The Tragedy of Ferdinand
by JoSelle Vanderhooft(Loosely based on John Webster's play The Duchess of Malfi.)
It's raining nails tonight, and hammers. They smash roofs into crystal powder, pop wet roads like champagne corks. All through the trees the night eyes watch, green and sharp as overhanging leaves. From the forest, a snakeskin boot, a tapered leg tight in black jeans.
Emerging, Ferdinand puts up his sable hood, praying he'll conceal the mushroom nose, the scissor teeth. His fur-lined ears prick like ziggurats, anticipating cars and walkers between the raindrops. But everything is wet and still as the church yard, as an open grave.
His sister moved into her house four years ago, clutching her three children like carpet bags beneath half-moon arms. One of them, the little girl, had black hair. His sister's hair had always been brown, just like his, before the transformations. Although her steward always wore a hat, a ridiculous old derby, moon-grey and peaked at the top, Ferdinand knew his hair was black as a millipede's legs.
He also knew they lived here, even though her address was still 1214 Malfi Boulevard. He'd hidden in the rose bushes watching them move in, digging his fists into the thorns to keep from leaping out and snapping his jaws around her lover's neck. But back then it would have looked ridiculous, and he knew it. A man pricked with thorns leaping from the Sweet Juliets and biting his fat neck. "Brother Bites Duchess' Steward!" the headlines would declaim. So, a transformation was in order. But what kind?
When he was seventeen, he'd woken up one morning and smashed his fist through a window because he had to. Because they'd given him a choice; break it or tell her what you really want. Weeping like overstuffed crocodiles and poisoned fountains, his parents shut him up in a glass and steel cocoon.
Here, doctors with hands sharp and precise as a mantis's forced blackberries and wasps down his throat each day, until the world shifted back into focus. When he finally came home he watched Gilligan's Island, ate ice cream, and went to bed. And things were normal, as long as he kept eating from the jar filled with mollusks and bird's eyes.
The day after they moved in, he took the writhing bottle, closed the cap and threw it in the river. That night the change began – his nails twisted into claws, his teeth grew into fangs, and his eyes were shot with blood.
Now the rose thorns didn't touch him, but neither could his human hands. It was getting harder and harder to change back, harder still to stay away.
Tonight there is a party in her house. Though the rain-streaked window their shadows paint the wall – husband and wife embrace, the children bumble at their feet. It's like a tryptic, closed and hiding horrors. It's like Eden.
He takes a final swig from the bottle in his hands. The fire inside makes his wolf condition something bearable. Hands heavy with two different kinds of water, he rears back, takes aim and throws it at the music, and the dancing, and the lights, and their embracing shadows free from rot. Free from snakes and scissor-beaked birds.
When it smashes, he's already down the street. Through the clouds of his breath, he looks back, eyes narrow in the rain.
The broken window gazes back at him, letting the night eyes out. Sharp scales glitter on the lawn like tiny apples. All the lights are out.
©JoSelle Vanderhooft
JoSelle Vanderhooft graduated from the University of Utah in 2004 and has been roaming around the United States ever since. Her first poetry collection, 10,000 Several Doors, will be released soon from Cat's Eye Publishing, and she is currently editing an anthology of lesbian-themed fairytales for Torquere Press to be released in May 2006. Additional poetic works can be found online at the Full Moon Review, in upcoming issues of Star*Line Magazine and the Prime Books anthology Jabberwocky #1. Her essay "The Most Important Letter of Your Life" is also slated to appear in an anthology of young gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender writing. A benefit for the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network (GLSEN) it is slated to be released from Random House/Knopf in 2006.