Becoming Belladonna

by C. A. Davore

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She is fifty. She has hot flashes. She is exactly who they have been waiting for. At fifty, Belladonna Blackbriar thought she knew exactly who she was. A horticulture professor at a Tucson community college. A divorced mother. A grandmother of two. A woman moving quietly through perimenopause and the strange new geography of her own body, who had accepted that her best years were behind her — and that the rest of her life would be small, careful, and her own. She was wrong about all of it. On a Friday morning at three-thirty-one, on a balcony of the Grand Floridian, Bell finally hears the voice she has been ignoring her entire life. I am Belladonna. And in the small dry register she will come to know as her permanent weather, she understands — for the first time — that she has never been the woman she thought she was. Three thousand feet beneath the eastern slope of the Appalachian mountains, a civilization has been waiting for her. A people who are not quite human. A line that descends from a king who abdicated his throne for love three centuries ago. A man who has been preparing to receive her for one hundred and fifty-seven years, four months, and twenty-eight days. A working chord, in her chest, that has — in operational fact — been ringing for her since April. She is fifty. She is exhausted. She is exactly who they have been waiting for.

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