Before I was married, I didn’t want a child. The thought of something growing inside me seemed wrong. Sickening. I knew I was not capable of nourishment. But as you grow older, things change. When I became the wife of a King, I was changed, immediately so. My King needed an heir. And I was bound to provide for him. I endured months of trial and error. He’d grind into me for hours, hips clanging against mine. My body carved deep scars into the mattress, the sheets staining too quickly to change them. Afterwards, I would lie with my legs in the air, willing his seed to life, not letting one drop escape. But still, nothing grew. I sought the crone. 

I wailed in her dank, cluttered dwelling. Lamented how his gaze wandered further from me each time I failed to bloom, how my stomach looked less like a peach with each passing day. How the chambermaids caught his eye and held it between their buttocks. The crone’s own eyes rolled in her whitened head; she had seen many a queen come and go in her time. None were able to bear the King an heir. But I knew I was different. I’d do anything, I told her. She smiled.

A chalice with two handles was left overnight in the dark grass, and in the morning, just as she promised, two roses stood tall in the garden. One red and one white. Red for a boy. White for a girl. Eat only one, the crone had said. But I wanted two children; one to hand over to my King to be his heir, and one to love as my own. My palms bled over two broken stems.

First, I took the white rose between my lips. It tasted sweet and milky. Her petals dissolved in my mouth and seeped around my back teeth, thick as cream. I then took the red head in my mouth and ripped it free; the tearing sound it made reminding me of ripping lace on wedding nights. Petals filled my mouth, forced their way down my throat. A keen stinging as I swallowed. Then, panicked, white-hot thoughts began to swirl inside my mind. Thoughts of insects trapped between petals. Of thorns buried in flesh. What would two roses create? A part of me, strangely, wished for anything but a son.

My stomach soon grew, quickly and painfully. Stretch marks grew like fingernails across my belly. My King was pleased. He took me out to the court for the first time in weeks, showed me off, swollen and smiling. The chambermaids held no sway over him anymore. I had dreams of him fucking me, hard and from behind, in the middle of court, while his subjects cheered him on; my cries echoing, floating up to burst against the high ceilings. I had dreams of giving birth to long, green, biting stems that scratched me on their way out. My King reached inside and grabbed them with his jewelled hands, pulling the stems steadily out of me like chains while I screamed in ecstasy. I had dreams of a baby that loved me. 

I gave birth laughing. 

My child was birthed a giant snake. When I first saw her, she was nothing but an endless stream of glistening emerald scales. My laughter turned to panic, to screams. I felt that his birth would never end, that I would forever exist in the space between, with my baby halfway in and out of me. The midwives panicked in silence, rushing to close the door, to darken the windows. Something in their movements told me this was wrong, that this shouldn’t be happening. And yet it was. And it was beautiful. And I felt whole. The night I bore my tiny snakelet I held her in my arms and let him suckle at my breast until sleep took us both. 

The King wanted to see his child. I wanted to keep her from him. I couldn’t bear for him to even set his tiny, dark eyes on him. But the King was not to be kept from anything he owned, and one night he forced his way in. The light from the doorway hurt my eyes; my snakelet’s body convulsed defensively. I stood to defend her and instantly realized my smallness, my futility. My child was larger even than the bed we slept in; and as the door opened so did his eyes, wide and orange and beautiful. Her tail flicked back and forth as the King approached him without a word, already drawing his sword to slay his child.

I opened my mouth to scream, moved to defend her. Before he could so much as raise his blade to strike, the King was swallowed up in one fluid gulp, my child’s fangs barely touching the floor. He made strange sounds as he passed through her; his great, booming voice muffled, the scraping of sword against bone. But my child was calm, and stayed stoic and steady as he gently, gradually moved towards her stomach. His scales swelled and pulsated. I watched my King’s mouth open and close fruitlessly beneath them, in terror and in silence. 

I didn’t know how relieved I’d be until I thought about how my King’s bones would slowly dissolve, how his sparkling jewels and his great sword would pass out of my snakelet’s body, how we’d leave them out in the gutter, covered in shit. My child cast his burning orange eyes upon me in a silent smile. She wrapped me up in his sparkling green scales. I could still feel the strugglings of the King within her. We stayed like that for some time, as the movements inside of him slowed, and then, finally, stopped. The castle and my body were wrapped in quiet, and all I could hear was our breathing.