The Story of
Gargoyle Girl
(a fairytale)
Once upon a time, in the Franciscan Emerald City, a mortal baby girl was born to a banshee and a leviathan disguised as a mother and father. The mother and father were born human, but tragedy deformed and infected them until all human graces forsook and abandoned them. By the time the girl was born, they were more monster than mortal.
Because the girl was human, she only saw their human forms. The monsters were beyond her comprehension, so when the banshee and the leviathan began to destroy each other, the girl didn’t understand what was happening or how much danger she was in.
One day, the banshee told the leviathan that she had found out a sacred secret about him. She discovered that the leviathan was not one of God’s creatures, but that he was created from Gargoyles. The banshee told leviathan the news gently, and feigned compassion for him, but within she relished the tiny seed of mass destruction she had sewn.
The girl, even in believing her parents to be human, knew the horrors of being from Gargoyles. Gargoyles were the most depraved, the most sinister, the most abhorrent creatures on Earth. Humans became Gargoyles when they abandoned all grace, all love, all dignity, and to be a descendant of Gargoyles was the most shameful thing any human could ever endure.
The banshee didn’t care that her daughter would bare the stigma of being a Gargoyle Girl, all that mattered to the banshee was complete destruction of the leviathan.
***
As the Gargoyle Girl grew up, she knew never to talk about her father’s secret. She knew the Gargoyles that her father came from. She hated being around them, and she tried to avoid them as much as possible.
She watched as her father disintegrated from the inside, while he spent money he didn’t have to buy things he couldn’t afford to pretend he could never be from Gargoyles. He befriended the great and the good to prove he wasn’t from Gargoyles because the great and the good would never be in the company of Gargoyle descendants. And he avoided and rejected his daughter because not only did her presence remind him of who he was and where he came from, she, like him, was a descendant of Gargoyles. He had no trouble calling her Gargoyle Girl, in fact, he constantly reminded her, especially as she matured, reminding him more and more of her banshee mother. But he always denied his own Gargoylness even while calling her Gargoyle Girl.
Gargoyle Girl took this to heart, and she began to accept that she wasn’t really human. She accepted that she could never have the love and happiness of the human world no matter how much she loved any of them and no matter how much she wanted them to be happy. She accepted that she was tainted, and she never wanted to taint anyone else. She allowed her heart to ache in private, while she imagined being loved and loving, and caring and being cared for.
When bad things started to happen to her, even though she couldn’t truly believe it, she knew that in the great cosmic tapestry of the universe, she deserved to be treated badly or at least that she couldn’t complain about it. She was grateful that the world was as good to her as it was. She wanted and expected nothing more.
She tried to be the best Gargoyle Girl she could be, but she wasn’t sure if that meant she should give more to her human nature or if she should slip into the darkness of her Gargoyle lineage? When the Gargoyle side won and she slipped into the shadows, she brought her humanity with her.
What she witnessed in the shadows scared and hurt her. She tried to help when and where she could. Her efforts were like a few drops of rain in a vast and endless dessert, often they evaporated before they even hit the sand.
Because she was a half breed, she could move effortlessly between the human and shadow worlds, and she began to see the differences between the two. She began to talk about the Gargoyles and shadows in the human world. In the beginning, she wanted to normalise her Gargoyle nature, but it really helped to keep the humans away. She needed them to know she was tainted. She needed them to know she wasn’t good enough for them. She needed them to know not to get too close. She knew she was blameless, she did not bare the fault, but she also wanted to save them from her, and the only way to do that was to tell them what she was. It made their rejection of her easier to bare. She never had to say it, but she knew she was ugly, deformed, and defiled to those in the light.
And after a while, she began to let her human side go. It was easier not to be human. Those in the dark didn’t care if she was human, much as they tried to sully and stain her for it, but humans were intimidated, even scared of her darkness. And after a while she suppressed it until she couldn’t feel anything at all. She couldn’t be hurt by them if she couldn’t feel anything.
***
Living in the darkness, she came across all manner of monsters and their prey. And she began to see the monsters her parents were. She saw how very little of their humanness was left.
In the human world, she saw how little she really felt or understood about being human, and she began to appreciate why people ran away or abandoned her. She realised that she wasn’t raised human, she was raised by monsters and was one herself.
She relished the freedom of not being bound to human fears, human duties, and human routines, but she wanted to be loved the way humans can be loved and she wanted to care the way humans care, but she was a Gargoyle Girl.
***
One random day she was told she couldn’t be from Gargoyles. She didn’t have any of the genetic markers, and neither did her father. She learned that her mother made it all up, that she was never really a Gargoyle Girl at all, that she had always been fully human all along.
She wondered… if she really was human, how could she have been treated like a Gargoyle? But she realised that because she believed she was vile, no matter how interesting, rebellious or sexy she had made her abhorrence, it was how she felt about herself that others picked up on. It was her defensiveness that kept people at bay. It was her inability to accept care, devotion or affection that kept anyone from reaching in. It was her coldness, that caused them to recoil when she reached for them.
When she finally accepted the truth, she felt her cold, black, heart of stone, melting into soft, beautiful, rose red flesh and the warmth of a new dawn filled her soul. It was hard to fathom what it all meant or how it could all change so abruptly. But the one thing she finally had, that she had never had before, was hope. Hope for herself and the world around her. Hope that she could love and be loved. Hope that she could care and be cared for. And mostly hope that she can bring gentle goodness with her wherever she goes.