Trophies
This Document Copyright ©2014 By Laura Morrigan All Rights Reserved
She had hunted in her youth, those
wrinkled hands, knuckles so swollen she can barely grip her cup of
coffee once held a bow, held the string taut, never shaking. All her
senses narrowed down to a pinpoint, to that soft spot in the flesh
where the arrow would hit its mark. She would concentrate so hard she
could hear the animal's heartbeat, her senses would, for a moment, be
as intense, as overwhelming as theirs, and she would understand their
bloodlust.
With those young hands, she would skin
the dead wolf, the flecks of blood dotting her hands like the dark
spots that would later cover them in her age. Usually, she would sell
the skins at the the market, sometimes, she would take the whole
skin, for a rug, or to make a fur coat for one of her lovers. Lovers
now long dead. Sometimes, she would take the skull, bury it behind
her house for the ants and worms to clean, dig it up months later and
hang it on the wall with a rusty, bent nail. That was when she lived
in a cabin in the hills, alone but for her some-time lovers, with
whom she lay under a thick wolf's pelt at night. They understood her
strangeness as the city people do not. Here, the wolf's pelt is
rolled in a cupboard, brought out on only the coldest nights. It
holds too many memories of dead hands anyway.
In the cabinet, behind her fine china,
she hides the wooden trunk. The china was a gift from her last dead
husband, whose name she barely remembered anymore. He was of no
consequence. He never knew her past and saw only the tweed jackets
and pearls and expensive haircuts, saw what she wanted the world to
see. He never looked past this cocoon of possessions to see what she
truly him to see, the secret inner self she hid from everyone.
Secrets she could not tell, but longed for someone to guess at and
accept.
Only Lise, her youngest grandchild, who
was, from childhood, as strange and fey as she was herself, knows
about this trunk. Only Lise is permitted to move the china, to open
the trunk, and look at the contents, her grandmother's hands shaking
as the girl unwraps the tissue paper and mothballs, to reveal the
trophies within. She lifts them out with the proper amount of
reverence, puts them in her grandmother's lap, so she will not drop
them from her shaking hands. Lise's own hands are young, unspotted,
unshaking. Lise would have made a good hunter. She thrills to the
tales her grandmother tells her. The grandmother talks in an
emotionless matter of fact way, although her blood always rises at
the memory of the hunt. Afterwards, Lise, who is a nurse, will tut at
her high blood pressure, but she won't stop asking for the stories.
She knows it is only the shared stories now that keep the old woman
alive.
Lise is sitting on the floor at her
grandmother's feet, a young woman, but she still sits on the floor
like a child. Normally she paces, restlessly, but when her
grandmother tells stories, she sits still and silent.
Lise gazes down into the box, not
touching anything, searching only with her eyes, until she finds what
it is she is looking for. She takes it from the box, handling it
carefully. A knife, with a bone handle, the blade still sharp after
all these years. Sharp enough to cut at a touch.
The old woman smiles.
'My old hunting knife. I used that to
skin the wolves I killed.'
'But there is another story, isn't
there, grandma', Lise says.
'I am getting to that, child, give an
old woman a minute to remember', the old woman clears her throat.
'Ah, yes,' she says after a suitable
pause. She enjoys watching Lise squirm with eagerness. 'That knife.
It used to have a wooden handle, it was a good knife, but nothing
special. Then one day, while I shot a wolf, it's partner sneaked up
behind me. It knocked me to the ground, my bow flying from my grasp.
The wolf had me pinned to the ground, about to tear out my throat,
when I managed to reach my belt, and pull out that knife. I buried it
in the wolf's neck up to the hilt, plunged it in so hard the wood
cracked. Afterwards, I carved a new handle for the knife out of the
wolf's leg bone.' A satisfied smile curled up the edges of the old
woman's mouth, the years seeming to recede from her face at the
memory.
The grand-daughter, Lise, lets the old
woman sit with her memories for a time, before she hands the old
woman something else. She had found it at the bottom of the box,
somehow she had never seen it before. It is the skull of a young
wolf, wrapped in brown paper so old and hard, she had
perhaps mistaken it for part of the box all those other times.
'And this grandma?'
At the sight of the skull, however, her
grandmother's face falls back into its wrinkles and lines, and
suddenly, she is an old, old woman.
'I am tired, Lise, no more stories for
today, get me my medicine.'
Hurriedly, Lise packs the skull away,
right at the bottom of the box. She puts the box back in the cabinet,
and the china in front of that, then goes to get the medicine.
~
Lise is gone, and the old woman is
snoozing in her chair, when the door cracks open. Slowly, a woman
slips through the door. Her step is so light, no one would have
heard it but the old woman, whose eyes snap open immediately.
'Who's there?' she calls. The woman
steps into the light, and the old woman gasps. The woman who stands
before her seems like she has stepped out of her dreams. She is
young and lithe, the curves of her body visible through the suede
pants and jacket, and the fur cape she wears. Her hair is tree bark
brown, streaked with yellow like sunlight through the trees. Her eyes are almost yellow too. Her beauty is marred only by the jagged,
faded scar on her throat, white and raised against her brown skin.
She grins at the old woman. 'Surprised to see me after all this
time?'
The old woman sighs. 'No, not at all,
I always knew you would come, although you took your time. The years
certainly have been kinder to you than to me.'
'It is so for all our kind, those who
keep the way,' the woman says, her eyes seeming to grow more yellow.
It would have been so for Ivar, if you had not killed him.'
The old woman fights the memory, the
one hunt she does not care to remember, the blood on the snow, the
ragged breathing of her lover as he lay there. 'Ivar's death is on
your conscience, too, Setta.'
'You killed him!' Setta snarls, 'you
killed him because he loved me and not you and then, you became
something worse!'
Although she does not want to, the old
woman is spiralling back down the years of memories. A cottage in the
woods, a warm fire. Lovers, intertwined on the fur rug. Promises to
love forever. Then coming home, one day, fresh, red cheeked and
bloodstained from the hunt to find Ivar with her sister. The terrible
sound of ripping flesh, the blood bathing her, baptising her as
something new, something different, something dark. Later, sitting
here, the drip, drip of blood onto the floor. Finally finding the
strength to bury them both. Coming back a day later to find the grave
open, her sister gone. Not dead after all. Only Ivar laying there,
cold and torn. Never to awaken again.
They hunted her, Setta and the others,
but they could never find her. She had always been the master
tracker, the master hunter, they could never catch her. She found a
new place, in a new woods, hunted for her food as usual. Eventually,
they gave up searching for her.
But with the full moon, a new change
came. The pain was terrible. And she lay there, wishing she would
die, knowing that the curse was on her, for what she had done. For
she could no longer change, with the full moon, her fur was stripped
from her, and she was no more a wolf, nothing but a weak and naked
human.
She was forced to seek out the company
of other humankind. They sickened her, their weakness, their
inability to change, to become something better. They had to use
tools, their teeth were weak, and they could not use them to kill.
Over time, she grew used to human ways. She had her lovers teach her
the use of weapons, arrows and knives did the killing for her. She
became the best hunter among the humans, as she had been among the
wolves. One day, she set out alone, her knife stuck through her belt,
bow and quiver of arrows slung over her shoulder to find her pack.
She hunted them for days, she could no
longer find them by scent and sound, as she used to. She had to rely
on footprints, on fresh kills left stripped of meat in the snow. She
still had some of their stealth, though, and she was able to hunt
them near the fringes of their town, to pick them off, one by one. It
was a long war, one that took years, but she won it. As the final
insult to her pack, she sold their pelts at the market, every time
she stopped back in the town for supplies. She built a cabin in the
woods, and her lovers would visit her there. She would anoint them
with the blood and scent glands of the wolves, which made their scent
so much better, and they would make love through the night.
Sometimes, with the wolf scent in her nose and the rough fur of her
pelts scraping her skin, she could almost imagine she was one of them
again.
She had thought, then, that she would
live the lifespan of a wolf, but as her people died, so did her aging
begin to speed up. For the first hundred years, she stayed a young
woman, but after that, she began to age at a faster rate, until,
eventually, she was ageing just like a human. It was humiliating, and
sometimes she wished that, like one of the elders of her race, she
had the courage to go out into the snow and die, but somehow, she
could not do it. She felt as if her death at her own hand would be a
victory for those that were once her own people.
In the hundreds of years she lived,
there was one of her pack she could not find, hard as she tried. It
was her sister. The sister who now stood in front of her.
'Where is it?' her sister, Setta asks,
'your box of trophies, I know you keep it still.'
'Behind the china in the cabinet', the
old woman sighs. Impatiently, Setta pushes the china out of the way,
not caring as the plates fall and smash. The old woman winces at
the sound. Setta drags the chest out. She does not need to rummage
through it, her hands going at once to the bottom, pulling the skull
from the trunk, reverently unwrapping it from those torn paper
wrappings.
'I couldn't find you for years, sister,
then I heard it, Ivar's skull, calling to me. I knew, then, where to
find him. And you.' Her eyes mad with love and longing, Setta kisses
the yellowed wolf skull.
'So this is it,' the old woman says.
'You are finally here to end my life, to avenge Ivar and all of your
people. Do it then, I am old, I am not afraid to die.'
To her surprise, Setta bursts into mad
laughter.
'Kill you? Is that what you think?' the
wolf woman says. 'My dear sister, long ago I might have wished you
dead, but now, seeing you here, this weak, withered thing, lingering
on the edge of death, I see that this is the best punishment for you.
You have lost the majesty of our kind, you gave it up for pitiful
revenge. You are old, and, apart from that little niece that visits
you every month, you are alone.'
The old woman feels her anger rising.
'And what of you?' she goads her sister, 'I killed the man you
loved, I killed your tribe, you are alone too, just like me!'
Secretly, she still hopes that her sister would kill her. Perhaps it is the thought of this violent reunion that has kept her going all these years.
Setta smiles, a real smile, this time,
wide, but a little cruel. The smile of a wolf.
'Oh, I was not alone, sister, I was
never alone. When I finally gave up the search for you, all those
years ago, I left our pack, too. I wandered for a long time, until I
was taken in by another pack. I have cubs, dear sister, grand cubs,
great grandcubs. I have so many family I cannot even count or name
them all, and they are always with me. They revere me, the great
matriarch of their clan. I have what you might have had, if you had
dared to love again, instead of killing Ivar out of spite. You may
have been married, but you were bitter and cold, you drove your
children away, they sensed your differentness, something in you, like
a plague. They shun you, fear you. Even little Lise will tire of you
eventually, find herself a human man, spawn more weak human
offspring. You will fade away, unloved and unremembered.'
'But you will remember me, sister', the
old woman says.
'I will not spare a thought for you',
Setta replies. She takes Ivar's skull in her arms. 'I am taking Ivar
home, I will give him the proper burial honours, as he always
deserved, and I will leave you, alone with your memories and your
trophies.'
Setta spits in the box of trophies. She leaves without another word.
The old woman sits in her chair. Her
hands are shaking harder than usual. She half wishes that Lise were
here to bring her medicine, and she half wishes she would die from
shock. She knows that neither will happen.
The old woman who had been a hunter,
and before that, a wolf, looks down at her box of trophies, befouled
by her sister's spittle. There had been a time when her sister had
not destroyed everything she had. There had been a time when they ran
through the woods together in their pelts, swift and straight as
arrows. She cannot help but remember that hunting with a bow and
arrow could never live up to those days. She cannot help but
remember a time when the kills had been with tooth and claw, and the
blood, the blood had tasted like the sweetest of ambrosias. The
trophies are bitter dust and ashes, nothing more. Her whole life has
been ash, since the day her lover's blood covered her and changed her
world forever.
Well! you have been busy!!! I'd love to see this movie! ......you are not just another pretty face my dear! xoxoDebi
ReplyDeleteAwww! Thanks for both the compliments! (Blushes)
DeleteInteresting, well-written story!
ReplyDeleteBlessings,
Victoria
Oh my gosh Laura! You are such a talented writer! I agree with Debi, a movie! One day it will happen :)
ReplyDeleteThank you! <3
Delete