She Swallows Swords

 She’s getting ready for a performance. In the eye of her new womanhood, she thinks she’s safe from the things that came before. Does the little girl know she’s going to be a performer one day? No, probably not. Does the little girl know she’s the daughter of a myth?

If she’s not lucky, you have her walk the plank: you, little men, afraid of a little girl. You have her walk the plank like Wendy Darling. Slip on a blindfold, or else she’ll turn your sailors to stone. Brush her hair ever so carefully beforehand - you want it to look soft, loose but not unbidden - so that, when she falls in the murky depths below, and the water takes her in its hand and squeezes and thrashes her about - so that when she inevitably drifts up somewhere down the shore, where the channel gets narrow and the murky water turns sweet and clear - the hair can float all around and along beside her, and falling petals can catch in it, and she’ll look like she’s just sleeping. Just sleeping, Snow White, Briar Rose, just sleeping. Eyes closed, veins blue, the water made sure of it. Daughter of a siren, daughter of a selkie, sleek as anything, she drifts. 

What is it with women and water? I suppose all little girls come from the womb, and so the imagery is familiar: the dank, dark grotto, the hidden cave, that close, wet thing of safety and confinement. So she grows up, and she fills her pockets with river stones. So she grows up, and sinks to the bottom of the earth, searching for that familiar grotto.

Little girl comes back as a ghost. She walks the halls of her family estate and takes one hand to the wall, feeling along the wallpaper, all the other little girls beneath. Feeling along the oil paintings, portraits hung in darkness, all the martyrs and performers who came before. Death-defying spells, incantations, she whispers poems she’s memorised in the dead of night. Death-defying magic, her ancestors the poets, the doctors and mothers, the actresses: all performing, poised, poisoned. All performing, little girls inside, still in the grotto, still running through the mud.

Every little girl has a mother to worship and a mother to kill. The knight and the dragon, Medusa and Medea, two martyrs, two performers. She sees them in her shadows; she sees them in the corners of mirrors, in the space between spaces, in the gaps of her lungs. She is she, she is mother, she is daughter. In the circus of her girlhood she spies them coming: mother and mother, hand in hand, one the poisoned promise of womanhood and the other a softer, unspoken gift. She doesn’t know which is which yet. Let the little girl grow a little older. If she’s not slaughtered by one thing or another, she’ll surely learn how to identify the beast. 

But little girl gets older. Death-defying miracle, she gets taller, too. Blood is how she tells the difference. It doesn’t matter where it comes from: the kitchen, an accident, a grotto. Blood from a knife held more like a pen than a weapon, or blood from her body telling her to choose which mother to become. Blood from within, or blood altered. All women bleed, one way or another, eventually. It’s how they shed their little girl skins. It’s how they hurt and hunt.

The little girl lives inside the woman. She traipses shadows stretching long as the water’s hand, chasing after her in the dark. The shadows whisper: bring mama home. Sing her legacy. Take mama home and show her where they mounted her head on the wall.

Little girl tries to run away, but she can’t leave the stage before the curtains come down. She stands as high as she can and looks down. Passenger bird. Little thing takes flight, spreads her arms and soars on girlhood. She’s a shrike, she’s a raven. She’s a baby magpie, searching for shiny things.

She hides in the grotto of the woman, the performer. It’s dark and warm inside, and full of blood, and familiar. Martyr, safe from the water, she doesn’t think of death.

In the comfort of fairytales, the woman tastes the iron of her own blood. She swallows swords, death-defying, performer. She swallows sharp things and they cut the little girl who’s hiding inside.