black water and made my way to land.
Dark heads emerged from the waves. A knot of seals watched my progress with limpid eyes. They posed no threat, but their quiet contemplation made me uneasy. Sophia’s legs kicked through the choppy water, and soon I emerged from the sea, leaving both boat and seals behind.
I dragged myself forward, seeking shelter behind one of the jagged rocks keeping the crashing waves at bay. The wind broke around the looming fortress of stone, but the hollow behind it was already occupied. A creature looked up at me with eyes as dark as those of the seals that had tracked my struggles. I shivered. Genevieve knew stories of Brides stolen from the sea. But even I could see this was no selkie.
Although her features were swollen and bruised, the woman had a haunted air about her. A fallen angel, innocence martyred. A demon, seductive siren. Charlotte reached out. Sophia stepped back. I could almost hear the ghosts of those disparate parts arguing for the correct action. Genevieve silenced the rising chorus. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. They’d been there all along. How else could I have known their names? So, what did that make me?
My attention turned back to the woman bleeding out into the sand. Her upper body was human but instead of legs, she had a split tail, fins instead of feet. Iridescent scales shimmered across her skin. No sealskin had ever covered those shoulders. Not a selkie bride then, but a mermaid perhaps, or some other creature better suited to watery depths away from this desolate place.
The dying girl opened her mouth, exposing needle-sharp teeth, and cried a thin wail reminiscent of a weak babe. I held her together as best I could, drank her tears, and shared in her suffering. As she neared the end, I swallowed her last sigh and, driven by something I couldn’t understand, I flayed a section of scales with my maker’s special scalpel and quickly spliced her flesh to mine—a willing vessel.
Welcome Annika, called the others, as her voice joined their own. Her memories crashed upon us. A thick net tangled. The splintered deck of a weathered fishing boat. The visage of a mortal man who had claimed her as master and mate against her wishes.
She isn’t the only one. There are others. So many. You know the ones. The drowned girls. The burning girls. The final girls. Can you see their faces? All the women in this world who had it coming? And then there are those who didn’t make headlines. Brown girls and Black girls go missing all the time. The disappearing girls. The runaways. Those who fall from grace. You know the story.
The pretty blonde on the morning news says last year, more than two hundred and sixty-eight thousand women went missing in the United States alone. More than the entire population of Reno, Nevada. It’s an impossible statistic. Fake news. The anchorwoman smiles and moves on. After all, she doesn’t know any of those vanished girls. She doesn’t recognize their names. Do you?
Don’t worry. You probably wouldn’t have been able to pronounce them anyway.
We tracked down Annika’s captor and watched as he bled into the dirt floor of his hut. After that, we caught trade winds, and with them, followed rumors of a remote island populated by creatures that were neither man nor beast, but both. By then, we’d multiplied sevenfold, our skin pieced together from the girls and women we’d discovered abused and abandoned in back alleys and under bridges, chained to stones and strung from wires.
We added the essence of Annika and the others who came after, but we were never able to recreate the magic performed on the first of us—Charlotte, Sophia, Lucy, Penelope, Rose, Genevieve, Violet, and myself. There were no other resurrections to walk in our steps. A scrap of scales or a sliver of skin allowed union, but it didn’t hold the same magic that had melded the first eight of us into one being. Instead, we became a willing vessel, a home to those who no longer had a body of their own. We were legion. A multitude of souls swirled through our core eight, spirits pulsing in veins, stretched across connective tissue, suffused in bone. Even so, we couldn’t save them all. If those discarded husks had been dead too long, there was no spark to transfer. Those, we committed to earth, marking each hidden grave with a smooth white stone, until there were so many we could have gathered them to build a tower to the heavens. And still we continued.
In tribute, we braided strands of each victim’s hair into Rose’s lustrous locks. We stopped in far-flung ports, learned the names of devils called men, and followed the trail of rumors and shipping receipts to a smoking volcano tucked in the crescent of an island in the South Pacific. Penelope expertly navigated our way around the coral reefs with the aid of Annika’s knowledge of ancient waterways, and we landed on the beach’s narrow edge. Beyond, a thick screen of jungle obscured the small isle’s interior. Sophia settled her feet in the golden sand and helped Charlotte secure the liberating sail for our return.
A woman slipped from behind a tree. No, not a woman—at least not entirely. Her face was vixen slender, the cheekbones limned with red fur. Her body thick and strong, lower limbs shortened, fingers ending in curved bear claws. Genevieve urged caution even as the creature beckoned us forward. Another woman stepped from the scrub, wolfish-grey, unabashedly walking on all fours. And then . . . another—
My heart stuttered and then stopped. A beat and then two, an eternity, only starting once more at the insistence of my sister selves—Charlotte, Sophia, Lucy, Penelope, Rose, Genevieve, and Violet. They crowded close, any distance remaining between us erased when they called me by name, a name that once belonged to another woman who defied her maker and took knowledge for her own. Come back, come back. And, like these hybrids before me—torn apart and reassembled by a doctor masquerading as a god—I was no longer alone.
A scream sliced through the falling dark. The beast women startled and slipped back into the green confusion—the last to leave, a creature with shiny pink skin stretched tight, sow’s ears crimped and clipped in the rude semblance of a human’s.
The elongated shriek—the suffering of a million women trapped in a tortured form—was cut short with a loud crack. The gunshot splintered the night like the dead-white needle of a new moon cutting through the velvet sky, and Violet’s lips split to take up the call cut short.
We found the man first. He lay face down among the canes, his head bashed in. We followed the broken trail until we found her in a trampled patch stained with blood.
Felines are the strongest when the night is darkling, but even that was no proof against the bullet lodged in the shattered shoulder bone of a puma: golden fur left in patches, lidless eyes ablaze. Red, branching scars zigzagged across her chest, a distorted canvas pulled by her frantic breaths. She snarled with lips strangely human in a savage face, but then Lucy’s milk dropped.
The puma woman began to whimper, a rattle lodged deep in her chest. Charlotte frantically picked the lock on the battered fetters still clamped on the creature’s bloody wrist. She’d fought her way free, at a dreadful cost. Sophia cradled the woman’s head in her lap; Violet’s tears mingled with blood as red as our own. We could not save her torn and savaged form, but her soul was a different story. Not so much different than my own.
There are those among you who claim female forms are nothing more than empty vessels waiting to be filled, that we are all Brides until we are not.
Stop. Do you hear that? Do you hear whispers in the night? Pay heed.
We are no longer following the script you’ve written.
We are the women raped on the altar. The forced brides. The final girls, and we are coming for you. Vengeance will be ours.
There is no where you can run, no safe haven for your kind. We will call you by name, rout all traces of your legacy from this earth. We will salt your graves with tears.
We are the New Eve. Everlasting. Eternal.
Originally published in Monster Aristocracy, edited by Dan Brereton, Allison Pang, and James A. Moore.
