Unnatural Creatures

“…and came after her one night in the form of a laidly worm to eat her,” Gilla’s mother finished. “You’re learning about Margaret of Antioch?”

Gilla boggled at her. “Saint Margaret, yeah. How’d you know?”

“How?” Her mother swivelled the rickety steno chair round to face Gilla and grinned, brushing a tangle of dreadlocks back from her face. “Sweetie, this is your mother, remember? The professor of African and Middle Eastern studies?”

“Oh.” And her point? Gilla could tell that her face had that “huh?” look. Mum probably could see it too, ’cause she said:

“Gilla, Antioch was in ancient Turkey. In the Middle East?”

“Oh yeah, right. Mum, can I get micro-braids?”

Now it was her mum looking like, huh? “What in the world are those, Gilla?”

Well, at least she was interested. It wasn’t a “no” straight off the bat. “These tiny braid extensions, right? Maybe only four or five strands per braid. And they’re straight, not like…Anyway, Kashy says that the hairdressing salon across from school does them. They braid the extensions right into your own hair, any colour you want, as long as you want them to be, and they can style them just like that. Kashy says it only takes a few hours, and you can wear them in for six weeks.”

Her mum came over, put her warm palms gently on either side of Gilla’s face and looked seriously into her eyes. Gilla hated when she did that, like she was still a little kid. “You want to tame your hair,” her mother said. Self-consciously, Gilla pulled away from her mum’s hands, smoothed back the cloudy mass that she’d tied out of the way with a bandanna so that she could do her homework without getting hair in her eyes, in her mouth, up her nose. Her mum continued, “You want hair that lies down and plays dead, and you want to pay a lot of money for it, and you want to do it every six weeks.”

Gilla pulled her face away. The book slid off her knee to the floor. “Mum, why do you always have to make everything sound so horrible?” Some of her hair had slipped out of the bandanna; it always did. Gilla could see three or four black sprigs of it dancing at the edge of her vision, tickling her forehead. She untied the bandanna and furiously retied it, capturing as much of the bushy mess as she could and binding it tightly with the cloth.

Her mother just shook her head at her. “Gilla, stop being such a drama queen. How much do micro-braids cost?”

Gilla was ashamed to tell her now, but she named a figure, a few bucks less than the sign in the salon window had said. Her mother just raised one eyebrow at her.

“That, my girl, is three months of your allowance.”

Well, yeah. She’d been hoping that Mum and Dad would pay for the braids. Guess not.

“Tell you what, Gilla; you save up for it, then you can have them.”

Gilla grinned.

“But,” her mother continued, “you have to continue buying your bus tickets while you’re saving.”

Gilla stopped grinning.

“Don’t look so glum. If you make your own lunch to take every day, it shouldn’t be so bad. Now, finish reading the rest of the story.”

And Mum was back at her computer again, tap-tap-tap. Gilla pouted at her back but didn’t say anything, ’cause really, she was kind of pleased. She was going to get micro-braids! She hated soggy, made-the-night-before sandwiches, but it’d be worth it. She ignored the little voice in her mind that was saying, “every six weeks?” and went back to her reading.

“Euw, gross.”

“Now what?” her mother asked.

“This guy? This, like, laidly worm guy thing? It eats Saint Margaret, and then she’s in his stomach; like, inside him! and she prays to Jesus, and she’s sooo holy that the wooden cross around her neck turns back into a tree, and it puts its roots into the ground through the dragon guy thing, and its branches bust him open and he dies, and out she comes!”

“Presto bingo,” her mum laughs. “Instant patron saint of childbirth!”

“Why?” But Gilla thought about that one a little bit, and she figured she might know why. “Never mind, don’t tell me. So they made her a saint because she killed the dragon guy thing?”

“Well yes, they sainted her eventually, after a bunch of people tortured and executed her for refusing to marry that man. She was a convert to Christianity, and she said she’d refused him because he wasn’t a Christian. But Gilla, some people think that she wasn’t a Christian anymore either, at least not by the end.”

“Huh?” Gilla wondered when Kashy would show up. It was almost time for the party to start.

“That thing about the wooden cross turning back into a living tree? That’s not a very Christian symbol, that sprouting tree. A dead tree made into the shape of a cross, yes. But not a living, magical tree. That’s a pagan symbol. Maybe Margaret of Antioch was the one who commanded the piece of wood around her neck to sprout again. Maybe the story is telling us that when Christianity failed her, she claimed her power as a wood witch. Darling, I think that Margaret of Antioch was a hamadryad.”

“Jeez, Mum; a cobra?” That much they had learned in school. Gilla knew the word hamadryad.

Her mother laughed. “Yeah, a king cobra is a type of hamadryad, but I’m talking about the original meaning. A hamadryad was a female spirit whose soul resided in a tree. A druid is a man, a tree wizard. A hamadryad is a woman; a tree witch, I guess you could say. But where druids lived outside of trees and learned everything they could about them, a hamadryad doesn’t need a class to learn about it. She just is a tree.”

Creepy. Gilla glanced out the window to where black branches beckoned, clothed obscenely in tiny spring leaves. She didn’t want to talk about trees.

The doorbell rang. “Oh,” said Gilla. “That must be Kashy!” She sprang up to get the door, throwing her textbook aside again.

There was a young lady of Niger…

“It kind of creaks sometimes, y’know?” Gilla enquired of Kashy’s reflection in the mirror.

In response, Kashy just tugged harder at Gilla’s hair. “Hold still, girl. Lemme see what I can do with this. And shut up with that weirdness. You’re always going on about that tree. Creeps me out.”

Gilla sighed, resigned, and leaned back in the chair. “Okay. Only don’t pull it too tight, okay? Gives me a headache.” When Kashy had a makeover jones on her, there was nothing to do but submit and hope you could wash the goop off your face and unstick your hair from the mousse before you had to go outdoors and risk scaring the pigeons. That last experiment of Kashy’s with the “natural” lipstick had been such a disaster. Gilla had been left looking as though she’d been eating fried chicken and had forgotten to wash the grease off her mouth. It had been months ago, but Foster was still giggling over it.