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A day that has begun so right and filled with laughter is now slipping into night, and everything feels wrong. The smoke still hangs heavy in the air.
Gloreth clings tight to her mother’s kilt, and she feels a comforting hand ruffle her hair in response. Mother and father haven’t let her out of their sight since they found her frozen by the village edge, staring into the darkness of the forest beyond. It’s weird that she can’t even take a few steps now before one of them asks her why and where, but Gloreth knows it’s because they’re afraid. She’s afraid too. Everyone is.
The entire village is crammed into the hall with them, in a clamour of shouts and whispers and coughs. Some are bleeding from cuts hastily bandaged up and almost everyone is covered in soot. And they all stare at Gloreth; three dozen or more eyes fixed on her. Gloreth can’t help but squirm under all the attention, and she is sort of glad for her parents’ constant presence. At least she can hide behind them.
“How could you let this happen?” a voice rises above the others. It belongs to a tall man with a rake in hand who’s staring right at her. A neighbour, his face used to smile at her. His knuckles around the rake’s shaft are white. “She brought that thing into our village; we were all there!”
“Lower your voice; she couldn’t have known.” That’s mother, stepping in front of her. “We were all fooled.”
“Ha! Some of us more than others. I told you there was something wrong with that girl.”
“She banished it!” another voice pipes up. “I saw it! The monster ran away from her.”
“Who’s to say for how long? We have to alert the other villages...”
“How do you defend against…”
Father kneels in front of her, blocking out the arguing people. He’s trying to look calm, but she can tell that he is afraid too. “Honey, I know this is hard, but can you tell us what you saw? How did you banish that creature?“
Gloreth tries her best to find an answer. Nothing of the past hours seems real; it feels like a blurred dream. She remembers the fire, the smoke. But, standing out more clearly than anything else, she remembers the look in her friend’s eyes. She couldn’t make sense of it then; she’s never seen Nimona look like that. Now that she’s seen that same look on everyone’s faces, Gloreth has finally realized what it was: fear.
Nimona was afraid of her. An awful feeling settles in her stomach and she swallows. Father is still looking at her expectantly.
“I just…told her to go away.”
“And it listened to you?”
Of course. That’s something Gloreth likes about Nimona so much; she always listens. In the village, sometime she can shout and not be heard, but Nimona always hears her. But this is different. She’s never told her to go away before. And Nimona looked so…
No. Not Nimona. A monster. She has to remember that. It’s so hard to remember that.
“Why did it listen? How did you do that?” someone calls from the crowd.
“Does she have some kind of magical power?”
“…I’m telling you; with nothing but a toy sword…”
Father stands and raises his voice: “Tell you what; as far as I’m concerned, my daughter is a hero. She saved the village. Or does anyone here think they would have stepped up and faced that monster as bravely as she did?”
There are murmurs – but no dissenting ones – as, once again, the entire village stares at her. Gloreth wants to sink into the ground. She doesn’t feel like a hero. Mostly she feels sad, like she should be crying, but so far she hasn’t.
Then mother takes her by the hand and pulls her away. “Well, as far as I’m concerned, she’s been through enough today. Even heroes need their rest, right, honey?”
Gloreth nods, grateful for the escape. She follows mother outside, feeling everyone’s eyes boring into her back. She’s still clutching her wooden sword. Her hand hurts. She thinks she may have gotten a splinter. It’s easier to focus on that. Everything is so confusing.
Mother tucks her into bed, wordlessly. Gloreth senses there are words she wants to say, but doesn’t. In the silence, the questions that were drowned out by the noise rise up inside her again. They turn over in her head, looking for answers they can’t find, until one of them spills out:
“Mama, when did Nimona become a monster?”
Mother pauses, her hands stilling. When they resume, Gloreth can feel them shaking. “I think she’s always been one, honey.”
“But we played together! She wasn’t a monster then.”
“She hid it well.” There’s tears in mother’s eyes now. “Oh, Gloreth, I didn’t know! If I had, I’d never have let her get so close to you. All that time you were off alone…” She breaks off. “I’m so sorry I didn’t see it. We’re lucky you were near the village when she got you in her claws.”
Something about the way she says it doesn’t sit right with Gloreth. “She wasn’t hurting me, mama. We were just playing.”
“Until she turned into a bear!”
Gloreth looks at her blankly. It sounds like that statement should tell her something important, but she doesn’t get what.
All at once mama’s face falls. When she picks it back up, there’s shock written across it. “Gloreth, has she…has she done that before?!”
“Yeah.” Often. It’s amazing to watch and Gloreth really wants to do it too. “She can be a goldfish, or a bear, even a unicorn! Once she was an ape. She threw me so high I thought I was flying. She can fly, too…”
She stops when she notices how pale mother has gotten. Mother takes her by the arm and says, “Listen, Gloreth. Normal people don’t completely change who they are. If you see something do that, you stay away from it from now on, okay? It’s dangerous.”
She looks so scared. That’s when understanding hits Gloreth. Another question is answered. “Is that why she’s a monster? Is that what monsters do?”
Mother nods. She cups Gloreth’s cheek, her touch soft like she’s holding something fragile. “Promise me you’ll stay safe from now on?”
Gloreth nods, too. She’s wondered what made Nimona a monster. She never met one before. She never thought about what one looked like, or what they did. She thought the shape-changing was just Nimona. It was strange and new, but it wasn’t monstrous.
Now she knows better.
Long after mother has left, she lies awake in bed unable to sleep. Her thoughts just won’t quiet down. They keep coming back to Nimona’s face in the fire light, the fear.
She did the right thing. She knows that. In all the stories father read to her, monsters are evil creatures that lurk in the shadows, just waiting to ruin everything good. Nimona didn’t belong in the village, she belonged in the shadows. Gloreth did the right thing by telling her that.
It’s the ‘ruining everything good’ part that she’s stuck on. The time she spent with Nimona was good, and Nimona never ruined it. Nimona was fun to be with, to run with, to laugh with – to do everything with. Gloreth never had that much fun before she found her by the old well. Nimona was her best friend in the whole world. It doesn’t make sense why she would ruin it now, why she would attack her friends at the village.
Maybe it was all a misunderstanding. Maybe it just looked like she was attacking. Sometimes her different forms can be scary, even to Gloreth. She’s screamed more than once when Nimona crawled over her hand as a spider, and she swore Nimona did that on purpose. Maybe that’s what happened; she wanted to play a joke and the others didn’t get it. And then maybe mother was wrong; maybe shape-changing wasn’t a monster thing. Mother had never met a monster either, right? Maybe…
There's a loud thump against her window.
With a yelp Gloreth jumps out of bed, entangling herself in the bedsheets. She grabs her sword and holds it trembling at the window, waiting for a monster to come in. She’s had it wrong, and they were right. The monster is back to finish what it started.
A second passes. Two. After 30, Gloreth gathers her courage and starts to slowly approach the window, sword held in front of her. Her trembling hands reach for the window pane. With a mighty yell she throws it open, her weapon raised, ready to smack any monster that tries to jump out at her.
There’s a large, round bumblebee on her window sill, lying on its back. It’s trying to right itself, small legs struggling uselessly in the air. It must still be dazed from smacking into the glass.
Gloreth breathes a sigh of relief. She drops her sword, feeling suddenly very foolish. That bumblebee nest has been under their roof forever. She gingerly takes the little thing and sits it back upright. As soon as she pulls away, it takes off and starts making its (wobbly) way back over to the nest, where a few of its friends are still buzzing around. Gloreth looks among them for a pink one. It was always easy to spot from a distance, because it would buzz around much noisier than the others and sometimes do loops in the…
She catches herself mid-thought. There won’t be a pink one anymore. Instead, Gloreth sees red; a flickering glow against the dark blue night. There’s a ring of torches around the burned village. The people holding them are staring outwards, into the darkness. They’re making sure that nothing else comes near.
That’s when the tears finally come. They spill off her cheek, landing on the wooden sword in her hand, and she throws it away with a sob. Suddenly there are two worlds where before there was only one. Now there is one with Gloreth, her parents and the village in it, and another with Nimona. She's a monster, and Gloreth isn't. They don't belong together anymore.
It is too big a thought, too scary. Gloreth pulls the blanket over her head to hide from it, willing sleep to come. Maybe tomorrow it will make sense. Maybe Nimona will poke her awake with a blade of grass and they’ll laugh and it’ll all have been a bad dream.
She'd like that.