In Horror Movies
The girls are always murdered, or murderers, or monsters. Sometimes they’re more than one of those things, or all three at once.
The girls are usually not little children, but they are usually not past their early twenties, either.
Growing up when you are a girl, or shaped like one, means getting murdered, or murdering someone, or changing into a monster.
You lose your baby teeth and your fangs grow in. There is so much more blood. Clumps of dark, wrinkled matter disgorge themselves from your body in gouts of red syrup. It is a rite of passage. A coming-of-age narrative. Red streaks your blonde hair, or your white ribbons, or your pink tulle. Your black hair hides the blood, or your red dress hides it, your red lipstick, your long black sleeves, the long muddy hem of your white nightgown. Your skin is too hot, or too cold; we can tell that even through a one-way observation window in the county asylum, or through a TV screen. There is something wrong with you.
Being a girl is what’s wrong with you, and it is also the stark, ironic contrast to the wrongness.
Cheap plastic barrettes studded with glitter, shaped like butterflies and flowers. A rusty scalpel. A sharp and deadly axe hefted in two small, delicate hands. A swarm of insects pushing out from a sweet little cupid’s-bow mouth, all hunger and humming, blocking the light.
They are afraid of you because you make them want to hurt you. They hate you because you make them want to hurt you. They want to fuck you because they’re afraid of you, and because they hate you, and because your flesh is ripe and pinchable, because your teeth are small brilliant seeds. And those teeth could, at any moment, sprout into long brilliant knives. They can never tell for sure what might happen.
You’re safest to them dead. If you’re a pretty corpse oozing from a slit in your throat. If you’re a skeleton in a bridal gown in a pine box. If you’re blue-lipped under the water with pearls for eyes. Then they can make you anything they want you to be. They can make you a tragedy and a lesson. They do not have to deal with your body’s propensity to change in unpredictable ways.
Decay is predictable. And there are preservatives to keep your body pliant and fresh.
If you survive, or resurrect yourself, it will be in blood and pain and fear. What you’ve been through inflicted back threefold on the whole outside world. Maybe you will come for them with pointed, inch-long incisors. Maybe you will come for them with piano wire and a straight razor.
Maybe you will come for them through a haunted video tape. Gore-soaked and angry in a fancy gown. Covered in bristling thorns of hair and seething skin, no longer recognizable as anything
human, or female. With all the power of your unsound mind and thwarted heart. With power no girl should ever access. With power that comes from being a girl, or from having been a girl, once.
Childhood ends, when it ends, in carnage.
Briar Ripley Page is the author of Florida queer gothic novella Corrupted Vessels and a forthcoming collection of short stories, both from swallow::tale press. They’ve also written and self-published an erotic dystopian novel, Body After Body. Apart from that, Briar’s fiction has appeared in places like smoke + mold, Delicate Friend, and The Book of Queer Saints. Briar recently moved to London and enjoys watching the flocks of feral parakeets and the horse that lives next to a nearby motorway. In cyberspace, you can find them at briarripleypage.xyz and on Twitter as @flameswallower.
