Here Comes the Child Bride

When people talk about child marriages, most of the time they aren’t thinking of America. As though America is some kind of utopia where things like that just don’t happen.

It’s not true, though, is it? Child marriage may not be as common here, sure. But it does happen. In fact, only ten states actually have laws against it.

Guess what? I didn’t grow up in one of those ten states. Even better, I grew up in a cult. Our leaders really emphasized the idea of “pure” brides and virginity and virility… I was taught, as a child, that only a young woman embodied these traits.

“Young woman” does not mean a twenty-year-old, by the way. Or even an eighteen-year-old. That would make it almost understandable, wouldn’t it?

I was sold into marriage when I was fourteen.

In a way, I was one of the lucky ones. See, in our cult, a girl “came of marriageable age” when she had her first period. My older sister got hers at nine years old. I still remember her screaming in the bathroom when it happened – my mother hadn’t told us anything about periods, or our bodies. My sister saw all that blood and really thought she was dying.

Maybe that is what it meant for her. Because only a few months later she was married off. Her husband was in his mid-twenties. She cried herself to sleep every night until her wedding.

I never saw her again.

Since the day I turned nine, I lived in mortal fear of ending up like my sister. I prayed and hoped to our version of God that I would never “come of age.” It was like a curse to me, to meet the same fate she did. For a while, it seemed that something had answered my prayers, because year after year passed and it didn’t come. My parents grew restless. When I was twelve, my father checked my panties every night to make sure I wasn’t hiding anything from him.

But then, halfway through my fourteenth year, it came. It came during the night and stained my sheets and there was no hiding it.

My parents were so relieved. I was so upset I actually vomited when I saw the proof, those stained sheets that I couldn’t pray away.

The man they gave me to was forty-three years old.

Can you imagine that? Can you imagine your own parents just… giving you away to someone like that? Even though I always knew it would happen to me, it still hurt. It still poisoned something deep inside me.

They didn’t wait as long for my wedding as they did with my sister. Apparently my soon-to-be husband was in a rush because we were married only a month later.

I won’t bore you with details about my wedding, or the first time meeting my husband, or the ride to our new “home” – I had to be dragged into the car, kicking and screaming.

Instead, I’ll tell you this: everything changed on the balcony.

Once he brought me home, he ushered me into the master bedroom and, thankfully, left me there on my own for several hours. He told me he wanted nothing more than to “attend” to me the way a proper husband should – and we all know what that means, don’t we? – but that he had to take care of some business first. Before leaving the room – and locking it for good measure – he told me to dress in the lingerie that he had left for me on the bed. I eyed it with disgust before throwing it on the floor and stalking out to the balcony that I discovered behind some thick floor-to-ceiling curtains. My parents must have been proud to marry me off to someone so rich.

The night was freezing cold and there was a light snow falling, slowly covering the ground below. Briefly, I considered throwing myself off the ledge, but I was too afraid. I thought that there was a small chance I might survive, and I didn’t want to think about what might happen to me if I did.

I’d made up my mind to go back inside and was halfway to the door when I heard something behind me. Curious – and not a little afraid – I turned back around.

The thing that sat on the balcony railing was strange.

It was perched there on its hind legs like an animal. Its arms trailed down to the balcony floor – they were so long I thought they might be able to reach me across the balcony where I stood. Each arm ended in a claw that looked sharp enough to cut leather. Its body was skinny – so much so that I wondered how it didn’t simply fall apart. It swayed in the breeze and its feet – well, its other set of claws, I guess – tightened their grip on the balcony.

The skin on its face was dried and wrinkled. In fact, it looked almost decayed, like it was some sort of mummy. Its mouth was nothing more than a gathering of bunched up flesh that pulled and tugged every time it stretched its jaw. Its eyes were huge – the size of baseballs – and totally white. It stared vacantly at me and I stared back at it.

The last thing I noticed was its throat. There wasn’t much to notice there, really, except that it had a small slit that pulsed with every breath it took. I wondered what it was for.

The thing stretched open its mouth and left it open wide for a second, giving me the chance to count its tiny, sharp shards of teeth.

It tilted its head to the side and it asked me, “Why are you crying?”

I lifted my fingertips to my cheek in surprise. I didn’t realize I’d started crying again.

“Because… my parents made me marry someone I don’t want to… and I’m scared and… and I want to go home!” My voice broke at that last bit. To be truthful, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to go home after all, but I knew that at least I didn’t want to be here anymore, in an unknown house with an unknown man who had anything but unknown intentions.

The creature blinked in surprise. “Marriage? You are but a child. How can this be?”

I buried my face in my hands at that and cried harder. Hearing it said aloud like that somehow made everything worse. It made everything more real.

I heard a scraping sound and looked up to see the creature hunched in front of me. Even squatting on its hind legs it was taller than me. It reached out and ran a tip of its claw down my cheek very, very gently. “Do not cry, little one,” it said.

I stopped crying, more out of shock than anything else. For a second I wondered if I should be afraid of it. It didn’t give me enough time to make a decision.

“What is your name?” it asked.

“Um… Mary.” That’s right, like the Virgin Mother. Hilarious, right? Like a joke I wasn’t let it on until it was too late.

“Hmm. Mary.” It nodded to itself and retracted its hand. Its claw had drawn a bit of blood from my cheek. I hadn’t noticed. “Mary. Do not cry anymore. I will help you.”

“You will?!” I cried. A burst of joy flooded my chest. It quickly turned to ice when the creature turned to go. It climbed up on the balcony railing and I ran after it. “Hey, wait, where are you going?! Aren’t you going to help me??”

It looked back at me and its eyes looked almost sad. “In time. I need something from you first.”

“What do you want? I’ll give you anything.” I was breathless with fear. I didn’t want it to leave, not yet.

“I need your hate. When you have enough of it, I can help you.”

I felt my heart sink right through the floorboards. I hated. I hated very much. I hated my parents and the man in the other room and everyone else who watched my sham of a marriage and did nothing to stop it. I had so much hate, and yet it wasn’t enough. I was so sure at that moment that it would never be enough.

“What do I call you?” I asked.

It blinked slowly, then said, “Yours. You may call me ‘Yours,’ because that is what I am.”

With that, it crawled down the balcony and disappeared into the night and the snow and the quiet.

And I was once again left utterly alone.

I was sitting on the floor of the balcony, half covered in snow when he returned. He dragged me back inside in disgust, furious that I’d refused to wear the lingerie he had picked out for me. He beat me, ripped off my clothes, and forced me to put it on in front of him while I sobbed.

You and I both know what happened next. It’s a story many women have told throughout history and they’ve all told it better than I could. So you’ll forgive me, I hope, for skipping the details of the next part.

The next day I woke up covered in blood and bruises. He sent me downstairs to make his breakfast. I could barely walk. In that moment, I hated him.

But I guess I didn’t hate him enough, because Yours didn’t come back.

He didn’t come back until a month later. My ‘husband’ treated me like a slave, having me do all the chores and cooking during the day. And then he’d rape and beat me during the night until there was blood in my urine and it hurt to sit down. One night, I accidentally overcooked supper. Not burned, just left it on the stove for a few seconds too long.

He beat me until I threw up, which he made me clean it up. He locked me on the balcony and made me sleep outside in the snow.

And I hated him. Oh, I hated him so much.

Yours came to me that night on the balcony. If it hadn’t, I probably would have died from the cold. It curled around my body and kept me warm – it was surprisingly warm, you know, for a… whatever it was. It whispered assurances to me and held me close while I slept.

I didn’t see Yours for another few months after that. The days went by with relative monotony. It wasn’t until about six months after we were married that I realized something was wrong.

It’s funny in a grim sort of way. He was the one who figured it out. I was throwing up one morning and he walked into the bathroom. “When was the last time you had your period?” He asked. It hadn’t been for over two months, and I told him as much. Stupid as I was, I didn’t even realize you should have one every month.

“I knew it.” His eyes were practically glowing with excitement as he moved behind me and snaked his arms around my belly, caressing it on the way. I suppressed the urge to vomit again. “You’re with child. You are going to have my baby.”

He was absolutely elated. I was shaking with terror. A baby? Me? I didn’t know much about having babies, but I knew it wasn’t pleasant. It hurt and it made you sick and at the end you had to take care of the thing and how was I going to do all that? When he left for work, I sank to the floor and cried my eyes out. I cried for a full hour before managing to get up and do my chores.

That night, I waited on the balcony. That night, Yours came.

He sat there from his perch on the balcony, staring at me. My eyes and chest were hollow. “I hate him. I truly hate him,” I said.

“Do you?” said Yours. I nodded. It beckoned to me, “Come closer.”

It reached out and trailed a claw down my cheek, staring at me. Its eyes held mine for a long minute before it shook its head. “No, no. It isn’t enough.”

I cried out as its claw fell away. “When will it be enough? I can’t hate anymore. I can’t. I hate him as much as I’ve ever hated anything. What am I supposed to do?”

Yours leaned towards me and pressed its mouth to my forehead in a strange imitation of a kiss. “In time,” it said. That was all the comfort it gave before it scuttled down the balcony and left me to my darkness.

In the months that followed my stomach grew bigger. My worries ballooned at about the same pace.

My husband wouldn’t take me to see a doctor. He told me that I would have a home birth. He wouldn’t get me any medicine. He wouldn’t tell me what I was supposed to do to keep the baby healthy. I didn’t know anything about my own pregnancy.

Worse still, I kept worrying about what would come after the birth. What if it was a girl? See, if it was a boy, I wouldn’t have to be so worried. Boys were allowed to go to school. They were allowed to choose their wives. They were allowed to come and go as they please.

But not girls.

What if I had a daughter? I wondered what my husband would do to her. How he would look at her. If he would… touch her. I thought about marrying her off to someone twice her age. I thought about never seeing her again, just like I’d never see my sister again.

I thought an awful lot about that.

So I suppose you might say what happened was a blessing, although at the time it certainly didn’t feel that way.

My husband came home drunk one night. Angry. Looking for a fight. Something had gone wrong at work, I suppose. He had some nights like that. But I foolishly thought he’d leave me alone this time. After all, I was several months along at that point – I don’t know how many, but my stomach was protruding rather obviously from my skinny frame. He didn’t much care about me other than as a sex doll, but I knew he cared about the child.

Apparently he didn’t care enough.

That night when he beat me, I begged him to stop. I told him he would hurt the baby. Somehow that made him even more angry. And when he punched me hard in the stomach, I knew he felt no remorse for what he did.

I fell to the floor, holding my belly, clutching at it while I screamed. He screamed at me in turn, blaming me, of course. Blaming me for losing the baby. Because we both knew it was dead. It couldn’t sustain a blow like that and live.

An hour later, the blood started. I hadn’t particularly wanted that child, but I still cried. I cried for it and for myself and for what had become of my life. I cried even as he screamed at me through the bathroom door for being a stupid slut, a whore, a Babylonian skank, a Devil’s curse.

Once he was done with his screaming, he stumbled to his bed and collapsed into a drunken slumber. I waited until I was sure he was out cold before unlocking the door.

I dragged myself out onto the balcony, a trail of blood following in my wake. I collapsed on the balcony floor, looking up at the moon, wanting to curse it like I had been cursed. I sat there on my knees and screamed at the sky, trying to pour out all the hate and rage and anger. Instead, I made it grow bigger and bigger and bigger.

Yours appeared over the balcony railing. It knew something was different this time. It came and sat next to me, running its claw through my hair. It was trying to soothe me. There was nothing left to soothe.

I could tell it was waiting, so I spoke.

“I hate him.” I said. I was calm. I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t cry. I simply spoke from somewhere in my chest that had been locked until that very moment. “I hate him for what he has done to me. And to the baby. I hate my parents for giving me to him. I hate the people who looked on and who did nothing. I hate them all and I want them to suffer.”

I don’t know what I expected from Yours just then. If I thought it’d be triumphant or sadistic or happy. All I know is that I didn’t expect the way it looked at me – sad, compassionate, resigned.

“It is time, then, for me,” it sighed, its voice a rasp on the wind that I could barely hear. “If I do this, a piece of you will come away with me forever. Do you understand?”

I nodded at it. There was so little of me left, but if it wanted me, it could have me. It could have all the pieces – I didn’t want them.

It moved to a crouch then, just low enough that it could slip its claw into mine. It held my hand as it brought me into the room where my husband slept. It looked at me with its blank eyes and said, “Watch.” I did.

Yours straightened its spine. As it did so, its neck became longer… and longer… and longer. I could hear its spine cracking and creaking as its neck unfurled. The slit in its neck began to widen until it gaped open, exposing the darkness of its innards.

From inside the slit, two muscles darted out. They were long and firm, resembling spider legs but for the fact that they had no fur on them. They didn’t even seem to have skin. It was just red, pulsing flesh crawling out from somewhere inside it. A deep hacking sound emanated from inside its chest as they continued to grow until they reached maximum extension. Tipped with a sharp, bony point, the two appendages rested on the floor, tapping impatiently against the floorboards.

Yours shifted until it was on all fours, its body about the height of my head. It moved forward at a painfully slow pace, approaching the bed where my husband slumbered. I noticed its eyes were closed and it used its throat appendages to feel around the bed until it found his flesh.

Once it had a sense for where my husband lay, its claws came forward. One grasped my husband near his collarbone, the other grabbed his pelvis. Yours leaned forward and all was still for a moment.

Then, it pulled.

It yanked its claws apart hard, so hard that my husband’s body ripped in half. By the time he awoke and began to scream, he was already in two separate parts, his internal organs spilling out between them. His agonized screams were soon drowned out by the blood filling his throat. As he sped towards death, the strange muscles extending from Yours’ throat began to comb through his organs, picking them apart and bringing them back to the maw in its neck. It swallowed my husband down piece by piece while its claws raked along his body, flaying him open. By the time Yours had eaten its fill, he was half-consumed, a mess of blood and flesh that was unrecognizable as human. He twitched for a long time after he died.

Eventually, the appendages retracted back into Yours throat. The process took several minutes, during which time I stared at the bloody mess on the bed. I wondered if I’d always remember that… if maybe, one day, images of his face would be replaced with this image of my triumph. I could only hope.

When Yours was finished, it crawled back to me.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“I am Yours,” it replied. “You must choose.”

A kind old man in a pickup truck brought me into the hospital several hours later.

He’d found me walking on the side of the road, covered in blood – most of it mine – and had offered me a ride, no questions asked. I wasn’t afraid. I knew that I had a protector watching over me. A guardian angel missing its wings.

The police came, of course. I told them every detail of what happened. At first, they were appalled, then bewildered. By the time I finished, they were convinced I was crazy.

They were a little less convinced after they found my husband’s body. Or what was left of it.

I was surprised how little I had to deal with the police, actually. I thought maybe they’d lock me up or open some big investigation or something. Instead, they informed me that my husband had been a very powerful man. That if they made his marriage to me known, I might become a target. I would be blamed for his death. I would be treated like a whore who had him killed. After all, among rich men, such things as what he did to me can be overlooked.

The official news story said that he died of a heart attack. The police knew that I didn’t kill him – there’s no way I physically could have done something like that, especially to someone more than twice my size. They probably thought that I had somebody kill him. I suppose they aren’t wrong.

They wanted to put me in foster care. I didn’t entertain that thought for even a second. As soon as I was able to, I left the hospital and never looked back. They didn’t look very hard for me.

The next visit I paid was to my parents. It took me a while to find them – I’d barely ever left my house growing up and I didn’t even know my own address. But I found them.

They were surprised to see me. And uneasy. I wonder if they ever felt guilty for what they did. Either way, it didn’t matter. I asked them what happened to my sister. They told me they didn’t know, but I could tell they were lying.

Yours helped me take care of them. It held them down and skinned them slowly, keeping them alive for hours as they screamed and begged for mercy. Finally, they told me the truth: my sister had been murdered by her husband two years after she’d been married off.

I let Yours kill them then. I didn’t have any more use for them. As he finished them off, I searched the house and stole as much cash as I could find.

I drifted for the next few years. I used the money I took from my parents to forge some documents so I could get work. They were obvious fakes, but some employers don’t really care. A lot of them gave me work out of pity, I think. They thought I was alone in the world.

But I was never alone. I always had Yours to comfort me.

I still don’t know much about Yours. I don’t know what it is or where it comes from. Of the few people I’ve told, most seem to think it’s some kind of a demon. I know that’s not true. Nobody can live through what I’ve lived and still believe in God. People like me don’t have the luxury of that kind of fantasy.

No, I think Yours is just another creature, like you or me, trying to make its way in the world. And it has grown quite fond of me, I can tell.

I know now what it meant when it told me that I had to give it a piece of myself. Each time I command it, you see, it takes away a little piece of my humanity. I couldn’t feel it at first. After all, I didn’t think I had any humanity left. But after it took both my parents, I could feel that something in me was changing. It happens just a little at a time, but it happens nonetheless.

It didn’t want to do that. It didn’t want to take anything away from me. But it was the only way to save me. It’s what must be – the consequences of our deal.

It mourns for me. It mourns for the humanity I’ve lost and for the childhood that I never had. It mourns because I cannot love. Well, that’s not true. I love Yours. I don’t love anything else. I don’t think I ever will.

Each day when I look in the mirror, I see something that’s a little less than human. Maybe that is its doing. Or maybe a substantial part of my humanity died when I was forced into that marriage. I’ll never know. What’s more, I don’t particularly care.

Lately, I have been thinking about all the other little girls trapped in these marriages all across the US. The ones who think they’ve been abandoned, forgotten about. The ones who are waiting for someone to come save them, because they cannot save themselves.

But I could save them. I could do it. I don’t know how much humanity I have left to give, how much until I no longer even remotely resemble a person. But I think that it’s worth it. If I can save even one child from the fate I was given, from the choices I had to make, it will be worth it.

It mourns for me now, too, that I’ve made my decision. But I won’t regret it. I won’t regret giving my life and my humanity for something bigger than myself.

Perhaps in time, I, too, will be like Yours. Or Yours will be like me. I only hope it stays with me so I don’t have to go it alone.

Yes… that’s what I must do. I’m ready now.

Are you?

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