The Smile on the Face

Originally published in 2004 in the anthology Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks, edited by Emily Pohl-Weary; from Sumach Press, Canada

There was a young lady...

"Geez, who gives a shit what a...what? What a laidly worm is, anyway?" Gilla muttered. She was curled up on the couch, school library book on her knees.

"Mm?" said her mother, peering at the computer monitor. She made a noise of impatience and hit a key on the keyboard a few times.

"Nothing, Mum. Just I don't know what this book's talking about." Boring old school assignment. Gilla wanted to go and get ready for Patricia's party, but Mum had said she should finish her reading first

"Did you say, 'laidly worm?'" her mother asked. Her fingers were clicking away at the keyboard again now. Gilla wished she could type that quickly. But that would mean practising, and she wasn't about to do any more of that than she had to.

"Yeah." Damn. If Mum had heard that, she'd probably heard her say, 'shit,' too.

"It's a type of dragon."

Looked like she wasn't going to pay attention to the other word that Gilla had used. This time, anyway. "So why don't they just call it that?" Gilla asked her.

"It's a special type. It doesn't have wings, so it just crawls along the ground. Its skin oozes all the time. Guess that protects it when it crawls, like a slug's slime."

"Yuck, Mum!"

Gilla's mother smiled, even as she was writing. "Well, you wanted to know."

"No, I didn't. I just have to know, for school."

"A laidly worm's always ravenous and it makes a noise like a cow in gastric distress."

Gilla giggled. Her mother stopped typing and finally looked at her. "You know, I guess you could think of it as a larval dragon. Maybe it eats and eats so it'll have enough energy to moult into the flying kind. What a cool idea. I'll have to look into it." She turned back to her work. "Why do you have to know about it? What're you reading?"

"This lady in the story? Some guy wanted to marry her, but she didn't like him, so he put her in his dungeon..."

"...and came after her one night in the form of a laidly worm to eat her," Gilla's mother finished. "You're learning about Margaret of Antioch?"

Gilla boggled at her. "Saint Margaret, yeah. How'd you know?"