Author: amongthegoblins

fairy tales, fantasy, fiction, old work, short stories, Uncategorized, writing

Century Fruit

amongthegoblins

Written July 2015

This is one of the ones that never got much attention. It’s a quiet story, and most of the action is internal, but it meant a lot to me when I was writing it. I think the ending is a little ambiguous, so I’d be interested to know what you think will happen.

The shutters in the hearth room were already drawn. A bright fire had been laid, filling the round room with shadows and chinaberry smoke.

Bas stood by the hearth, chewing on a grass stalk. He looked up when Amir came in, then back at the fire. His face shone with sweat; he’d been out running, or pacing.

Amir crossed to the sofa and sank into the joint of its two halves. He leaned his face against the cool, cracked leather. “I’m nervous,” he said, surprising himself with the admission. A tight knot had grown in his stomach for days. He’d barely eaten anything at supper, though it had only been herbs and lentils—a simple meal meant for contemplation. Traditional on century nights.

His cousin laughed. “Don’t worry. You’re very clever; I’m sure great things are ahead of you.”

“Lots of people are clever,” said Amir glumly. “Mother’s brother was clever. A horse kicked him, and he lost half his wits. One-Eyed Ahmad was clever, and he was a muck-hauler. What if I’m a muck-hauler?” His breath was speeding up, but he couldn’t slow it. “We don’t know what any of us will see.”

Bas inhaled sharply. Before Amir could try to reorder his words into something more positive, his cousin stalked from the room.

He thought of following, but didn’t. Bas would be unapproachable until this was over. In the unlikely event that the fruit didn’t send him after Isra, he’d leave tomorrow anyway. He’d only stayed this long because he hoped that the century fruit would give him a direction to start in.

He stood and walked, running his hands over the old furniture, the hangings, the pottery. Here and there were crude objects made by generations of the family’s children. A clay figurine of an old traveler with a bird on his pack had been Amir’s gift to Grandmother three years before. Beside it was a lopsided coil-pot Aunt Gili had made when she was five or six, painted with wobbly olive branches under its cracked glaze. Other things were so old no one knew their stories. How many people had left this house over the centuries and never returned?

The adults still lingered over their tea in the kitchen. The mint was a cool thread under the tang of woodsmoke. He could hear Mother’s voice, quick and strident, rising over the rest. Again she said that this was all too sudden, too breathtaking. She’d wanted to put off cutting the fruit, at least till tomorrow, but Aunt Gili had gently reminded her that it would rot after just a day off the tree. Bas had found it this morning. If they didn’t eat it tonight, they might go another century without guidance.

He sat back down, inhaled again the familiar scent of old leather. It seemed harsh, almost crude, for all of them to eat the fruit where they could see each other’s faces. Kinder if they could take their visions in their rooms, their private spaces. He thought of the fig tree outside the kitchen, where he could sit in fragrant breezes as the sun set over the desert. He’d rather process his fate alone.

Was it fate that they would see? Mother insisted they could ignore the visions if they didn’t like them. Father said she wanted them all to stay within calling distance, but Amir was sure Adi, at least, would go farther.

He slouched down in his seat. He wasn’t sure he wanted to try the fruit at all. His family probably wouldn’t push if he refused, though they’d be disappointed. Twelve was young. But though a full century didn’t always pass between one fruit and the next—once it had supposedly only taken 20 years—he probably wouldn’t see another in his lifetime.

His muscles were tensing up. He eased them deliberately, though his heart still raced. Which would be worse: to see a vision, and have to leave the farm—or pass it up, and stay here forever?

Hani stomped in then from the kitchen, scowling. Amir straightened. “Hey, little. What’s wrong?”

His brother climbed up next to him, sliding down on his first attempt. “I’m angry,” he announced, glaring at the fire. His face looked sticky from the honey pear he’d had for dessert. At five, Hani had nothing to contemplate.

Amir smiled, but lacked the energy he usually had to entertain his brother. “Because you don’t get to try the fruit?”

Hani kicked his heels back against the sofa, nodding. His lip trembled.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Amir after a moment. “Tomorrow, when our chores are done, we can go for a long walk. All the way to the west field, if you like.  Maybe we’ll find some flowers for Mother.” The adults generally preferred that the children not wander to the west end of the farm, as it bordered the desert and was mostly unguarded, but they would probably make an exception.

Hani looked marginally cheered by that idea, but his face soon clouded again. “Why do you get to eat it?” he said, kicking his heels again.

I don’t know. Amir drew his knees up to his chest. It was a lot of pressure for someone who’d never been farther than the city—to know that in a few years he would either leave forever, maybe for someplace he’d never heard of, or settle in for the rest of his life.

Then Shani and Shai came arm in arm through the curtain to the back wing, trailing a cool cloud of perfume. Shani was whispering, Shai giggling. Fais followed, smiling. Amir shifted to make space for him, but Fais followed his sisters to the bench by the hearth, and sat closer to them than he usually would.

They might be gone tomorrow, Amir realized suddenly. Both his girl cousins were seventeen. The visions were said to fade quickly, and it was best to start as soon as possible if your path lay elsewhere, especially if details were unclear. Amir might wait three or four years, until he was better prepared, but even that was risky.

And Adi… His sister appeared then, a silhouetted against the warm light of the kitchen doorway. It was still startling to see the abbreviated outline of her hair. All the other women in the family kept theirs long, but Adi had seen something in a magazine that made her chop hers off at chin level.

She was wearing the new outfit Father had brought her from the city. To Amir, she looked very sophisticated—shoulders bare under the cropped blouse Mother hated, full silk trousers swishing as she walked. He had expected Mother to scold her for wearing something so frivolous tonight, but Mother had only sighed, and looked at Adi with a sort of desperate fondness.

Adi, too, would probably waste no time in leaving.

What would that be like? They’d never been particularly close, but Amir supposed they loved each other as much as siblings usually did. He would miss her if she left. He thought she would miss him, too, at least when she remembered to.

The adults filed in from the kitchen: Father, Mother, Grandmother, Aunt Dar, Aunt Gili, Uncle Rabi. Lutfi and Siva came hand-in-hand, whispering. They sat in the shadows a little apart from Lutfi’s sisters.

Grandfather came last of all. In his hands was the covered silver dish he’d brought out and polished that afternoon.

As the adults all sat on the couches, Bas slouched back in. He leaned against the wall by the doorway, not looking at anyone, as far from everyone else as he could stand without leaving the room.

Everyone stared at the dish Grandfather had balanced on his knees. He was running his hands along its edges, uncharacteristically hesitant.

Father cleared his throat and clapped Grandfather on the shoulder. “Here we all are.” He’d dressed especially well tonight—formal silk, beard neatly trimmed. He seemed to expect good news.

“Here we are.” Grandfather glanced at Father. Father removed his hand.

Hani slid from the sofa and ran to Grandfather’s knee. “May I open it, please?”

Grandfather hesitated, and then held the dish out so Hani could reach it. “Go ahead,” he said.

Hani’s fingers smudged the silver as he groped for the handle. At last he got hold and opened it.

The fruit might never have fallen at all, especially from a tree as high as a century tree. Its burnt-golden skin was flawless. It had a flattened spherical base with a little dome on top where the stem was. Strange. As it ripened, it had been a fig-sized green lump, high in the branches. Now his hands wouldn’t have circled it.

Hani reached for the fruit, but Grandfather shook his head. “You’ve helped enough, dear. Go sit with your brother.” Hani obviously wanted to protest, but even he wouldn’t argue with Grandfather.

Grandfather’s wrinkled hand sagged under the fruit’s weight as he lifted it from the dish. He offered it to Grandmother. “Well, my dove.” He cleared his throat. “Why don’t you cut it?”

Grandmother had laid out a plate, a fruit knife, and a pewter saucer on a tray. She took the fruit and looked around, moving her lips as she did when she counted. “Fifteen, then,” she muttered. Setting the fruit on the plate, she picked up the knife and began to cut.

Mother shifted. Always calm and reasonable, she’d been unusually agitated about all this. Father watched her, but didn’t move or speak. They hadn’t spoken much lately, and today they’d hardly looked at each other. Father, uncharacteristically quiet, had mostly sat alone in his courtyard, writing materials untouched beside him.

Bas fidgeted, shuffling and tugging at his clothes. He was sweating again.

Everyone else was rapt and quiet. Adi watched the fruit as if it were the only thing in the world. Aunt Gili and Uncle Rabi held hands.

Grandmother cut precisely, methodically. The sound was shht, shht, shht, shht, like eastern pears when you cut them. Drops of juice flew out from the blade as it sawed. Some landed on her spotted knuckles, but she ignored them.

A strong perfume floated out: apple, honey, something floral. Pears, too? He couldn’t tell.

The knife reached the bottom. Grandmother began another cut. Shht, shht, shht, shht.

The first segment finally fell away. The flesh was brilliantly white: whiter than apples with their green overlays, or pears with their brown shadows. Would it be tart like apples? Sweet like pears? Grandmother sliced away the core, coaxed out the black seeds with the point of her knife, dropped them into the saucer. Plink, plink. She offered the section to Grandfather.

He shook his head. “Cut the rest, dear, and we’ll all eat together,” he said. “I think it’s best, don’t you?”

Grandmother set the section on the plate and began cutting again. She worked so slowly, pausing each time to cut away the core, to drop the seeds into the saucer. Plink, plink…

Amir’s mind wandered. What would he see? The city? He’d been there once. It was interesting, but smelly— manure and smoke and bodies, all familiar but too concentrated. Too much dirt, too much traffic, even at night—no quiet time when the ground could rest. He didn’t think he could stay there for long.

Maybe a distant village. Even another country—Masra? The fruit was supposed to keep the family from entrenching too deeply in any one place. They had to send out their own seeds, find new soil in other places. It was said that they had kin in every village, every city—even across the border in Ardunh, and in other countries, too. Wherever he was sent, some of those scattered kinsfolk might be there.

But after so long, it was unlikely they’d recognize him. He certainly wouldn’t recognize them. Long ago it was said that the family had carried tokens to identify each other, but those were long gone; only the trees, and tradition, remained.

Maybe he would be told to stay on the farm. It was a good place. He’d always been happy heree, and his family loved him. Of course, many of them might be gone tomorrow, but… some would surely stay.

In the stories, someone always stayed. Grandfather, of course, was from a branch that had. The century grove by the western fields was said to be 800 years old.  Someone had to tend it. It wouldn’t be so bad, to be that person. It was an important duty.

Grandmother stopped. After a moment, Amir realized she’d finished. She offered the plate to Grandfather, and this time he took a slice.

The plate went around the room. No one spoke. Amir turned to make sure that Hani wouldn’t take a slice after all. Incredibly, his brother was asleep.

He studied the little boy’s round face, long eyelashes, grubby hands. Hani didn’t realize, yet, that Amir might be leaving home soon. To a five-year-old, “three or four years” is the same as “forever.” But even if he stayed awhile, Amir thought knowing he was to leave must somehow alter their relationship. Who would take care of Hani, if he left? If Adi and Bas left? If all the other cousins left, and only Hani remained?

He brushed a few curls from Hani’s face, and reached to gather him up, carry him to their room as he’d done so many times—but now the plate was beside him.

It was Father who held it. He smiled nervously at Amir, as if seeking reassurance. Amir smiled weakly back, took one of the two remaining sections of fruit, and gave the plate back to Grandmother. She took the last piece, set the plate down, and nodded to Grandfather.

Grandfather closed his eyes. “May we all be blessed, whatever our futures hold. Let us partake.”

Amir lifted the fruit to his mouth. He still couldn’t trace the fragrance. Had he imagined that it was like an apple’s? It was more delicate, like a cucumber or a winter melon, like nothing in particular. Then it came back, strong as honey. Like honey—and then a tang of citrus, and then an amber scent. Then those went away, and he smelled apples again.

Everyone was waiting, eyes darting to each other’s faces. No one wanted to do this all together—everyone wanted to see their fortunes alone. The juice was sticky on his fingers. He wanted to throw the fruit away, bury it, give his share to someone else.

But he was a son of this house. As he had been privileged to grow up here, now he was bound to face his future bravely. He put the fruit into his mouth.

Juice pooled in his mouth as he bit down. The fruit was crisp, grainy, sweet and tart. He closed his eyes.

He didn’t know at first that the vision had started. He began to feel hot, firelight scorching his face, though he was far from the hearth. There was an odd mix of smells—tar, salt, rotting fish, something frying nearby.

He opened his eyes. A broad stretch of white sand… leading… to the sea.

It had to be. He’d never a lake so vast, so alive. Blue-green, rolling in white foam onto the shore.

A few ships rocked in the shallows, lazy in the sunlight. Men were loading them with crates and bags.

His shoulder ached under the weight of a heavy sack. His clothes were light and crisp. He felt full, happy. Spiced milk lingered on his tongue.

Men called to him from the nearest ship.

Blinking, Amir saw the fire, smelled chinaberry smoke, heard his family’s hushed breaths. Shutters creaked as the wind swept the desert. He could still taste the fruit, but he must have swallowed it; his mouth was empty, drawn by the tartness of the juice.

Could that have been it? Everyone else was blinking, shifting. Had they waited a century for so little?

Details were already fading. He tried to fix them in his head. White sand, blue-green sea—the shape of the shore, the brief line of ships. Smells… spiced milk… a blue sky, a punishing sun. Men shouting. He’d been a little taller, though not a man. There had been the sense that everything he owned had been in the bag he held on this shoulder.

How could he base his life on… that? Search without stopping, until he saw that scene exactly? It was said that some looked for years, even decades.

He’d never heard of anyone failing entirely. But he only knew of his ancestors, who had succeeded—who had, at least, planted their seeds, started a farm. The remains of the old farmhouse were still by the grove. The skeleton was almost full of sand, but you could see it. Eight hundred years ago, they’d come. And it was a good place.

Probably others had died before finding anything. Or—

“I’m going abroad!” Adi crowed.

Everyone looked annoyed. He knew he did, too. Couldn’t she have kept still a few seconds longer?

But the spell was fading, so he listened.

“I think so, at least,” she said. “I’m almost sure. It was night. We were in someone’s house. There was a big fire, and we were eating some sort of sweet on little plates. There were glasses of… I don’t know, it was gold, and full of bubbles. Everyone was wearing these beautiful clothes, like in a magazine. I didn’t know the language we were speaking, but it did sound familiar. My flute was in my lap, like I was going to play, or had played already. And I had this gorgeous dress…” She rubbed at her trousers.

Amir turned to see how his parents were taking this. Mother was looking at her hands, mouth tightly closed. Father smiled, but it looked forced. “Well… ah, that’s wonderful. I…” His smile faded. He looked at his own hands, then raised his eyes to Amir. “And what about you, Amir?”

Amir’s mind went blank. “Ah… what about you?” He was sure Grandfather would scold him for impudence, but Grandfather didn’t seem to have heard.

Father’s forced smile returned. “I’ll be here, of course. Playing the fool as usual. Here, forever.”

Amir wondered what Father had expected to see. Though it wasn’t respectful, he’d always thought of his father as… unfinished, somehow. Childlike. It was sad to think of him sitting in his courtyard forever, writing his rare poems, entertaining his friends with pipes and backgammon. He’d never been as close to Father as he was to Mother, but he loved him. If he left, he might not see Father again for… ever.

Now Shani said, “Shai and I are going to the city! Right, Shai?”

“Right.” Shai’s smile, strangely, was a bit sad. “It looked like a shop. I don’t know if we worked there, or…“

“Oh, you saw the shop, too?” Shani squeezed her sister’s hand. “Maybe we’ll own it. And we’ll be close enough to visit…“

“And I’ll be there, too!” Fais broke in, grabbing his sisters by the shoulders. “Isn’t it great? Probably I’ll come later—I was grown up. I think I was a student.” He turned to Mother. “Maybe I’ll be at the University, Aunt Mor. You’ll tell me about it, right?”

Mother nodded, but didn’t look up.

Abruptly, Bas straightened, crossed the room, and knelt by Grandmother. He whispered something in her ear. She murmured, and touched his forehead.  

Bas bowed his head, took Grandmother’s hands, and kissed them. Then he took a seed from the pewter saucer and left the room.

The first seed. Bas would plant it, someday, if he reached his destination. He’d probably leave tomorrow.

And he hadn’t looked at Aunt Dar, or at Grandfather.

“Well.” Aunt Dar’s voice was bitter. She stared after Bas with a look of angry satisfaction, as if she’d seen exactly what she’d expected. “There goes my son. I’ll be lucky to see him again.”

Mother looked up suddenly. Amir thought she would snap at Dar—but her face was stricken, almost gray. Her eyes darted around the room—landed first on Adi, then on Hani, then on him. They looked so tortured he lost his breath. She lowered her face again before he caught it.

“Elder sister,” said Aunt Gili, formally. “You knew from the beginning that this could happen—“

“And who are you to speak?” snapped Aunt Dar. “You’ll barely be separated from your children—the city is only two days’ ride from here. I may never see my son again.”

And whose fault would that be? Amir couldn’t help thinking. Aunt Dar had disapproved violently of Isra, had been just as active as Grandfather in blocking the marriage. She and Bas had rarely spoken since.

But maybe having Bas not there to not-speak-to would be different. It already hurt Amir to think about losing his cousin. If he thought about it much more, he’d probably cry.

“Let’s try to think more positively,” said Aunt Gili, more gently. “What did you see, elder sister?”

Aunt Dar hesitated. “Lahm. I’ve been considering…” She looked around as if she felt the need to explain herself. Her voice took on an appealing tone. “My friend’s husband died. She has a farm, and… I can be useful there.” She turned to Grandmother and Grandfather. “Mother, Father,” she said earnestly, “I would never disrespect the memory of my dear husband— I will miss him until I die— but—“

Grandfather roused from his trance to smile vaguely at Aunt Dar. “You honor his memory. I am sure our son smiles on you from Heaven. And now, since you have had a vision, you must go. We will bless your path as you travel.”

Aunt Dar bowed, but then looked away, as if unnerved. There was an odd blankness in Grandfather’s expression that had not been there before he’d eaten the fruit. Grandmother looked at him, and they shared a long glance, in the way they did that seemed more intimate than holding hands.

Amir remembered suddenly that the century fruit also gave visions of death.

Aunt Gili cleared her throat. “Ah… Lutfi…” She turned to her eldest son. “I don’t want to pry, but…”

Lutfi and Siva had been smiling blissfully at each other all this time. Now they turned their smiles on Aunt Gili.

 “We’re staying.” Lutfi said. “Just a few miles out, not even to the edge of the farm. The mountains were the same. And…” He looked at his wife.

“We’ll be parents.” Siva laid a hand over her stomach, as if the vision had somehow placed a child there already. “A girl. And others, too—two or three, at least.”

Lutfi’s parents were beside them in seconds, pressing their hands and patting their cheeks.  Aunt Gili seemed already to be giving them advice. Uncle Rabi just smiled, though his eyes were strangely melancholy.

In the wake of all this, Amir stood, and went to look down at the saucer on Grandmother’s tray. Grandmother watched him.

Eight seeds remained: black-brown, glistening. He could take one and go, or kneel and ask for a blessing as Bas had done—or he could sit down again, and pretend he’d never stood.

Father watched him, eyes wide. Amir’s hand hovered above the saucer.

Grandmother waited.

Amir looked at Mother.

She sat hunched over, arms wrapped around herself, head bowed. A hank of her long hair covered one cheek. Her eyes were tightly closed, but there were tears in her eyelashes.

Amir bit his lip. Still his hand hovered over the seeds. When everyone who was leaving had taken one, however many remained would be planted in the century grove. No matter how many trees grew, there was never more than one fruit at a time. One tree, more or less, wouldn’t make any difference.

Mother would be all right. She had to have known, marrying Father, that this might happen. She must have known her children might leave.

He reached for a seed.

Hani shifted in his sleep.

Amir’s heart stuttered. Could he leave, never to see his little brother grow—maybe never to see him again?

With Bas gone, Lutfi would probably inherit the farm; Hani was too young. But Grandfather had considered Amir, too, especially after falling out with Bas. To live here, run things, marry and have children like Lutfi—that wouldn’t be so bad.

He thought of the sea, the rocking ships, the sailors’ voices.

Mother’s shoulders were shaking.

Amir let his hand drop. Swallowing, he smiled at Grandmother. “I’m staying here.”

Grandmother blinked, but nodded. Impossible to know what she was thinking. Amir hoped she hadn’t guessed what he’d just done.

Grandfather didn’t seem to have heard. He was looking around the room, as if seeing it for the first time, with something like fear or wonder in his face.

Shivering, Amir looked at Mother, who hadn’t responded. He thought she hadn’t heard, but finally she lifted her head, and gave him a strange, cloudy smile. “That’s good, Amir. It’ll be a good home for you, all your life.”

All your life. It wasn’t the response he’d expected. He looked around. He would be as old as Grandfather one day, might never travel as far as the sea—might never go beyond the city. He would live in this house all his life. Become an old man, and die here.

All his life.

Father was watching them with a mix of alarm and disappointment. Though Mother was smiling, it was obvious from the quality of her smile that she wasn’t the least bit happy.

Amir knew that he had miscalculated somehow. “I’m going to bed,” he said, at a loss for what to do. “Good night, everyone.”

He heard Mother stand, but didn’t turn as he left. He didn’t want to hear what she might have to say.

Bas stood outside the door, watching Amir with obvious disgust.

“What?” Amir muttered, though he suspected Bas knew exactly what he’d done.

Before Bas could speak, there was a gasp in the room behind them. Whirling, Amir saw his mother standing in the center of the room, fists clenched. Father was behind her, one arm outstretched, as if he’d tried and failed to catch her.

Mother saw Amir watching, and gave him that strange smile again. She turned one hand over, and opened her slender scholar’s fingers. In her palm lay a century seed.

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fantasy, fiction, old work, short stories, Uncategorized, writing

Over the River

amongthegoblins

Halloween story 2012

I try to write a Halloween story when I can. Someday I’d like to do regular holiday pieces and put out more of my own story collections. This story is ten years old, so it’s not representative of my current style, but I still like it. I wrote it while I was living with my mother and stepfather in their house in the woods in central North Carolina. It’s quiet there at night and gets a bit spooky if you’re the only one awake. I don’t think the story itself is that spooky, though it is a bit bittersweet. Let me know what you think.

Sabrina couldn’t sleep with the moonlight shining in her eyes.

Her friends were having no such trouble. Jenny and Mark were sound asleep, cuddled up in their zipped-together sleeping bags. Brian had been snoring for half an hour. But Sabrina, pressed against him, was as alert as ever.

She’d tried snuggling closer to Brian, and moving farther away. She’d unzipped the bag for a breath of air, and zipped it back up when she’d gotten too cold. She’d rolled over, covered her eyes, counted sheep, and tried to meditate. But wherever she turned, the halogen light of the full white moon shone through her eyelids, keeping her wide awake.   

At last she couldn’t take it any more. She eased herself out of the doubled sleeping bag she shared with Brian, patting his shoulder when he whimpered in his sleep. Shoving her feet into her old yellow Crocs, she walked to the edge of the woods. 

The air was cold tonight. Shivering, she rubbed her arms and stomped her feet. She’d put on sweats over her flannel pajamas, and the socks she wore were the fluffy SpongeBob ones her sister had given her for Christmas, but the wind cut through everything like scissors through gauze. Strange that it should be so cold: usually it didn’t get below fifty this time of year. 

She supposed she could go into the house. It would be warmer. But the door was probably locked,and she didn’t want to wake Jenny for the key. Anyway, what if she encountered Jenny’s parents? They seemed like nice people, but she hardly knew them, and she didn’t feel like making small talk. Better to stay out here.

She could stir up the coals and roast some marshmallows, but she’d already brushed her teeth. She hadn’t even brought a book.  

Frustrated, Sabrina stared into the forest. The moonlight fell in broad beams through the leafless trees, chasing the shadows from the underbrush. Far below, at the bottom of the hill, the Little River glittered like tinsel. They had walked along the shore this afternoon, before sunset, but the place looked very different at night–fairy-haunted; forbidden.

She paced restlessly around the edge of the campsite, peering through the trees for a better look at the water. Every few steps she saw a flash of moon-bleached sand, a twinkle of water. Then, suddenly, a path came into focus.

She didn’t know how she had missed it. It was a wide, straight track between the trees, leading right down to the water. It looked much more passable than the glorified deer-trail they’d followed that afternoon. She could probably make it in her Crocs without twisting an ankle. And it wasn’t that far: the murmur of the water carried clearly over the chilly night air.

She could go down now, have a little walk, and come back without waking anyone. It would only take a few minutes. She might even be tired enough to sleep when she got back. Still, it seemed wrong to go off and leave her friends without saying anything.

Sabrina turned to wake them–let Jenny or Brian, at least, know where she was going. But they were all sleeping so peacefully–and she knew they’d tell her not to go. It wasn’t safe to wander by herself at night. 

Making a quick decision, Sabrina shoved her hands in her pockets and started down the trail.

—

On the shore of the river stood the most beautiful man she’d ever seen. 

He was a little older than she was, tall and broad shouldered, with a swimmer’s body–clearly visible, as he wore nothing but a pair of soaking-wet jeans. The moonlight was generous, highlighting muscles that might not have been visible by day. Half mesmerized by his abs and deltoids, Sabrina stepped closer.

His face would have been at home on a Grecian urn. His nose was aquiline, his complexion umber, his mouth sensuous and a little cruel. He had a satyr’s beard, and his thick dark curls shadowed his face like little horns. As she approached, he pushed his hair back, and his sharp black eyes nearly stopped her in her tracks.

“Hey.” His voice was deep and lazy.“What’s up?”

She couldn’t speak. She felt as she were being studied, as if he were assessing her fitness for some unknown purpose. She groped around for words, and finally came out with, “Aren’t you cold?” 

His laugh rippled through her skin. “I’m used to it. Where’d you come from?”

“Up the hill.” She pointed toward Jenny’s house, though she couldn’t see the path anymore. “We’re having a campout. You know. For Halloween.”

“Very nice,” he drawled, sounding entirely uninterested. “What’s your name?”

“Uh… Sabrina.”

“Nice to meet you, Sabrina. I’m Cyrus.” He held out his hand. “Well met by moonlight, et cetera, et cetera.”

Sabrina took his hand, found it warm and dry and strong. “You live around here?”

He laughed. “Sure. Over the river. We’re having a party, too.” He pointed at a spot far upstream, where the opposite shore was mostly obscured by a clump of deep, dark forest.  

Sabrina couldn’t see anything over there that looked like a party. She moved closer to the water, and a wavelet swamped her shoes, soaking through her socks in seconds.

Cyrus laughed as she cursed and staggered backward. “Don’t get wet.”

“Thanks.” She kicked off her shoes and peeled off her socks, rubbing her feet on the sand to try and dry them. She felt like she’d been frostbitten, and knew she should probably go back to camp. “How’d you get here, anyway? I didn’t see a bridge.”

He shrugged. “Walked. Ain’t that deep. I’m about to go back…” He looked her up and down thoughtfully. “Want to come with?”

She should say no, of course, but found herself stammering. “Uh… I… I don’t know.” She dropped her shoes and socks on the sand. “What kind of party is it?”

“Oh, you know. Just a small gathering–food, beverages, entertainment. Kind of a yearly tradition.”

Sabrina glanced back towards the house again. Would her friends wake up, if she went with this stranger? Would they find her gone, panic, and call the cops to search the river? “I probably shouldn’t. Didn’t tell anyone I was c–”

Cyrus grinned, and she stopped speaking abruptly, realizing that she should have kept that information to herself. 

But he only turned away, and said, “You’re probably right. Best to go on home. Could be dangerous over there–you might meet strangers.” He patted her arm. Her whole body tingled. “So long…”

“Wait. I…”

He shook his head. “You probably wouldn’t like it. I mean, you’re already scared…”

“Scared?” She looked down at herself, as if that accusation might be visible on her shirt. “I’m not scared. I just…”

But was she? A chill was running through her veins–but she didn’t think she was frightened. Excited, maybe. Intrigued. “I’m not dressed for a party,” she hedged.

Cyrus laughed. “You look fine. No one over there’s going to care what you’re wearing.”

Sabrina stared across the water. The moonlight was so bright that in places the surface of the river looked almost opaque. It rippled so smoothly she knew it had to be deep. “Isn’t it dangerous?” 

“Not if you’re with me. I can carry you over.”

He probably could, she thought, looking him up and down. He was as tall as Brian, and looked stronger, though Brian had been a football player before his injury. Cyrus looked like he’d never been injured in his life. 

She turned away, wondering if he could see her blush by moonlight. “What are you, the ferryman?”

He laughed again. “If you like.”

Well, he was a cocksure bastard of the first degree, but she had to admit he was oddly alluring. Unconsciously, she moved a little closer. “How do I know you won’t drop me in the river?”

“You don’t.” He held up two fingers, a Scout’s-honor gesture. “But I swear I’ll do my best to keep you dry.” Then he lowered his hand and leaned quite close, so his breath ghosted over her face. “I’ll keep you dry,” he murmured, “as long as you pay the toll.”

She breathed in, then exhaled, distracted by the smell of his hair: moss, dry leaves, and something animal. “Wh-what kind of toll?”

“Well, what have you got?” His lips curled into a teasing smile. His face was nearly touching hers. “I can’t work for free.”

Sabrina shivered, but stepped back, trying to conceal her disappointment. “I guess that settles it, then.” She tried, and failed, to smile. “Don’t have any money.”

“Oh, it doesn’t have to be money. Could be anything. A silver coin. A loaf of bread.” He pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “Even a kiss.”

Even as her whole body came alive with interest, she thought guiltily of Brian, sleeping by himself at the campsite up the hill. She should walk away now–shouldn’t even consider the offer. But the moonlight made the river seem like a different world, and Brian had no part in it. “All right,” she said, surprising herself.  

Smiling, Cyrus opened his arms.

He was hot, and strong, and his warm lips tasted like river water. It was the best kiss she’d ever had. 

Without taking his lips from hers, Cyrus gathered her into his arms. Despite his heat, a chill ran through Sabrina’s body. She realized, very faintly, that he was walking–wading into the water, his feet sinking into the sandy riverbed. Her heels dipped into the river, and cold water soaked the hems of her sweatpants, but she didn’t open her eyes. 

Finally, when Sabrina was quite breathless, the kiss ended. They were on the opposite shore, and Cyrus was setting her down on the hard-packed sand. The cold ground was like an electric shock on her bare feet. She staggered, clutching his arms for balance, and opened her eyes. 

While they’d been crossing, the moon had passed behind a cloud. The shore was entirely dark, and very quiet. Thick bushes crowded them like thugs. A strange bird cried in a nearby tree. Even the river sounded odd–its voice a sullen murmur, as if heard through a layer of ice.

She hadn’t realized, from the other side, just how wide the river was. It had looked small, and passable–an inconvenience, but not really an obstacle. From this shore, though, it looked wide, and deep, and dangerous. 

She turned back to Cyrus, suddenly unnerved. He was wet from the ribs down, and the muscles of his abdomen gleamed like oil. Unconsciously, she reached out to touch them. 

He pushed her away, almost gently. “That’s enough now.”

Embarrassed, Sabrina pulled away, confused by the distance that had come into his face and voice. “What’s going on?” Her voice, in her ears, was childish. “Where are we?”

“The other side. Come on, now.” He turned away, and started upstream without waiting for her to follow. 

—

Sabrina was suddenly, overwhelmingly conscious of the dangerous situation she’d walked into. She opened her mouth, about to ask him to take her back, but he was far away by then. His strides were swift, unfaltering: he seemed to have forgotten she was there. When she called to him, he barely slowed.  

As they walked, she started hearing voice, laughter and conversation and even song echoing out of the darkness. Far ahead, faint golden light reflected off the river. “Is that the party?” 

Cyrus nodded.

Then they came around a bend, and there it was. 

The shore had broadened, and the air was warm, fragrant with woodsmoke. Tiki torches had been set out in a large square across the side. Inside were dozens–perhaps hundreds–of people, sitting around bonfires and under striped pavilions.  

She rubbed her eyes, but the picture just got clearer. How could they all have gotten here? This was parkland–she was pretty sure no roads led in or out. Had they come by boat? A few were tied up on the shore, but not nearly enough to have brought so many people. And the sound should have carried–why hadn’t she and her friends heard the party from their campsite? And who were these people, anyway?

They looked, at first, like a historical reenactment society with a very relaxed dress code. Their clothes spanned the last two or three centuries, and seemed to have come from a number of cultures and walks of life. Most of the guests were dressed as farmers–in shirts and homespun trousers, calico dresses, or T-shirts and overalls. A few, however, wore hoop skirts and frock coats. Some of the black people wore old cotton clothing, and had a beaten-down look that made Sabrina think of slaves. A number of the guests looked like full-blooded Native Americans, and wore beaded shirts and dresses with feather-topped hats for the men. There were soldiers, flappers, hippies, businessmen, and even a few people who might have come from Sabrina’s own street. 

Then there were… others. Firelight flickered off of faces and bodies that weren’t entirely human. There were small, nude people with bald heads and jagged teeth; there were enormous men with branches that looked like clubs. A woman in the corner had three or four arms, all pouring drinks for the crowd around her. There were even people who seemed to have animal heads: dogs, cats, birds, foxes. Sabrina thought they were masks, until she saw one blink.

She turned to Cyrus, meaning to ask she-knew-not-what, but he was already gone. A moment later she spotted him across the campsite, accepting a mug of something from the woman with too many arms. Even he looked wilder here–the curls that had shaded his face like horns now looked like horns indeed. She waved to him, but he didn’t even look at her.

Despondent, Sabrina crossed the line of torches. Friendly face surrounded her immediately. 

“Hello, dear,” said a little round woman, whose skin was wrinkled like tree bark. “Is this your first time?” 

“Of course it is,” said the person beside her, a Native American man in a beaded blue shirt. “Look, she doesn’t even know where she is yet. Bet the riverman brought her.”

He beckoned to a young Black woman who was pouring herself a drink. She approached, handed him the pitcher, and gave Sabrina a curious smile. Beneath her calico kerchief, her eyes were large and sad.

“What is this place?” said Sabrina, helpless.

The wrinkled brown woman had produced a mug from somewhere. She held it while the man in blue poured. “It’s a party, dear,” she said, quite kindly. Her voice creaked like ancient branches. “Haven’t you ever seen one?”

Not knowing what to say, Sabrina took the mug and stared at it. It was very simple, and looked handmade–plain red clay with a clear glaze that gleamed in the firelight. Its sides were cool, and wet with condensation.

“Take a sip,” the old woman urged her. Sabrina obeyed. 

It wasn’t beer–she wasn’t sure what it was. It had a strange, spicy flavor she couldn’t quite place. Was it mead? Some kind of cider? She took another sip. “I’m Sabrina.” It seemed suddenly important that they should know that.

The three strangers nodded. “We don’t use names much here,” said the girl, “but I’m pleased to meet you, Sabrina. I was Hannah.”

“I was Tom.” The man smiled. 

The old woman smiled, too, but didn’t give her name.

A few feet away, a girl with red curls paused to give Sabrina a filthy look. She was very pretty, and wore a tight sweater that showed off an excellent figure. 

“Who was that?” Sabrina said, when the girl had moved on.

The other sighed. “That was Kelly,” said Hannah. “The riverman brought her last year.”

“Sour grapes,” said Tom, smiling again.

The old brown woman just shook her head, and filled Sabrina’s cup. 

Sabrina took another drink.

—

Time passed in a pleasant haze. Whatever was in the mug proved mildly intoxicating, and she didn’t get sleepy no matter how much she drank. From time to time she thought to look for Cyrus, but he was never nearby. He moved from fire to fire, greeting friends and smiling mysteriously at everyone. Once she saw him pat Kelly on the shoulder and kiss her cheek. Another time he seemed to be exchanging secrets with a beautiful dark woman in an old-fashioned dress. Not once did he look at Sabrina.

She soon forgot her disappointment, because it turned out her new friends were excellent company. They constantly asked questions about her life, and seemed fascinated by every answer, even things as simple as “I go to State,” or “I have three sisters.” Soon others joined them, and greeted Sabrina like one of their own. They all plied her with drink, and with food in little clay bowls: deviled eggs, cornbread, muffins, brownies. Everything was perfect, and she never felt full.

Before long she was in the middle of a large crowd of people, roasting homemade marshmallows over the largest bonfire. Its heat scorched her face, and the air was rich with smoke and sugar. Someone had remembered an old drinking song, and was teaching it to the others amid waves of laughter. “‘Twas on the good ship Venus–by Christ, you should’ve seen us…’”

Halfway through the song, Sabrina noticed that the crowd was getting a bit thin. Several of the more flamboyant partygoers were nowhere to be found, and most of the fires and pavilions had been abandoned.

As she watched, two Native women who looked like sisters embraced, sighed, and disappeared altogether. Before she could move, a little blond boy ran into the shadows and didn’t come back. Then a person in a long white cloak, whose face she’d never seen, bowed once to the crowd and vanished.

One by one, the guests disappeared. Some of them just left, walking from the torchlight into the darkness. Others faded slowly from sight, waving sadly to their friends. Others still were there one minute, then gone the next time she looked for them. 

She knew, in whatever part of her brain was still active, that this was not right, but she couldn’t make herself move. The disappearing guests seemed like someone else’s problem–an unfortunate fact of nature that no one could really change. Framing a comment along those lines, she turned to Hannah–and gasped. 

In the last few minutes, Hannah’s lovely oval face had shriveled like a month-old apple. Her dress hung from her body like a tablecloth, and she smelled of sweat and illness. She seemed to be dying of some wasting disease.

“What happened?” Sabrina said.

Hannah smiled faintly. “You know, I almost made it,” she whispered. “I got as far as the river–then I broke my leg. So…” With a sigh, Hannah disappeared.

Tom, next in line, was covered in blood. It poured from a fist-sized wound in the center of his chest, which must have taken out at least one vital organ. “Bastards were waiting at the river.” Blood flowed through his teeth as he spoke. “We–” Then his eyes widened, and he too faded away.

Desperate, Sabrina turned to the old round woman, who was watching her sympathetically. “What’s going on? Why–”

“Don’t worry, dear.” The woman patted her hand with broad, soft fingers. “They’ll all come back next year, you know. You will, too.”

“I…” Her brain was spinning. She shook her head, but couldn’t clear it. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s just the one night, you know–before the winter starts. When the veils are thin.” She yawned, smiled apologetically, and stood. “But I’d probably better go, too–I’m getting sleepy. Lovely to meet you…”

“Wait,” Sabrina said, reaching for her hand. “Please–”

But the old woman was already strolling towards the torches, nodding goodbye to the few remaining guests. Her wide back swayed, and her brown skirts rustled across the ground like leaves. Before Sabrina could stand, the woman had left the campground, and vanished into the darkness of the woods.

In a few minutes, all the other guests had left–fading like mirages, or simply walking away. Sabrina could only watch, pinned in place by shock or confusion or whatever she’d been drinking. Finally, as the sky began to lighten, she was alone, still sitting on her log beside the abandoned fire. 

Or almost alone. There was Cyrus, standing at the edge of the campground, surveying the site with satisfaction. 

As if a spell had broken, Sabrina finally stood. “Cyrus! What happened?” She ran over to him, tripping on feet gone suddenly numb.

He smiled distantly. “Hello, Sabrina. How’d you like the party?”

“It–where is everybody?”

“Oh, they all went home. Back to where they died, you know. It’s almost sunrise.”

“To where…” Her voice guttered like a candle. 

Cyrus laughed. “Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you didn’t guess?”

“You mean they were…” 

“Sure.” He gave her a pitying look. “You already knew there was no one over here–no one human, anyway. Where’d you think they all came from?”

Sabrina shook her head, sure there must have been something in the drink. “But… How do I get home?”

“Oh, you don’t.”

“What?”

“You are home, now.” Cyrus gestured around him at the abandoned campground. “You paid the toll, remember? Drank the brew, ate the food? It’s a one-way trip–you’re one of them now. If I were you, I’d just get used to being dead.”

“I… but…” Dead. The word echoed in her mind like a church bell. “But… you didn’t… I didn’t… why did you bring me here?”

“Because you wanted to come,” he said, smiling. He leaned close, and pressed a chaste kiss against her cheek. “I’m an equal-opportunity ferryman–I’ll take anyone over, as long as the toll gets paid.” He patted her cheek, then stepped away. “And it was a good party. But it’s over, now.”

Her mouth opened. The words fell out of her head, and she just stuttered. “I–but–we–”

“It’s not so bad, being dead–from what I hear, anyway. And you picked a good place. The river’s lovely, and you might even find some company if you look. If all else fails, you’ll see them all at the next party.” Then he yawned, stretching his exquisite muscles like a sleepy cat. “Afraid I’ve got to go. Got a drowning to take care of tomorrow–today, that is–and then a suicide after that. No rest for the ferryman.” He grinned. “Later, Sabrina.” 

She reached for his hand, but he was already gone.

It was getting lighter, and fog was rising from the dawn-touched river. Sabrina watched the moon set behind the trees, and listened to the calls of awakening birds. The torches went out one by one, and the embers of the bonfires slowly turned to ashes.

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fiction, horror, old work, short stories, Uncategorized

Under Glass

amongthegoblins

Written 2010/edited Halloween 2011

I wrote this during a mini writers’ retreat with my friend Brittany Harrison back in 2010. We’d decided to do a Frankenstein-style writing challenge, since it was spooky season and our isolated rental cabin in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina was very conducive to imagining horrors. When I decided to put out a few short stories as an ebook a couple of years later, this was one of the ones I included. I think I’ve grown quite a lot as a writer, and I wouldn’t call this representative of my writing now, but people have enjoyed it and I think it has some good moments. Let me know what you think!

“But you said I could go!”

    “I said you could go if you kept your grades up, young lady, and I told you what would happen if you didn’t.”

    “But Aunt Laurie–”

    Adie’s mother folded the report card and set it down on the pristine kitchen counter. She clearly would rather have thrown it on the floor. “I will call Aunt Laurie myself and tell her why you’re not coming,” she said. “Or you can explain to her why shopping with your friends was so much more important to you than your visit next month.”

    “That’s not–”

    “Don’t you raise your voice to me, young lady, or you’ll regret it.” Her mother pointed out the door. “Now go upstairs and do your homework. Dinner’s in an hour.”

    Adie glared. “I’m not hungry.” Her stomach rumbled as she spoke. The air was heavy with the aromas of baking bread and homemade tomato sauce, and she hadn’t eaten anything since lunch. But some things were more important than her mother’s spaghetti, and New York was one of them.

    Adie’s mother looked heavenward, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “All right. Then go upstairs and go to bed. I don’t want to see you until morning.” With that she turned back to the cutting board and began dicing celery with harsh, uneven strokes. Adie knew that the conversation was over.
    She grabbed her backpack and stormed from the kitchen, down the hallway and up the towering stairs. She made sure to stomp hard on each beige-carpeted step. When her mother didn’t come out and yell at her, she stomped even harder. All right, she would go to bed– and then she’d get up early tomorrow, eat breakfast and leave the house before either of her parents woke up. Right now she wasn’t sure if she wanted to see them ever again.

    The trip to New York was a long-delayed birthday present from her Aunt Laurie, who had been one of Adie’s dearest companions until she’d moved away last fall. The thought of calling to tell her aunt that the trip was off was enough to make her gut clench. Tears blurred her vision as she opened her bedroom door. She threw her backpack on the floor, then went down the potpourri-scented hallway to the bathroom to brush her teeth. She would go to bed. Right now she’d rather be dead than face the knowledge that her own stupidity had lost her New York.

    In the bathroom, Adie squeezed a healthy glob of toothpaste onto her toothbrush and shoved it into her mouth. She winced as it rammed the backs of her gums and bruised the inside of her cheek. As she brushed (tops… bottoms… insides… outsides… twice all over…) she watched the reflection of her face in the mirror. 

The girl in the mirror was an unfashionable sixteen. She had frizzy hair and an awkward nose, and her shirt was stained from a spill at lunch.. Her cheeks were wet with tears; her eyes were red and swollen. This was the kind of face you had when you were hopeless. When you weren’t going anywhere. When you would spend Christmas break alone with your own stupid parents… and when, worst of all, you weren’t going to New York because you were stupid.

    She spat her toothpaste into the sink, then spat again to clear the remnants from her mouth. Now the girl in the mirror had little dribbles of toothpaste foam all over her lips and chin. Her nose had begun to run. She looked ridiculous. 

Adie wrapped her arms around herself and stood staring at the girl in abject misery. So stupid. Why had she ever even thought she would make it to New York? She was probably doomed to stay here and rot, like an unharvested pumpkin in the world’s worst field. 

    A little more toothpaste ran down the chin of the girl in the mirror. Despite her foolish appearance, there was a glint in her eyes that Adie didn’t much like. She looked mocking. Mean. She could understand why people wouldn’t want to be around a girl like that. She wouldn’t want to be around herself, either. She just made everyone angry. It was probably for the best that she wasn’t going– Aunt Laurie would probably have regretted inviting her even if she’d gone. 

Adie glared at the girl, and the girl glared back. “Fuck you,” Adie whispered. She wiped the toothpaste from her mouth with an angry fist.

    The girl in the mirror watched her dumbly, as if she hadn’t understood what she’d said.

    On a whim, Adie licked a fingertip and wrote– in big, neat block letters– on the surface of the mirror: FUCK YOU. 

Then, to make it even clearer, she wrote it backwards. 

    When she looked back at her reflection, her stomach dropped. The girl was not looking at her. She was looking at the message Adie had written, and her lips moved as she read the words. When she’d finished, her eyes widened. Slowly, she lowered her eyes to stare at Adie. 

It was not a nice look.

    More than an hour later, as Adie lay shivering in bed with the blankets over her head, her mother came into her room. She knew that it was probably her mother because she could smell her mother’s neat floral perfume over the faint tang of her own unwashed laundry. Well-pressed chinos swished efficiently to the center of the floor and stopped. 

The woman who was probably her mother stood quietly for a long time. Adie lay in the warm darkness under her blankets and wished that she could be sure. “Still mad?” her mother said finally. The sound of her voice was blessedly familiar.

    Adie shrugged. She hadn’t actually thought much about the argument since seeing what must have been a hallucination in the bathroom mirror. She still shuddered just to think of the malice in her reflection’s eyes.

    “Do you want to talk about it?” her mother continued in her calm, reasonable way.

    Adie snorted. Tell her mother she was hallucinating? Sure, that would smooth things over.

    Her mother sighed. It was a soft, gusty sigh, quite restrained: the sigh of someone who has too many troubles to welcome another one. There was also that extra trill of exasperation at the end that had always been reserved for Adie. That, more than anything, convinced her that it was safe to come out.

    Adie pulled the covers from her face and sat up. The air was a cool shock against her face after more than an hour between the blankets. Her mother, who had already started to leave, stopped in midstride, looking surprised. Adie didn’t usually get out of a sulk until at least a day after she’d started it.

    “Still mad,” she said quickly, lest her mother wrongly assume that all was forgiven. “But I’ll… I’ll come downstairs.” 

    “All right,” her mother said, looking bemused. “Go wash your hands and then come set the table.”

    Adie approached the door to the bathroom as if it were a dragon’s cave. Her heart was pounding. The light was out, and since the room had no windows it was as dark as a real dragon’s cave would have been. Adie snaked her arm around the doorframe and felt for the switch. For a harrowing second she was sure that something would bite her hand off, but then she found the switch and light flooded the bathroom.

    Her hair stood on end as she crept inside. There was something wrong with the mirror. At first Adie couldn’t make sense of what she saw. There was a strange crosshatching over the surface of the glass, so thick in places that it almost looked frosted. It covered the entire surface of the mirror, top to bottom and edge to edge. It took her a moment to realize that the marks were scratches, gouged into the surface of the glass as if with a screw or a nail. They grew larger and wilder the farther down they went, until at the bottom they were a nest of angry gouges that took up half the mirror.

    Adie reached out automatically to touch the glass. The scratches were quite deep, rough to the touch. It would have taken a lot of work– and a lot of anger– to produce them. Gradually her mind found patterns in the chaos– and then it all clicked into place. From top to bottom, side to side, the scratches spelled out the same two words, written over and over again until they culminated in a ragged scrawl across the bottom:

    FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU

    Something moved behind the glass, and drew Adie’s eyes to her reflection. The girl behind the mirror was almost hidden behind the destruction she had wrought, but it was clear that she was pleased with herself. She smirked at Adie, and mouthed two words. Though Adie could not hear them, she understood them clearly.

“I just don’t see how you did it,” Adie’s mother said the next Saturday. “You were only up there for an hour– some of those scratches were a quarter of an inch deep!” She was leaning against the kitchen counter, overseeing Adie’s punishment breakfast of cold cereal and milk. For Adie’s parents there were pancakes and coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice. The smells in the kitchen were a glorious torture to Adie, who usually looked forward to Saturday breakfasts all week.

She watched wistfully as her mother sliced fresh cantaloupe and poured real maple syrup into a jug for the table. “I didn’t do it,” she muttered for the thousandth time.

“Then who did, Adie?” her mother snapped, clearly losing patience with Adie’s protestations of innocence. “Only you and I were in the house, and I promise you I didn’t carve ‘Fuck you’ all over your mirror. Are you suggesting that some criminal broke in and did it?” She looked as if she wanted to throw something. 

Adie rather wanted to throw something, too. She shrugged, looking down at her plate. What could she say?

The new mirror for her bathroom was delivered within a week of the old one’s demise. Under her mother’s direction, Adie had cleaned and polished the bathroom to a sparkling sheen, and the air was heavy with the remnants of chemical vapors. The mirror itself was larger and more elaborate than the other one had been. It had a beveled edge where the other had been plain, and a border of frosted-glass roses that Adie wanted to run her fingertips over. She stole glances at the glass as her father installed it, and as her mother polished it to a brilliant clarity. There was nothing unusual in their reflections. Adie began to hope.

After dinner that night, she crept toward the bathroom with butterflies in her stomach. Once again she reached through the doorway first to turn on the light. New mirror or not, there was no way she would ever set foot in that bathroom without the light on. Across the flawless counter, she laid out her things: toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, mouthwash. Then she looked up.

For a long, still moment, Adie stared at her reflection, and the reflection stared back at her. Neither of them moved. Around them, the house was quiet. Downstairs she could hear the news, and over it her parents’ quiet voices. Nothing was out of the ordinary.
    She slowly let out the breath she must have been holding for ages. In the mirror, the girl let out a breath, too. The two of them smiled at each other, then reached for their toothbrushes.

But as Adie squeezed toothpaste on her brush, her reflection continued to smile. The smile grew until it was a savage grin, full of sharp white teeth much larger than Adie’s own. 

Adie shrieked and leaped backwards. She hit the wall hard, and a towel rack jabbed into her back. The thing in the mirror shrieked, too, and then began to laugh. As Adie doubted her senses, the thunder of footsteps began coming up the stairs: her parents, coming to see what the matter was. Adie wanted to tell them to hurry, please, help her– but the thing in the mirror had wrapped its fist around the toothbrush in its hand, and was advancing towards the mirror. Adie covered her face just as the mirror shattered.

When her parents reached the bathroom doorway, they found Adie crouched amid a sea of broken glass, still covering her eyes and weeping hysterically. Of the thing in the mirror there was no sign– only a little flicker of motion in one of the shards of glass that littered the floor.

This time the mirror was not replaced. Instead, her parents began to talk about “special care” and “seeing a therapist” when Adie was around the corner. She barely heard them. She was too busy finding, to her horror, that reflections were everywhere. She caught glimpses of herself in windows, in pot lids, in the blades of table knives. Though she kept her eyes lowered, and tried to avoid anything reflective, it always came to her, anyway: a flicker of motion where nothing was moving; a flash of teeth in the corner of her eye.

One night, as she was going up to bed, she paused in her bedroom doorway. Across from the door, next to the closet, was a full-length mirror that her mother had bought for her at a flea market years before. It was very pretty, with a carved wooden frame the color of oxidized copper. She had always loved it, but since the night the first mirror was defaced she had kept it well-covered. Now the sheet she’d hung over it lay on a pool on the floor, and the mirror stared back at her unguarded. 

She was stopped by her reflection. It had grown pale and drawn from many nights without much sleep, and the skin under her eyes was so dark that it looked blue. Her hair was an  unkempt mass, and her clothes were out of place: she never checked her appearance anymore. It was no wonder her parents had taken to talking about her in hushed voices from around the corner. The changes in her appearance startled even her. 

Just as she remembered that she should probably look away, the girl behind the mirror stepped forward. 

Adie was out the door and halfway down the hallway before she’d registered what had happened. She had just enough presence of mind to sneak back and yank the door closed. Something seemed to tug against it when it was almost shut, and she gasped and held back a scream as she wrestled it into place. When it was closed, she grabbed a handful of blankets from the linen closet, minced back across her doorstep, and pounded down the stairs as fast as her legs could carry her. 

Her parents were in the kitchen, talking in low voices again. They stopped when they heard her go into the living room. “What are you doing, Adie?” her mother called, in that careful, sweet voice she’d taken to using when addressing Adie personally..

Adie spread the lightest blanket across the old tweed couch. “I’m sleeping down here tonight.” She’d given up explaining her actions; they never believed her explanations, anyway.

She heard a flurry of whispers. “Uh… all right, honey,” her father said. She heard him close his paper. “Good night.”

She stacked most of the throw pillows at one end of the couch, then spread the other blankets on top of them. As she curled beneath the covers in her makeshift bed, chairs scraped in the kitchen. A moment later, the kitchen light went out. Now the living room was black and infinitely vast, but Adie didn’t care: it was a familiar darkness, and felt safer than the compromised space that had been her room.

With her vision thus lost, Adie’s ears grew sharper. She listened as her parents climbed the stairs and continued down the hallway to their room. They were still whispering, as if they thought she didn’t know what they were talking about. Someone stepped on the creaking board outside her bathroom. She heard the hallway light click off, and the darkness around her deepened. A moment later, her parents’r door squeaked open and shut.

Now the living room was an alien wasteland, alive with black shadows that moved when she tried to see them. She pulled a blanket all the way over her head. It had the same vague odor of mothballs as everything else in the linen closet, although Adie’s family never used mothballs.

She tried to reassure herself that everything was safe. Her parents were probably still awake. They always sat up for a while after they’d changed into their pajamas, talking and reading and settling down to sleep. She could see the clean white light of their reading lamps in her mind’s eye, and could nearly hear the placid murmur of their voices. It made her feel a little better to remember that they’d hear anything out of the ordinary.

Then she remembered the menacing stare of the thing behind the mirror. It had come from the bathroom to her room so easily– had haunted the kitchen and the car and the corners of her mind. What was to stop it from traveling to her parents’ room, as well? Reassurance twisted into regret, and she wished that she could go and warn them. 

The house grew very quiet, and into the silence there came a dream. Adie was walking, holding in her arms a long wrapped parcel: the mirror from beside her bed, safely covered once again in a sheet with little hearts all over it. 

Something was thumping and thudding against the glass inside the parcel, struggling to get out. There was a sour, unhealthy smell coming from the sheet. Adie knew that if she didn’t lock the mirror away it would get her, and then maybe it would assume her face and go and kill her parents, too. She tried to shoulder open the sliding door of her closet, and as she did so fingers rose from beneath the sheet and began to pinch at her arms and shoulders through the cloth. She screamed, and shuddered, but at last the door slid open.

“You are nothing,” hissed a voice inside her ear, just as she was wrestling the mirror inside. “You are food.” Sharp teeth bit into her neck just as Adie hurled the mirror into the corner. She heard it crack, and saw the sheet start to fall. Heart pounding, she leaped backwards and dragged the door shut just as something began to emerge from the shower of broken glass.

For a moment, there was silence. Then something began to scrabble against the door.

Adie screamed herself awake– and then was not sure she’d woken up at all. She lay paralyzed in the darkness, soaked in sweat, listening desperately for some sign that what had happened wasn’t real. All around her there was breathing: sharp, harsh, desperate, as if the lungs of an animal had been ripped from its body and left to die on their own. Her heart pounded against the inside of her chest.

Gradually the breathing slowed, and Adie finally realized that it had been hers all along. The last black shreds of the nightmare soon lost substance and fell away. Adie realized that she was still curled up beneath a nubbly, scratchy blanket that smelled vaguely of old mothballs, on a couch that under usual circumstances she’d get in trouble for sleeping on. She was in the living room, not in her bedroom at all, and nowhere near the mirror or the closet into which she really should have put it earlier. 

Her mouth felt like it had been wiped out with cotton balls. She swallowed, but couldn’t get rid of the sour taste that lingered in the corners. Taking one last, deep breath, she pulled the blanket off her face. Cool air rushed over her skin, drying her sweat and giving her goosebumps. Adie peered into the darkness, trying to assure herself that nothing was amiss. 

The house was dark and still, and around it the neighborhood was silent. Even the crickets weren’t chirping. It had to be late– maybe three or four in the morning, she thought. She turned over uneasily, meaning to go back to sleep, but quickly realized that she quite desperately needed to pee.

For a split second she thought of waiting tilll morning. The house was vast and black and chilly, and in her nest of blankets she felt relatively safe. The pressure on her bladder, however, was too powerful to ignore, and at last Adie relinquished her safety and staggered wearily to her feet.

Clumsy with sleep, she toddled towards the bathroom. The hardwood floor was chilly under her feet. She wished she’d thought to bring sleep-socks. From the kitchen she heard the hum and groan of the refrigerator, the rattle of ice falling into the machine. Outside the kitchen window, a bright streetlight showed that no strange shadows were lurking in the street. Everything appeared normal.

It wasn’t until Adie had almost reached the bathroom that she remembered: Her bathroom might have no mirror anymore, but this one most definitely did.

Frost crept up her spine as she stared through the pitch-dark doorway. She almost retreated right then and there, but she knew that she’d never be able to wait until morning. A brief thought of going back upstairs was quashed by the memory of what she’d seen in her room. Downstairs it was. 

Anyway, if the thing was in her bedroom now, then maybe it hadn’t come downstairs yet.

Somewhat cheered by this thought, she reached through the doorway and turned on the bathroom light. Its cheerful yellow beams spilled into the hallway, shrinking and clarifying everything they touched. Now she could see that the bathroom was, after all, just a bathroom. There was the striped wallpaper that her parents had picked out together. There were the gleaming brass fixtures her mother had shined, and the white tile floor that her father had laid down one sweaty afternoon a few years before. There was an unlit purple candle among the bath towels on a shelf above the toilet, and it filled the room with the faint mixed scent of lavender and roses.

Just to be on the safe side, she kept her eyes lowered as she stepped quickly past the mirror. Nothing flickered in the corners of her eyes, and nothing hissed or muttered as she raised the toilet lid and sat down on the icy seat. She concluded her business without incident and got up to wash her hands.

A morbid curiosity compelled her to look up this time. She raised her eyes fearfully to her reflection– but there seemed to be nothing to fear. She saw only herself– the same old Adie, frizzy hair and awkward nose and all. She smiled, and her own shy smile came back. When she lifted her arms, the reflection’s arms went up, too. She did a little dance, and the mirror mirrored it without a trace of mockery.

The thing must have been somehow confined to the upstairs– or maybe she’d even defeated it when she’d trapped it in her dream. Tomorrow she would ask her dad to take the mirror out of her room. Maybe a priest could even come to bless the house– she’d ask her mother about it.

Adie grinned at her reflection, happy that the end was in sight.

Her reflection grinned back, and turned off the light.

Image source

books, fairy tales, fantasy, fiction, long stories, reading, Uncategorized, writing

Upcoming publication: “Serpents”: A romantic fairy tale retelling

amongthegoblins

When I was little, I spent a lot of time reading the books my mother had kept from her childhood. One of them was an abridged version of Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book illustrated by Grace Dallas Clarke.

The book was illustrated in a colorful 1950s style (I don’t have a copy now, but you can see some illustrations here.) I read the book multiple times, but my favorite stories in it were “Felicia and the Pot of Pinks,” “The Princess on the Glass Hill,” and “Diamonds and Toads.”

For some reason I have a strong memory of reading this book on an airplane, though I would have been young and I’m not sure where we would have been going. Anyway, I had lots of time to pore over the illustrations. “Diamonds and Toads” particularly stuck with me. I can see the glitter of the falling diamonds from one sister’s mouth, the other sister’s sassy expression, her hands on her hips. Later, cursed for her rudeness, she looks bewildered and ashamed, turning away defensively as snakes and toads fall from her mouth.

“Diamonds and Toads” is a “good sister/bad sister” story, a motif so common in world literature that you could fill a decent-sized book just with versions of Cinderella. Lately I’m starting to think more about the bad sisters in these stories than the good ones. Some of them are cruel, but their cardinal sins are usually greed, laziness, rudeness, and pride. In return, they’re often maimed or killed. Cinderellas’ stepsisters lose their eyes in some versions of the story, and “The Two Caskets” ends with the stepsister (along with her mother) being burned alive. Sure, she was rude and lazy, but isn’t that a bit harsh?

“Diamonds and Toads” is a classic example of this story. There are two sisters–one pretty and good, one ugly and bad–and their mother, who is also ugly and bad and thus favors the girl who resembles her. She and her daughter are cruel to the pretty sister, making her do all the work and fetch the water every day at the well. (I made the sister a little more sympathetic in my story, but I hope I still captured the spirit of the original.) At the well, the good girl meets and is nice to a fairy, and is rewarded with a shower of diamonds and flowers falling from her mouth whenever she speaks. The bad sister is rude to the fairy, so she’s punished: for the rest of her life, toads and snakes will fall from her mouth whenever she speaks. Eventually “even the widow was sickened by her older daughter, and drove her out, and she died alone and miserable in the woods.”

Image source

When my friend Sonya Lano told me that Fiction-Atlas Press was calling for submissions for an anthology about fairy-tale villains getting their own happily-ever-after, my mind immediately went to “Diamonds and Toads.” I can get a bit gloomy, but I’m not a dark fantasy writer: I wasn’t sure I could write a romance about a child-murdering witch or any other serious villain. But everyone’s said something they regretted, and something about this story has always spoken to me. Plus, snakes are cool. So I decided to try it out.

Next, I needed to find a romance for my protagonist. My first idea was to have her meet up with the girl from “The Two Caskets”–terribly scarred from the fire, but still alive–and have them hit it off. But that seemed a bit too complicated for a short story or novelette, so I needed something simpler. Fortunately, Sonya suggested another possibility that was right up my alley, and I got really interested in the project. But in order for this fairy tale to work, I’d need to get my heroine on a more equal footing with her love interest, and that’s what this story is about.

“Serpents” is a novelette of about 10,700 words that follows Fan’s adventures after she’s kicked out of her family home. (The original character’s name is Fanchon, short for Francoise, so Fanny would be a more natural translation, but for obvious reasons I decided not to go with that. Frannie is my partner’s name, which would have been weird, and Fancy and Frances didn’t seem quite the vibe, so Fan it was.) Once I had the idea straight in my mind, the writing process was pretty straightforward because I was happy with the story and how it played out. I’m still happy with it, and I had a lot of fun with it, so I hope you’ll feel the same

Once Upon a Wicked Heart is a collaborative anthology from Fiction-Atlas Press. There are twelve total stories in the book, most quite a bit darker than mine from what I’ve heard but a few with happy endings. Sonya has a story there, too–a dark (less dark? haha) retelling of “The Juniper Tree”–and all the others look really interesting. There’s a universal buy page here where you can check it out, or you can look us up on Goodreads. We’re doing a pre-release sale price of 99 cents (the full price will be $2.99), so it’s a good idea to preorder if you’re interested. You can also visit us online at the anthology release party on November 19 (that’s this Saturday) on the group’s Facebook page. Sonya and I will be posting from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. EST that day, so drop by and see us.

There are lots of other fairy tales I’d like to explore in more depth, so I hope to do more projects like this later. Is there any story that really stuck with you?

fantasy, movies, TV, Uncategorized

Belated review: ‘Midnight Mass’

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Fran and I often have trouble choosing what to watch. She’s seen almost everything, for one thing, and I hate making her rewatch things. The overlap in our tastes also isn’t that wide, so it can be difficult finding something we both enjoy. Last week I randomly picked Midnight Mass, though, and it turned out to be a very good choice.

To make it clear: we are not horror fans. I walked out of IT about ten minutes in, and my attempt at watching Ju-On ended after ten seconds. We’ve both been curious about The Haunting of Hill House, also by Mike Flanagan, but we weren’t together when it came out and neither of us wanted to watch it alone. (Maybe now we’ll try.) Jump scares are the real issue, at least for me. I feel them like a physical assault, and that’s not a feeling I want in my entertainment media. Fortunately, Midnight Mass doesn’t have too many,, and the ones it has are for dramatic effect, so I didn’t mind them too much. Overall, it’s a beautiful series, with great acting, wonderful music, and gorgeous cinematography.

SPOILERS below, for obvious reasons.

We start with Riley Flynn. While driving drunk, he causes an accident that kills a teenage girl and is sent to prison for four years. The story begins when he comes home to the dying fishing community of Crockett Island. At the same time, Erin Greene, Riley’s childhood friend and sweetheart, has come home pregnant from a bad marriage. She’s settling into life as a single mom-to-be, taking her own mother’s place as the island’s only teacher. At the same time, Sheriff Hassan, one of two Muslims on the island and a recent transfer from New York City, is trying to build a meaningful life in a small, hostile town where there’s nothing much to do. His son resents him for bringing him here, and both are generally made to feel like outsiders. Meanwhile, the island’s few teenagers do their best to keep themselves sane in a place where nothing interesting has happened in years.

Then something does happen: to the shock of everyone in the congregation of St. Patrick’s, the local Catholic church, a new priest has come to fill in for the old priest, Monsignor Pruitt, who supposedly fell ill on his return from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The new priest, Father Paul, is very good at his job: kind, charismatic, and a talented preacher. Everyone seems to like him, and attendance at mass is going up. Good things are happening, relationships are forming, upswing, and the community as a whole seems to be on an upswing.

At the same time, though, some pretty nasty things are happening, too. (Content warning, if you’re thinking of watching this show: there are lots of animal deaths, including one very graphic one that’s extremely awful.) Father Paul seems to know more than he should, and in general there seem to be lots of secrets for an island with 127 people on it.

Then a genuine miracle happens at St. Patrick’s, and suddenly the mood changes.

I won’t completely spoil the rest, but I will say we were just a hair disappointed by the revelation of what’s actually happening in town: the truth wasn’t quite as mysterious and strange as the first episodes suggested. But it was a really neat twist on the trope.

The priest (played by Hamish Linklater) was a cool character: earnest, devoted, well-meaning, and tragically misguided. The congregation was also mostly devoted and well-meaning (though, critically, not all of them were) and I thought the director did a good job showing the positives and negatives of deep religious faith. Mike Flanagan apparently grew up Catholic and is now atheist, and you can definitely see that in this series. The incorporation of religious music is very effective, and it’s neat how key moments of the story are set at key points during Holy Week, building up to a catastrophic midnight mass on the eve of Easter Sunday where everything finally goes down.

The final scene of the show is really beautiful, and it’s a great callback/final summation of all those religious themes, with what felt like a reenactment of some of the earliest days of Christianity. It was clearly very deeply thought through, and really effective. Addiction, the show’s other main theme, was really well dealt with, treating the subject with both honesty and compassion. The series also has things to say about life in a small, traditional, dying community. The depiction was really strong, but if it had been possible, I would have liked to see just a tiny bit more of Crockett Island before everything went to pieces. I’m not even sure what state it’s supposed to be–Maine, maybe? It’s not important, I guess, but it would have been nice to know a little more about some of the extras who died horrifically during the course of the show.

One of the strongest points of the series was Bev Keane, played by Samantha Sloyan. She was a fantastic villain in that I absolutely hated her from moment one. Well done. She’s a kind of person who feels very familiar, though I can’t think of specific examples: a judgmental zealot who resents all the sinners around her for having a good time, and who can’t understand why everyone seems to be happier than her when she’s following all the rules and they’re not. There was some interesting little-girl imagery her portrayal (hair in a single braid down her back, Peter Pan collars, a high-necked white dress for mass, and a general air of “malicious tattletale” attitude”) that shows you she’s always been like this. Having never matured emotionally past “teacher’s pet,” she has no real depth of soul and isn’t able to understand genuine human relationships. There’s a brief moment at the end where she seems to have gained a hint of maturity, but (spoiler) it doesn’t last. It was a really compelling performance and added a lot to the show.

Sheriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli) was another strong performance, though I would have liked to see just a little more of him throughout the series. I loved his relationship with his son and the way the show dealt with the issue of religious conversion and intergenerational culture gaps, plus the irony of Hassan bringing his son to Crockett Island for safety in the context of what actually happened. I would have liked to have gotten a bit more backstory earlier in the series, because I felt like his big monologue (episode 6, I think?) tried to push too much info into too little space, but Kohli is a great actor and did an excellent job.

Riley (Zach Gilford) was probably my favorite performance. I absolutely loved him. Remorse shone through every moment, every gesture, and every word he said, and the dream images of Tara Beth were incredibly vivid and effective. I absolutely understood what he had gone through, where he was coming from emotionally, and why–after being gutted by the guilt of accidentally killing an innocent human being–he would make the choice he did rather than live through that again. The AA meetings between him and Father Paul were some of my favorite scenes. Another of my favorite characters was Joe Collie, a distorted reflection of Riley, who was also incredibly well acted (I would like to see more of Robert Longstreet).

Erin Greene, probably the main female character, was not my favorite. She was… fine… but her line delivery was a little too theatrical for me, and her big final monologue went on for WAY too long. But the actress, Kate Siegel, is apparently the director’s wife, so I guess I should get used to her if I’m going to keep watching Flanagan shows. I did love the relationship between Erin and Riley, though (from the beginning to the end). Another strong note was how Riley and his parents kept trying and and half-succeeding at reconnecting with each other throughout the story after the physical and emotional rift caused by what Riley did.

The show did have a few downsides. My main pet peeve was the lighting: though the show was set during early spring, the constant darkness and general color palette kept making me think it was October. There really is a difference between spring and autumn light, and in a series where so much of the action happens outdoors, I think that should have been taken into account. (Just looked it up and apparently it was filmed in fall because of COVID, which is understandable but unfortunate. I think it would have been better to wait a few more months.) I also felt that the last two episodes of the show were weaker than the first five (possibly because of who was missing). Overall, though, it was a really good series and I definitely recommend it.

I’d like to watch other shows and films by Mike Flanagan, but I’m worried they’ll be too scary. The Haunting of Hill House is one of my favorite books (I reread it almost every autumn), so I’m definitely interested in that adaptation. I’d also like to see The Fall of the House of Usher when it comes out, since we read that story in high school. I’d like to read The Turn of the Screw before I tackle The Haunting of Bly Manor (which is based on that book), so I’ll put that one off for a while. What spooky, creepy, pretty, and not-too-scary horror shows and movies would you recommend?

Image source here.

books, fiction, writing

Bonsai Writing

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My fiancee and I went to a bonsai festival this weekend. Naturally, since then I’ve been watching a lot of videos and reading a lot of articles about bonsai, reassuring myself that yes, I should not become a bonsai hobbyist. For me, the most interesting theme in all these videos is how slow and gradual the work is: artists work every day on their living sculptures, pruning and refining, transplanting and fertilizing, and day by day the average person wouldn’t see any change at all. Only after decades does the mature plant show the vision the artist had in their head all along. If you went to a bonsai nursery, everything under the age of two would look like an unremarkable seedling, and it would be hard to imagine how those twiggy little things could transform into sculpture worth handing down for generations.

So I was thinking about writing, and how it’s slow, incremental work, and how little progress the average author seems to make from day to day (even a prolific day’s writing is only a few minutes’ reading for most people). And so I though I might like to put a little sapling on display, so that no matter how long it takes me to finish a piece of my regular work, there’s always a little window open for anyone who’s interested to see what I’m doing. So I created a document today, and planted a seed, and here it is: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uq1Gd7Z0svfbvOuYisnVZUbSp87TBupnsA8CUabFU68/edit

This is the beginning of what I hope will turn out to be a novel. It’s an actual working document, with notes and scribbles and half-finished sentences and all, and so far only a few words of prose. If you’re ever curious about what I’m doing, you can go and have a look, and leave a comment if you’d like. I’ll try to spend at least a minute on it whenever I tend to my other seedlings.

Image by Ilona Ilyés
daily life, prague

Easter weekend

amongthegoblins

Enjoying the long weekend here (Thursday through Monday for me, though I’m still teaching private lessons). F and I took Donut to the dog park yesterday, where he met several dogs and got somebody to chase him in a circle; then F and I had dinner at a restaurant that brings you your food on trains. Our neighborhood is VERY crowded, and lots of people are coughing, but we’re crossing our fingers and trying to keep our distance. This evening F made tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, and then she helped me dye my roots, so I’m well fed and have thoroughly purple hair.

Tomorrow is a writers’ group day, and Sunday we’re going to a small birthday party, so we’re keeping pretty busy. The main fly in the ointment is a big leak that’s sprung in the bathroom and toilet-room ceiling, which no one will fix until after the holiday. Please pray for the integrity of our ceiling.

Public-domain image of a hand holding a pen, apparently writing, at a sunlit desk with papers and a white coffee mug on it. The sleeve of a cozy gray sweater is visible.
daily life, prague, updates

Hello again

amongthegoblins

Flowers blooming and an icy wind in Prague. They’ve set up an Easter market in Wenceslas Square. I’m not sure Easter markets are traditional here, but I think the city is trying to recoup some losses after closing most of the Christmas markets. Tourists are back. Our new street, in the heart of the tourist district, is busy. We’ve settled into our first place together and are now managing diplomatic conflicts between the cats and the dog.

How are you?