The Frau’s Belly

Chapter 1- Preface: The Burning Bride

The rain had stopped, but the cobblestones still gleamed like oiled black glass beneath the pyre's hungry light. Frau Umfang stood at its center, wrists bound with rope that had already begun to smoke, and the crowd pressed forward-not out of hatred, though hatred was there, coiled in their throats-but out of something rawer. Hunger themselves. For spectacle. For certainty. For the sight of a monster rendered down into ash.

She was enormous. Not merely fat in the way of prosperous merchants' wives or well-fed abbesses, but vast in a way that seemed almost architectural. Her belly hung before her like a moon about to birth, slick with sweat and the flickering orange reflection of the flames that licked at the kindling stacked around her ankles. Her chins cascaded in soft, quivering folds, and her small eyes-buried in the magnificent landscape of her face-gleamed with something that should not have been possible in a woman about to die.

Joy.

The executioner touched his torch to the base of the pyre. The crowd inhaled as one, a great sucking sound of anticipation. The straw caught with a whoosh, and the flames began their patient climb up the tower of her skirts.

Frau Umfang threw back her head and laughed.

The sound was not the cackle of a witch. It was not the shriek of the damned. It was a sound like a thousand feasts, like the crack of roasting skin and the pop of marrow bones split for broth. It rolled across the square, fat and rich and horrifyingly merry, and the nearest onlookers stumbled backward as if the sound itself had weight.

"Look!" a woman shrieked, pointing with a trembling finger.

The flames had reached Frau Umfang's belly now, and through the translucent curtain of fire, the crowd saw them-shapes within her, pressing against the distended wall of her gut from the inside. Three silhouettes. Three writhing, twisting forms that clawed at her flesh from within as if trying to escape the oven of her body.

The carriage boy. The dock master. Her husband. All three of suitors.

They had not been consumed in any ordinary way. The townsfolk had found the bones, yes-cracked and sucked clean of marrow, arranged in a pattern of almost liturgical significance on her dining table. But the bones had been empty of their spirits, and now they knew why. The men were still in there. Still trapped. Still burning.

One of the shapes seemed to press its face against the inner wall of her stomach, and for a single, horrific moment, the crowd could see the outline of a nose, a brow, a mouth stretched wide in a silent scream.

Frau Umfang looked down at her own belly with something like affection. "Shhh," she murmured, and her voice carried strangely over the crackling of the flames. "Shhh, my darlings. We feast together tonight."

The fire took her then in earnest. It climbed her body in sheets of orange and gold, devouring the layers of her finery, the ribbons and laces that had been her pride. Her skin began to blister and blacken, and the smell-sweet and terrible, like a pig roast gone wrong-spread across the square. Women buried their faces in their husbands' chests. Men gripped their children's shoulders and turned them away.

But Frau Umfang did not scream.

She laughed again, though her voice was beginning to crack and peel like her skin. "Through hunger I am burned," she called out, and her words were punctuated by the pop of fat and the hiss of blood boiling. "And through hunger I shall be born again!"

The crowd fell silent. Even the flames seemed to pause, as if listening.

Her eyes, those small, bright eyes buried in the ruins of her face, found the midwife standing at the edge of the crowd. The woman was old, older than the Pyre, older than the stones beneath her feet. Her name was Marta, and she had delivered half the town, had held their blood and their screams in her weathered hands. She had seen death many times. She had seen birth many more.

But when Frau Umfang's gaze met hers, Marta felt something twist in her gut. A cramp. Low and deep, in the place where her womb had been barren for thirty years. It was not a painful cramp, not exactly. It was a cramp like hunger. Like emptiness suddenly remembering what it was to be filled.

Marta clutched her stomach and doubled over, gasping.

The flames roared. Frau Umfang's body slumped, the ropes that held her burning through at last, and she fell forward into the heart of the fire. The crowd erupted-screams, prayers, the frantic jostling of people trying to see and trying to look away at the same time. The silhouettes within her belly continued to writhe for a long, terrible moment before they too were still.

But Marta did not see any of that. She was on her knees now, her forehead pressed against the wet cobblestones, her hands clapped over her mouth. The cramp had passed, but something else had taken its place. Something cold. Something patient. Something that curled in the hollow of her womb like a seed waiting for spring.

When she finally looked up, the pyre had collapsed into a bed of glowing coals. The crowd was dispersing, muttering and crossing themselves, already beginning to weave the story into legend. But Marta remained where she was, staring at the place where Frau Umfang had fallen.

The ashes stirred. A single spark lifted from the coals, caught by a wind that seemed to come from nowhere, and drifted across the square.

It landed on Marta's outstretched hand.

She should have brushed it away. She should have screamed. But instead, Marta watched the spark die against her skin, and in that moment, she felt something move inside her. Not a cramp that time. Something more than hunger alone.

A flutter.

Marta looked at her reflection in the Frau's mirror, along with the rest of the witch's belongings unconsumed by flames, in horror.