Maid Born of Crone
There
is a young girl tucked inside of every old woman. She comes
in the sweaty dreams of summer and gives the old wrinkled
belly and scarred thighs the soft tug of desire.
Elise of
Springhaven had grown old and gaunt, her belly three folds
of loose skin that hung thin against her back. Her lands
were under siege from fierce men and women who swept down
from the cold north looking for fresh game and holes in
earth warm enough to accept corn. Elise’s people came to
her and told how the cold ones forced into the daughters of
spring for warmth and took entire herds of goats for food.
Her people cried and she cried with them, feeling innocence
lift from land it had lain across for long.
Elise studied the invaders. Families. Even dogs. Many
leaders rather than one, strong men and women still touched
with the last glow of youth.
One morning, she asked her people to post guards about her
small house, the one she used for hunting each fall and for
flower-gathering each spring. Flowers still dropped about
it, dry petals falling from the eaves and giving pale color
to the paths about the cottage. She filled three buckets
from the stream and set them inside. She took up two leg
bones from last fall’s greatest elk and used rose petals
and dried leaves for tinder to start smoke in the hearth.
She blew gently, bringing fire, and fed it sticks and dried
roots and handfuls of herbs.
When the flame found its full heat, Elise stripped, and
stood naked in front of the fire. The smoke stank of garlic
and heliotrope, of iris and phlox, of dirt and char and
tears. She lifted a foot, and then the other, and then the
first, and then the other. She clapped her hands.
Elise danced until her calloused feet bled.
The sun hung straight above her.
She reached up above her ears, each hand grasping fistfuls
of old grey hair, thin as a spiderweb and nearly as
translucent.
Elise pulled.
She screamed.
She danced with her fingers twisted in her scalp and
pulled.
The wrenching screech she let out as her scalp tore in the
center made one of her minions peer in the window. He
fainted.
Age sloughed from her scalp to shoulder to elbow. It peeled
down across arthritic fingers, taking the knobs and brown
spots, the purpled bruises and the scars. Breasts forgot
how to fall and slouch across her chest and stood tiny and
full, like fresh fruit which had not yet been plucked.
Elise paused at her waist, the skin hanging loose and
jittery, the old arms and knobby dislocated fingers
brushing the ground. She remembered a boy and a girl who
grew in her belly, kicking and squirming. They had since
died, the boy at seven, the girl at fifty-three.
Below her belly hung the memory of lovers. The first man
who filled her. The first woman who leaned in against her
and rubbed her hot pubic bone against Elise’s fur. The
first and last time she was forced. The friend who gave her
children. The later lover she took and took and took during
the last year she bled.
When she bent to peel the wrinkles from her thighs, a strip
of moonlight from the window rode up her spine like the
white tail of a skunk, and she wriggled as she worked the
dry, old wisdom away from her inner maiden.
She placed her age on the flames. Her shed skin glowed and
burned and charred the air with the unpleasant smells of
its history.
Elise danced.
The sun tinted the air with gold.
She sat cross-legged in front of the embers and dreamed of
her old age and her wisdom. She spoke quietly of cunning
and hope.
The embers faded and Elise took fistfuls of hot dark ash
and rubbed her body hair and painted her lips and her
eyelids and her cheeks, and drew a straight dark line
across her forehead. She took the first bucket of water and
emptied it over her head, carrying away the worst of her
sweat and of the ash, making black mud on the floor.
She invited the man who had fainted to come inside and
light a torch. He obeyed. She showed him the door, and he
went out of it, his eyes wide and brown.
Elise used her old pants and the second bucket to scrub her
new skin so that it almost glowed.
She toweled her long blond hair dry with her shirt.
Softened by the ash, and lengthened by her dance, her hair
hung gold against her skin, nearly touching the smooth skin
of her thighs when she stopped to rest.
She left her old clothes in the third bucket to soak, since
if she needed to put them back on, she wanted them to be
clean.
Elise of Spinghaven donned a red and black cape and stepped
through the door into the hot night. For weapons, she
carried all of the wisdom of her years, and her tiny fresh
breasts and her green, green eyes.
The cold ones stood no chance against her heat.
All the people of Springhaven walked behind her as she went
to meet the strangers and escort them from her lands,
sending them on to summer.
Brenda
Cooper. June 24th,
2009