Nightmare Magazine, Issue 65 (February 2018) by John Joseph Adams

Author:John Joseph Adams
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2018-01-30T17:11:16+00:00

2. Grow up, grow hungry.

She grows tall and broad, her hands capable, red from the dishwashing and from the long dry afternoons in the darkling forest. By her sixteenth year, other girls are moving into the pattern of the village: their husbands seek them round the bridal well, they bear screaming ugly children.

No one calls her round the bridal well. The village boys never holler or grab her in the market square, which she knows is their way of wooing. The other ugly girls in the village compensate for their ugliness by becoming sweet, or spirited, or by learning baking and fine embroidery. But her childhood spent in the seething belly of the forest grew something inside her that she can only describe as a hot blinding jewel; crystallized from all the turmoil and want whispered to her by the stinking bones of the dark-tumbled animals. It is because of this that she knows she will never be chosen as one of the dutiful wives of the village men. They do not want a wife with a hot blinding jewel roiling in her heart, and she does not want their want; she wants more.

She knows if she were beautiful, she could have her more. She could transcend village life the only way she can imagine: through one of those noblemen who never spied her through the hedge when she was young. A castle, and with it, a vindication for the strange girl.

And so she must wait, to age into beauty before she becomes too old for love at all.

She doesn’t want to wait.

And so she turns to Lilé Mar.

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