When Women Were Dragons
Kelly Barnhill
For Christine Blasey Ford,
whose testimony triggered this narrative;
And for my children—
dragons, all.
The dragon is in the barrow, wise and proud with treasures.
—ANGLO-SAXON PROVERB
They were ferocious in appearance, terrible in shape with great heads, long necks, thin faces, yellow complexions, shaggy ears, wild foreheads, fierce eyes, foul mouths, horses’ teeth, throats vomiting flames, twisted jaws, thick lips, strident voices, singed hair, fat cheeks, pigeon breasts, scabby thighs, knotty knees, crooked legs, swollen ankles, splay feet, spreading mouths, raucous cries. For they grew so terrible to hear with their mighty shriekings that they filled almost the whole intervening space between earth and heaven with their discordant bellowings.
—LIFE OF SAINT GUTHLAC BY FELIX, AN EAST ANGLIAN MONK, APPROXIMATELY AD 730, IN WHICH THE GOOD MONK DESCRIBES THE ORIGINAL OCCUPANTS OF THE BARROW WHERE THE SAINT HAD ATTEMPTED TO BUILD HIS HERMITAGE
If I, like Solomon, . . .
could have my wish—
my wish . . . O to be a dragon, a symbol of the power of Heaven—of silkworm size or immense; at times invisible.
Felicitous phenomenon!
—“O TO BE A DRAGON” BY MARIANNE MOORE, 1959
Contents
When Women Were Dragons
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
When
Women
Were
Dragons
Being the Truthful Accounting of the Life of Alex Green—Physicist, Professor, Activist. Still Human. A memoir, of sorts.
Greetings, Mother—
I do not have much time. This change (this wondrous, wondrous change) is at this very moment upon me. I could not stop it if I tried. And I have no interest in trying.
It is not from any place of sorrow that I write these words. There is no room for sorrow in a heart full of fire. You will tell people that you did not raise me to be an angry woman, and that statement will be correct. I was never allowed to be angry, was I? My ability to discover and understand the power of my own raging was a thing denied to me. Until, at last, I learned to stop denying myself.
You told me on my wedding day that I was marrying a hard man whom I shall have the pleasure to sweeten. “It is a good woman,” you said, “who brings out the goodness in a man.” That lie became evident on our very first night together. My husband was not a good man, and nothing ever would have made him so. I married a man who was petulant, volatile, weak-willed, and morally vile. You knew this, and yet you whispered matronly secrets into my ear and told me that the pain would be worth the babies that I would bring to you one day.
But there were no babies, were there? My husband’s beatings saw to that. And now I shall see to him. Tooth and claw. The downtrodden becomes the bearer of a heavenly, righteous flame. It burns me, even now. I find myself unbound by earth, unbound by man, unbound by wifely duty and womanly pain.
I regret nothing.
I shall not miss you, Mother. Perhaps I won’t even remember you. Does a flower remember its life as a seed? Does a phoenix recall itself as it burns anew? You will not see me again. I shall be but a shadow streaking across the sky—fleeting, speeding, and utterly gone.
—From a letter written by Marya Tilman, a housewife from Lincoln, Nebraska, and the earliest scientifically confirmed case of spontaneous dragoning within the United States prior to the Mass Dragoning of 1955—also known as the Day of Missing Mothers. The dragoning, per reports from eyewitnesses, happened during the day, on September 18, 1898, as a lemonade social was underway in the garden of next-door neighbors, to celebrate an engagement. Information and data regarding Mrs. Tilman’s case was suppressed by authorities. Despite the sheer amount of corroborating evidence, including the accidental capture on a daguerreotype taken next door which showed in shocking clarity the dragoning at its midpoint, and signed affidavits by witnesses, it was not covered by a single newspaper—local or national—and all studies organized to research the phenomenon were barred from both funding and publication. Scientists, journalists, and researchers were fired and blacklisted for simply asking questions about the Tilman case. It was not the first time such research blackouts occurred, but the sheer quality of the evidence, and the vigor of the governmental effort to suppress it, was enough to trigger the formation of the Wyvern Research Collective, an underground association of doctors, scientists, and students, all dedicated to the preservation of information and study (peer-reviewed when possible) of both spontaneous and intentional dragoning, in order to better understand the phenomenon.