Giantess

            Alice hates the way she makes herself small. She’d like to finish off the bottle labeled Drink Me. She sees the little cakes and wishes she didn’t feel fated to eat them.

            Alice imagines what it would be like not to worry whether the house will contain her. Why must she be contained?

            She makes promises to herself: One day she’ll take up space until the walls fall away. One day she’ll drown them in her tears.

Visionary

            When she has a tongue but no feet, the Mermaid’s song is so astonishingly lovely that all the creatures of the ocean pause to listen. When she has feet but no tongue, she dances so beautifully that all the creatures of the earth are brought to joyous tears.

            But the Mermaid does not want to choose. She wants song and dance. She wants feet and tongue. She wants to exist beyond the rules of sea and land. She dreams of carving out her own realm.

            Whenever she tries to give voice to these wants, though, the words slip through her fingers, and the sentences fall apart like sea-foam.

Herald

            Persephone lingers at the river Lethe. Each spring she stands on the bank and wonders if the current’s strong enough to carry her away.

            The year rips her in half. She’s divided down the middle, a pomegranate cracked open and evenly distributed. Battle lines have been drawn between her breasts, carving her up like a bird at a feast.

            She is the harvest, and she is the famine. She is the autumn, and she is the spring. She is the end, and she is the beginning.

            Who would she be if she were new?

Artist

            The silent girl listens with envy to the sound of crunching bones as her brothers transform back into swans. For fifteen minutes a day, they are cursed with their human form. When they take back to the sky, she remains behind to weave nettles into shirts for them.

            The fiber cuts her palms as she runs it through her spinning wheel. Blisters on her fingers weep as she threads the yarn on her loom. She says nothing; she asks for nothing. Speaking would undo all of her work.

            In her dreams she, too, is a bird: free to fly, free to sing, free to leave. Waking up hurts like crunching bones. She weaves herself into the fabric and imagines she has wings.

Scholar

            Eve talks to Lilith through the garden wall. Every morning they gather mushrooms side by side with only an ivy-twined barrier between them. They cannot see each other, but with their voices they paint pictures as vivid as anything the eyes can register.

            Lilith does not envy Eve, and for that reason Eve envies Lilith—how sweet must freedom be to be worth being outcast from the garden?

            From her den in the wall, the Snake is a witness. She is a creature made to live in the narrow divide between the two worlds. She sees the good and ill of both women’s lives. There is no trickery when the Snake offers Eve the apple. The apple is a gift, one that Eve takes with perfect knowledge of what she will gain and lose by accepting it.