How to be a better banshee
I don't usually do this, but...
Artful Wobbler
This isn’t the kind of thing I often write. Something about November brought it out. Something about January made me think of it again. I don’t usually post fiction I haven’t sent out for submission somewhere, but I don’t know where I’d send this and anyway, who doesn’t like free stuff? This is free stuff. Maybe not everyone’s taste but bear with it and see. I hope you like it anyway.
How to be a better banshee
My grandmother was the first banshee of our line. She finished her apprenticeship with honours and in less than 100 years was teaching too. We were all very proud. ‘They’re taking after Edie,’ we’d say when our babies hollered with air-shredding force. When we stubbed a toe or someone left an empty ice cream container in the freezer we wailed with such piercing sorrow neighbours popped by with casseroles and soup.
After Edie came my mother, a lamb who barely mewled, went stone mute as a child and got packed off to a convent where I inexplicably was born flashing Edie’s smoke-grey eyes and a voice like a leaf blower. They say I howled for days without taking a drink or screwing up my lumpy little face. ‘Such exquisite agony,’ my proud uncle said and I was plucked from my mother and the convent to a banshee school for girls. The ‘for girls’ was redundant, all banshees were girls until the boarding school met my grandmother. Edie asked heretical questions like why should girls wail when boys cause most sorrow and soon after boys trickled into the academy. When their voices changed a pleasant bass warmed our wailing practice, inspiring the first Banshee choir. You can find it on Spotify.
My grandmother’s heresy grew, shattering the practice of selecting us solely from specific elite bloodlines. She was herself a blemish on this policy and spreading her diluted blood through the gothic halls of banshee learning made her enemies. ‘Clacking skeletons,’ Edie said but in the school I saw threads of the net that would eventually take her down.
Because of our kinship I was revered, bubble-wrapped and bullied. Invited to every birthday and funeral rite with the best cakes but also there was gum in my shoes, glue in my locker, the cafeteria always out of my favourite drink. ‘You’re here but you don’t belong’ was the message. Edie kept Edieing, unleashing her ‘there’s a lot of bastards’ amendment. After 150 years she knew some families felt relief and not terror at our appearance. It wasn’t a special tyrant that scraped away the last of her restraint, just a routine abuser but for him she abandoned the usual howling and laughed. Nearby gulls heard and they laughed too. After a few slack-jawed moments the man’s jagged son and two daughters joined in. Even his hollow wife couldn’t resist. Her helpless giggles woke her husband who saw ghoulish Edie and his kin in slumber party fits and that’s how he died.
The banshee council called an emergency meeting. It was made up of six progressives, five traditionalists and three neo-trads but one was at work wailing over a decaying VIP and another out cold with complex laryngitis so the vote to strip Edie of her banshee licence was a draw. The tiebreaker came via public polling, another Edie reform, and it seemed people couldn’t wait to laugh their abusers into death. Humiliation outpaced cancer and heart attack in cause of death reports. Abusers were petrified and the usual human ghouls swept in to monetize their fear, helping them pop off for a fee before anyone knew they were sick.
People begged for our services, leading to Edie’s final flourish. Since the very first banshee, in a time so misty even our oldest squint to see it, we only visited a certain stock of families. But with Edie banshee equity joined the great equalizer of death. Anyone could be a banshee or be visited by one. Kids lined up for banshee school. It was a golden time. By then I’d passed my studies and couldn’t be prouder. Until those threads tightened into the sticky net that took Edie out and bansheedom with it.
While the progressives were having their moment, and a very brief one it has to be said, a cabal of old-school acolytes, mostly male and led by a human who brought all the dark arts of their species, planted dissent with speculative news articles (Banshees: harbinger or killer?) and fake social feeds dripping vampirism, moon magic, fake Druid calendars, all unrelated to actual banshees business but humans, well, dim. They opened fake banshee academies and sent graduates shrieking outside the homes of their enemies like hyenas but you’d be surprised how loud humans can be when they put their hate in it.
We became hunted. Outlawed in random towns then across nations as the cabal crawled into political office. A bounty perched on Edie’s ancient head. ‘Kill the witch’ graffiti appeared in cities though banshees are not witches and can’t even be killed but any loud-mouthed grey-haired women, then any loud-mouthed woman, then any women, were targets. The preposterous violence exhausted real banshees who had more omens to deliver than time. They did their best, we even threw rookies in the field before they finished training but the first banshee labour strike soon followed. Young people lost interest and once again our numbers brimmed with middle-aged women with a lot to scream about.
Even Edie was fed up. One damp and windy October night a smouldering smell bloomed near the banshee council chambers and the whole complex burned to the ground. Edie vanished. Did she throw herself in the flames or just light a match and retire to one of those castles in Europe she mooned over? Either way all that ash quieted things down. Progressives slunk to seaside coves to drown their screams in waves, our version of quiet quitting. Traditionalists exulted but came to grief as most were by gender, economic class or nationality disqualified by the traditional banshee rules they enforced. They expelled each other one by one and we just kind of dissolved.
I went back to the convent to visit mom and my five half-siblings, life goes on, even there. You should hear the voice on one. ‘Just like you when you were that age,’ my proud uncle said and everyone smiled in that mysterious way and the baby vanished into a ‘vocal academy.’ I went there to teach not long after. If you sit quietly and concentrate you might hear a faint hum, a vibration in your bones. A thing about banshees, we know how to wait.