Short Story Inspiration
This story was inspired by a work of art I found in the Kunsthal in Rotterdam. To read more about it, check my earlier post, which is also an invitation to join me in this short story contest and win 10 Hive.
But now, story time!
My Cold Daughter, Salome
When my first child was born, my daughter, Salome, I feared for her life. Her fingers were cold as ice. I tried rubbing her little hands in mine. I blew on them, warming them with my breath, pressed her tiny fingers to my chest.
I wanted my baby to survive, I wanted her to be more alive than me. Because at that time, I had one foot in the realm of the living. And with the other I was descending into the realm of Hades, my toes already dipping into the river Styx.
The girl’s father, the man I was married to when I was sixteen, had gotten me there. He was a general in the Roman army, a strong man, but also jealous, and vengeful. He would find reasons to discipline me. He believed violence would correct my mistakes, and I feared him, because they were mistakes I wasn’t aware I was making.
Whenever he called me in to teach me, he would be sitting at his desk. To his right, he had his battle armour on display, polished and shining.
“Do you realise what you did?” he would ask me.
And then I had a few minutes to explain myself. While he slowly got up, walked over to the armour, and picked up the right hand metal glove. He would make his way over to where I was sitting, my final chance to apologise, to repent. And I would repent for everything I could think of, and I would beg him, desperate. But it was never enough.
He would stand over me, lift the glove and bring it down, again and again. And I would sit there, blubbering, bleeding, till he was satisfied. I tried looking him in the eye, tried appealing to his heart. But in his eyes, I found nothing. As he beat me, his expression did not change.
The cold metal bruised my skin and left deep cuts. But what worried me more than the bruises and cuts, was the state of my heart. As the years passed, I felt myself growing numb. As if my heart no longer pumped blood, but only ice. It was a cold that suffocated me. That made me question whether I was still a living, breathing human being. I felt removed from myself. As if I was watching myself from a distance, going through my daily routines.
On the day Salome was born, my husband was hosting important guests. He wanted me to serve them, but when I brought out the food and wine, I tripped. I fell to the floor, my white dress soaking up the red wine I had spilled. While I was on the floor, curled up into a ball, he kicked me, bruising me from my tailbone to my shoulders. The kicks caused internal bleeding and pushed me into labour, all of it a haze of pain and fever.
Hours later, they handed my baby to me.
“It’s a girl,” the doctor said.
For a second, I felt a new surge of hope. That maybe, this little girl would bring back meaning to my life. That this would be something to love, someone to reawaken my broken and lost spirit for. I pressed the baby to my chest.
But as I held Salome close, I felt how cold she was. Her tiny, icy fingers gripped mine. Strong, but inhumanly cold, and I was afraid. First, for her life. But later, as I realised that nothing I did could warm her, a second fear took over the first. The fear that my baby was corrupted.
Salome’s hands were cold like the metal glove, with which her father had hit me so many times. I was overwhelmed by the thought that the general’s cruelty had seeped into the girl. That his evil, torturing spirit had made her violent, heartless, even as a baby.
In my feverish state, I felt the urge to know whether I was right. I had to find out whether the girl really had a heart, or not. I pressed her little throat, desperate to find a pulse, pressing and pressing, my hands around her neck. Till the doctors were shouting.
“Get her off! Get her off! The baby can’t breathe!”
They pulled me away from her, and I was left alone in my own bloody mess. It dawned on me then, that in the very first minutes of her existence, I had almost taken Salome’s life. And that, if the father’s violent nature lived on in the girl, I had done exactly what was needed to fully awaken it.
Three years after Salome was born, the general died in battle. Slowly, as the years proceeded, the fear that gripped me subsided and my heart began to melt. The scars on my skin faded, and sometimes I would laugh out loud. There were moments where I enjoyed the orange and purple colours of a sunset. Or where the hot water of a bath comforted me.
But as I came back to life, I also worried about my daughter, a little more every day. My heart had a memory of warmth to return to. But Salome was cold from the day she was born. As the years passed, the signs of her violent nature worried me deeply.
Salome was eight, when on a beautiful summer day, I was reading a book on the veranda and Salome was playing outside. Just as I looked up, I saw her bend down to pick up a frog from a rock near the pond. I watched, as it sat in her cold hands, motionless. And then, holding the frog in one hand, with the other, she started pulling its limbs.
One by one, pulling, tearing, dissecting the frog with her iron grip. The expression on her face did not change. Not even when, after pulling a leg, the dark and wet insides of the frog came dripping down her arm. When she finished, she dropped the mutilated pieces to the grass and continued playing, without even washing or wiping the stains from her hands.
I called my little girl close to me, and asked her, “Why did you kill the frog?”
“I did not kill the frog,” She told me. “I just pulled at its body. I wanted to make it do things it couldn’t do before.”
Fear flooded me, again. Violent, heartless, I thought, as I took Salome’s hands in mine, always trying to warm them. I wanted to believe every child has to learn about life and death, at some point. That this was normal, that my girl was okay.
“Don’t do that again, Salome,” I told her, “and go wash your hands.”
I watched her closely that summer. When she was playing outside, I’d find a reason to be around her. She found another frog, twice, and poked at it with sticks, but didn’t hurt it. One time I saw her bending over something, fascinated. When I asked one of the maids what Salome was looking at, she said it was a dead rat that the cat had brought in.
Summer ended, and we spent more time indoors. And the next year, Salome went out into the fields for her games, instead of playing in the gardens. And the image of the frog’s juices running down her arm faded from my mind.
It was three years later, when I was on my way to the market with the maids, that we passed a dog in an alley not far from our house. It was whining when I got to it. Its limbs were folded in unnatural angles. And when I looked closer, I saw that fine incisions had been made to cut tendons and muscle, allowing the animals body to stretch beyond its normal capacity.
When I came home, Salome was sitting at the kitchen table. This time her hands were clean, but the knife with the fine blade was right beside her. I sat down with her and asked her what she had done to the dog.
“I was helping the dog,” she said.
“How were you helping the dog?” I asked her, desperately.
“There is a hole in the fence surrounding the dog’s garden. He always barks in front of it, he wants to chase the neighbour’s cat. I knew what he needed, to get through that hole. And I gave it to him. But he didn’t know what to do with it.”
It was then that I realised that I did not know how to speak to my child. That I had no clue how to warm Salome’s hands, or her heart. She had no inner compass, and all I could think of to do was to give her rules.
“You cannot force other beings beyond their boundaries, my love,” I told her, holding her face in my hands. “Imagine what it would feel like if someone did to you, what you did to the dog.”
I did not realise, of course, how what I had meant to be a rule, was taken by Salome as a suggestion.
It was when Salome was about fourteen years old, that I was personally introduced to Herod, the king. And I fell in love, for the first time in my life. From the terraces surrounding his palace, we watched the purple and orange sunsets together. We made love, in front of the bedchamber’s fireplace, in secret corners of the royal gardens, in private areas of the cities bath houses. I felt alive, more than ever, and happy.
The one thing reminding me of my suffering was my daughter. And I let her slip out of my sight. I spent less and less time with her, hoping, perhaps, that if I forgot about her, she would simply fade away. Like a painful memory, pushed into oblivion by everyday waking life.
But Salome continued her peculiarities. Her sense of violence disturbed, seeing it as a means with which to achieve her own twisted ends. After I requested her not to force other beings, she directed her attention away from animals, and started working on herself.
While I was away, enjoying the rich dinners at court, dressing up and making new friends, getting undressed as I spent the nights with Herod, Salome created a vision of herself, in which she would be invincible. Unstoppable. She wanted to push herself beyond her natural abilities, and violence and force were her tools. She used sharp, precise blades, to cut tendons and muscles, a little bit at a time. And after inflicting the damage, she would stretch, and train, and control the healing process.
All her time went into building her body to be flexible and powerful. But I didn’t know, because I was not paying attention. Salome asked me for dancing tutors, and I conceded, happy that she had a regular interest. I did not interfere with her classes, and it was only later that I understood she used them as part of her program to recreate herself.
The king made me his second wife, and on the night of our wedding, he told me he wanted to have a baby with me. As he did, my body stiffened, the memories of pain always just around the corner. Stroking my hair, he asked me what was wrong. And I told him about my first husband. About the metal glove he used on me, and the kicks that sent me into labour. And that was all I said. Because the other part, the part about Salome and her icy cold fingers, and what I knew she did with them, I could not tell.
And Herod stroked my hair, tears welling up in his eyes. As he held me close, he told me about the horrible things he would have done to my first husband, had he still been alive. I rested my head on his shoulder, feeling comforted by his protective love.
We sipped our wine and he held my hand. And then, when I did not expect it, Herod said, “I want to meet your daughter.”
I was not fast enough to think of a reason to deny his request, and I told Herod I would bring Salome along to a dinner party. But I did not want my husband to speak to her. At all cost, I wanted to hide her violent nature. So I told him that Salome would come and dance in front of the court when the occasion was right.
In those days, there was a prophet, a strange man, called John, who baptised people in water. And to the crowds, he spoke ill of the king’s second marriage. Herod, annoyed, threw the man in the dungeons, below his palace. And he planned an extra party, just to show the world how proud he was of me as his wife. We planned this to be the party where Salome would dance.
Preparations went on for weeks, and Salome practiced her part with her tutors. Then, on the night itself, hundreds of guests attended. The music, the food, the entertainment, it was all grand, one big statement of the king’s affection for me. Towards the end of the evening, the king called Salome forward to dance. I sat as his feet, and we watched my daughter together.
From the moment Salome started dancing, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. As she moved through the hall, her body like a snake, flexible, bending, making the impossible happen, I knew her secret, our secret, was out. The secret of how cold she was, the secret that she had no heart.
But the king saw something else altogether. “She is gorgeous, just like you,” he said to me. “I cannot believe what she is capable of. Look at her strength, look how lean and flexible she is!”
For a minute, I felt reassured. That maybe, things would just continue as normal.
But then the king leaned towards me again, and said, “This beautiful girl, growing up without a father. Let me make it up to her, for your sake.”
And before I could do anything to stop him, king Herod rose from his throne, and shouted through the halls, for all to hear.
“What do you want, girl?” He paused, all eyes were fixed on him. “Whatever you want, it is yours, even if it is half of my kingdom.”
Fear, the old, familiar fear, ripped at me again. This was exactly what I had been trying to prevent. But Salome knew what she wanted, and did not hesitate.
“I want a head. A human head, please.”
A ripple ran through the crowd. A wave of shock, and then silence. And then, only then, the weight of my responsibility hit me like a tidal wave. I remembered holding Salome’s hands after she was born, her tiny, icy fingers. How I pressed at her throat, desperate to find her pulse, already convinced the baby had no heart. And how I ignored her, left her to struggle by herself, after I found new love. And I realised that I owed it to my baby girl, to take the blame.
I stood up, and ran to Salome, where she was standing in front of the king. “Then make it the head of John the Baptist, my love,” I whispered in her ear.
And like she had done before, my little girl listened to me.
“The head of John the Baptist, on a silver platter, my king,” her voice echoed through the silent hall.
I looked at Herod. His eyes moved from me, to Salome, and back to me again. A frown ran over his forehead. As if he wanted to ask me why. He had thrown this party to show the world that the words of the prophet meant nothing to him, we had agreed that this would be the way to set things right. He looked pained, as if I let him down.
But I knew he would believe it. I knew king Herod would think I set Salome up, that I instructed her to ask for John’s head. And he’d blame me, not her, for forcing his hand to this violence.
They sent someone down to the dungeons and then brought in the head, like my daughter had asked, on a dinner platter. I watched her, as she accepted her gift, an eager, hungry look in her eyes. And all I could think was, poor John. Poor man. Poor innocent man, a random victim to my daughter's experiments. And I did not even know what Salome’s next step would be, or how I could prevent it.
As the minutes passed, and the party guests slowly turned back to feasting, I could feel myself slip into darkness again. Guilt and regret already numbing my senses. Hate overpowering me, towards my first husband and his metal gloves and his discipline, towards the wretched girl he gave me, whom I still wanted to protect.
That night, when I sought comfort in the arms of my lover, the king, he pushed me away.
“You are cold, my dear,” he told me. “Cold, and heartless.”
And as I turned away from him and curled up on my own side of the bed, I knew he spoke the truth.
Tapestry of the work 'Salome Dance Pour Hérode', by the French painter Marcel-Béronneau.
Writing Contest
Do you have a different idea about why Herod, Salome and Herodias did what they did? Why the head of John the Baptist on a platter? The Writing Contest 'An Alternative Motive' is still out. Looking forward to your version of the story!