The Axeman’s Daughter’s Wedding

The dead axeman’s daughter wasn’t allowed to be married in white. Her mourning pervaded her wedding day. Though none of the losses were hers, she shifted all the grief over her shoulders like the braids made heavy with flowers. Two lilies pinned behind every ear were the only hints of purity aside from the pale frame of her face.

Even then, she was a blushing bride, and smiled. The priest in attendance gripped the open bible, wielding it like a sword, or rather a shield, before him as she marched up the aisle.

Her full pink lips conceal two fangs, top and bottom, she uses to rip throats.

Dorothea smiled and her beloved reached out to her, clad in enough white for the two of them. Together they stood like day and night outside the edge of the village, on the same spot that her father took her mother, and his father before him, since the village was nothing more than seeds in the ground and makeshift cabins.

But on this day there was a city, and every south-facing window blinked with uninvited guests watching her like the figure of feminine death gliding toward her marriage moment.

Until this moment she was weaving baskets, facing the river’s deep dark waters, like a nymph drying out her hair on the banks or a siren waiting for her next lover. Out of the woods one day came a huntsman and saw her face.

The way he watched her on that day made every man wish for a taste of death.

They say she will wield the axe when her old man dies. I pity the convicts, every man killed by a woman is bound for Hell.

At the thought, curtains were closed, and axes of their own were sharpened under whispered prayers.

She heard the grinding blades and spoke her vows to their tune, unheard by any but the figure of love before her. They retreated into her father’s empty house and were scarcely seen thereafter, and never together. The huntsman, now married, ceased his killing, and his wife her weaving.

The morning after the wedding, baskets of white lilies were hung from the lamp-posts in town, under bridges, and from the gallows outside the odd couple’s house. Not a sound was heard in the night but the shifting breaths of guilty men turning in their beds, wracked with nightmares of nimble hands swinging blades sharper than theirs, heavier than theirs, into throats dotted with stubble and cold sweat.

It’s not what she’s done, but what she may do. I won’t die by the hand of a woman.

Death’s daughter had a husband now, who walked the town like a man sworn to an angel, never frowning but to shield his eyes from the sun, and carrying with him the air of love like an ancient blessing. He was not afraid, as the angels of old had preached, of the bed he shared with a killer on the outskirts of town, and fell into it at the end of each day with the same light heart he wore in the mornings.

The lilies in the baskets never got a chance to wilt, as petal and wicker alike were crushed and burnt before the sunrise could light on them. The axeman’s daughter had visited the town before it was awake, breaking a custom older than the houses she had passed over and spared. The men approached the huntsman and met his smile with confusion. It had been him that hung those baskets up, so the rest of them could witness his beloved’s beauty from afar, as she held them all in the utmost regard and would never break the laws of the men whose crimes became her father’s livelihood, and would soon be hers.

Death is a business older than time itself, he explained, with the power to create riches as often as grief. After all this time, the former has outshined the latter for centuries.

She’s driven him mad. A sensible man, and rambling of death, he must be saved.

The huntsman laughed his way home and shared the tale with his wife, and then they went together to sleep. In the middle of the night, she awoke to a cold and heavy pillow at her side, and a grief like no other fell over the house.

Only a demon, or the demon’s child, would shriek like this.

The sound echoed twice around the forest, coating every sturdy trunk in an icy loss, until the very bark wept off the centennial bodies. Guilty men woke with a start, their blood running cold through their noses as pounding headaches wracked them, and they could not fall asleep again. They shook their wives and children, but none stirred, still breathing in their lily-scented dreams, with a peace only death could provide.

For the men, she saved a haunting of a lifetime.

I would have liked to take you all in your time, as God intended.

The found their sharpened axes dulled and brittle, as useless as their pleadings when the figure darker than the night picked the bolts off doors and ripped curtains off their rods, slunk in through letter-boxes and crept along windowsills. Shadows flooded up stairs and ladders into candle-lit attics, but the flames blew out before they could see that face they momentarily fell in love with.

That night, one by one, guilt seeped out of men’s throats in shrieks carried downwind. The axeman’s daughter did her job in one axe fall and was left richer than the woods that gave her refuge as a weary daughter coming home. She knelt at the grave of her father and asked not for forgiveness, but rest.

This story was inspired by John Keats’ poem, Lamia.