Motherly Love - A feminist reimagining of the Medieval folklore; Bluebeard

When my mother was just a girl, she was gifted three precious chicken eggs by the old village storekeeper. They all, miraculously, died.

“I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to keep them in the sun,” she said.

“The damned things. They didn’t crack or break, I was careful and propped them in a small basket along the kitchen window ledge; but still they spoiled and festered. Thus is the nature of love.”

Cooped inside the carriage wagon, I watched the countryside, all familiarity and juvenescence recede into the distance. My slow and deliberate breaths; in, out through the mouth, did little to quell my rising nausea. The vehicle reeked of male opulence, with the faint after stench of wives gone by. I wondered if my sisters could be included in the latter. Had Fitcher, in this very wagon, murmured marital promises of tomorrow and tomorrow? Were my sisters, like the damned eggs slowly, but surely rotting away?

It was almost nightfall, and the low-lit carriage made my soon to be husband seem all the more foreboding. His weighty and wrinkled hand gripped my own like a noose around a criminal’s neck. Like I would hop out of the carriage at any moment and run through this perilous, faraway forest just to escape him (I must admit, the thought had occurred to me numerous times). Looking down, Fitcher’s jewel encrusted digits bore evidence of his prior marriages to unknowable women who died from tragic illnesses or equally tragic accidents. Fitcher’s lavish clothing and horse hide cloak were made from only the finest of textiles. It was all in stark comparison to his blue-black beard and under eye circles, which gave him an almost ghoulish presence.

Sensing my attention, Fitcher announced, to the air in front of him that I had almost arrived at the castle. This proved to ring true as I soon exited out of the carriage, down the windy cobblestone steps and into my own fully furnished prison.

The dark interior was reminiscent of some gothic underground lair I had once read in a Shelley storybook. You could hear the wind, howling like the dead, through the front corridor.

“It’s so quiet.” I whispered to myself.

The youngest of three daughters, I was accustomed to noise and laughter and chaos. Marissa’s riding boots and Adiv’s tumbled garments cluttering the hallway, buffering the silence.

“All the better to hear you with, my dear” Fitcher replied, suddenly behind me.

His fingers lightly grazed up and down my arm, a satisfied look on his face. He leant forward, broadly grinning and slyer than a Cheshire cat, then halted – suddenly, thinking better of himself.

“Go upstairs and prepare yourself for dinner, then the ceremony. I have laid out your dress for you.”

And so, feeling like the child I sensibly still was, I hastened up the staircase, away from his wandering eyes and roaming hands to the top of the platform, where I reached innumerable doorways. Each door in this corridor was precisely the same. Made of heavy oak, a double keyhole and deadbolted doorknob akin to a criminal’s hideout.

At first, I thought this strangeness to be some sporadic anxiety induced hallucination, or more probably, an abnormal symptom from my arduous journey. Realising the actuality of my situation, I approached the closest door and heaved and pulled and tugged with all my might, to no avail. Like an outlandish fairy-tale heroine, I even removed a hairpin from my braided curls in attempt to pick the lock. But each door was absolutely, positively locked closed.

The farther and faster I travelled down the corridor, the more I wondered what, even the richest man in the world, could possibly do with so many rooms? My mother’s modest two-bedroom country home suited my sisters and I perfectly comfortably. We might have quarrelled over who hogged the most room in our shared bed, but on my own, without Marissa and Adiv in the end, I learnt it was better this way.

Once I had regained my composure and remembered I was in no such position to be making these remarks I walked back towards the staircase. Here, I eyed one lonesome door with a slither of artificial light seeping through the crack. Entering inside, the expansive space held two chests of drawers, a mirrored dressing table, old-styled chaise lounge and the largest bed I had ever laid my eyes upon. Draped atop was one virginal, silky white dress I assumed was intended to be worn for the ceremony. It was the loveliest dress I had ever seen.

I did not, ever, wish for it to adorn my body.

Over by the dressing table lay a further assortment of strongly scented body lotions and spritzes designed to preserve my youth while Fitcher grew older. To keep me shiny and smooth. Just like the egg.

In this moment I could not help but think of my mother and her extensive beauty regiment. Each night she would stand in front of the decrepit bathroom vanity and lather countless witchy concoctions made from snail mucus or crushed beetle wing in the name of vanity.

“Beauty, after all, is a woman’s greatest asset” she always said.

I tried to picture what she would be doing now. I could image most decent, ordinary mothers moving about my room and tidying away the small relics I needn’t have any use for. Perhaps they would come across some childhood memorabilia; my worn stuffed teddy bear, a crayon artwork and stow them away into a special cardboard box? Or maybe they would shed one motherly tear over a photograph of me in the living room, having dearly missed my presence?

Instead, I was sure my own mother was pouring herself a glass of red; she certainly couldn’t afford and finally rejoicing that she was rid of her godforsaken, good-for-nothing daughters. She had likely thrown away my - albeit few and far between - possessions into the garbage to make way for her new materialistic junk. And mother never, ever cried.

I distinctly remember when Fitcher, the lonely traveller, first arrived at our doorstep asking to meet with my father. Instead, he was sent out into the darkness and cold, forced to wait an age before he could meet with mother. Her hair had been pinned and face prepped for a night of lengthy beauty sleep. She was not prepared for visitors, but she could never, ever, turn a man away.

That evening Marissa was engaged. And for a hefty sum of three gold coins.

Mother bought a nice cerulean blouse and two weeks later Fitcher was back again.

This time, the discussion was lengthier. Adiv and I crouched down by the paint peeled door and cupped our hands around our ears, giggling like schoolgirls; eager to hear news of our sister’s marital bliss. Instead, we learnt that Fitcher had a brother, and that evening Adiv was gone too.

This time mother bought a sapphire necklace and some brightly coloured facial creams. For three months I cried alone in my sister’s bed, wondering about Fitcher’s brides.

On his third visit, I was resigned to my fate and told mother to take the gold and buy herself a nice blue porcelain egg. The worst she could do is shatter it into a million pieces, and in a way, she had already done that.

But alone again, in my ornately decorated chambers, I couldn’t help but wonder if I made a colossal mistake. My bridal garment felt cool, like Fitcher’s lingering, unwanted touch. Even now, I could feel his bony fingers running up and down my spine, the whispers of a ghost.

I had primped and pampered myself, just the way mother had taught me. Now I needed to face my present fears. As I exited the bedroom, I saw a flicker of light right across the hall. I came across another slab of identical timber, except, between the gab of air where door meets floor, I could see the shadow of feet pacing backwards and forwards.

I walked forward, not daring to breathe and twisted the doorknob. The door creaked open and unveiled the macabre scene.

Inside, the ground was sullied a bloodied mess and an assortment of axes and hammers and flails and swords hung proudly upon the wall. Seven platforms, long and thin like a surgical operating table, held sickening, decomposing body parts, finely diced like raw meat. Some corpses had been there so long they had been reduced to a pile of bones. Others, still oozed a thick, gelatinous red.

Within these piles I noticed Marissa’s dirty riding boots. I looked over and saw Adiv’s severed head.

In the middle of it all, Fitcher stood wickedly smiling, a carving knife in hand.

And just like the egg, I knew it was my mother’s nature to love things to death.