Jessica was neither pudgy nor bereft of scales. Her flame
appeared as quickly as did those of other serpentine seafish. Besides, her
claws were as sharp as was any rondel dagger and her venom was equal to that of
any Blue Kraits. However, her kin had ousted her to an uncharted island
in Polynesia; they were ashamed of her height. The young chimera hadnt
even merited a berth on Compadre Rock, let alone a home on the reptilian
paradise known as Vigur.
She had been sent far from her people simply for towering over
them. Collective memory suggests that never before and never since had there
been a wingspan as colossal as hers. Unfurled, she was an enormous freak among
lesser fiends.
Whereas her kind had sufficient resources such that each of them
could eat, weekly, the equivalent of a sheep or of a small person, unlike
Jessica, other hatchlings successfully translated their calories into
well-muscled limbs, glossy scutes, and strong organs. A minority among them
packed on attractive adipose tissue, too. Jessica, regrettably, just seemed to
morph food into additional latitude. Before achieving even two months of life,
she stood much taller than all of her age-mates.
Little has been recorded by chimera bards about the shock,
denial, and disbelief Jessica experienced when being taunted, but we know that
she tried to binge eat as a means of relieving her distress. Unfortunately, on
those occasions when she consumed two colts or an entire wild boar, shed
feel stuffed, and then, just hours later, swell perceivably taller.
Jessica also attempted both starvation and other, less extreme,
routes to allaying her vertical gains. In spite of those efforts, when she ate
less, the only corporeal changes she achieved were catching a respiratory
infection and developing an intestinal amoebic ulcer. To heal from those, she
had to, respectively, swallow fruiting citrus trees and indulge in afternoon
naps. When she snoozed, the young dragon hid away from her colony, in general,
and from her mother, more specifically.
Her mother, that same creature that had refused to yield to our
species-centric prerogative to devour ones young, found no fault in daily
assaulting Jessica. Charles, a clutchmate of Jessicas, posited that Mom
had gone a trifle mad from the unrelenting mockery of Moms peers.
The laugh of a chimera is a horrid thing. Such derision begins
with the scream of the goat-like head, continues with the bellow of the
lion-like head, and crescendos with the slight sighing of the snake-like head.
When several chimeras snigger simultaneously, the resulting sound is a
cacophony akin to the unnatural voices of cursed beings being
rehabilitated.
In other words, given her colonys freely articulated
response to her refusal to destroy her children, and to her odd childs
unnatural stature, Mom was irreproachable for regularly trying to chomp and
claw Jessica in ways that might accidentally result in death. Had
it not been for nearby woodlands plentiful population of deer, Jessica
would have died. Rather, she grew taller and taller.
Even so, Jessica, who was not only taller than Mom, but who was
also faster, did not tolerate being bitten and lacerated. She continued to
insist on staying alive, too. Those truths notwithstanding, the young chimera
was hurt by Moms slashes and punctures because those acts meant her
parent wanted to dismember her. Jessica was unprepared for such brutality, felt
powerless to prevent it, and understood it as cruel. If Mom had tried,
alternatively, to eat her, all would have been well, even socially acceptable.
Thus, months later, after Jessicas wings had grown strong
enough for her to be legitimately expatriated, she felt both grief-stricken and
relieved. Being anathematized could translate into loneliness or it could
translate into freedom from intimidation.
In her autobiography, Jessica claimed that she had not been
ostracized to a small, uninhabited volcanic isle, but had been sent, along with
Charles, the runt of their clutch, to an Australian hamlet. That she could have
journeyed from their hatching site to the vast continent, given her physical
prowess, was not incredible. That Charles, a normal-sized terror, could have
also flown to Auz, though, continues to be unbelievable.
Jessica reported that in Australia, she continued to
engage in counterproductive eating behaviors, which, in turn, led her to
further irritability, mood swings, and interruptions in concentration. The
young chimera wrote that she blamed herself for both imagined inconveniences
and actual problems.
For instance, she attributed her ingrown claws to her inability
to adapt to her new environment. She understood her bad breath as resulting
from her reluctance to suck down sticky birdlime or odd-tasting fruited kou
trees. Albeit, when suffering dysthymia, Jessica gobbled mouthfuls of koalas,
pawfuls of iguanas, and as many Iriomote cats as she could catch, but those
choices made her ill and indubitably made her taller.
Only when Jessica reached physical maturity did she stop toying
with restrictive eating. The end of her adolescence brought the end of her
increased height. Accordingly, Jessica took solace in her newfound ability to
binge with immunity. She overate to fight muscle tension, insomnia, fatigue,
and even agitation. No pleasure surpassed that of stuffing her craw full of
fins and feathers.
Charles watched his sisters horizontal growth. The colony
where they had hatched was, according to Jessicas book, thousands of
kilometers away from Australia, but Jessica kept on reacting to her
childhood trauma. So, Charles stayed to himself.
Jessica responded by telling her brother, more and more often,
why he needed emancipation. For his part, Charles began to see the wisdom in
seeking freedom from his sisters fangs, claws, grammatical strictures,
and freely offered axioms. He thought that he ought to flee the hamlet and that
Jessica ought to give up both clinical solipsisms and colloquial proverbs.
Later, a human psychologist, who maintained a house in that
homestead, attempted to relieve Jessica not only of her identity, but also of
its associative memories and feelings. He also dallied with Charles. So,
Jessica ate him.
That meal granted her, for a complete fortnight, ten centimeters
of additional abdominal girth. Afterwards, she was again hungry, both
emotionally and physically. Nevertheless, she eventually found a gym.
Subsequent to eating that fitness centers employees and
patrons, the chimera used the treadmill there that was dedicated to super-sized
customers. Jessicas body slowly transformed from fat to muscle. She felt
motivated to work on other aspects of herself. She hired (and ate) tutors of
math, of song, and of international affairs.
Sadly, those intellectual pursuits proved merely to be detours
from, rather than improvements to, her psyche. Whats more, she found
herself with no other chimera with whom to converse, as Charles had flown away.
Had it not been for an acquaintance, a bright human named Doris,
who was a master of persuasion, Jessica might have spent the rest of her life
in a permanent sulk.
In her magnum opus, Jessica wrote that she allowed human affairs
of the heart, particularly those of Doris, to amuse her and in that manner
survived. She noted that she found fresh delight in tutoring Doris in revenge
and in eating Doris nemeses.
From that odd friendship, the chimera discovered,
too, that truth can be located in moments beyond those constituted by achieving
a command of opponents languages or constituted by succeeding in
consuming them in neat bites. She learned that heroes need to be familiar with
enemies beliefs, and that killing mad scientists often incurs the need to
also polish off their families. In other words, Jessica saw herself as having
evolved into a being of great significance.
Perhaps, Jessica was not depressed, but delusional. Its
possible that she never met a friendly human, ate scores of nasty ones, or left
the rocky atoll to which she was banished.
Perhaps, no sibling had ever lived alongside of her. Maybe her
writings were wishful ideations, not facts and she attained a svelte size
because she lacked foodstuffs. Logic dictates that she died prematurely, never
contributing to any literary canon or to the greater cryptid gene pool.
Some of our scholars argue that Jessica and her brother did land
within human civilization and did meet a young woman named Doris,
but were befriended by her rather than befriended her. In that account of
Jessicas life, the acumen the she-beast gained from her travels, along
with the insights she gained from her concessions, allowed her to finally feel
fearless enough, proud enough, and sufficiently self-empowered to record her
personal history and to do so as a champion adored by brutes and
domesticated animals, alike.
A third possibility has been posited by those familiar with
Jessicas writings. Feasibly, Jessica was the runt and Charles the
behemoth. It could be that the clutchmates made it to Australia, where no young
human female rescued or was rescued by them. Possibly the mightier monster,
Charles, wrote the story of his beleaguered sister to comfort her, signing her
name, not his, to the volume. Words remain more powerful than tooth or talon in
altering history.
No matter Jessicas actual story, on both an atoll in
Oceania and in the boondocks near a small Australian settlement, humans sighted
an extra-large and a normal-sized chimera. Well let them puzzle it out as
to why and how an eccentric scientist and many household pets went missing.