Subject: [OTL]: (FOH Challenge) Gods & Monsters (PG-13) Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 22:30:17 +1100 From: "Amanda Sichter" This is a startlingly bleak little piece that emerged when a few things got together in my head and had a party. There are notes re: why I wrote this at the end of the story, but I'll warn now that it is not recommended for practicing Catholics. Disclaimer: Something here must belong to Marvel. Maybe. I think. Gods & Monsters The children of God are monsters. The children of Monsters are gods. I was born a Monster and my mother gave me into the hands of the children of God. They watched me. They hated me. They spoke of how we are all the children of God while making it quite clear that I was not included. They told how God loved all of us while their eyes told me quite plainly that He did not love me. They let the other children call me 'freak' and 'ugly' and 'monster' while they averted their eyes from my pain, closed their ears to my screams. I told my mother. I told her how the nuns made sure I was always at the back of class, always hidden away in assembly, never allowed to answer a question, always locked up when the bishop came to visit. How I was their shame. How I was hers. My mother smiled and nodded and paid the fees and made me go back to the children of God. I wonder if my mother ever saw me - if she ever knew the Monster that she birthed. She looked at me, looked at my eyes, my face, my body - but she never *saw*. She would dress me in the prettiest clothes, the loveliest dresses, but as she tied the bow beneath my chin I would look into her eyes and see the blankness that told me she did not see. I sometimes think that all she saw was a girl-shaped gap where the Monster lurked. The children of God saw me, saw me plain and true, took the money and mouthed the platitudes and made quite sure I knew I wasn't one of them. It was in my last year with them that I could take the taunts no more and for the first time the Monster fought back, hit back at the taunting children, struck out when the shouts and the pain and the terror became too much. The children scattered and screamed and when the nuns came only the Monster cowered there, bloody fists still striking out blindly. The Mother Superior could not force herself to look upon my face. She put her back to me and looked out of the window as she finally allowed herself to speak the words she had always longed to say. My mother, she told me, must have been a wicked slut, must have copulated with demons to birth an abomination like me, and I was not to touch one of the children of God, must not touch them with my filthy, corrupted body and I must keep my gaze down to the ground forever because I could not look upon those that God had made. God had not made me, I was Devil-spawn, and I would burn in Hell forever because God saw everything but He had averted His eyes from me. She closed her eyes and shuddered with passion as she beat me and beat me and beat me. She taught me well that day. She taught me not to fight back, not to try, not to even attempt to better myself because I was a demon's daughter and I would burn eternal. I lived my life by her rules. My eyes did not leave the ground, I would not speak to one of the children of God in case my voice defiled them, I hid myself away in the day, I moved only in the dark where the children did not have to see me. I lost my name to the Monster and at night when I walked back to my house the children of God followed me and flung stones at me and I knew the pain I felt from that was nothing compared to the pain I would feel when I burned for all eternity and so I welcomed the stones. Until the night came when the children of God grew brave and bold and as I shuffled back to my home trying to make myself nothing the children finally made their mistake. The blow to the back of my head was heavy enough to shudder my brain inside the heavy armour of my skull and I could not regain control of my limbs quick enough to save myself. Instead I watched the world through jangling colours and shattered sounds as the children came so close, so close and I tried to warn them not to touch me, Devil-spawn, but I only grunted and they laughed and called me Monster and then one was on me, in me, pain tearing between my legs and I tried to beat him away from me but I only flailed as he moved on me, pain, more pain, then hot liquid inside me and then he was away from me and standing up and saying 'Told you I could fuck the Monster - who's next?' and then another and another and the world went away into the dark, where I belonged. God must not have been watching His children that night. The children of Monsters are gods. Look at the mythos of a hundred cultures, where gods are spawned from Monsters, from Titans and Pythons and the mating of woman with swan. My children, the Monster's children, swell my belly now, bright with the promise of revenge. I shall birth my golden twins and they shall be gods, gods with powers that the children of God cannot imagine and I shall teach them how to slay the children and I shall set them loose to destroy those whom God will look upon. The children of God are monsters. They put us out in the dark and the cold and tell us that we shall burn forever, that we are not one with them, that we are Devil-spawn. If you say something long enough and often enough it will come true. I am a Monster now in face and mind, heart and womb. I nurse my Monster's children inside my belly and croon over them as I tell them what they will be, tell them how they will wreak my vengeance on the children of God, send them into an eternity with He who averted His gaze from me and mine. The children of God will be slain. The time of Monsters is at hand. The End Notes: I have quite a few Significants in my life who attended Catholic schools (over a range from 1930's to 1970's) and were damaged by them - including my mother who was told at age 5 that she would burn in hell for all eternity because she was an Anglican, a few people subjected to quite serious physical assaults, including sexual abuse and a friend who was mercilessly treated, assaulted and told she was 'Devil-spawn' because she committed the cardinal sin of being left-handed. This story arose because I wondered what a mutant child, particularly one with an obvious physical mutation, would have gone through in such an institution and how it would have damaged them. This story is not meant to comment on Catholic schools today - as far as I'm aware this kind of horrendous religious bigotry and hysteria is a thing of the past. I can only hope the sexual and physical assaults are as well. Amanda wolf@ozdocs.net.au 'I want the world and I want it now'