LIFE BEFORE THE BEAST

inspired by a famous fairy tale.

After I and the rest of angry fathers killed the beast, we lost ourselves to feverish celebrations which lasted two days and which left everybody tired and dizzy.  But then, we remembered too late that we had forgotten to ask the beast a question, the one question that mattered. 

The morning of the third day, a woman knocked on my door when everyone in my household was still asleep.  There was something stately in her tall thin body and silent eyes, despite the ashen face and the scruffy wisps of hair.  She remained speechless for so long till I thought I should perhaps shut the door and go back to my bed, but before I did, she spoke.  She wanted to have a talk with me, she said, and she insisted we had it in private.  I told her to meet me by the fig orchard before sunset.  When I went to see her, she introduced herself as the wife of the beast, which surprised me for I had always heard people say that the beast had a beautiful wife.  But I had heard that many years ago, and she must have changed. But she could possibly be his wife, for there was yet a faint hint of a long-gone beauty barely visible in her face.

She sat on a rock and she spurted a long, inconceivable account about how she was kidnapped by the beast when she was young (she did not remember how old she had been then), about the happy life she had with him before those strange fits he had at sunset and after which he left the house not to return before the next day with his jaws smeared with blood...  She said other scraps of stories that made little sense.  Sometimes, she would ascertain that she was the daughter of a poor wood-cutter who lived at the outskirts of the forest, and sometimes she would say her father was a rich farmer who lived somewhere beyond the northern mountains, when I knew that beyond the northern mountains there was nothing but the ocean.  At times, she would say she did not remember anything about the life she had before she married the beast. I concluded after she finished her talk that the long life she had with him must have robbed her of sagacity.  But that was not what she came to tell me.  She told me how, after we killed her husband, she built a fire where she threw the books, clothes and the hunting utensils of the beast.  ‘Seconds later’, she said, ‘I saw shadows rising out of the fire, shadows of people, trees, buildings, and animals that went as high as flames then disappeared into the thin air like smoke. I heard voices too, a commotion of voices as though many people were speaking all at the same time.  At night, the fire subsided and so did the voices and shadows; everything sank under a heavy blanket of silence, and I sat brooding by the fireplace where the smouldering cinders of the burned objects were eating themselves out bit by bit… I was totally dazed… Could he have hidden so many secrets in his life?’

I did not know what to say, I wasn’t not sure if I should comfort her or give her an answer. In the end, I suggested that she could take her husband’s body to bury it wherever she chose, and I offered to give her help if she needed.  She said she did not want any of that, and she started to walk away.  Before she disappeared into the dark thickets of the woods, I called her and asked her if she knew anything about my daughter who went one day to visit her sick grandmother and never came back. ‘What made your daughter recognizable?’ she asked. 

‘She wore a red hood,’ I answered, for all that I remembered from my daughter was her blood-red hood.

‘All of them little girls that the beast had taken away wore red hoods’, she said ‘and all of them loved poppies.’

‘What had poppies to do with it all?’ I asked.

‘Why,’ she said, ‘the meadow where they all liked to stop to collect poppies was the territory of the beast,’ and she walked away.

It’s been fifteen years since we killed the beast.  I sometimes tell the story to my grandchildren, and tell them how we regretted doing it before asking him where he hid his preys.  The story made little impression on them, and they never believed it was anything more than a hallucination.  But as time went by, I cared little that people did not believe me.  I often went on rides on horseback to the woods, which was my sheer pleasure.  Sometimes, I would go past the house of the beast where we found him asleep one day and planted our spears in his body, then dragged it for miles across the woods.  All that was left of the house was a hardly visible hedge on ground level above which grew profuse foliage of poppies, all red as blood and fresh as daybreak. Whenever I walked past them, it seemed to me I heard all the voices of people, animals and singing larks that the beast had known in his life. I noticed, one spring, a poppy that grew much taller than the others as I walked past the place; it was the most beautiful, but it was also the saddest of all, quietly bent down as if in pain.  I reaped it and offered it to the youngest of my granddaughters who gratefully bedecked her hair with the flower. The same evening, I found the poppy in the courtyard, trampled on by the feet of children, so I picked it up and buried it in the garden, hoping to see next year an army of red-hooded poppies spread over my soil.  And it happened.  The following year, a new breed of poppies grew in my garden. They were of a striking beauty, but they looked all forgetful, with no pride and no memory, for they did not seem to remember the man who reaped them in a past life. 

I wondered if I would come across my daughter one day, would she then remember her father. Or would she have lost all memory of her past life, like those poppies. I cannot blame them, anyway.  Year after year had passed in this village with everyone hoping to catch the beast and to take their revenge on him, and when it happened, nobody remembered how life was like before the beast, nobody remembered the old taste of our drinks, the length of our festivals and the feel of holding their children’s in their arms.

Author's Note

I'd be glad if you read it and say what you think.