When Women Were Dragons(10)
My mother reappeared in the doorway. There were tears in her eyes. I hated it when my mother was upset. I turned on my aunt and glared at her, folding my reedy arms across my chest. How dare she, I thought. How dare she upset my mother in this way? Granted, I had no real understanding as to why my mother was bothered. Only that she was. And it was my aunt’s fault, I was pretty sure. I stuck out my tongue at her. This just made her smile.
“You disagree, Alex?” she said to me.
“It’s Alexandra,” my father corrected, taking his last inhale of his cigarette and snuffing it out on the ashtray in the middle of the table.
I glowered, but didn’t respond.
Marla kept her gaze on me. I felt my skin start to singe. “You dispute your mother’s powers, Alex?” she said.
My mother remained in the doorway, like a pillar of salt. The light from the kitchen shone around her.
“Numbers aren’t magic,” I said firmly. I knew this wasn’t the reason I was rattled, exactly. At times, the tension between adults felt like acid on my skin—no physical wound, but burning all the same. My aunt had made my mother sad. Or maybe my father had. But I couldn’t explain how, as the words I knew at the time were unwieldy tools, improperly calibrated for the topic at hand. This only made me more angry. At my aunt, mostly. I scowled to make sure she knew. “Numbers,” I said with particular emphasis, “are numbers.”
My aunt took in this piece of information, clearly impressed. “Agreed,” my aunt said. I leaned back in my chair and relaxed. Even back then, I liked winning. “But to be fair,” she continued, “I never said that numbers were magic. I said that your mother was magic. A sorceress, specifically, but let’s just say magic. It’s easier. But here’s the thing, Alex, my love. This isn’t new information, and your mother isn’t alone. All women are magic. Literally all of us. It’s in our nature. It’s best you learn that now.”
My father gave an incredulous grunt, and my uncle, far too deep in his cups, brayed like a donkey. “Well if that isn’t—”
And, abruptly, the table fell silent. The sound simply ceased in my uncle’s throat. A single glance from my aunt was enough to stop his words at the source. I looked at her, and her eyes were two hot coals. The wire knots around her wrists grew so hot they glowed, and left burns along the edges of her arms. No one moved. No one breathed. My uncle looked pinned in place, as though my aunt’s eyes had pierced him in the middle and stitched him shut. He was in her power and at her mercy. She smiled as he went pale.
And then, with a wave of my aunt’s hand, the moment passed. My uncle gasped for breath. “You were saying, my love?” my aunt hissed.
My father’s hands shook. His eyes were wide. He didn’t say a thing. My uncle drained his glass and stumbled toward the door. I learned later he went on what my father called “a bender” (I didn’t learn what that meant until much later) and was gone without a word for over a week. No one missed him.
As a preface to the analysis of the various documented cases of mass dragoning in human history that I attempt in this paper, I do wish to add a personal aside, as it will, I believe, assist us in creating the lens through which we must view these events.
On that fateful day in April of 1955, while I, myself, did not experience the shock of a dragoning within my own family, immediate or extended, I did bear witness to one such transformation—Mrs. Norbert Donahue, the wife of one of my colleagues. I had originally known her by her maiden name, years earlier, as she was one of my residents at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, where she went by Dr. Edna Wood. Shortly after her training, she left the practice of medicine to marry and have her children, and thus left her title behind. On the day of the Mass Dragoning, I saw Mrs. Donahue moments before her transformation, as she went streaking through the hallways in a rush, her handbag swinging from her left arm like a pendulum. “Madam,” I said, nodding in her direction. She did not stop, nor did she seem to hear me. I did notice that her neck shone. And she seemed taller than I remembered.
She strode into Dr. Donahue’s office, screamed something unintelligible, and walked out, sobbing. She had been, I must add, one of my favorite residents, and while it had been many years since the two of us had conversed, I was moved by her obvious distress, and so I approached to see if I could offer comfort, or assistance. “Dr. Wood,” I said. “I mean, Mrs. Donahue,” I corrected myself. And then I gasped. Her teeth had elongated, becoming razor-sharp. Her eyes, once small and blue, were now the size of fists, dark gold, with horizontal pupils, like twin horizons.
I was astonished. I knew what was happening to her, of course, being well versed in what scant literature existed on the subject. But I had never seen it firsthand, at close proximity. Indeed, few have done so and lived. Since I did not know whether she would be capable of human speech after the process was complete, I thought it prudent to conduct an interview in medias res, and began transcribing my observations as I lobbed questions at Mrs. Donahue—now the subject. The activity was not entirely fruitful, unfortunately. I asked the subject to provide a narrative of her experience, paying close attention to the sensations in the area surrounding the womb—as that, at the time, was my primary focus as the catalyst for such transformations (though later data revealed the flaw in this hypothesis). But also, if she could, an explanation of basic bodily functions would be helpful—respiration, vision, muscle pain. All useful data points. Did she feel flushed, as though with a menopausal hot flash? Did she feel the nausea or muscle cramps associated with pregnancy and childbirth? Was the production of scales accompanied by a burning sensation? Did the eruption of fangs cause bleeding of the gums?