The sun is just dipping toward the horizon when the knock I've been expecting for seven months comes at last. My hand is already on the doorknob when I recognize him through the sidelight. I start talking myself into what I know needs to be done. It's not fear I'm suppressing. It's anger. I want very much to attack the bastard on the doorstep, but if I do it will ruin all I’ve worked for. I'll never get what I want most, which is revenge. Or what I want second most.
My sister back, alive.
I open up and there he is in all his skin-deep glory. A sweet-talking, good-looking cancer. Armani covering up the dead inside him. I plaster a big shit-eating grin on my face and act like I don't know he’s the reason my mother swallowed a one-way ticket to paradise after five months without news of the better daughter.
His own grin is a thousand-watter, and the ice-blue eyes set into a chiseled, olive-complected face would get the dustiest old matron percolating in her Hanes. I resist the urge to spit in this cliché of a face he’s hiding behind. I invite him in and he comes like the fly.
He only thinks he's the spider.
When he's seated and a drink is firmly in his manicured paw, I settle myself across from him on the loveseat.
“What brings you here?” My smile says, ‘I think I know’. My posture says, ‘I’m glad.’
“I was in town. Thought I’d look you up. See if you were free for dinner.”
His eyes are filled with a smolder cultivated to entice. I giggle, girlish, and imagine dousing him in the remaining whiskey. Lighting a match. Watching him burn. Hearing him scream.
Now I really am turned on.
“Dinner sounds lovely. Where were you thinking?”
“Let me surprise you.” Mischievous is his aim but malicious is what I hear. I’m expecting this dance. All I’ve learned of the monster before me indicates he needs this, this seduction, this…consent. It’s part of his game and he thrives on it. I give him what he wants.
“I love surprises.”
If his smile were any more vulpine, he’d grow a snout. He leans forward and beckons. I’m ready. I go to him. My entire life has been training for this. Not just the twelve months since the prettier, sweeter sister disappeared, but the twenty-six years I spent as the plain, disposable, troublesome one. Call me Jane the Baptist. I was only here to prepare the way for the perfection to follow me, and if my head on a silver platter will bring baby sis home, so be it. It’s too late to please our mother, but maybe I won’t see that look in Dad’s eyes anymore.
The one that says, “Why couldn’t it have been you?”
I slip onto the devil’s lap and he wraps a powerful arm around me. With his other hand he reaches toward my face and I fight the flinch rising up inside me. His fingers make contact. Flesh on my flesh. Matter meeting antimatter. I expect an explosion, an implosion, the end of some world. And maybe that happens, but I wouldn’t know.
When I come to I’m in his trunk.
Relief sets my skin to tingling. There was always the chance he’d see through me. Or search me. But if he had done either, I wouldn’t be on my way to his lair, I’d be dead. I slip my hand into my “trying to” B cup--little sis even got the good boobs gene--and pull out the square of silk I’ve carried there since the day a homeless woman touched my arm and gave me back the memory the monster stole.
Nearly blind in the dark space, I run my thumb gently across the three rough spots. My mother’s blood. If this were a fairy tale she’d have given them willingly, bidding me safety on my quest to bring our beloved Lizzie home. She would have struggled with my decision. She would have feared the loss of her only remaining child. My mother, in whose womb I grew, might even have begged me remain securely by her side.
This was no fairy tale.
Or if it was, it was more the sort where parents leave their ugly kid in the forest to be eaten by an evil witch so the pretty one can afford a better gown for the ball. It was the kind where a woman wearing a garbage bag turns out to be a good witch with a lot of really shitty news and one tiny glimmer of hope.
The kind where I raced home in my enlightenment, prepared to give my mother that hope at all costs...only to find her a corpse. An exclamation point on her lifelong declaration of my insufficiency.
It probably would have looked bad if someone had walked in as I pricked her cooling finger and pressed it to the silk the witch had given me. Luckily, no one did. And here it is: talisman, holy object, probable disease carrier, and my only weapon against my sister’s--and now my--captor.
The idea for this came from the Five Minute Freewrite prompt "Sunset," and my mulling over what to enter into @carolkean's contest She Liked It. The original contest link is here. It's inspired by the Grimm Brothers' collected tale Fitcher's Bird, which has been my very favorite Fairy Tale from the time I first read it at age five.
I recently brought this particular story--Fitcher's Bird--up in conversation at The Isle of Write with my dear friend and fellow writer @sandzat, who was looking for scary stories for her daughter. Before an hour had passed she reported reading it to her daughter who also loved it. I was struck by the miraculousness of this event: A story discovered two centuries ago in Germany, read by an American child thirty-six years ago, was shared across oceans with an Indian mother who transmitted it to her own daughter within minutes. It felt...magical. This previously impossible intimacy shared between mothers spanning the planet. Thank you @sandzat for being a part of that moment <3
The story is still grand today, deserving of world-spanning. And I couldn't resist incorporating it here. I hope very much you enjoy this modern retelling, and that you follow the link to the original as well.
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art and flair courtesy of @PegasusPhysics