19 years old rapid skeletal growth
no citizenship member of the X-Men
unmarried
Go backYou would have thought that I'd asked for her first born.It's widely said that Marrow has the social skills of a wild animal. A couple of times I heard her say it herself. She wasn't amenable when I asked her to sit for me. The words "freak show" were mentioned several times, as were a fair number of words that I won't repeat. I got the feeling that not only should I not have asked, I shouldn't have looked in her direction, thought about her, or in fact woken up that morning.
In her defense, she was holding a wound closed on her leg and waiting for the protruding femur to stabilize so that she could break it off. I wouldn't have tried then, except that if I'd waited for Marrow not to be bleeding, I might have waited forever. For sheer physical damage, her only rival is Jono Starsmore, and it's that much worse because she's female. Most of the women who work with the teams are startlingly lovely by conventional standards. Intimidating at the best of times (certainly it was for me), it has to be misery-inspiring for someone who borders on the monstrous.
Marrow's skeletal growth is uncontrolled. The bones that emerge are both armour and weapons, but they tear through living flesh on their way out, and the resulting pain is one that she simply lives with.
She claims to have no memory of her parents. Before joining the X-Men, she lived as part of an underground community of people with radical physical mutations. Nearly all members of that community were murdered. A very few survivors came by their own ways to Westchester. (At the time I was there, only Marrow and Caliban, whom I didn't photograph, were still present. A few others had vanished, and one or two older ones had left openly.)
Gambit, eventually, talked her into sitting for me. Their friendship isn't one I was able to categorize, but I suspect it helps that he speaks to her as an equal rather than as a monster. The tights cover still-healing wounds on her thigh, and the arm not visible in this shot had two delicate and very sharp bones radiating back from the forearm, over her elbow. In spite of the room's attic appearance, we were underground, in a room half-under the basement stairs.
She isn't, in spite of her abrasive manner, stupid. She made a couple of remarks that I had to reference later, in the mansion's library, and it was only then that I recognized how much of The Tempest that she knows by heart, and exactly how wry a sense of humour she has, to take that kind of perverse joy in being the monster in the basement.
Marrow: You're gonna give them the idea that all the X-Women are fuck-toys waiting for somebody to take them. Or is that what you wanted?
Sinclair: No.
Marrow: Then why naked?
Sinclair: I'm shooting everybody naked.
Marrow: Yeah. Why?
Sinclair: So you'll look like people instead of superheroes.
Marrow: [stands, peels her shirt off] This look like people to you?
Sinclair: . . .
Marrow: Yeah. [sits] You were gonna ask me something?
Sinclair: Why do this?
Marrow: You see me maybe moving into New York, maybe open myself a nice little hair salon?
Sinclair: There are other things you could do.
Marrow: If I left, all the X-Women would look like fuck-toys. They already think like that, that mutants are mostly normal-looking or else spectacular-looking, and that they could all go teach school if it wasn't that they can leap over tall buildings in a single bound and that shit. They gotta remember that there are mutants who look like me. Lots that're worse.
Sinclair: So that makes you what? Some kind of a hairshirt?
Marrow: This island's mine by Sycorax my mother. [grins] Caliban needs them. But I get to know their secrets. And I do like that. Yeah.