Page 74 of If Looks Could Kill
“How…,” she begins. “How, then, does the sight of a Medusa stun or… kill a man?”
Miss Stella rocks silently in her chair. Pearl wonders if this question is somehow a taboo.
“There’s no clear answer to that,” Miss Stella says at last. “There’s no… scripture or book of magic or science or… anything like that.”
“Oh.”
“I have a theory.” Miss Stella unravels wool from a skein. “A Medusa finds, in most men, an easy target. He is terrified of monsters. The supernatural. Things that scream in the night. But the real fear,” she continues, “is born of guilt. A ferocious, deadly female must feel to men like a just and fitting retribution finding them at last. For their crimes, you see.”
“We can only kill… criminals?”
“Their sins against women. Their ten thousand exploitations,” she says. “Men’s treacherous hearts can’t confront their shame. They convict and kill themselves, you might say.”
“I don’t understand,” Pearl says. “Not all men are… so bad.”
“Humph,” replies Stella. “From the cradle to the grave, the work of giving a man life, and giving him the life he wants, is performed by women. Is it not?”
Pearl shifts uncomfortably. “If you’re speaking of childbirth, that’s just nature.”
“His nursing,” Miss Stella continues. “His meals, his clothes, his washing, his home, his pleasures, his children, his care when sick. The weavers and workers in his mills and factories. The thousand unpleasant tasks that make great deeds possible. Almost all performed by women. He’ll rule over them all, and he’ll feel entitled to. He’ll view them with contempt while enjoying their bodies when the mood suits him. And that’s just the men society would call ‘decent.’?” She laughs mirthlessly. “You only need look around this city to see what the rest are capable of. But know that, king or pauper, it’s a woman who’ll wipe his bottom at his beginning and at his end.”
“His rear end,” says Pearl, surprising even herself.
Miss Stella smiles. “They rationalize it away, oh, how they do, but make no mistake: men know their lives—every minute of their lives—are on loan to them from the unfair, unpaid or underpaid, unappreciated toil of women. And they can’t live in that imbalance without knowing, deep in the gut, that one day, the bill might come due. Women might rise up in their wrath.” She leans forward in her chair. “Or send a champion to do it for them.”
When this statement produces no reaction, she resumes her rocking. “I did once meet a man,” she concedes, “whom I couldn’t stun.”
“Oh?” asks Pearl. “Why not?”
Miss Stella shrugs. “I’m not sure,” she says. “He was a quiet sort of man. One of your passive do-gooders who wouldn’t raise his voice at a mouse. A Quaker, as I recall.”
Pearl frowns. “Why did you want to stun this, er, quiet Quaker?”
Miss Stella blinks at Pearl in surprise. “Why, to see if I could.”
But you couldn’t, Pearl thinks with no small satisfaction.
“My father was a kind man,” Pearl says. “Always gentle to me and my mother. Always did his own work, where possible, to spare my mother any pain.”
Miss Stella’s needles pause. “?‘Was,’?” she says. “I’m sorry you lost such a fine father.”
Thank goodness, thinks Pearl, he didn’t live to see me turn into this.
“But for every sweet man like him, two more are brutes and monsters.” Miss Stella’s needles resume. “You’re old enough to know what I mean.”
Pearl presses her fingertips together to keep her hands from trembling.
“Somewhere, tonight, in this city, lies the man who did this to you,” Miss Stella explains. “I think of him as a vector. A maker of Medusas. He became one when—and this is important—when a powerful Medusa tried to kill him and couldn’t do it.”
A vector?
Pearl rises. “How do you mean, couldn’t do it?” she asks. “Did she… lose her nerve?”
Miss Stella shakes her head. “No. I mean, she hurled at him all her fury—like the executioner, wielding an axe—and it wouldn’t penetrate. So to speak. Where there should’ve been flesh, there was steel. Where there should’ve been a human conscience, some capacity for guilt or fear or shame, there wasn’t.”
Pearl struggles to absorb this idea. “That means men like that would be—”
“The most dangerous men of all,” supplies Miss Pearl.
