MONSTRESS.

a medusa, a baba yaga, a woman outside of the bounds of love and goodness and beauty, who can scream and laugh as she sees fit. her queendom is her cave, her forest, her walking house, and she gives and takes exactly when and what she wants. she is something altogether impossible to define. who does she help? who does she damn?

what is body when you have two kinds in one? how would someone half-girl and half-beast see herself? divine, monstrous, both? what would that body want? what would her mind want for it?

“here, i am the only kind of holy, / and there is no room / for nonbelievers.” (x)

someone wanting to be queen of everything just to be remembered, to be put down in history books and immortalized in museums. memory is a kind of worship.

or - the mother of queens or kings. how does she feel about power, about being its conduit? what does she think of her spouse (and what happens to them?), and the land she’s gained through her marriage? does she influence her children to attain her own ends? does she try to destroy them to become ruler herself? is she a puppet master content to be unseen? or a giving, kind mother, wanting only for her children to succeed? or - could she disavow the concept of monarchy entirely, start a revolution to destroy the institution that gives her children so much power?

a female monster used to win male wars, both a soldier and sword.

“They dig,” the dryad replied with a voice as soft as blue violet secrets, “like arms and hands and fingers into the soil.” The dryad gently pushed her fingers through the sleeping mermaid’s thick, coarse hair. “They seek out water and bits of magic and every beautiful thing they need.”

Before long, it would be time for breakfast, then dishes, and then chores and the day’s business and adventures and everything wonderful or necessary or both.

But for now, there was her wife’s head in her lap, sleeping and snoring in protest to the early hour.

“No. I am in love.”

become active primarily at night

have soft, thin, waxy black wings

use echolocation to find prey

eat over a thousand bugs in one hour

live in large groups in dark damp caves

go into torpor (regulated hypothermia that can last several months) in order to survive harsh long winters

Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth