Word spread quickly of the monstrosity dragging its way through the night. Marilyn made no secret of herself. Her screams traveled for miles, and her path cut through the backroads to reach a main thoroughfare. Morbidly curious onlookers approached her as she passed through and outside their towns. As she had unwittingly done with Penn in the clinic, Marilyn connected to the people around her, even to those well beyond, through what little antlers they had left. Some of them only wanted to see the spectacle. Others seemed drawn by a terrible familiarity with the pain in her cries.
Then the police came. Her audience scattered as every weapon available to the state was brought against her, but the divine nature of her form showed itself. Their projectiles couldn’t so much as scratch her. The goddess had granted Marilyn more than she’d known: this was not the same material Penn had been able to carve into with a whittling knife.
Next they tried offensive magic. It may as well have been dust thrown into the storm that surrounded her. As they drew together to plan their next move, Marilyn raised her forelegs into the air and changed the pitch of her screams to get their attention.
“Stop this,” she ordered. “I’m not here to hurt you, but I won’t be stopped and I won’t be silenced anymore.” She felt their fear and disbelief. “Have I harmed any one of you? Stand aside.”
“Goddess help us,” one of them said as the group fell back.
The Stagmother turned to him and locked her eyes on his, but he couldn’t even see her in the dark and chaos. She asked Marilyn flatly, “Should we unmake them?”
“What?”
A change in the officers’ emotions distracted Marilyn; relief and cautious hope came over them. “They’re ready,” one shouted, confirming something they all knew already.
“Did you say something?” she asked her goddess.
“Don’t let them worry you. I won’t allow them to hurt you ever again.”
Marilyn carried on. She was more than halfway home. New notes crept into her cacophonous song as the hours passed and night turned to morning. Triumph and a caustic, howling joy that challenged all who could hear to try anything they liked.
A grey van crept toward her from the east. The flow of traffic had long since dried along this road; it was here for her. The van crawled up a hill alongside her route, some tweety or thirty feet ahead of her, and came to a stop there. A dozen people emerged with determination and anxiety pouring from them like plumes of smoke from a house fire. Each joined hands, the identical charms around their necks glowing in unison as they united in purpose.
A sphere of silver light enveloped Marilyn. She reached out with one foreleg to test it and found a solid, unyielding force. With a flap of her goddess’s delicate wings, the sphere disintegrated before her, the remnant silver sparks flying outward.
“Do you see her?” The goddess asked.
Marilyn concentrated on the magicians gathered in a nervous huddle on the hill. A beacon of self-assurance among them, Healer Fenton prepared to try the barrier spell again.
Everything else fell out of her awareness. Instinct and rage took over, and she seized Fenton’s antlers with such force it sent the healer stumbling. It wasn’t merely a connection- Marilyn had as much control over Fenton’s antlers as she’d had over her own. She dragged Fenton by them, pulling her down the hill, over the rocky field, through roadside thickets; when Marilyn remembered the frailty of the human form she had only left behind hours ago, she remembered it with bitter gladness. Fenton fell before her. The goddess calmed her maelstrom and looked down in silence.
Marilyn split her own abdomen open, putting her corpse on full display, and Fenton screamed.
“We should unmake her,” the Stagmother told Marilyn, not allowing anyone else to hear.
Fenton scrambled to her feet. She cried out, “What have you done to that poor girl?”
Again, the Stagmother appealed to her. “Help me. We’ll do it together. It’s no different from dispelling a charm, really. Unmake her and the rest of these selfish, arrogant, unfeeling things my children have become.”
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Marilyn slammed both forelegs into the ground, piercing straight through the pavement. She addressed Fenton first. “YOU DID THIS TO ME.”
The healer staggered backwards, hand clasped uselessly over her little charm as she whispered in horror, “Marilyn?”
“You could have saved me.” She made certain the others nearby could hear. Marilyn reached further. Her will spread over road, through the towns, across the cities, until every last pair of antlers in the land were in her grasp.
The goddess called another gale to pass through Marilyn, forcing the entire population to hear her wails. Fear rolled over them like a tide.
The goddess told her, “I’ll show you how I made them. You can undo the magic.”
A different kind of fear sparked from three antlers not far from her. Not self-preservation, but worry— concern for her wellbeing. Penn and her mothers had finally found one another. Momma B had her arms wrapped protectively around Penn while Momma G searched the dull pink horizon for answers.
“No,” Marilyn said in private. “My goddess, Mother of Stags, forgive me for refusing you. But if you’re finished with your children, let me have them.”
The little sparrow rose from Marilyn’s shoulder to drift above her, wings spread out and eerily still. “What would you do with them?”
“It’s finally safe for me to be kind. I was a good person. I deserve to do the good I want without being suspected, misunderstood, or hurt for it. I would help them.”
“If you had asked for their sake, I would have denied you.”
Marilyn drew her forelegs out of the ground. Healer Fenton watched in agonized confusion, trying to understand what she was seeing, and hopelessly far from understanding what she had done. “They’re not all like her, Stagmother.”
“What they’re like will no longer be any concern of mine. I renounce them. Do what you will; I won’t stop you. But you should know, even with the blessings I have granted you, when I am gone they can and will still hurt you.”
“Not like before. Whatever they can say or do to me, they can’t lie now, can’t tell me I don’t know what I know. I think I can take anything other than that.”
With affection in her tone, the goddess replied, “We’ll see if you feel the same in a thousand years.”
“Then I will see you again?”
“You’re the last of my children. Whenever you’re ready to leave, I’ll come for you. I have one last gift for you, Marilyn.” The goddess flapped her wings once, sending a shower of silver dust to coat Marilyn’s body. It coalesced along her back and sprouted two delicate wings made of pale light. “In case you need to scream again.”
The little sparrow broke out of its unnatural pose and flitted away, indistinguishable from any other save for the fact that no animals had yet returned. “Thank you, Mother,” Marilyn said softly.
She stretched her new wings wide and reestablished her connection to the people she had taken on as her own. Marilyn flapped her wings and sent her shrieks to each and every one.
“My children,” she called out once the noise had died down. “I am the Mother of Stags. You have forgotten yourselves, forgotten your goddess, but I take pity on you. The antlers you despised were a divine gift, rejected and wasted by you. I restore that gift now.”
Marilyn took hold of her people and bid their antlers grow. She guided each branch and prong, pulling them higher and longer, ripping away their velvet in bloody strips. Once all of her children wore the same magnificent crown, she went one step further and warped most of them as she had her own, wrenching them open to catch and torture the air. Marilyn spared a handful from this treatment: Penn, her mothers, the Pine Valley Healing Clinic workers, and the woman who had helped her realize she was sick— Lillian, she learned.
To the rest, she explained, “You will carry the pain you’ve caused with you. If you want to shed this weight, listen for my next call. Come to me. Beg me for forgiveness.”
She let them go.
The goddess was long gone, Fenton had retreated to her compatriots up the hill, and Marilyn was alone again. Dropping her serious intonations, she said to herself, “We’ll work our way up to kindness.”
***
Marilyn reached her mothers’ house by late morning. They took their daughter’s former body into their arms and wept. Though Marilyn’s presence was a comfort, her appearance frightened them. She could feel Momma B wrestling with a sense of especially nervous awe while Momma G tried to reconcile grief with gratitude. It would simply take time for her mothers to adjust.
Penn, on the other hand, only needed to hear that Marilyn had chosen this form herself, and they were immediately in love. Half threatening, half promising, Penn went on at length about how they were going to carve magnificent figures of her. They lamented no longer being able to share sweets with her until finding out that Marilyn could still sense the world around her, at which point they launched into a new tirade of all the foods the two of them were going to try. The love Marilyn felt radiating from them all the while was almost too much to take in.
Marilyn didn’t need shelter, food, or water. She did need sanctuary and space. It was Momma G who suggested a forest clearing. She knew of one more than large enough for Marilyn— a hilly patch of tall grass and fern hidden not far from her and Momma B’s camping spot. They could all bring their tents and stay with her anytime she wanted. Penn offered to stay with her that very night.
In the end, Penn never left. Days in a tent turned to weeks in a stick shelter, then months fortifying a more permanent structure. Marilyn tended to the pilgrims seeking forgiveness while Penn braided vines into rope, collected sap, coaxed moss to grow. In their spare time, the two of them made art together.
The children of the young Stagmother, all sensitive to such things, began to take Marilyn’s growing sense of peace on as their own, easing into an honest, vulnerable, and utterly foreign way of life with the aid of her contentment.
