Post by Wilhelm Opens-the-Way on Jun 23, 2010 2:05:35 GMT -8
The first thing that I can clearly remember is sunlight.
One of the Sisters is bathing me, and then there is water on my claws and in my fur. A little of it from the basin where I sit gets in my ears, so I reach up. The nun brings my small hand back down and presses her own hand against my face gently. The water on the hairs of my arms glisten gold. The sunlight from the window is warm where it touches my skin.
At three or four years old (I never celebrated birthdays) it may have been the first tender touch I'd gotten. It's certainly possible considering what I was.
I touch her face back, and it... of course it opens. My tiny sharp claws part the flesh of her cheek like tissue paper, and it blossoms like a rose in a spring rain, vibrant red and wet. Then there is shouting and screaming and pain for me, and darkness. I don't understand.
The sun was not allowed after that.
The moon was though. When I was young, I remember being able to sometimes run at night, to stretch my legs and move in the moonlight, away from the manor where I was kept, away from the darkened wing I had been confined to, away from the grey room piled high with children's books.
When I was around eight, getting to run at night was a regular joy that I had to look forward to. I loved it; the wind in my fur, the cool air on my face, the night stars twinkling down at me through the trees on the wooded hill near the manor. It was, for many years, my bliss.
What I understood of myself then was very limited, very simple. I knew that I was bad, a monster, and of poor breeding, and that I constantly needed to be reminded of my place. I knew that I was a Devil child, and a child of Sin, and deserving of many punishments for my misdeeds, and they were many: Howling for more food than was my due, speaking before being requested to speak, and the worst of my offences, stealing books from the drawing room or library to hide beneath the blanket or mattress of my cot.
I loved books as soon as I learned to read, especially fairie stories and adventure books. Tales of witches baking children into pies and knights saving damsels in distress and riding lance against fearsome dragons. I loved tales of trolls under bridges and poisoned thimbles and dwarves in the wood. I loved Ivanhoe and read the collection of folk myths cobbled together and printed in German by a pair of brothers called Grimm. I read of Sigrund and his sword Gram, and of St. Georg and the dragon. They always ended terribly, these stories, with death and blood, and curses, but I didn't mind.
And of course the Sisters taught me scripture, and I learned of all the saints, like St. Anthony the Abbot who was born into riches but gave away all of his wealth, and St. Thomas Aquinus who was both priest and doctor, and St. Leo the Great, who talked Attila the Hun away from the very gates of Rome, and many others. Many of them had interesting lives as well that I didn't mind hearing about.
Yet in those early years, I was mostly alone, an unwanted beast in a house on a far away hill in the countryside, allowed only the company of nuns, my storybooks and the midnight sky.
