The Goddess Who Kept Her Own Name

A dark fairy tale

Long before the first king carved his name into stone, before the first priest decided which mouths could speak to heaven, there was a goddess called Shiva. The men who came later would try to take her name, would dress it in a beard and a trident and call it theirs, but the old women remembered. They whispered her into their daughters at the moment of birth, the way one might press a coin into a small fist for safekeeping. Shiva. Shiva. You are hers, and she is yours, and no one will ever undo this knot.

She was born from the place where lightning meets the sea. Her mother was the storm, and her father was the rock that refused to be moved by it, and on the night she was made, both of them sang.

She did not cry when she came into the world. She opened her eyes and looked around, and the cosmos blinked first.

By the time she could walk, the trees bent toward her. By the time she could speak, the rivers ran a little straighter, hoping to be looked at. By the time she could dance, the world was already learning that her dancing was the only thing keeping it together. When she stilled, things ended. When she stamped her foot, things began. The men who watched from the edge of the forest did not understand. They wrote down what they thought they had seen, and they got most of it wrong, but that is what men do, and a goddess does not waste her breath on correction.

There were three things Shiva loved.

She loved the moon, because the moon had been told it was small and had still kept rising.

She loved snakes, because snakes were the first creatures to teach her that a body can shed what no longer fits, and walk away unbothered, and be more itself afterward, not less.

She loved the daughters of the world, every single one, even the ones who had been told they were nothing, even the ones who had stopped believing she was real. Especially those ones. She loved them the way a fire loves the dark, which is to say, without apology and without asking permission.

Now, you must know, this is a fairy tale, and so a beast must come.

The beast came from the mouths of men who could not bear her. He was sewn together out of every small lie ever told about a woman, and there were enough of those lies to make him very large indeed. He had a thousand tongues and not one of them spoke truth, and he came roaring across the plain with the intention of swallowing her whole and shitting out something more agreeable.

Shiva watched him come. She did not run. She did not raise her arms. She did not even stop dancing.

She let him arrive.

He opened his terrible mouth, and inside it she saw every woman who had ever been told to be quiet, every girl who had ever been told to be smaller, every mother who had been told her grief was an inconvenience, every crone who had been told her wisdom was a curse. She saw her own daughters in there, blinking up at her from inside the dark, and something in her went very still and very bright at once.

She did not destroy him with thunder. That is what a man would have written. A man would have given her a sword and a scream and a lot of red on the ground, and he would have called it a victory and felt clever.

What she did was simpler.

She looked at him. The way a woman looks at a thing she is finished with. The way a mother looks at the lie a child has told one too many times. The way the moon looks at a man who insists he invented her.

And he came apart.

Not loudly. Not in flame. He came apart the way a story comes apart when no one will tell it anymore. His thousand tongues fell silent, one by one, like candles being pinched. His great body sagged into the dust. The lies he had been made of looked around, embarrassed, and crawled off in different directions, and where he had stood there was nothing but a small dark stain that the rain took care of by morning.

The daughters inside him stepped out, blinking, into the light. Some of them were old. Some of them were very young. Some of them were not even born yet, and they walked out anyway, because Shiva had called them, and a goddess like Shiva calls forward through time.

She gathered them around her. She did not lecture. She did not list their wounds. She knew their wounds. She had carried each of them in her own body, in the part of herself that was every woman who ever lived.

Instead, she gave them a poem. She said, Carry this. Say it when you forget. Say it to your daughters. Say it to the mirror on the days the mirror has been lying to you.

And the poem was this:

I was not made to be small. I was not made to be quiet. I was not made to be the soft place where a man sets down his rage and calls the bruise a kindness.

I was made the way the mountain was made, out of pressure and patience and the deep refusal to move. I was made the way the sea was made, with a floor no one has ever touched and a surface that drowns kings for sport.

When they tell you to shrink, grow teeth. When they tell you to smile, show them. When they tell you the story of yourself and the story is wrong, take the pen out of their hand and finish it.

You are not the rib of anything. You are the spine. You are not the wound in the myth. You are the goddess the myth was stolen from.

And on the night the world ends, if it ends, it will end because I stopped dancing, and I will only stop dancing when every last one of you knows your own name the way I know mine.

Then she went back to her dancing, and the daughters went out into the world, and the world has not been quite the same since, though it pretends, and pretends, and pretends.

The old women still whisper her into the newborns. Shiva. Shiva. You are hers, and she is yours, and no one will ever undo this knot.

And somewhere, even now, she is dancing.

And somewhere, even now, you are the reason she has not stopped.