Belladonna

Once upon a time there were cotton skirts and wooden baskets and singing, lovely girls in the woods and classical activities like reading books for entertainment. The perfect setting for fairy tales, if one didn’t mind a set of rose-colored glasses over things like poverty, and grime, and the deaths from illnesses now so easy to cure.

There were fairy tales, but then people came up with science and invention and created the modern age. Although many still ache for that cottagecore lifestyle. Many still ache for a simpler life spent living in the forest with puffy white skirts, picking roses and being seduced by princes. When we tell fairy tales, they are often free of anything remotely resembling the world today for fear the stink of iron and stone and smog will hit too close to home, ruin the dreamlike state.

But this story occupies that unfortunate world.

So once upon a time there was a fairytale born outside of a castle, in the heart of a small town in Virginia.

Small towns are easy to romanticize, but this was the sort of small town where everyone married their cousins and the women could only wear skirts to their ankles and church was every day because people’s houses stank of Bible quotes and fear of an Old-Testament Lord.

On the outskirts of town in a big old house, a mother gave birth to a squalling little girl that was immediately snatched up by one of her formidable aunts and cleaned. The girl was formally named Mary by another aunt, but her mother whispered her true name against her skin, tickling the baby with her sweet breath: Belladonna. The name her father, a Greek immigrant, had wanted to call her before he died.

Born of an act of sexual rebellion, named for that rebellion, Belladonna grew as quickly as a poisonous flower.

Her family grew to be composed of her mother, frail after birthing three daughters, her stepfather, and her younger two stepsisters that cried too much and did silly things like pull the petals off of the flowers. Her aunts hovered around them their entire childhood, preaching, scolding, impressing the Lord’s name upon them. Gentler, her sisters quickly cowed to their formidable gazes.

But not Belladonna. Her wildness made her squirm from their arms and go on long hunts through the woods. By the time she was six, she could read better than her entire family and, growing bored with the limited collection of books in their home, spent her days in the dingy bookshop in the center of town.

Her intelligence was quickly shown when she enrolled in school. She was moved up a grade, then another, and then another. Teachers didn’t know what to do with her. She wrote essays faster than any of the other students. Numbers flew from her fingertips with ease. Complicated explanations about science and the natural world fell to understanding ears as she stared unblinking from her seat, never even taking notes.

A teacher took a liking to her and gave her history books which she devoured under the covers. In this way, she learned about the world outside of her family and marveled at such a place. Her fingers traced a biography of Harvard University. College, she thought. I want to go to college.

Her family was poor, uneducated, but Belladonna threw herself into her studies anyway. High school passed her by in a blur, and lo and behold, she was granted her scholarship for a degree in biochemistry.

Belladonna’s family made no secret of how little they understood her. When she came home on breaks resplendent in the new clothes she bought, showing more flashes of skin than they ever had, they gawked and insisted she covered up. When she tried to explain what she was learning and how it related to the real world, her aunts’ eyes grew dim, her mother’s jaw hung stupidly open and slack. Her sisters gazed with vapid interest and resolved to skip school the next day.

Each of her sisters married, one before her high school graduation and one a few months after. Their husbands brought in money for the family, gave the sisters babies of their own, and their tight-knit cocoon of women grew as fast as Belladonna’s ambition.

In her second year of college, Belladonna’s mother became sick. Her aunts and sisters covered her in money and spent long weeks at the hospital while Belladonna continued her studies. Upon returning home she was shocked at how weak her mother had become, and berated herself for her selfishness. For even though she was different, even though she craved things like Nobel Prizes and headlines and news articles and biographies, Belladonna’s heart had still grown loyal to those who loved her.

A loyalty that would be her undoing.

He came a few months later, with thick brown hair and bright blue eyes. They met at a train station and he was struck by this woman with her curls of thick, dark hair, her long-lashed eyes that studied him, the full and pouty lips that usually had the end of a pen stuck in them. Marveling at her, he charmed her in a way that she had never been charmed before and Belladonna found herself wanting to give in to the affections of this handsome, sweet man.

In her rushing quest for perfection and fame, she’d sworn off relationships. Watching her sisters, she grew frightened of how easy it would be to fall in love and fall back into that easy sphere of womanhood so expected of her, fall back into the webs spun by her aunts that tangled and swirled her around until she wasn’t sure what to think. But with him, the scary things seemed less scary.

I can love, she decided, and still love myself more.

When her family figured out she was dating someone, they swamped her with dinner invites, conversations about how charming he was, suggestions of beautiful children, and religious sermons preaching that holy matrimony between a man and a woman was the Lord’s great plan for everyone. They were practically measuring her cervix for babies already.

Belladonna batted them off and bit her tongue at the urge to tell them her dreams, knowing already what their response would be: a woman’s place is in the household. She dreaded their hatred. It was easiest to pretend.

When they found out how rich he was, though, there was little holding back. Her aunts pressed her to marry quickly so they could pay for her mother’s treatments, and reminded her of duty and love and respect. Belladonna wanted to put her hands over her ears and scream so she didn’t have to hear them.

But she couldn’t look away from her mother, lying crumpled and weak on the bed.

She squeezed her eyes shut. I can’t love myself more than them.

He asked her to marry him a few months after she had graduated college.

Belladonna said yes.

Once they were married, he moved her to his estate in Virginia, a massive old house with stone archways and topiary and a fountain, the nearest town about forty minutes away. Belladonna clutched her degree tighter in her hand.

She got hired at an internship. He supported her, happily. He hired servants to drive the car, to cut the grass, and spent most of his time in the attic where he worked on his novels. At night they tangled in sheets, and Belladonna found her love for him swelling in her chest, surprising and pleasing her at once.

He gave money to her aunts, told her he loved her, supported her dreams. Everything was, and seemed, fine.

Then he hit her.

The first time she could convince herself it was nothing. They had had an argument. When they walked towards the front door he shoved her with his shoulder, leftover anger in the gesture, and sent her head cracking against a cabinet. When he reached for her, eyes full of concern, she almost forgot the reason she fell over in the first place.

The second time was his hand too tight on her arm, leaving bright red fingerprints and small cuts from his nails behind. She thought, He works out too much, and he doesn’t mean it and didn’t do anything more than turn away from him that night in bed.

His anger came next, in the form of frustration; frustration with their chef, who never cooked anything he enjoyed, and frustration with her for never being home soon enough to enjoy it. They spent days arguing about it, until she agreed to come home sooner and even try taking a few days off a week. She refused to admit to herself that she agreed because she was starting to feel afraid.

A year passed in this fashion. He didn’t stop abusing her for small slights. And Belladonna’s degree seemed to have become nothing but making the roses in their backyard bloom brighter and bigger than before, or the occasional experiments in their basement that occurred to her. Her husband lurked in his attic, writing his novels, coming down for a kiss on the back of her neck or lunch.

She was trapped. If she tried to broach the subject of her marriage with her aunts, they gushed about her husband before she could get a word in, enough so that she would start to agree with them and half-forget what she’d wanted to say. Her mother stayed in her hospital bed, most of her bills now paid by Belladonna. Her sisters had seven children between them now, and eyes with blurry black circles underneath them.

One day he hit her hard enough that she crashed to the floor and felt the welt already stinging her cheek. He was all concern that evening, all tender attention, oblivious to the anger that was slowly beginning to cocoon her heart in fire.

Belladonna hatched schemes to leave him, plans to run away, but she didn’t know where she would run or how she would get there. And always, she thought of her mother and what the word ‘family’ was supposed to mean. So she let her anger stew inside of her like a slow-cooker, the injustice and bitterness she felt at everything coat her face in a smile, her attitude friendly and forbearing.

She got fired from her job.

She got pregnant.

Her husband struck her so hard that Belladonna’s collarbone broke.

And she snapped.

Most women who snap take an ax to a lover, or a gun. Or they whittle them down with cold and manipulative words. Or they leave, tears streaming behind them, children in tow. Most women were not Belladonna. They did not believe revenge was attainable without greater hurts. They did not know how to settle into their madness for months at a time, to enjoy the cold bloodlust and white-hot anger, to take it for what it was: a blessing. A fucking blessing.

Your husband hurt you? Hurt him back. And she would.

It started out simply enough. Tiny dustings of white powder in his coffee that mingled with the milk and cream on top. A thin blue liquid that she pressed against his lips while he slept, letting it trickle down into his throat. Roses, set in his attic, coated with something yellow that could have very easily been pollen.

He came down each day jovial, smiling and kissing her cheek, and she smiled too, an empty smile, full of heartbreak and menace. The doses continued every day. He never bothered to ask her why she was spending more time in her lab than usual.

Six months passed, and the doses grew larger and larger. Belladonna filled the bedroom with greenish smog one night and slept on the couch downstairs while he breathed it in. She found a needle with a point so small she couldn’t see it, and pushed it through his skin until it hit bone. She did this for every bone in his arms and legs, ribcage too, but there wasn’t so much as sores on his body when he woke up.

Belladonna bought him new shampoo and body wash from the store one day, and filled both of them with tiny red beads that burst on his skin when he washed. His toothpaste was laced with a particularly tricky white powder that was the result of hours and hours in the lab, getting the chemistry right so it tasted like mint.

She gave birth in the springtime. Her sisters swaddled the baby for her while she lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and remembering the time when she had vowed to be nothing like a traditional woman. Her husband had wanted a son, and pouted and frowned when she was born. Belladonna placated him, dully, by offering to name her Charlie anyways.

Looking at the baby, she waited to feel that overwhelming love everyone talked about, but all she could think about was the fact that there was no way she could go back to work now. No way to make money for herself. No way of being able to escape him. Her family certainly wouldn’t help her, so relieved that she had tied herself down, and she didn’t have any idea of where she would go to begin with. Her future, once so glittering and perfect, had been reduced to a single white point by an infant’s shrill wail.

The anger grew again. She clutched her daughter too tightly and a nurse pulled her away.

Charlie wandered around with her during the day as she picked things from the garden, brewed bright-colored liquids and powders and potions in her tiny lab, and cooked complicated meals to keep her husband happy. Sometimes she watched with big blue eyes as her father struck her mother and heard her cry out as her head snapped to the side.

The abuse slowed during her pregnancy, but didn’t end. Somehow, though, each bruise became a relief. More fuel for the fire inside of her that kept her awake at night, unblinking eyes turned towards the wall. Every time he was cruel or unkind to her, Belladonna had to stop a tiny smile from tugging up her cheek at the validation for what she was doing to him.

It was so much easier to be awful when someone was awful first.

Her husband could not begin to guess at the depths of cunning to his wife. Like some men with cruel hearts, meeting Belladonna had been interesting because she was so unlike any other woman he had dated before. She did not obsess over his looks, or hang on his arm and beg him to marry her with every too-sharp squeal of laughter. She was dedicated, ambitious, proud. She wasn’t the sort of woman who could be easily caged or cowed.

Maybe that’s why he had been so determined to put her in a cage, just to prove that he was the one who did. Maybe that’s why he hit her, so he could hear her cries and see the wetness to her eyes. See, he would think with each savage blow, you’re not better than me after all. You’re not stronger than me. You’re not more clever than me. What do you think of that?

It’s not so hard to love someone and hate them at the same time, if they awaken particularly ugly things inside of you. Jealousy. Resentment. Insecurity. Belladonna, with her fantastic intelligence and perfect, curvy beauty, was everything he told himself he was and everything he definitely was not.

So he didn’t think much of the fact that he got up every morning slowly, his bones heavier than usual and his muscles more sore. He didn’t think about the tiny red beads in his soap, only shrugged and decided they were effective; his hair was thicker than ever. The extra two inches he grew didn’t bother him, even when he noticed they were because his ankles were longer than before. He had to shave a lot more, but he congratulated himself on his testosterone levels.

Three years passed in this fashion. Their daughter toddled around with those big eyes, watching the wars between her parents play out in front of her, wondering if she could be the solution. She cried more than a usual baby might, but was often thrust to the servants instead with little concern.

The dosages continued, ramped up, until finally he was spending hours in bed, muscles twitching and spasming, a cold sweat on his brow and his jaw aching, his arms and legs full of needles and pain. When he slept, fitfully, he dreamed of his wife leaning over him and stroking ointments onto his skin, crooning threats into his ear.

When he opened his eyes, weeks later, he noticed that everything seemed blurrier. Then, running a hand through his hair, he realized it was because he needed a haircut. It swept back from his face, longer now, parted by something resting on the top of his head.

With a groan he stood, and almost fell over immediately. He frowned down at his feet and where they disappeared into his slippers. They felt different. The slippers were too big, maybe. He dropped to all fours instead, and found that easier for some reason.

His whole body felt sore. His jaw hung heavy from his mouth, aching with the weak portions of food he’d been eating. It was so low it practically felt like it was unhinged. He rubbed it, wincing.

None of it felt right. He looked around for Belladonna, but she was nowhere to be found. He lumbered over to the bathroom and took a sideways glance at the mirror.

And screamed. Swung his head to look over his shoulder for the monster, but there was nothing behind him. He looked back at the glass, wildly.

His face was covered in stubbled brown fur, his hands too, and they were twisted and scarred across the palm in a way that forced the fingers to curl into fists no matter what he was doing. His jaw had become a block, so large it rested on his chest, probably due to the weight from the massive tusks that arched out towards his nose-- blunted and ugly more than ferocious-looking. More hair swept down his scalp, parted by two tiny goat horns by the front of his face. He touched one, hand shaking, and felt the hardness of them.

He quickly stripped. His legs were deformed too, curving outwards in the thighs and arching back in with his calves and ankles, so that he stood slightly leaning forwards. His feet were covered in more thick fur, and looked awkward and massive on his new legs. His shoulders seemed broader, his arms rangy and skinny and dangling to his waist. Flashes of humanity still poked out at him like the blue eyes staring in horror or the curling seashell shape of his ear, but no one would notice with the layers of monster, monster, monster, on top of him.

He staggered out of the room and nearly vomited when he saw his sheets: twisted and scratched with clumps of fur all over, bloodstains marring the carpet and pillows, bite marks on the mattress. His new hands clutched at the wall for support. He screamed again, shrill and frantic, and staggered downstairs.

Belladonna was making pancakes. She looked up at him and smiled. “Hi, honey--” Then her face changed and she let out a shriek, dropping the spatula into the batter. Snatching up their daughter from the table, she pressed her back against the wall, waving a knife at him from a drawer. “Stay-- stay back!”

He tried to speak, but all that came out was a hoarse grunting sound. He moved towards her and she screamed again. He stopped, noting the terror on Charlie’s face.

Belladonna dialed the police. Good, he thought, they can sort this out. He thought of the blood upstairs.

But when they came through the door, it was him they surrounded with guns. It was him they bound while an officer comforted his sobbing wife. And rather than let him try to explain himself, it was to her that they asked the questions: where is your husband, when did you last see him.

“He was sleeping,” she sniffled. “Upstairs. We had a fight, and I slept on the couch.”

That’s not true, he thought, as a couple of officers sprinted up the stairs. We didn’t--

Slow horror came over him when Belladonna looked at him, tears already drying. She gave him the smallest of smiles, all venom. Her eyes were completely black.

The rage that he felt was like nothing he’d ever experienced before. He roared and lunged for her even as officers shouted, trying to keep him at bay, even though she was still clutching Charlie. But when he swiped a paw at her it came up short. He collapsed and she kneeled towards him.

“You can’t hurt me,” she whispered, hate in her voice. “Rose perfume. If you smell it at all, it stops you from being able to hurt something. Tricky bit of chemistry.”

He looked up, dizzy and weak. Her eyes were blazing with an expression he had never seen before. “You thought that you could hurt me, that I was too weak and stupid to stop you. You thought wrong. You underestimated me.” Then she stood, and her voice took on its teary edge. “Officer, please, get me out of here.”

He watched, struggling, as she was led from the room with a hand at the small of her back to gather up her things. He watched, shocked, hating her more deeply than he had ever hated anyone, but also remembering all those days and nights and weeks she had never cracked.

It turned out she had cracked more deeply than he’d thought possible.

He closed his eyes and let them take him away.

…

By the time doctors had studied him for long enough to realize just who, rather than what, he was, Belladonna had long disappeared.

The house had been stripped clean of valuables and sold for massive funds. No one knew where she went, and though he was asked many times-- by her pleading aunts and sisters and mother-- he wouldn’t admit that he thought he knew.

Greece. Sun-soaked, wine-stained Greece where her father had been born. The place of the world’s first monsters, like the Minotaur and Medusa. A place it would be so easy to hide.

Why he didn’t tell the authorities, he wasn’t sure. It wasn’t like he harbored any sort of love for her anymore. But maybe, he could admit to himself, he understood her. He knew how deeply he had hurt her, for how long. Maybe he had just wanted the reaction that he never got, wanted her cold gaze and silent tears to turn angry, wanted her to fly back at him and rake her nails down his face so he would at least know he wasn’t the only one broken. He’d gone into their marriage hoping she was broken, too. And he knew that hadn’t been fair to her no matter how he felt about it.

The doctors couldn’t undo what she’d done to him, though. They admitted the chemistry was absolute perfection and once again he burned with the knowledge that his wife was far smarter than he ever could be.

In the first few days when he was thinking it over, he couldn’t figure out why she’d fled her relatives. She had married him, after all, partially for her family. Partially because she felt she had owed them something. Partially because they were very good at guilting her and reminding her of how easy it was to be like them.

But he had his answer when he talked to her aunts, who confessed that Belladonna’s mother suffered from an untreatable illness that doctors had no hopes of curing. They took the payments from Belladonna and her sisters for themselves, upgrading their houses and going on vacation. They grew fat and happy while the others in their family suffered. And they confessed the truth to Belladonna just a few days ago.

Some leftover kernels of love for her raged at this information. It was not so long afterwards that he escaped the doctors who held him, crept into the aunts’ houses, and slew them while they slept. Then he fled, paws pounding the muddy grass, disappearing into the wilderness of Virginia.

They never found him.

They never found her.

But their daughter found both of them, eventually, some twenty years later when she crept from Greece to her home state and spent months tracking down the monster that had been her father. When she discovered him slumbering in a lair, she offered him the chance to travel home with her. He looked at her blearily and some of the humanity in him recognized her scent. He nodded and padded out of the woods.

They took a boat where he slept below deck and snatched the seagulls from the air, splattering her clothes with blood and feathers. Watching him, it was easy to feel fear, but also a strange and tender love for her cursed father.

Belladonna’s villa sat with sandy woods to its back and a massive rose garden that twined in the front. She waited on the porch steps as Charlie and the Beast moved towards her. His hair had grown longer, faded to a golden-brown. He walked on all fours now, and his feet had developed naturally into something resembling lions’ paws. He loped with easy grace and then paused, staring at her. She stared back.

Twenty years is a long time. She couldn’t forgive him for what he had done to her. He couldn’t forgive her for what she had done to him. But they had both grown enough to feel the guilt for what they had done to each other reverberating through their bodies.

She stroked his head and he leaned into the touch. Then, after a few solemn minutes, he turned away to bound through the rose garden and explore his new territory. She watched him go, crying a little bit, and turned to her daughter.

Charlie smiled, sadly. “Yeah.”

A beast patrols the sun-soaked shrubbery of a Grecian villa, protecting the two women inside. Villagers who see it call it a blessing after it kills two dogs who had gone after a little boy. They leave out offerings for it on their front porch.

A beast patrols the land, and a woman watches from the window with vases of roses around the room, letters from her sisters rotting in her desk. She wonders what he thinks about. She wonders if he would kill her if she could. She wonders if they still write headlines about her in the US.

She wonders, and smiles, and turns away.

The End.