Fern After Dark • • • Dori Rathmell

A Letter to My Maker

Connaught Riley

Content Warning: Sexual violence

Medusa <msnakes6@hotmail.com> To Athena

Dear Athena,

I hope this email finds you well.

I’m just reaching out, again, wondering if your still there? It’s been a long time, a millennium, or two. I can’t remember. My friends are still here. They always are. They always will be. The snakes never leave my head. Extremely low maintenance you said.

You waved your godly hand and replaced my luscious brown locks with slithery, hissing beasts, and had the audacity to look me in my eyes and tell me they were “low maintenance.” I don’t know about you, but I would not call thirty-seven pet snakes that will never die, “low maintenance”.

Saul and Sam keep getting in fights:

Sam: “I’ve turned five people to stone.” Saul: “No, you haven’t.” Sam: “Yes I have!” Saul: “Okay, who?” Sam: “Remember that mailman? And that um…” Saul: “See! You cant even think of two!” Sam: “Wait, just give me a second…There was that bread girl! Ooh and the two priests!” Saul: “And…?” Sam: “There was that dog last century.” Saul: “A dog doesn’t count.” Sam: “Yes it does.”

It goes on like that all day. If I have to spend another century with these snakes I’ll go truly and properly mad. Not to mention Sharon, who’s had a cold for the past 20 years and keeps sniffling in my ear.

I thought you should know, they miss you. Yet you’ve never even met them. They’ve never even seen you, but they know you, and they miss you. Guess you created them, right? They just miss their mother. They shouldn’t, seeing as I don’t. I don’t miss you. The inventor of this monstrosity, I do not miss you. I spent my life devoted to you, believing you were most important. Years of scrubbing floors and performing your “rituals,” all while men fawned and drooled at my feet. I could have had any one of them. But I didn’t. Jul 34, 2021, 1:55 PM (4 days ago)