The Tears She Hadn't Cried
 
By
 
Lindsey Beth Goddard
 
 
 
 
Mahakali stretched her arms and sighed, feeling heavy, despite her scrawny figure. Tears crashed and roared behind the levee of her eyes, but she kept them at bay. Just a bit longer. She’d been holding them back for a year. It would feel good to finally let go, but not yet.
 
She stood atop a towering hill, the wind in her long, black hair—what remained of it, anyway—and she examined the town below with disgust. Going back to her birthplace was not something she looked forward to, not like shedding the tears. And shedding this damaged body.
 
Mahakali walked a dozen paces, then stopped, turning back. She would miss the cave. The way sunbeams trickled through the cracks each morning. The way she never needed a fire, nor a blanket, because the cave provided its own warmth, somehow. The way it had been waiting for her when she needed it the most.
 
She stood in the flitting shadows of swaying Mahogany branches, a lanky outcast with a burlap sack slung over her shoulder. The air was hot and dry and felt good in her lungs. She tilted her head back, breathing deep and listening to the forest. Weeds danced against her legs, a welcome embrace from a trusted friend. This land had become her home, and she was saying goodbye.
 
For many months, Mahakali had laid on the dirt floor of the cave—broken but mending. She had heard the woodpecker drumming and the reptiles slithering, the night owl hooting and the morning bird’s song. Now, it seemed the rhythm of the woodland creatures beat in time with her own heart. She had always belonged here, among the untainted resilience of nature, and only by crawling through the sand and brush, on the verge of death, had Mahakali remembered her role.
 
But she could not stay. She was healed enough, now, to go on.
 
The city of Bharini awaited at the end of the long path that wound down the hill. It bustled with movement, the people scurrying like worker ants. In the air, the aroma of fried bread, stewed goat, and slow-roasted chicken announced an oncoming feast. People rushed between the colorful tents erected in the town’s center, preparing. The hum of voices carried across the field and up the hillside to Mahakali, who sighed, put one foot in front of the other, and reluctantly began her journey.
 
As she traveled, Mahakali felt a flood of relief that she had gone into the city under the veil of night and stolen fresh garments. She had known all along she could not wear the tattered rags of her old life, full of holes and covered with bloodstains. Such attire might get her tossed from the bazaar. But Mahakali hadn’t mustered the strength or courage to find more clothing, until two nights prior, and she smiled now, a bit proud of herself, satisfied with how her feet felt on the rough hillside in her stolen shoes. And the ghoonghat would provide a nice veil for her face, once she reached the city.
 
As she strode into town, her kurta rippling in the wind, the savory smell of cooking food dissipated, and the true stench of human existence surrounded her. She pulled the veil over her face, but the thin fabric did little to mask the smells that invaded her nostrils like a frontline of putrid soldiers—sweat, excrement, blood, smoke, tears, trash, and all of humanity’s willful suffering.
 
Nobody seemed to notice her arrival. An unchaperoned woman might garner jeers or crude gestures on any other day. But not today. The townspeople were busy, rushing to-and-fro in preparation of the festival.
 
Good.
 
A furious energy bubbled inside Mahakali, hotter than the cauldron of stew she passed, an old woman stirring it with a large wooden ladle. The energy had been growing for a long time, filling her up. Now it sloshed at the brim of her consciousness, barely contained, as Mahakali walked the streets of Bharini, wondering what she’d ever seen in this place. What redeeming quality it had.
 
She passed women with long black braids setting up rows of large tables. They spread out tablecloths of orange, yellow, and blue, then placed stone platters atop the billowing fabrics to hold them down. With the heavy plates in place, they piled them with fruit and dried meats. Mahakali stopped to watch, and she did recall the mortal pleasure of taste. How the feast had melted on her tongue after a day of fasting. She nearly licked her lips at the remembrance. But those lips were gone now. A ruined mess, barely resembling their old shape. And she was not a starving child. She hadn’t needed a bite of food for many months as she had laid healing in the cave.
 
So, she told her mouth not to water and pressed on.
 
Hundreds of followers would gather soon, chanting their praises to the sun god. But Mahakali would not join. No. Not when the rays of the sun hurt her skin where it had dripped away like melted butter. Not when these people had taken her youth and her beauty.
 
With her russet brown veil pulled over her face, Mahakali traversed the market, pleased that no one paid any attention to her. That much hadn’t changed. There were rupees to spend and rupees to earn, and she was a nameless wanderer here.
 
Familiar faces floated by. So many of them. They did not recognize the woman in the veil as a ghost from the past, or a harbinger of the future. Yet, Mahakali was both.
 
She spied what she needed on a table filled with trinkets. Without so much as a glance around, she slid the item up her sleeve, then dropped it in her sack. A lingering regard for punishment, left over from her old life, forced a dry chuckle from her throat.
 
Let them catch her and suggest lopping off her hand. Let them unleash the storm.
 
She found a place to rest beside a gray brick building. She took the item from her burlap sack and turned it over in her hands. Sunlight gleamed on its surface. A brass hand mirror with filigree markings. An intricate design ran from the mirror’s back down the length of its sturdy handle. She didn’t know the value of the mirror. It could cost one rupee or one hundred. What mattered was its function, what it would reveal. Something she’d not yet seen. Her new face.
 
But Mahakali was afraid. She did not want to see. So, she sat a moment longer.
 
The scent of fresh Chapati hung on the breeze, summoning memories of childhood, wishful ideologies of safety, warmth, and love. This was a lie her heart whispered to her mind. The truth was, Mahakali had never been loved. She’d been a commodity, a slave for her father. Eighteen unbearable years she’d spent with her father barking orders and criticisms at her, day in and day out.
 
Tears formed in her eyes, threatening to fall.
 
Not yet, she told them.
 
She sat on a mildewed crate in an alley laden with waste, feeling the weight of the mirror in her hands.
 
Drawn by the smell of the feast, people shuffled past. They filled the town square, famished from their fast. Mahakali was starving, too, having not eaten in a year’s time. But it was not food for which she hungered. It was revenge.
 
As they gathered, she let herself remember.
 
It should have killed her, crawling alone on her belly through the city’s filth, and through the hot sands on the outskirts of town, her oozing wounds worsening with every pull. Nobody offered to help her. And why?
 
Because her father had lied?
 
Why did that mean she deserved such cruelty? How could the people she’d known all her life look down on her in pure agony and turn away, leaving her to die?
 
Father had always been a liar, all his life. Everyone knew as much. Everyone except for the groom who had agreed to marry her, and his family. They trusted what father had told them. He had boasted of a generous dowry, full of precious jewels and rupees, set aside for his daughter’s hand in marriage.
 
She had always been reluctant to believe her father’s stories of a dowry safely stored away. Her stomach was empty; her fingers were sore from scrubbing, and she wore little more than rags. Still, the rotten man had challenged anyone who doubted him, the centers of his eyes like two black cannonballs, ready to fire.
 
At seventeen, Mahakali found herself engaged to a stranger. It wasn’t a matter in which she was consulted. A man she had never met, ate dinner with her father one evening, then returned seven weeks later to collect his fiancé.
 
When the new in-laws asked for the dowery they’d been promised, no such payment was bestowed.
 
For months, the families feuded with each other, at odds, over the unpaid dowry. Her father kept promising he would make the trip several miles away to retrieve his treasures, but he never made the trip. The more he stalled, the thicker the air grew, until young Mahakali felt she could barely breathe.
 
One day, as she was sweeping the walkway outside her new home, a passerby threw a bucket of acid onto her face. The surprise attack covered Mahakali’s face, neck, chest, and arms in a corrosive liquid that made her skin drip like water. It seared into her muscle tissue and leaked down her thighs, liquifying meat. When the blindness caused by the acid eating her eyelids finally subsided, she grew sick at the sight of her own ruined arms, scraps of meat hanging like a flayed goat at a cookout, bone peeking out from deep within the raw, red meat.
 
Mahakali screamed, but no one came to her. They all turned away, as if she had done something to deserve that excruciating pain. The worst thing she’d ever felt. The acid ignited every nerve in her body, melting away the girl she’d once been.
 
She eyed the people with scrutiny now.
 
Why do men look to the heavens for gods? She wondered. Don’t they see the goddesses among them?
 
She had only wanted to live among the humans for a little while. To feel what they felt, eat what they ate, love like they loved. Immortal life in the heavens grew so tedious, being untethered by physical form, able to coalesce with space and time. The sheer unbridled freedom of it all bored Mahakali. It bored most gods after a while. And so, she had waited patiently for her chance, for her moment to fall to earth and be born into humanity, an opportunity afforded to gods and goddesses once every thousand years or so.
 
All she’d wanted was one fleeting, measly, mortal lifespan.
 
And it had been cut short.
 
Mahakali raised the mirror.
 
She looked at her face. Her ruined face. For a moment, she did not cry.
 
She had not shed a tear since crawling to the cave on her hands and knees and laying down in its healing soil. Sometimes, Mahakali could still feel the soil on her skin, cool and silky, like the cinders of her burnt yesterdays, surrounding her to drown out the cruelty of humanity and remind her of who she really was. The soil was the only thing that had been there for her at the end of her short, painful life as a mortal woman. Perhaps because the earth had come from her mother, Kali.
 
So now, she looked at her reflection in the mirror, her skin a patchwork of dark and light pigment, rugged where her body had mended itself. She was a quilt now, stitched with pain. The cartilage in her nose had burned away, and what had grown back was darker than before, so that her nostrils appeared sunken in. Part of one eyelid was missing. Her ears were knotted lumps. Her face was that of a stranger.
 
Mahakali’s dark eyes shined with rage as she observed the true extent of the damage she’d only felt with curious fingertips until now. The rage gathered in her gut—a hot, electric energy. It rushed through her, rocketing into the atmosphere. It roared across the sky with a crack.
 
Thunder clapped. People stopped, tilting their faces upward. Thick clouds blew over the sun, casting everything into shadow.
 
Mahakali did not draw the veil of her ghoonghat as she left the alley and stepped into the street. She needn’t hide her face any longer. People turned. Their eyes grew wide. More gazes were drawn from seeing others look. Soon, there were gasps, sighs, and whispers as the crowd openly stared.
 
She saw the horror in their eyes. But it was not her burnt visage they should fear. This feeble, ninety-five pound sack of flesh, held together with scar tissue, had never meant harm to anyone, though they executed her just the same.
 
No. Instead, they should fear the first wet tear that formed in the corner of her eye and fell with a foreboding splatter, sizzling against the cobblestone.
 
Dense gray clouds swirled overhead, and as Mahakali cried, a fatal rain began to fall in Bharini.
 
She knew firsthand how quickly corrosive acid ate the flesh. Yet, still, she was surprised by how soon screams erupted in the crowd, pleasantly ringing in her ears. Raindrops had only begun to speckle the streets when a man cried out. Within moments, several more howled in pain as a deluge of acid rain beat down upon them.
 
Hands shot protectively to faces, skin bubbling and bleeding. Everyone ran for the tents. In their chaotic dash for cover, many men were pushed to the ground and trampled. Blood swirled in puddles as the nightmarish rain devoured skin and bore into muscle tissue.
 
Mahakali trembled, and she felt herself begin to grow larger. Her pants and kurta tore into shreds, fluttering to the ground. It did not hurt, though. It felt good. It felt right. Soon, she towered over the tents of the bazaar, looking down on the pathetic humans as they darted about.
 
Her scars disappeared, her once-damaged flesh revitalized. Her skin darkened to a mesmerizing shade of black that glistened in the rain. Her breasts swayed as her bosom heaved, angrily. The pain in her heart faded. Now there was only vengeance.
 
Her ominous figure was as black as night as it loomed over the city, save for the whites of her eyes and her pearly teeth as she grinned. She stood over the people, naked, without a hint of modesty. Her crimson tongue flicked in and out of her smiling lips, tasting the air, lapping at the dread that collected in it.
 
Six additional arms sprouted from her sides. Unfurling like proboscises, they waved through the sky. The long-lost appendages made Mahakali feel whole again, like a goddess again, and with that, her tears stopped flowing.
 
But the rain didn’t stop.
 
No, it kept falling as all eight arms extended across the sky, long, dark streaks over layers of thick, gray clouds. Her biceps and triceps bulged. She gyrated, throwing all her appendages into the rhythm of her triumphant dance, like an arachnid in its fatal mating posture. Myriad limbs cast ghastly shadows across the landscape as lightning flickered.
 
Everywhere, there were screams.
 
The storm blew harder, whipping sideways. It ate through the refuge of the tents, exposing everyone to the downpour. Unable to wipe the acid away, the panic-stricken crowd then tried to clutch the flesh to their bones as it melted, layer by layer. They cried in agony, falling to their knees as bodily tissues sloughed off and ran like red ribbons through a river of carnage in the streets.
 
Mahakali flicked her giant, red tongue, savoring the pain in the air. She didn’t crave all pain, no. The pain of an innocent held no allure for her. She was a goddess of retribution, and she craved the pain of men who deserved it. Men who abused earth goddesses. Ravaged their bodies, imprisoned their minds, broke their spirits. Her palette was designed for their pain, and she inhaled it greedily.
 
Bending down, Mahakali collected skulls from the gore-splattered streets with sixteen digits, focusing her attention on the ones that had been stripped clean by the acid, for they would do nicely as pendants on a necklace she could wear around her neck. Her fingers descended like a wake of black vultures, combing through the sticky bones, disconnecting heads from spines like a child plucking flowers from their stems.
 
Mothers and children scurried away from Mahakali’s fingers as she searched the rubble, but they needn’t worry. Mahakali would not bring them pain. No, not the innocent. Some innocents were battered by the chaos of the terrified crowd, but as for the rain, it slid off their skin like ordinary rain on an ordinary day.
 
The village would need mothers and children once the storm had passed, as well as men of pure heart, some of which remained. Even though Mahakali brought destruction, she also brought rebirth.
 
Such was the way of gods.
 
The rain continued to fall. But those affected by its deadly bite had grown silent, no longer breathing, as the brutal liquid downpour ate deeper into their corpses, bodies melting in the streets of Bharini.
 
Mothers continued to cover the eyes and ears of their young ones as if frozen that way, huddled over them protectively, and the men who had thrown themselves over their wives and daughters wept and waited out the storm, eyes closed, lips fluttering in prayer.
 
Every now and then, a giant hand swooped from the sky to pluck a skull from the ground, adding to those gripped in her many palms, until she had collected enough for her necklace. Then, feeling much better, Mahakali sighed, turned off the rain, and returned to her place in the skies.
 
 
 
 
 
Lindsey Beth Goddard is a tortured poet and dark fiction author, living in Missouri, whose short stories have been published in e-zines such as Gamut Magazine and Carnage House, as well as in anthologies such as Error Code and The Asylum of Terror (1 and 2). Her work has been performed on popular podcasts like Creepy Podcast and Chilling Tales for Dark Nights. She is the author of four short story collections, two poetry books, and a novel. For more information, visit: LindseyBethGoddard.co