I have a Destiny, doncha know? With a capital D. Really! I’ve got a
prophecy and superpowers and everything.<\/p>\n
Supposedly.<\/p>\n
Yeah, I know, you wouldn’t think it to look at me. I mean, my dad was a
pencil pusher in the bookkeeping division of Somerville Pickle, and my mum
was a writer of fairy tales\u2026when she wasn’t convalescing.<\/p>\n
Despite my unassuming parents, I come from a long line of\u2026well, let’s just
call ’em weird women: the Ashbys. It started way back in the 16th century
in England with Alys Asheby, who bewitched a lord’s son to fall in love
with her, then lived to almost 200. She passed her strange gifts down to
her daughter, whose speaking with ghosts saved her family from a flood.<\/p>\n
The legacy moved through the generations, endowing each Ashby woman with
some sense of the supernatural. Sometimes it was a magical skill, like
Dame Alys’. Sometimes it manifested itself as an eldritch sort of art,
like my mom’s revisions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I always lay awake after
her bedtime stories, waiting, electrified, for a transformation as if
waiting for a storm.<\/p>\n
The Ashbys were always supernatural, always women. Ashbys just didn’t have
sons\u2026unless you count my great-aunt’s miscarriages or that two-headed
thing that my grandmother tossed out in the midden three years before
giving birth to my mom.<\/p>\n
There were no Ashby boys\u2026until I was born.<\/p>\n
When my mom finally got pregnant, she and my dad consulted my great-aunt.
You see \u2013 my mom had a delicate constitution \u2013 I think they call it brain
palsy, cerebral palsy, nowadays \u2013 and she wanted to make sure that her
childbed would be healthy. So she asked my great-aunt \u2013 whose Ashby legacy
was second sight \u2013 to predict my future.<\/p>\n
“Don’t worry, Leonora,” she said to my mom. “Your lying in will be quick
and painless. Your child will be healthy, longer-lived even than Dame
Alys, and it shall have power over love and death.”<\/p>\n
Feeling reassured, my mother then went on a search for a suitable name for
her daughter. Of course, she turned to the Metamorphoses.<\/p>\n
There she found the story of Philomel. In brief, Philomel’s brother-in-law
Tereus rapes her, then cuts out her tongue so she can’t tell. But she does
tell, by weaving the story in a tapestry. When her sister, Tereus’ wife,
finds out, vengeance, murder, child-eating and transformation ensue \u2013 all
par for the course in Greek mythology.<\/p>\n
Naturally, my mom thought that Philomel was a perfectly appropriate name
for her child. I was to be Philomel Ashby Cox, after a woman with no voice
and excruciating powers of shapeshifting.<\/p>\n
If she had wanted something truly suitable, she would have chosen a name
like Iphis, who was all confused because she felt like one gender
inwardly, but looked like another outwardly\u2026or Protea, Erisichthon’s
daughter, who assumed the shape of a man.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I was born, premature and painless, just as my great-aunt said,
and everything was great, except that my parents had no idea what to call
me. For three days, I actually went by Philomel until my dad took pity on
me and stuck his name \u2013 William \u2013 before the rest of mine.<\/p>\n
I was supposed to be a superhero.<\/p>\n
I was supposed to be an artist.<\/p>\n
I was supposed to be my mother’s daughter.<\/p>\n
Instead I’m an amoral vampire fag boy with 110 years of writer’s block.<\/p>\n
I mean, how can I have a Destiny? I don’t even have a job, unless you
count lesbovamps.com, the porn site I run.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have a Destiny, doncha know? With a capital D. Really! I’ve got aprophecy and superpowers and everything. Supposedly. Yeah, I know, you wouldn’t think it to look at me. I mean, my dad was apencil pusher in the bookkeeping division of Somerville Pickle, and my mumwas a writer of fairy tales\u2026when she wasn’t convalescing.… Continue reading Will, 8\/30\/06<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/oddpla.net\/modernwizard\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}