Beware the Mara
The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli made its debut in 1782 where the horror of the scene and its suggestiveness rippled through the crowd at the Royal Academy exhibition in London. The woman in the painting is wearing a white dress. Aren’t they always? Peep the woman’s foot unveiled from her white nightgown. Her toes balk at the chilly air. Light shines on her face and chest, her arms dangling off the mattress, her hand scraping the floor. Her head is lolling, her neck exposed. To see her face clearly you must turn your head upside down, which I do. She is either in ecstasy or in so much pain that she has passed out. When the blood starts rushing to my head, I turn myself right side up again.
The mara hunches atop the woman’s abdomen, as if it is preparing to devour a piece of stolen fruit. Its eyes are lemur-like, golden and wide. It scowls, not angrily so much as hungrily. The mara looks like a stone goblin with pointy ears. The mara knows it has been caught, but it does not care. It dares you to interfere.
Behind the mara, peeking through the curtains, the face of a wild eyed midnight horse, its mane defying gravity as if electrified by a burst of lightening. Its teeth gleam. Its eyes have no pupils. The horse was not there in the original sketch, but found his way into the oil on canvas.
When I was a child, I had terrible nightmares. I appeared at daycare as a kid with bags under my eyes. One of the aids asked what was the matter. I told her about what came to pass in my mind’s eye at night. She crouched down in that way adults tend to do with children when they’re about to say something thoughtful. She said, do you know what a nightmare is?
A bad dream, I answered.
Yes, but there’s another meaning, she said. Nightmare is really two words, night and mare. She asked if I knew what a mare was. I shook my head no. She told me that a mare was a female horse.
Perhaps this is what led to the horse photos on my wall and my schoolwork folders. The mare became the symbol of my protector.
The horse in The Nightmare looks haunted. The horse watches the woman whose arms dangle off the mattress. And then there’s the mara. No matter where your eyes wander, they always return to the mara.
The mara is often cited in Germanic folklore though there were whispers of such things in many places. At night, some mara ride horses, leaving them bone-weary and sweaty by morning. Others ride trees, the branches tangling beneath them. Most prefer riding the chest of an unsuspecting sleeper, tangling their hair and giving them bad dreams. That’s if you’re lucky. In Serbian stories, the mara slips through the keyhole and tries to strangle the sleeper.
I was not a peaceful sleeper, even as a child. Combating my resistance to forgo my crib or my parents’ bed, my mother called the toddler bed a princess bed. I climbed into the princess bed night after night and tossed and turned. I had vivid nightmares. I have them still. Often, in these dreams, I am being chased by a beast or a man.
My first time living on my own, I rented a Florida room in a historic home in Michigan. Three of the four walls were windows. I filled the space with plants and slept in a lofted bed. I sometimes felt like a princess climbing that ladder, as if I was scaling a stack of mattresses before a sleepless night atop a pea. I felt less like a princess when winter came. The landlord’s son put aluminum foil behind the radiator as consolation for the creeping cold in that room of windows. I huddled underneath my lofted bed, wrapped in blankets beside a space heater to the tune of the ineffectual radiator’s yawning hisses.
When my boyfriend and I lived together, I treated the space under our bed as if it was a notch in an old tree filled with fairy trinkets. I stashed bags of seashells and rocks beneath the bed beside papers and secrets. We spent hours upon hours resting above these treasures of mine.
When I move out of my boyfriend’s house, I bring my childhood bed with me. I roost in a room on the top floor of an old, creaky house. I push the bed against the wall, and stuff the crack with pillows as I did when I was a child, to block the imagined eyes and cold, boney fingers from finding me in the dark.
Come winter, there are mice in the house. My housemate finds squirrel bones in the attic, and I’m sure I hear claws in the walls. There’s a brown water stain on the ceiling of my room. My housemate assures me the stain is old, it isn’t wet or growing. After watching a thriller where a dead body falls from the ceiling and an unspeakable horror dwells in the basement, I’m jumpy. In the moments between sleep and waking, I’m sure the stain on my ceiling is haunted, a harbinger of death. When I close my eyes, I swear I can feel the weight of something perched on my chest, tying knots in my hair and caressing my face.
Brooke White is a Michigander with a penchant for long conversations. Her work has appeared in Midwestern Gothic, Entropy, Iron Horse Literary Review, Superstition Review, March Xness, Honey Lit, and others. She received her MFA from the University of Minnesota. She’s at work on a book about desire and fairy tales @brkthewriter