Mother of Titans

For the first five thousand years, I was alone.

The sun never visited me, and the moon never wrote. Rain didn’t return my calls, and wind didn’t bother saying goodbye.

For five thousand years, I never felt the summer light warm my back. I never felt the rain on my eyelashes, the wind burn my cheeks or whip my hair. I never saw my mother’s face in the moon again.

My only light were candles, my only friends the shadows on the wall.

I don’t know where we live, I never have. I would guess underground, but there’s no way to tell for sure.

Maybe I should start from the beginning.

My mother was Tzipporah. Yes. That Tzipporah. My father, however, was not Moses.

My mother called him Samson.

History remembers him as a dark shade, overtaking Athens in 430 BC, England in the mid-fourteenth century, and in 1918, the entire world.

You might know him as Pestilence.

When I was born, my skin was so rotted, the flesh so decayed, that my mother thought I was stillborn. But my heart beat like a rabbit’s under the knife.

My mother never begrudged me my birth, nor did Moses, despite the fact that I was my mother’s victimization brought to grotesque life.

I was ten years old when Moses freed the slaves.

It was only by using my darkness as leverage that he swayed the Pharaoh. My mother said that I was a gift from God, a tool to free our people, a weapon to level at those who did great evil. My plagues became the Hebrews’ salvation. I know, not exactly the story you read in Sunday school.

Nine years later, Roseal found me and took me away. I never saw my mother again. I heard that thirty one years after I was stolen from the desert, she and her people found their Promised Land. I hope it filled whatever hole in her heart that may have been left by my absence.

The angel hid me away in a cavernous hovel, I’d assumed because he wanted to keep me away from others like Moses who might use my God given wrath to avenge themselves upon others. After years went by without any contact with other humans, I thought that maybe I was not being kept here for my own protection, but for the protection of others.

When one hundred years came and went without aging me, I realized that I am not being kept without ulterior motive. I am being preserved for later use.

My mother was wrong. I am not a liberator, I am not the wrath of God. I am the wrath of humans, a primitive biological warfare, with more devastating results than any science can yield.

As people began to progress, so did my tiny prison. Candles were replaced with oil lamps, then electric lights. My cauldron was traded in for a stove and oven, and plumbing updated as the years went. I was allowed a radio, then a television, then a lagging hand-me-down computer. My favourite conquest by far is still the refrigerator. Over time, I even started a tiny collection of books. Contained within nine, small, cramped, square rooms is my life.

And for a while, Roseal was the only person I talked to. Though, it really wasn’t talking. After so many years, I was too embittered to grant him anything besides a noncommittal shrug or grunt here or there, and any civilized sentences were passive aggressive at best. Despite the lack of conversation, the years granted me ample opportunity to learn languages besides my own. It was one of very few hobbies.

Like I said.

For the first five thousand years, I was alone.

And then a peculiar thing happened.

For four years in a row, a child was born on my birthday.

The first was Edwidge, a girl who could talk to ghosts. She likes flowers. Yellow roses are her favourite. She helps me around the house sometimes.

The second was Palluqtuq, a mermaid. She has trouble walking sometimes. I got her crutches. She’s the only one who can touch my skin without catching its rot. Once, I could have sworn that my flesh under her fingertips looked healthier.

The third was Manju. Abundance. The only word I can use to describe her. The longest hair I have ever seen. The biggest mouth, so much to say. She brings light to every room she enters.

And the last was Ping. Feminine, pacifist, non-violent, Chinese monk, boy messiah of my heart. He likes flower crowns. They're his favourite thing. He’s also lactose intolerant. I had to ask Roseal to start giving me stocks of Lactaid because his gas was so explosive.

After they were born, they all came to me.

Roseal told me at first that they were orphans, that I was their new mother.

I can’t touch a human without them growing boils and lesions, and yet the angel wanted me to play Mother Goose to a brood of fledgling titans.

I pushed him and pushed him, and finally after he bestowed tiny Ping upon me, swaddling clothes and all, he amended his previous assertion. I was their protector.

They were being preserved, like me. Like pigs fed and fattened until slaughter. To be saved for later use.

A thousand years ago, I might have been furious on their behalf.

But I don’t have the energy for anger anymore.

I did as Roseal commanded and shepherded them through adolescence, guiding from afar. I wouldn’t have called myself a mother. For their formative years, I hardly spoke to them, though they spoke plenty amongst themselves. I was a silent figure, a barely adult guardian that ushered them to and fro, feeding them, bathing them, tucking them in at night, reading the occasional story.

I had to adjust my dress for them. I wore linens, ribbons, bandages, covered up any skin they might accidentally touch. I brought out my old headscarf when they all became fond of pulling my hair. I put posy in my pockets every day so the smell of rot wouldn't overwhelm them. I learned rudimentary Hindu, Chinese, Inuit, and Creole to communicate with each of them, as well as taught them English and Hebrew, to allow us all to converse together. I thought that my gaunt, decrepit appearance would have made them perpetually terrified of me. But I couldn’t have been more wrong. They seemed only to be cautious around me, like I was a fragile ragdoll that must be handled gently.

I never tried to mother them, up until now. I just tried to look after them in the most rudimentary sense. Yet now, 12, 13, 14, and 15 years old, they’re normal kids. I did that.

I didn’t try to do anything besides make sure they didn’t die in their sleep, yet somehow, they willed me to be their mother anyway.

They are the kindest, sweetest, wisest, most insightful children one could ever ask for. And now I’m going to lose them, all because Roseal and his archangels are too busy circle jerking to do their own damn work, and want to send children to do their duty. It’s not fair.

A boy came with him today. The first time I’ve seen someone close to my age.

Roseal said he was like me… A demi-god. A halfling.

A back-up plan. In case my titans don’t work.

His name was Arnie.

He was quiet.

My hovel has been more crowded in the last couple days than it has in thousands of years. Roseal seems to want to give the world to me, to bring it to me, into my cage.

He doesn’t understand that all I want is to see the sun and the moon, to feel the rain and the wind. I want my children to live a real life. The walls of this attic are not the ends of the earth, and they will never know that until they are allowed to leave.

Arnie brings tidings from the Outside.

He tells me I am foolish. That he would switch places with me gladly, to hide from the world, to be safe, alone, in the dark.

I don’t tell him that what he’s running from isn’t in the big scary world, it’s waiting for him in the mirror. I don’t mention to him that it will find him no matter where he hides.

All I tell him is:

“Facing the world is a privilege I have never had.”

A privilege, for me. A duty and burden for my children.

Soon I will be alone again.

But if there is one last stand I can make, I will take it.

I will protect my kids.