Bábi Freyr Mythology — Excerpt №2
By: Abraham T. Steel
Tags: Puberty, Family, Babi Mythology, Fiction, Adventure

The years gave no solace for the restlessness in her soul and by the time she had turned twelve and went through pubescence, she began blossoming, so she was told, into a woman. Her breasts became round puffs of fatty flesh that she could cup entirely with her palms; her hips had begun to sprout — growing outward as if determined to match her shoulders; and her butt was fleshier than ever before, as if it were swelling beneath her. She often examined her naked body with a curious abandon — the curve of her waist, her sliver of a belly button, and her swollen nipples. There were faint scars on the fleshy parts of her inner thigh and along the back of her arms, near her elbows, remnants, she thought, of her enemy. Her vagina too was swollen, as if stung by bees, but she was told that it was normal — even desirable. Her face had not changed much though there were the subtlest signs of maturity that only her mother could read. The sun had finally stolen all the brown from her hair and given her a new color: black — like the raven. It ran down her shoulders and played with the wind — shining like a black sea. In elegant, flowing curls, it chased her when she ran and danced when she laughed. It was always a lovely sight — a far cry from the often unkempt wildness of her childhood years. Though she no longer had to, Linnea would spend endless hours tending to it and, sometimes, when there was nothing left to be done to improve upon its dark beauty, she would simply run her fingers through its length.

Her body had begun to change in unusual ways and things were happening to her that needed to be explained. When she had her first blood, she sat awake in bed for hours before her mother found her. The sheets and her gown were stained red and smelled like coppery musk. There was a bittersweet joy in Linnea that Bábi did not understand for the longest time — even with the explanation of what was happening. She was told that the bleeding meant that she was capable of bearing children. It meant that she was a woman now, in spite of her years, and she would have to learn about what came with womanhood. Walking through the field, Linnea taught her about the complexities of her body and how it would continue to change over the years; she taught her how to keep herself clean when the bleeding began and how to deal with the pain that it brought — the curse; she told her how desired her genitals would be and braced her for the vulgarity of men; she taught her how to dress to hide her budding curves and how to flaunt them if she needed to; she taught her everything associated with adolescence, vague in the specifics but detailed where she needed to be. Bábi absorbed the information with earnest but it was processed through a filter as fine as thread, forged through a life lived with an unquenchable thirst for excess. Becoming a woman did not excite her the way it excited her mother, rather, it disturbed her. She did not want to suffer this curse through her adult life. She did not want to become an object of affection for young men, or learn to hide herself to elude them. These concerns, responsibilities, and emotions were thrust so suddenly upon her that she felt herself buckling under the pressure — only there was nowhere to fall. Even dropping to her knees, it all came crashing down on top of her; the burden of womanhood, marriage, her sex, and the constraints of life. For a long time after her conversation with her mother, she felt suffocated and afraid, and she would have panic attacks that took hours to overcome — walking in circles in the field, clutching her chest and gasping for air. Life, it seemed, was closing in around her, and to sate this feeling of helplessness, she would seek out the only remaining horse in the stable to ride up and down the valley until she was dizzy.

It was not long before fear of the parameters in which she was bound turned to resentment and grew from there like a flame. She rebelled, denouncing her mother’s open desires for her to find a young suitor and bare his children; displaying a wanton disregard for couth, refusing to tie back her hair and running barefoot through the pigs’ pen. She would let the blood drench her undergarments and nightgown until it crusted and ran afoul, rebuffing advances to clean her in flagrant expressions of defiance against Linnea, affirming both the wildness in her and her refusal to conform. And try as she did to hold onto a sense of urgency for the present, all things moved steadily toward the bittersweet pangs of adolescence. She fell into a state of sadness that confused her parents. When she was not missing in the woods for half the day, she was usually sitting on the hill under the great tree staring vacantly at the valley, or walking quietly through and around the shed, the animals, and the stable. Something inside of her was fighting this plan that the world had laid out and she sought it — to champion it. But it was as fleeting as the breeze and each time she felt the rising of emotional clarity, she reached for it, but it would vanish — and she would be left alone to endure.

A series of events occurred during the beginning stages of her adolescence that would come to define a new relationship with her mother. It happened in the height of her thirteenth summer though the seeds were sown over a year before, when her mother first started collecting the textiles she would need to build the cursed dress. And what a dress it was — it’s gentle fabric the color of clear skies with ivory trim along the breast and hem, a delicate frill on the sleeveless shoulders a shade lighter than pale blue, and a near-perfect fit for her developing body. She was to wear it that afternoon for a courting ceremony in town where boys and girls would flit to one another in young earnest. Naturally, she refused, but her mother was an iron wall that day. She had suffered years of rebuked advances and guidance on her future and Linnea was determined not to suffer today. But Bábi brought the fury. She screamed and paced through the kitchen and the garden, arguing at the full strength of her voice — it rang across the valley. This time, Björn did not intervene. She fought for hours, through the morning, through her bath and careful grooming, up until it was time to put the wretched thing on. She had worn summer and spring gowns before but what this one symbolized was a thing to which she could not concede. It represented everything that she fought each day to avoid and everything in her future that moved a step closer to the present. It angered and enraged her. Cornered and without an avenue of escape, she gave silent consent with boiling blood and eyes on fire, and dressed herself in the room. It was slipped on with disgust and fastened at the back of the neck with hate. It held her waist delicately, accentuating the subtle curve of her body, and the hem reached just above her knees, low enough to cover her scars. She hated it — the color, the fit, the soft fabric, even the smell which reminded her of weeds. The fit of the bustline was tight and the fabric pressed her breasts flat against her chest, perhaps it’s only redeeming quality. In the least, she would not have to worry about flaunting those too. When Linnea saw her carefully planned work, Bábi swore that she was glowing. The afternoon pressed forward and each hour spent trapped in the dress brought mounting discomfort. On the road near the square in town, children her age drifted about in small groups. The boys held delicate white flowers that they presented to girls that suit their fancy. The girls dawdled about, batting lashes and twirling in their summer dresses to flirt and tease. They all seemed content to participate in the ceremony, she observed, and the parents, all mothers, wore blissful grins. It only made her want to leave even more. She drifted on the outskirts of the group, near the edge of the road, Linnea watching her with sidelong glances. She saw the disinterest rising in Bábi and watched as her eyes saw past the town — beyond the field. She was running, through the forest, the wind in her hair and the twigs broken beneath her feet. Her sanded leather shoes pressed into the mud but she did not retread. There was an ache deep in her belly and she took a long breath of the hot afternoon air. Bábi had bled early that day but Linnea was careful to ensure that she kept herself clean. From the tangible world, pulling her away from her thoughts, a boy with straw-colored hair approached from the group. When she was certain that her mother had drifted away and the other women were not watching, she glowered at him with hateful eyes. But he was unphased, holding his flower out to her with a vacant stare. She moved away but he persisted, following close and reaching toward her with the unwanted gift. To ensure there was no miscommunication, she knocked it from his hand into the mud. He went for it but it was ruined so he instead moved toward again, touching her arm as if to pull her to him. She pushed him away and he nearly fell to the ground. However fleeting the sensation, something about the surprise he wore made her feel better. Another boy, hiding behind him, offered a flower of his own but she swung violently to thwart him. Certain there was nothing ambiguous about her actions — that her feelings could not be misconstrued, she became quietly alarmed when he came for her again. She made sure to knock this one off of his feet. This escalated rather quickly and before anyone could intervene, she was jostling on the ground with four boys. There was nothing intentional about the reluctant blows that they served in the fray but she was violent and deliberate — intent on harming every one of them.

When Linnea returned to her daughter, she found her in the mud, holding a boy down with an arm around his neck and three other boys lay crying in the muck clutching their stomachs, legs, and arms. In a blind fury, she grabbed at her and dragged her across the ground by her hair. Bábi screamed and tried to squirm free, but her mother had her, and suddenly she felt terribly wounded. As she was dragged through the road, she could feel the barren gazes of the other children and their parents burning holes straight through her.

When they returned home, she stripped off the sullied dress so violently that the neck strap was torn, and while her mother tried reaching to salvage it, she tossed it out into the grass. She was slapped, she hit back, and then she was whipped with a leather strap. She was left lying in the garden, crying and writhing on the dirt to distract herself from the pain. It was the most demoralized and betrayed that she had ever felt. It was the first time in her life that her ability to express herself had been suppressed with violence. It was also the first time that her mother had intentionally hurt her outside of the constraints of discipline and the privacy of their home. Dragging her by her hair away from the scene was not a necessary reprieve but rather an indulgence for Linnea’s rage, and, even though she lacked the eloquence to describe it, Bábi understood this and it made her hateful. Clad in her cloth undergarments, she sat beneath the great tree to watch the sunset beyond the horizon. A silent resentment for her mother festered inside of her and she knew that she needed to release it into the world lest it would consume her. In a moment of absolute clarity, she stole the shears from the kitchen and brought them to the hillside where she took them to her crown. Holding onto brilliantly black hair as if it were a horse’s tail, she snipped near the base of her head in one clean cut. The wind took her and the remnants of the crepis flower seeds lifted into the twilight like summer snow. She held the delicate curls out in front of her and let them slip away, carried across the plain, through the wind, lost in the twilight. In spite of the lingering pain against her back and her thighs from the strap, she felt like she had just woken from a long, dizzying slumber. In the succeeding moments, she saw all of the frustrations and faults in her life personified through her mother: womanhood, growing older, maturity, marriage, children, and courting. She forced her to wear that dress today — to attend the courting ceremony — to attack those boys — and to toss the gown into the grass. The blame fell upon her for the entire predicament but she suffered no reprisal. She hated her, and had never been more certain about it. Linnea marveled at her hair more than any other part of her body and this rebellious act, Bábi knew, would hurt her most of all.

She boldly lingered outside of the home, in the garden, for a long time before her mother discovered her. She was furious but not in the way that Bábi had expected; Linnea gasped through an ineligible murmur and ran her fingers through what was left of her daughter’s gentle mane, as if desperately searching for a reminder of the raven tassels that had brought her all the joy in the world; and she cried, which Bábi had only seen her do when she spoke to the dead. There was no further punishment, but rather a somber air that followed her back into the house. Her face a remorseless mask, Bábi walked by the open front door several times, glaring into the home at Linnea seated in the kitchen sobbing into her palms. Her father took her to the shed that night and it was the first time she could remember feeling as though he were truly upset with her. He told her how cruel it was of her to do what she had done and how deeply she may have wounded her mother. She said nothing in retaliation, which frustrated him, and before long, he left her there to tend to his wife. She walked along the walls of the shed, remembering the sheep and their wool collected on the ground. She remembered their shaved, pale bodies and their screams. In the chasms of her memory lay a gateway to the past, and she went through it, spending the rest of the evening replaying the resplendent moments of her youth. By midnight, she had drifted toward the horse loose in the pasture. Her body was wracked with terrible cramps and she did not want to be alone anymore but she also did not want to go home and face an uncertain tension. She ushered the mare to her with a gentle coo and, drawn to her charisma, it did not buck when she mounted it, or even when she used its golden mane for leverage. She lay flat on its back under the night sky and buried her face into its hair to forget the world. The pain never stopped, even after she fell asleep, following her into her dreams. She woke once in the middle of the night to find the world a dark wonder. The valley was bathed in the gentle glow of the moonlight and her mare was awake, moving them slowly through the pasture. There was a calm in this that was the most peaceful thing she had ever felt. Falling back to sleep was no task. When she woke again in the morning, she was in her bed with the sheets nestled over her body and a pillow beneath her head. There was a pink rag in a bowl of warm water by the side of the mattress and she found that her undergarments had been removed and she had been wiped clean. Only her mother would have done this. There was a sobering sadness in that fact which kept her from rising to meet the morning.

Her feelings changed over the following days as she watched Linnea from a tentative and emotional distance. As if nothing had changed since she was a small child, she watched her cleaning their clothes by the basin in the garden, scrubbing the stains from their breeches, vests, gowns, and garments; hanging them to dry on the same line that she rigged in the mornings when they would play together; washing the bowls, mugs, and skillets in the kitchen, and tirelessly tending to the welfare of the home; sweeping the leaves, dirt, and filth from the floor of her daughter’s sleeping room and dusting off the bed and pillow. She cooked, cleaned, and tended each day without fail. And when it was time to serve meals, she would go to the open door to call for her, but find her watching nearby and offer the faintest smile and quiet invitation. It was as if they had never bickered at all. There was something fascinating and disheartening about this that Bábi tried desperately to understand. One morning, when she was sure that she would not be seen, she found the ruined courting dress in her parents’ room. When the garden was silent, she took the garment to the basin and washed the fabric clean just as she had observed time and again. And when she finished, she took a needle and thread and gave the greatest effort she could to sew the neck strap back onto the bodice. She had no training in the art and she poked her fingers over and over for hours until she was satisfied with her work. It was hung to dry on the line with the sheets. She lingered until Linnea saw it. There were no words, but she could see the infectious smile that lit her face and, in spite of herself, she did the same. They embraced and Bábi felt an overwhelming sense of relief — as though she had released a terrible burden that barred the joy from her days. She was not sorry for what she had done — she was sure of that; but she wanted to be the reason that her mother smiled again.

Their relationship expanded, strengthened, and became endlessly complex during that summer. They spent nights wrestling between the sheets and telling stories of the world both true and fantastic; eating warm bread under the sun, Bábi dangling over the side of the roof, and Linnea on the grass beneath her toes, tossing spackled black crumbs onto the dirt that the crows pecked away; walking through the forest with her in the lead, Linnea following close behind, clumsily skipping over roots and nearly tripping on air; and working together to plant new flowers to expand the garden around her brother’s grave. Sometimes, on bad days, they would argue through the home and out the door, their voices carried across the plain, and Björn would have to pull them apart.