Theosis

By Jessica Snell

They couldn’t execute my second son because I couldn’t conceive him.

I burned for a second son. I burned like my first son had burned on his pyre: head tilted towards the sky, mouth open and gasping for air, neck tendons standing out like cords as the fire licked his skin and devoured his heart.

I did not want my husband, and yet my desire for a child drove me to him time and again, so often that he couldn’t help but laugh. He turned towards me with his body, but away from me with his eyes. Away also from friends and family, from anyone who would dare risk the queen’s wrath by consoling him for our loss.

The only thing he turned to willingly was the bottle. The cask of wine that used to live in the cool stone cellar now lay on the floor of our bedchamber.

And so we consoled ourselves: him with drink, and me with the furious hope that I could have another child.

A child so pious and devout that he would never meet his brother’s fate. Or so I thought.

“A chance, holy goddess, I beg you. Only a chance.”

It was not that we were too old, my husband and me. It was that the body of a bird is not the body of a woman, and since the terrible and mysterious curse had come upon me, my body at night was made to curve in protection around eggs, and not infants.

I lifted my wings towards her every night, and my hands to her every morning, as ashes from the burning place fell to the ground with the autumn leaves.

I pleaded.

I could only think that since my son had mocked the goddess, the goddess was now mocking me, turning me nightly into an impotent miniature of her glorious self.

The mystery of my curse so consumed me that I didn’t notice when my husband’s behavior changed. I didn’t notice that he stopped falling asleep, drunk and snuffling, before the sun sank its last red edge below the horizon.

Looking back, I should have known where my first son got his impiety.

More than that, I should have realized that my husband’s depression and drunkenness had turned to fury—the disciplined and unholy fury of a heretic.

I did not realize it. Not until the day when he did not fall asleep in the early evening, and so saw me as I turned.

He watched my fingers lengthen into feathers and my shoulders melt backwards into wings. He swore, and he tripped, and he tried to throw his arms around me before I left my windowsill perch with a fall that swelled into flight as the breeze bore me up.

He was not at the house when I returned before dawn.

The queen’s soldiers came for me before noon. I screeched that I had not known, that I had not consented to my husband’s actions—but I was still my husband’s wife, and so they did not care. Because my husband, in his terror and his rage, had tried to assassinate the queen, throwing all the plans of his sect into chaos, loosing the queen’s cold wrath upon all his brotherhood.

Upon the brotherhood to which our son, in his folly, had allied himself.

They had burned my son, and they would now burn me. Any hope I had of another child would turn into ash as my body did, because you must have a body to conceive a living soul.

I wanted a child, but when they bound me to the stake, I saw a vision.

I saw the face of the goddess.

She reached down her talons, and clutched the sides of my face, holding me so that I had to look at her, and not towards the crowds crying for our deaths, and not towards my husband, bellowing his defiance.

“You wanted a child,” she told me, speaking the words of my heart. “But you misunderstood my gift.

“It is not what you wanted,” she said. “It is what I wanted. My child.

“Mine.”

The queen’s soldiers lit the flame at our feet.

Then came the pain.

The pain alone should have killed me. I wished it would so the torture would end. Perhaps I had misunderstood again. Why would it hurt, if she was about to save me?

The flames reached my fingers.

And my fingers stretched to become feathers, fiery feathers that stretched longer and finer than my nighttime feathers ever had. The pain flickered, then flared, and then transmuted into something new, something glorious.

I became wholly fire, and wholly bird, a small copy of the goddess above me.

“Mine,” she said, fiercely happy. “Mine.”

I did not want a child.

I was a child.

Fiercely happy, I followed her into the sky.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jessica Snell lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their four children. When Jessica’s not writing or editing, she enjoys knitting, hiking the local trails, and traveling up to the mountains whenever she can. You can follow her on Twitter where she tweets about books, short stories, and the constant struggle to get more words on the page. Her work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction and Tales from Plexis.

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