alternative sea life

***

Credits & Notes:

The dominatrix mermaid outfit (called Mmmm...mermaid) is from Vita's Boudoir. Vitabela Dubrovna's creations just keep getting more wonderfully outlandish. I love that she was at her computer one day and thought, "You know what Second Life really needs? A goddamn dominatrix mermaid outfit." She was right.

My skin is Mystere Skin Tone No. 27 by Pulse skins. The hair is Betty Page by *Jetdoll*.

And look what I found on Etsy! Want, want, want:

Fairy Tale

Charley Harper

The other crows don’t believe me when I tell them I used to be half-human. They just caw and rustle their feathers. But it’s true.

My head was normal, though human-sized, with a grey beak, the large, quick eyes of our raptor ancestors, the sleek, black plumage. My tendon-calves and talons were also strong and avian. But the rest was a cruel joke—mottled feathers covering mammalian breasts, primate arms and hands, thighs bare and goose-pimpled white, a woman’s sex. Human heart, no wings.

A freak.

When I was born, the humans in that small town were frightened. The country doctor offered to kill me humanely and dispose of the body, but my mother refused.

As I grew older, I never learned to speak like the humans, but I could understand the hushed gossip of the neighbor women, the drunken shouts of the men, the taunts of the children. I heard them call my mother a whore. I heard the preacher tell her I was from the devil.

I also heard what the government scientist who appeared one day at the door said to her, pushing an envelope thick with bills into her hand in exchange for me. Again, she refused to give me up.

I loved my mother, as much as one can love a human. Each day, she would let me sit in the garden and watch the birds. She would bring me seeds and berries and crickets to eat. She'd bring me cool birdbaths in the summer and blankets in the frosts of winter.



And all around me the acrobats were soaring and diving: Magpie pinwheels of black and white and red in the wind, crows teasing cats, blackbird pirouettes, the looped birdsong of the starlings in the leaves.

Charley Harper

I learned the language of their calls and watched them build their nests from tufts of down feather and string. I watched their talons grab earthworms and crush field mice. I watched their yellow beaks vomit meat for tiny squalling chicks. I would close my eyes and imagine how it would feel for my own crane-like bones to unfold, for my own dark musk of wing to expand.

And each day the same crow would land on my outstretched hand and stare a warning into my eyes.

***

The third time someone offered to take me away, my mother did not refuse.

For months she had been coughing into handkerchiefs stained with blood. She could no longer leave at night to work. When the red-faced circus man gave her a bag of money and said he would treat me well, she nodded.

I looked back toward the house once as we drove away in the old-fashioned horse-drawn cart. My mother’s head was bent down, handkerchief to mouth.

***

The circus was exciting and dusty and loud, and after their initial fear of me, most of its humans were friendly.


I liked the boy who threw daggers. He teased and joked like the crows from the garden. Your goose is cooked, bird girl, he’d say to the roar of laughter from the crowd. I could hear him wink as he said it.


I liked the shy tightrope girl as well. She reminded me of the gentle robins that nested in the awning of my mother’s kitchen. I tried not to scare her during our act.

I even liked the man who took me from my mother and brought me there. He was as loud and greedy as the gulls that would fly in from the shore.

There were others as well—a very fat woman who would give me chocolates I could not eat, a man covered completely in hair, twins fused together, a short little man in a grimy tuxedo, the groundskeeper with his trembling hands, an animal trainer with a red, knotted scar in place of his left eye. At night around the campfire shadows and flame, I’d imagine their cacophony of voices and laughs as comforting caws and squawks.

***

Not every human at the circus was kind to me, however. Seeing the old fortuneteller, I finally understood the crow’s warning, which in my mother’s garden I had sensed only in my gut like the thud of a bird flying into a window.

“Devil!” the old lady would hiss to my face.

“She’s an abomination!” she’d shout to the red-faced man.

“Disaster,” she’d moan, holding up The Tower card to any who would listen.

"That crow is up to no good," she'd whisper to the groundskeepers.

Over those months at the circus, I grew feathers on my thighs and useless wings that would not take flight. I'd wrap them around me at night.

“Wings!” she shrieked one day, pointing to me in the mess hall, in front of everyone.

“She does not have a mind like you or me,” she warned, her eyes growing large. “She will kill us in our sleep! You fools, do you not see the evil in her heart?”


Nobody looked up from their plates. Nobody spoke to me or looked at me at all anymore.

The next day I woke to a scarecrow in front of my door.

The Scarecrow's Post

What happened next exists only in fragments, flashes: Running until my body screamed to stop, falling into the mud, dogs barking, night again, and then, suddenly, the rush of gratitude when I realized I was flying—the animal joy, the moon.

I don't remember when my human arms shriveled and disappeared. And I can’t think of when I was first among other wings, talons, beaks—the murder of crows, my family. I used to ask myself how it was that I couldn’t remember the exact moment of transformation, the change in my size.

I know now that I didn't get smaller. The world around me grew.

killydoon

***

Circus photos were taken at Mysterious Wave, a beautiful sim created by Cherry Manga & Anley Piers. The crow-girl avatar is called Puppeteer and is available there for purchase.

The fortuneteller's skin is Ethel Crabtree from Peachy Keen. It also comes with a shape and outfit not shown here. Her dress is Silk Gypsy from an old season of Paper Couture (look for it on the SL Marketplace). The turban is from Paper Couture's Roaring Green Ruffles outfit (also an old season). In the first photo, crow girl is wearing the Long Island T from Pig, and an edited version of the Black Boho Skirt by !BF! (I can't find the store anymore, sorry!).