Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28266772-20160909215816

A/N: So I appreciate that I have a few stories in the workshop right now so there's no need for anyone to rush to a review. This is for Shawn's competition which closes on the 21st so there's plenty of time. Nonetheless I've put this through a few drafts and am at the stage where I've stopped feeling the need to come back to this and want to put it somewhere before I forget about it.

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Dear Andrea,



I am sorry to say that I will not be making myself available for interview. I imagine that despite your morbid interest in me you probably don’t find me sympathetic so I will put this simply – I am extremely tired of being subjected to constant questioning. People are interested in how my account of events can inform their own narratives and I am tired of being forced to play a role in that. No one has sympathy for me so I no longer have sympathy for them and their interests. I am no longer invested in making this story easy to understand; I will no longer censor it, or twist it, to conform to sanity and common sense. So no… I will not give you an interview, but I will give you an account which I would prefer be printed in full. You can all think I’m fucking mad then and be done with it. But I’m no longer going to sit around and try to explain it piece by piece so it can slot in with the tale of the abused wife, or the mad mother, or the ruthless bitch.

It doesn’t matter anyway. I’m going to be here for a long time. I used to be normal before I entered this place but all that has gone now; I’ve lost it all. I’m told I don’t have much time left but I don’t believe them. The state doesn’t want to kill a white woman in this country because they’re all a bunch of fucking cowards. So all I really have left is time to wait while they take turns passing judgements and then appealing those judgements over and over. They say they’ll fry me in a year; I guess we’ll see about that.

Unlike them I am not a coward. People have accused me in the past of appropriating masculinity but they had no idea; men appropriated me and my ways, not the other way around. I watched my father slink across the hallway every night to fuck my younger sister and he never touched me and you know why? I bet he’s still got a fake nail embedded somewhere in his scrotum and it’s floating around inside him. Did you know with enough force a testicle can be pushed back into the abdominal cavity? It’s a good thing to know. There are about three or four ex-frat boys running around this glorious country one soldier down because of me. I bet they tell their wives it was a football accident.

I was a fucking Valkyrie.

I went to Harvard. I won unwinnable cases. I worked for billionaires, I commanded respect and admiration from men who had nukes tucked under their arms like college footballs. I was a black belt in four different martial arts; I have ended the careers of three professional athletes. I had unspeakable control over people and I exploited them at every turn. Women were scared of me and men would have gone to war for me. Women like me are why men woke up thousands of years ago and tried to stamp my sex into submission. Women like me make people afraid, and they should be. I may be sauntering off to some ‘early retirement’ but there will always be more. I’m not the first and I won’t be last. You better hope some girl like me doesn’t look at you and take a fancy to your clothes, your man, your job, or even your body; because a girl like me could pluck it like an apple from a tree.

God I was a fucking Valkyrie.

Then I met him. Jesus Christ what a cliché, right? Well I’ll skip the shit and say that I fell in love and that left me weak and vulnerable. All this talk of the wealthy older man getting taken down by a silly little tramp but God damn it, it goes both ways. He was a lot of things. To me, at first, he was curious and interesting enough to compel me towards him. Before long he was more than just a man but a glorious idol. I worshipped him and I… humiliated myself.

Let’s skip the house and the dog and the white picket fence. I bought into it, okay? I bought into the whole fairy princess story and I don’t know why. I just did. I didn’t even tell him when I got pregnant. I kept it quiet. I wasn’t scared. I just wanted to be the perfect wife. He mentioned one day in passing a possible name for a daughter and I went home and stopped taking my contraceptive. I wanted him to express a desire and for me to present it to him effortlessly. Contrary to the internet’s opinions I did not trap him with a child – we had been together many years before my pregnancy.

Ignoring all the anger and the pain I have experienced is not an easy thing for me to do. But I should make it clear that I loved what grew inside of me. I didn’t do it for logical reasons but it didn’t matter. I hate all that “magic vagina” nonsense where pregnancy and birth is described in terms of inexplicable and intangible connections. But for what it’s worth I loved my daughter. I loved her the second she started growing. I was a Valkyrie and she was my kin and I looked at the Earth and all the glorious pleasures I had wrung from it and I remember thinking,

“Let’s see if it can handle two of me.”

I found out nine months later that the answer was no. I never named her—I guess at this stage I don’t need to because I’ll never have another—because my daughter was born dead on the 19th May 2011. What happened afterwards is not what the doctors say happened. I have, in the past, lied and confirmed those accounts because I thought that’s what I should do. I didn’t want people thinking I was crazy. But I don’t actually remember exactly what happened during my bout of unconsciousness. The labour was a terrible trauma and I had been forced to accept all kinds of crazy drugs that wrecked my system. By the time I woke up, in a grief ridden haze, three days had passed.

I remember that by the time a dry knot of pain had begun to form inside me—literally just as I started to really process the grief of my miscarriage—my husband appeared from around the corner with a little baby. At first I kinda thought he’d stolen it, or maybe borrowed it. I didn’t fully remember the actual labour but I remember resting my thumb in my daughter’s hand and feeling the cold, lifeless, skin. It had been so absolute that when I woke up and saw him there with a goofy grin and a hot pink little baby that was crying loudly I just couldn’t quite believe him when he told me it was my daughter.

I held her. I told myself she was my daughter. I told myself she was my Valkyrie but… in my heart I was still grieving the stillbirth. At this stage I started to feel a dissociation. There was my daughter, my babe, my child, and she had died at birth. But then there was this new baby. I kept telling myself as I smiled inanely and cooed at her, and watched her grip my finger with her little chubby fingers, that this was my daughter but deep down I didn’t feel it. Deep down a part of me wanted to grieve a loss. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe my husband, it wasn’t that I didn’t trust him or that I couldn’t understand the story I was presented; I just didn’t feel that it was true.

For three months I stayed at home and wore the indignity of housewifery. Those days were relatively benign although strangely quiet, and gut wrenchingly hollow. I assumed that I would be the best mother there ever was so when my baby never cried I just went along with it. She laid in her crib eight hours a day and I fed her formula (the papers had a field day with my refusal to breast-feed) so it was just me waiting around listening to the suburban silence. Lawnmowers ticked off in the distance, people shouted barely audible greetings that flitted through my open windows, and aimless middle aged men built man-caves in preparation for their retirement.

It was exactly how I imagine purgatory might be. Sometimes I would push past my anxiety, and my doubts, to enter the room and look at the baby in the crib. She would just lay there silent and still, and she would follow me with her big grey eyes relentlessly. I should have seen it as a sign that something was wrong but I didn’t want to be near my own child. It was much easier to just think I was so good that the baby never needed to cry. And when she would suddenly start to cry, and act like an actual baby, when her father came home I thought that was because he was a fumbling “straight-out-of-a-commercial” kind of father. The evidence kind of fit a certain narrative so I accepted it on one level, while I continued to keep my partner and child at arm’s distance.

<p class="MsoNormal">But after a while something changed. It was the way she looked at me. It was so accusing and its eyes  pried at me aggressively. And her face… She didn’t look a thing like me. She looked like a gargoyle. I am… I was beautiful and my daughter would have been too. But this thing was hairy all over! Even her ears were fucking hairy and her feet were too long,  and her hair wrinkled and peeling. My husband showed me pictures from a book explaining it was normal but it didn’t change how I felt. Every time I had to hold her when other people were around, every time she cried and some shrill hag-in-law looked at me with anticipation and I had to run over and pretend to be that thing’s mother while the men clinked beers in the kitchen, I wanted to vomit my stomach lining all over the damned room.

<p class="MsoNormal">And then the urges came. They started as little thoughts—I don’t think you should feel guilty for your thought—and they were lovely little escapes. I kept thinking about just maybe slipping one day and, whoops, there it would go tumbling out the window. Sometimes I came dangerously close. I would drive to the bridges that overlook highways and make it look like a gentle stroll but in reality I kept thinking of throwing her over and watching her thump on the ground below. I thought of some poor old couple screaming hysterically while hitting the windshield wipers to smear infant viscera off their smashed car. I would take her to the park and dream of one of the dogs going mad, and eating her alive. I thought of those massive pit bull skulls clamping down on her face and squishing it like a rotten pumpkin beneath a boot on Halloween.

<p class="MsoNormal">There was a day when one of the dogs approached her and ran away crying hysterically. I can’t hold it against the beast. I didn’t have the stomach to face her either so I can’t judge. But when it first looked up at her and sniffed I held my breath with anticipation; I’ve read so many stories of dogs savaging children I just wanted to be one of those mothers. I wanted to have to stand there on the news and sob like a little bitch about how some vicious illegal dog tore her face off and left her bleeding to death.

<p class="MsoNormal">The first real incident was when the child was sixteen weeks old. I was in the bathroom running the water ready for the child. I… had always let my husband take care of the diapers and the bathing so it was the first time I tried it on my own, and I ran the water as deep as I would for myself. I was naïve; so what I’m not fucking Margaret Stewart? I didn’t really what to do so I placed her on the edge and quickly realized it was too deep. I balanced her with one arm while trying to reach the plug with the other when she slipped in. Plonk, she went down into the water like a bar of soap sliding down. I remember time came to a sudden stop as I heard it. I remember feeling like reality itself had crashed but the funny thing is… it hadn’t.

<p class="MsoNormal">I waited and I waited and kept thinking that I was experiencing some strange kind of stress induced warping of time but that wasn’t really the case. When I looked up at the clock I saw fifteen minutes had passed. I tried to act shocked, or horrified, almost like some invisible choir of angels were judging me but I knew damn well what to expect when I looked down into the water. I thought I was going to see a blue little cooked ham hock that everyone had told me was my daughter and I was going to go,

<p class="MsoNormal">“Oh no, it was an accident. I’m so sad. My vagina fried my brain.” And all men, like they all do, would shrug their shoulders, call me crazy, complement my tits, and leave me alone to grieve but when I looked down the baby was still there staring up at me

<p class="MsoNormal">I got up and stared down into the water that, for some reason, I touched with my hands. I guess I was checking to see if it was real. After a second passed and I watched the water slosh around rhythmically, with that little thing bobbing around, I felt compelled to pick her up. When I pulled her out she stared at me with those eyes. She was wet, and naked. And he gaze was relentless. She had grown enough to be able to hold her neck on her own by this point and she used it to just fix on me as I lifted her out of the water. Slowly, she blinked one and then the other. I watched her eyelids stretch slowly over those wretched glassy eyes…Those eyes. I knew what they said.

<p class="MsoNormal">“I know what you let happen.”

<p class="MsoNormal">This is the moment I actually became what everyone told me that I am. They’ve wanted me to be a child-killer. Violating children is the ultimate taboo; for men that involves fucking them but for women it means no longer accepting the job of ‘mother’, and instead choosing to drown one of the little shits instead. I felt that ping of disgust and hatred. I wanted to step on it. I wanted to get rid of it anyway I could but some part of me was still convinced that this was some irrational compulsion driven by an illness. I swore that what I’d experienced in the bathroom was a delusional moment of weakness that did not reflect reality.

<p class="MsoNormal">But let me be clear about one thing. I have my sentence and I am unrepentant about the truth. Now I really know. My daughter was unnamed. My daughter did not live pass the moment when she broke her neck trying to be delivered. I wear that as my reality. I know it to be true. My husband, maybe the doctors too, conspired to present me with something else that was like a parasite and not my kin. I know it now, clear as day, but back then I was still unsure. The natural feeling of anger, and disgust, that I felt when I saw the baby were interpreted by me as signs of a rank and foul illness that ate away at my mind. I assumed it was postpartum depression.

<p class="MsoNormal">When my husband came home he found me there still frozen on the spot with a soaking wet child in my arms. I tried to tell him what happened but he saw the baby and smelled her and told me she had clearly been washed. He gave me a patronizing speech explaining that the child would be cold if not dried, and hurried the baby away over his shoulder while he looked for some towels. When he’d put her down hours later he explained to me the symptoms of post-partum depression—like I didn’t know—and told me how I was still feeling guilty from the difficult birth. He made it out like I had never tried to let the baby drown and that I was just having a hard time and for some reason I believed him because it just felt so much easier.

<p class="MsoNormal">Things died down on the outside for about a year after that. But make no mistake she was a monster. I never took my eyes off her. And when she started to walk I saw her for what she really was; she really, genuinely, was a fucking gargoyle. She was a wretched little gargoyle that had slithered out of some hole in the ground, where the fær folk went to die, and came to torture me. I thought back to the dog and it’s fear. I thought of how, if it had torn it open, it would have revealed otherworldly anatomy. Maybe it had green blood and yellow skin beneath the baby suit? Maybe it had eight kidneys and four livers and once doctors did an autopsy they’d all realise what I’d known all along.

<p class="MsoNormal">My daughter died the day of her birth, and somehow this thing had tricked everyone else into letting it take her place. It knew that I knew this and that’s why it kept messing with me. Like I said, as soon as it could walk things started to get nasty. Bit by bit I started to see it do things that were well beyond normality. It started off simple enough. It would run quicker than normal. It would climb to places that were too high. But quickly enough it escalated. It didn’t just look at me to freak me out; it took to hiding. I’d go to put some towels in a cupboard and it’d be there folded away behind the searing hot boiler and I could smell the searing flesh. I’d go to vacuum and I’d find it squished beneath the sofa, or hidden behind a cabinet that was only two inches from the wall. I swear to fucking God I saw a nasty bulging little eye blink back at me one day from the petrol cap of my car. I tried to drown it in gas but when I got home it was still there.

<p class="MsoNormal">Over time I was started deteriorating into a mess of unwashed hair and saggy tits. I became obsessive, but vigilance was for good fucking reason. It started leaving me little gifts. I found long sewing needles slipped carefully into my tampons. I noticed labels on my painkillers had been peeled off and returned with amazing precision. But nothing got past me. Baby oil on the top of the stairs, battery acid in my shampoo bottles, dog shit in the toothpaste tubes, acid in the mouthwash, razor wire in the garden ready for a fall, fuses ripped from appliances ready for a shock; no matter what it threw at me I caught it and never fell for it. Every day I would go into the room where it played place the tampered object on the ground.

<p class="MsoNormal">It would turn and look at me with grey eyes fixed in that ugly little face and smile. By the time I turned I knew it had already disappeared and was quickly working towards some new trick. As time went on it started playing in the garden but I knew it was all part of it. I went out one night and I found bottles of frothing glowing liquid buried in the garden ready. I think those little tinctures were perhaps some potion it carried forward from its old life as a monster; liquid tends not to drip to the top of the bottle.

<p class="MsoNormal">I shudder to think of what it might have done to me if it had ever successfully snuck the liquid into my system. But it didn’t matter because I just kept tipping them into the dirt over and over again. For a while this nightmare of mine was something I even started revelling in it. It was taxing but I always I thought of how any other woman, any weaker woman, would have crumbled like a dusty shelf at that level of stress. In a twisted way I felt like that monster was making me stronger.

<p class="MsoNormal">But on the 18th January 2013 my husband’s car suffered a flat, and he took mine instead while I was in the shower. He thought so little of it because I never drove anywhere but I don’t think he expected the brake lines to fail thirty minutes into his commute when he came to a corner that rounded a cliff. They say it took him forty-five minutes to die given the way the car had compressed his spine. Apparently the crash had caught him in such a way that it actually stemmed the blood flow and kept him alive. During this time, I received a voicemail from an anonymous call that was mainly heavy breathing. This isn’t up for debate. It was part of the courtroom testimony used by my lawyers.

<p class="MsoNormal">They say it said,

<p class="MsoNormal">“The Bay Rise.” They say that’s the road he died on. They say, if it is my husband, that’s what he said and he was signalling how to find him. At first I thought it was some crazy call conjured up to distress me. I didn’t have a clue what it said. It was just mindless breathy babbling at first. But then the police came. It’s a funny thing experiencing that sort of cliché in real life. I’m usually quite… robust. I don’t break down sobbing at any old prompt, but when they told me…

<p class="MsoNormal">I felt alone. I felt a twisted blackness inside me. It was a horrendous torrent of fear, rage and isolation. Waiting there rocking back and forth I found my mind wandering back to the call. I listened to it again and this time I truly heard it. He didn’t say,

<p class="MsoNormal">“Bay Rise”. He said, “Those grey eyes.”

<p class="MsoNormal">I knew exactly what it had done. I knew what to do.

<p class="MsoNormal">I had been normal. I had been a Valkyrie. Now I’m just a wench passing favours around this fucking prison for the luxury of a cigarette. But it was worth it. It was so fucking worth it. I ran into the garage and I grabbed the biggest God damn club hammer I could find and when I went back and found that wretched little shit grinning at me I slapped that rubber mallet against its temple and heard it crack. I watched it tumble over with its brown hair splayed across the ground, growing wet and mulchy from the blood and gore that poured from the wound. I knelt over it and I smashed and smashed and until the head, the brains, the skull, was pulped across the floor and ground into the carpet. When they found me I was throwing bits of it against the wall. They found me screaming aloud in a cackling rage with my top off; bits of it smeared over my chest while I waved the club in my hand.

<p class="MsoNormal">I was a Valkyrie again.

<p class="MsoNormal">You don’t have to believe me. I don’t think you will, of course. I’ve just grown tired of rigging this thing to fit different stories. My defence told me I had to be the abused wife whose mind was shaken from the trauma of a stillbirth, followed by the death of her husband. The prosecution looked through my early life and hauled up the tales of my childhood acts of aggression and got pictures of my meth head sister who told them about those rancid early days. And of course my college life was easy enough to plaster over the television and scrutinise for fun. I was, all at once, a victim, a sufferer of illness, a selfish whore, and a predatory ruthless psychopath.

<p class="MsoNormal">I prefer my story, because in some ways I am all of those things. I am, no doubt, ill. And I have been a victim of great misfortune. And I have revelled in preying on the weak in the past. But that doesn’t mean I killed my daughter.

<p class="MsoNormal">No.

<p class="MsoNormal">My daughter was stillborn.

<p class="MsoNormal">I killed a gargoyle.

<p class="MsoNormal">Yours sincerely,

<p class="MsoNormal">Charlotte Millanson

<p class="MsoNormal">-

<p class="MsoNormal">Sorry this took so long to get you Miss Scrallet. The administration here at Slattery Women’s Penitentiary would like to apologise for the delay and reiterate our commitment to transparency; we have nothing to hide from your publication so please don’t interpret our hesitance for secrecy. But there has been a need for increased security as of late. I hope you understand. There have been a number of incidents where inmates have been found smuggling sewing needles in certain private items. We hope you can appreciate the searches were a matter of our safety. Attached you will find the letter addressed to you (untampered).

<p class="MsoNormal">Best regards,

<p class="MsoNormal">Warden Adam Little  <ac_metadata title="Gargoyle"> </ac_metadata>