Mikaila Nalbantova
Revelations
C.Z. was born seven generations into the town. Seven mothers. A lineage tracing back to the town’s founders. She was the first in seven to be born an only child, with parents who died young. The town congregated at the church with the question of what to do with the orphaned girl. “Reverend,” they clamored, “who is to take her?” For lack of living grandparents, one member suggested, “Hasn’t she an aunt? Castor’s sister. Someone ought’a write her.” Another in the crowd echoed the sentiment, not hearing in himself the tremor of prophecy beckoned to fruition, “Ought’a, course. It’s for family to tend family.”
The reverend’s lips twisted. He felt a tightness; where, precisely, in his body, he failed to decipher. “She’s not the type–” he started, but the call of tradition had already been taken up with the terrific strength it claimed in the town of Falaron, and soon the whole congregation chorused: Family tends family. What option was left to the reverend? No dispute he raised would sway the people against the way things had always been done. No dispute, in any case, that he was willing to lend his timbre. Truth was negotiable in his house of God. The Word warps upon deliverance. So what emerged from his lips was, “Yes, I shall write her.” Unspoken: his belief that with the letter written in his hand, she would demur.
A deserter, C.Z.’s aunt, three decades gone from the town and grown wild with laughter and a love that made the neighbors flinch when she returned—for she did return. Medeia, “but you call me Deedee,” she’d said to her niece upon introductions, the invitation angling in her mouth like a dare or a taunt.
C.Z. rose to it. “Deedee.”
Family tends family, that was indeed the way, but the town swiftly knew regret for hailing Deedee back to the nest. She made a mess of the twigs so that the whole tree shuddered with the disassembly. “No decorum,” came the twitters from the surrounding branches, “Got no sense of temperance.” And by her own admission, she didn’t, but for good reasons, one of which, at least, seemed innocent. Seeing a child made heavy too young with grief, she found in each day some cause for festivities. Thursday: the sunrise was particularly splendid, “and that’s cause enough for music and dancing.” Sunday: another week evading church-going, so “hallelujah, how’s about a picnic? Snow ain’t a bother, we’ll put down a blanket.” Wednesday: there was a sale on eggs and sugar at the grocer’s, “two in one go, can’t be helping but bake cakes. Get the candles.” Monday: the crocus bloomed, surely hailing winter set on its heels, “say, girl, you ever tried cherry cordials? Now these ones here, they’re somethin’ special.”
C.Z. bit the dark shell of chocolate, nipping the brandy-soaked cherry with her teeth. Her nose scrunched at the taste. "Somethin’ awful,” she amended her aunt’s description.
Deedee chuckled. She had a laugh like bleating, and the hair to match: thick and fleecy and bleached as cobwebs. C.Z. didn’t know if her aunt had already grayed naturally ’cause Deedee dyed her whole head that luminous white. She liked to shock the town with it, going out with her head wrapped in one of her purple scarves—provocative in themselves, with pin-ups block-printed on the fabric—then unveiling herself with a swish and flick, and a toss of her locks.
C.Z. leaned over her aunt’s arm on Sunday evening, while Deedee worked one of her little gouging tools into another block of wood for printing, revealing the curve of a thigh under her knife. “What’s this one for?” C.Z. asked.
“Careful now, getting yourself an elbow in the ribs, hanging on my arm like that.” The tool spat a thin ribbon of wood, and Deedee began on the next curve. “For the reverend’s lady.”
“He don’t got a wife.”
Another curl of wood shot free from the block, tumbling softly onto Deedee’s lap. “He don’t, and by tomorrow night, he won’t have a lady either.”
Sunset was creeping its way down the horizon, and Deedee added more wood to the fire. She’d insisted on keeping a supply stocked even after the snows thawed to mud, saying winter wasn’t done doing on this town. She’d sighed heavy as she said it, glancing at her stack of opened envelopes she always kept on the kitchen table, and grumbling about time and patience and sheets growing cold and forgetful.
C.Z. watched the split logs catch. Deedee never harried her to bed with nightfall, but let her doze in and out of consciousness while her aunt worked. C.Z. fought her weariness; she wanted to see the carving finished. She peered through tired eyes as Deedee finally tested the woodblock, made a few fine adjustments, and tested it two more times over. Then her aunt kissed the inked surface, painting her lips black, and tossed the whole block into the fire.
C.Z. started to wakefulness with a yelp and lunged to save it. Her aunt caught her arm.
“Leave it,” she ordered, “Let it do its work.”
C.Z. stared at Deedee’s ink-stained mouth, not understanding the words coming out of it. “But you burned it.”
“You know a better way to reach a soul burnin’ in his fires?”
“Whose? God’s?”
“The reverend’s.” She shrugged. “Same difference.”
The block cracked with a sudden pop, and flames ate across the engraved surface. A smell emerged with it. Nothing like woodsmoke, more sulfurous, yet muddled with another fragrance. Myrtle, was it? The smoke funneled up, up, up, and vanished through the chimney pot.
“Fly,” Deedee whispered, and her breath seemed to catch on the same current of heat into the night sky.
C.Z. never did hear about the reverend losing a woman after, but the next gossip that took the town was of a resident deserting—the first since Deedee all those years ago. This time was Myrene, pretty and pious, and never assumed restless for the outside. Deedee first heard the rumors on the way back from collecting her weekly post. She’d stopped in the middle of crossing the road and turned toward the sidewalk. “Say that again,” she’d charged the muttering duo of women. They’d stared at her headscarf, at the lilac envelope in her fingers as if they could smell the perfume on the paper, and then they’d glanced away as though they’d never laid eyes on her, never heard her, never called her from a warm bed that welcomed her in order to uphold their traditions.
But no matter. She hadn’t come for that reason anyway.
She said as much to C.Z. without shame or restraint. “Didn’t come back for you, girl. Came for him. He wants to call my name, thinking I’ll frighten? Well, I ain’t God; got consequences for doubting me.”
“What’s that to do with Myrene?”
“Everything,” she said. “Everything.”
Then she’d gone silent, watching the clouds bloat on the horizon. Another storm coming—the slow turn of the seasons she’d predicted had been full of pounding water, like spring had demanded a violent birth, a babe holding fast to the womb of winter. Deedee opened the window and splayed her palm to the heavens. Damp clung to her skin. Her fingers curled, catching something unseen in her fist. The wind quieted. “Who’s next?” she spoke into the silence.
Next, so it came about, was Daphna, the sister of the innkeeper. She’d never married and had grown old on the last pew of the church. Hers was a premature aging—maybe a decade on Deedee but fading to parchment with a voice that wheezed like a draft got into her throat and took up residence. C.Z. didn’t know her except the row she took on Sundays—from back when C.Z.’s parents still lived to take her to prayers—but even she’d noticed the change. Daphna looked no younger, that wasn’t it, but there was something that simmered a youthful flush to her cheeks. Fever? Fear? Rage? Every day, a little redder, and every morning prior, Deedee would press her lips against the gaps in the window frames and whisper, “I remember.”
I remember, I remember. The breeze needled. Another sign of the season refusing to roll gently over?
C.Z. followed her aunt through the house the next morning, mute with some instinct not to interrupt the ritual, then, at the last sill, demanded, “What’re you doing to her?”
“Reminding.”
“Don’t you gotta ask who I’m meaning?”
“Hell I gotta ask for, whole town saying her name? Listen.” She cracked the window. The cold air wafted, redolent and biting. And keening, almost like speech. How many years? it shrieked, How many years?
“How many?” C.Z. repeated.
Her aunt studied her a heartbeat then nodded approval. “A life’s worth. Gotta lay that grief at someone’s feet.” She snapped the window shut. “And I know the pair.”
The fire flaming Daphna’s cheeks finally burst that next Sunday. C.Z. wasn’t there to hear, nor Deedee, but rumors spread like gospel, something insidious whether wanted or healthful. And before that news traveled, even, while scrambling eggs in the late morning, Deedee began her ewe’s laughter. C.Z. had gained an inkling just by the sound, especially following a sour dawn, her aunt up early and bent over her ever-mounding collection of envelopes on the table. She’d held the open flaps to her nose and inhaled the fading perfume. “Wait,” she’d bid into the slit in the paper, like it could be resealed and shipped back to its sender to convince her. “I ain’t finished here. Just a little longer.”
As the gossip told it, Daphna had called the reverend a bastard and worse, and the whole church got so hot, hot, the sudden return of the lingering winter when she barreled her exit gave her brother a heart attack from shock. Or maybe her words were the direct cause: Revelation. Divinity is known to wound, so the book tells us, in delivering Truth.
“But is it?” C.Z. asked, “Is it true, really, what she said he did to her?”
“What d’you think?”
“What about the part after? How he said it’d be good for her? God’s healing?”
“Don’t be asking questions you know the answers to.”
C.Z. waited in the wake of Daphna’s departure for who would be third, for she was certain it was not over. After all, the days still dripped with so much moisture, and the chill left the dirt tough and unyielding. Yet, it did not occur to her that the trio would be completed within her own home.
The following week passed restive. Deedee was agitated with her newest letter added to the collective. It wasn’t purple this time, and it was scentless. She split it open with a thumb, read its contents, snarled, “Choose, she says, choose, like I’m doing nothing, like it don’t matter.” She crumpled the paper and hurled it toward the fire. Before it landed, she’d already lunged for the hearth to rescue it. The ridges blackened, singed, and she snatched a furling edge, smothering the embers before they could spread. She cursed and choked on tears as she smoothed the letter carefully open upon her leg.
C.Z. spied on all of this. She wasn’t ignorant. Her aunt made no effort to hide the envelopes or warn against reading them, her candor so bold it verged on performance. A point being made, a display of the lover she left behind. But which did she wish to demonstrate: that the woman existed and pined, or that Deedee refused those comforts to prolong her punishing winter?
Either way, she kept returning to pick up the post, as if her need would cause it to arrive any faster. She sent envelope after envelope of her own, entreating. But that Sunday, like clockwork, she turned stoic and opened the box of cordials, its contents depleted slowly thanks to C.Z.’s disdain for the flavor. Three shiny pieces remained. She selected the first and placed it on the floral tiles of the hearth before the lit fire. Orange light rippled across the glossy surface of sweet and ceramic. She selected two more cordials, and stacked the trio one atop the other, a chocolate and cherry snowman to suit the stubborn weather. She nudged the bottom bonbon with a finger, so the top two tottered, but held, as if the confectionery man were a drunk teetering closer to the warmth of the fire. He glowed and glowed like sunrise, and then he began to melt. Tempered, the chocolate, yet it dribbled so quickly over itself. The shell of him sloughing off, puddling at his feet, exposing the glaring red sheen of the cherries, their skin semi-translucent—drained, dyed, made radiant—and seeming to pulse. Three syrupy hearts.
“What’re you doing?” C.Z. murmured. She stared at the dark, spreading pool on the tile.
“Assigning penance.”
“What’d he do?”
“What’d I say about asking questions you know the answers to?”
“I meant to you.” She crept toward the hearth and sank to a careful knee beside her aunt.
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to, either.”
“But I do.”
“No, girl.” The snowman’s head toppled. The bright red cherry rolled across the floral tile and burst, leaving a small, sticky stain where it popped. “You don’t.”
The next morning, she collected the post. Another white envelope. Deedee opened it and said nothing, just stared and stared until two tears traced her cheeks and dripped off her chin to splatter the paper. She folded the letter, returned it to its packaging, and set it atop the pile.
C.Z. waited until midnight to read it, while her aunt slept and the embers dozed with just enough light to illuminate the words. “Then you’ve chosen,” they said, “If you’re not back by the solstice, don’t come back ever.”
C.Z. had to check a calendar and didn’t believe it. The solstice in a fortnight already? With these temperatures? Had the days even gotten any longer?
A creak on the floorboards. She flinched. Her aunt blinked blandly at her from the doorway to her bedroom. C.Z.’s hands tensed, primed to hide the evidence as though she hadn’t already been spotted.
But Deedee showed no greater propensity to hide than she ever had and raised no scorn at the sight. It emboldened her niece.
“You’re leaving?” C.Z. asked.
“Can’t.”
“Two weeks, she said.”
“I read it. Not ready yet.”
C.Z. didn’t know what Deedee was waiting for, and didn’t know why she wanted to rush her aunt. Maybe she’d gotten some notion about coming with, fleeing the town of Falaron. It was a desire she hadn’t known existed within herself until it was threatened.
She began to pester her aunt, but Deedee would not relent. “Not yet,” she said, “Not yet.”
“When then?”
“Until he repents.”
“Ain’t that for the guilty?”
“What else is he?”
But guilt was a feeling, and could not be forced, though Deedee carved her blocks and whispered to the windows and melted bonbons until the cherries popped. She messed with salt and enduring crocus blossoms, and knelt every night at the hearth, but remorse did not come. Rashes did, upon the reverend’s thighs and palms and around his mouth, and resentment from the town—against the man, sure, but against her, as well, for the discomfiture of Truth, for traditions eschewed. And the letters stopped. The white, scentless ones. Then they disappeared from the tabletop, and C.Z. didn’t know where they had gone. She felt something frantic in her gut, a feeling like being trapped someplace dark and small. The scent of metal was on her tongue, and smoke, a lowing bellow. What now? Would her aunt go and leave her to the town? Or, with no bed to return to, would Deedee remain here forever, the two of them bound to an impotent retribution?
C.Z. recalled the shrieking wind and the odor of myrtle. Scent and sound: two fleeting things. She envied them their transience. And more: their lack of substance. They fled unburdened by their neglected griefs, their loss and loneliness, though surely both were haunted.
So why linger? For an aunt more prone to vengeance than picnics, who admitted without hesitance that her niece was a lesser concern? Or for a town that now extended its resentment to her, though she remained a child with hands pure? Was it the home itself, perhaps, that she remained for, with its good memories of family she refused to explore for fear of the hurt in accompaniment?
C.Z. gazed at the front door. Seven generations, and only one who left the threshold—and she, only to return. A town of traditions. They died slow and hard.
Another evening set, and Deedee pressed her cheek to the tiles as if against a woman’s breast, listening to her heartbeat, to the house’s. The room smelled of smoke and lilac. She fell asleep there, and C.Z. crouched on her heels beside her slumbering aunt. The girl gently tucked fleecy, white strands behind Deedee’s ear that had escaped her printed headscarf. She felt her aunt’s warm breath against her wrist, and heard in it the familiar whisper of the past. I remember.
“So will I,” C.Z promised—quiet, so as not to wake Deedee—then she slipped into her aunt’s bedroom and stole the cash. She didn’t know much about being on her own, about the outside world, but she knew she’d need that.
She stepped over the threshold, closed the door behind herself, and didn’t look back.
The reverend’s lips twisted. He felt a tightness; where, precisely, in his body, he failed to decipher. “She’s not the type–” he started, but the call of tradition had already been taken up with the terrific strength it claimed in the town of Falaron, and soon the whole congregation chorused: Family tends family. What option was left to the reverend? No dispute he raised would sway the people against the way things had always been done. No dispute, in any case, that he was willing to lend his timbre. Truth was negotiable in his house of God. The Word warps upon deliverance. So what emerged from his lips was, “Yes, I shall write her.” Unspoken: his belief that with the letter written in his hand, she would demur.
A deserter, C.Z.’s aunt, three decades gone from the town and grown wild with laughter and a love that made the neighbors flinch when she returned—for she did return. Medeia, “but you call me Deedee,” she’d said to her niece upon introductions, the invitation angling in her mouth like a dare or a taunt.
C.Z. rose to it. “Deedee.”
Family tends family, that was indeed the way, but the town swiftly knew regret for hailing Deedee back to the nest. She made a mess of the twigs so that the whole tree shuddered with the disassembly. “No decorum,” came the twitters from the surrounding branches, “Got no sense of temperance.” And by her own admission, she didn’t, but for good reasons, one of which, at least, seemed innocent. Seeing a child made heavy too young with grief, she found in each day some cause for festivities. Thursday: the sunrise was particularly splendid, “and that’s cause enough for music and dancing.” Sunday: another week evading church-going, so “hallelujah, how’s about a picnic? Snow ain’t a bother, we’ll put down a blanket.” Wednesday: there was a sale on eggs and sugar at the grocer’s, “two in one go, can’t be helping but bake cakes. Get the candles.” Monday: the crocus bloomed, surely hailing winter set on its heels, “say, girl, you ever tried cherry cordials? Now these ones here, they’re somethin’ special.”
C.Z. bit the dark shell of chocolate, nipping the brandy-soaked cherry with her teeth. Her nose scrunched at the taste. "Somethin’ awful,” she amended her aunt’s description.
Deedee chuckled. She had a laugh like bleating, and the hair to match: thick and fleecy and bleached as cobwebs. C.Z. didn’t know if her aunt had already grayed naturally ’cause Deedee dyed her whole head that luminous white. She liked to shock the town with it, going out with her head wrapped in one of her purple scarves—provocative in themselves, with pin-ups block-printed on the fabric—then unveiling herself with a swish and flick, and a toss of her locks.
C.Z. leaned over her aunt’s arm on Sunday evening, while Deedee worked one of her little gouging tools into another block of wood for printing, revealing the curve of a thigh under her knife. “What’s this one for?” C.Z. asked.
“Careful now, getting yourself an elbow in the ribs, hanging on my arm like that.” The tool spat a thin ribbon of wood, and Deedee began on the next curve. “For the reverend’s lady.”
“He don’t got a wife.”
Another curl of wood shot free from the block, tumbling softly onto Deedee’s lap. “He don’t, and by tomorrow night, he won’t have a lady either.”
Sunset was creeping its way down the horizon, and Deedee added more wood to the fire. She’d insisted on keeping a supply stocked even after the snows thawed to mud, saying winter wasn’t done doing on this town. She’d sighed heavy as she said it, glancing at her stack of opened envelopes she always kept on the kitchen table, and grumbling about time and patience and sheets growing cold and forgetful.
C.Z. watched the split logs catch. Deedee never harried her to bed with nightfall, but let her doze in and out of consciousness while her aunt worked. C.Z. fought her weariness; she wanted to see the carving finished. She peered through tired eyes as Deedee finally tested the woodblock, made a few fine adjustments, and tested it two more times over. Then her aunt kissed the inked surface, painting her lips black, and tossed the whole block into the fire.
C.Z. started to wakefulness with a yelp and lunged to save it. Her aunt caught her arm.
“Leave it,” she ordered, “Let it do its work.”
C.Z. stared at Deedee’s ink-stained mouth, not understanding the words coming out of it. “But you burned it.”
“You know a better way to reach a soul burnin’ in his fires?”
“Whose? God’s?”
“The reverend’s.” She shrugged. “Same difference.”
The block cracked with a sudden pop, and flames ate across the engraved surface. A smell emerged with it. Nothing like woodsmoke, more sulfurous, yet muddled with another fragrance. Myrtle, was it? The smoke funneled up, up, up, and vanished through the chimney pot.
“Fly,” Deedee whispered, and her breath seemed to catch on the same current of heat into the night sky.
C.Z. never did hear about the reverend losing a woman after, but the next gossip that took the town was of a resident deserting—the first since Deedee all those years ago. This time was Myrene, pretty and pious, and never assumed restless for the outside. Deedee first heard the rumors on the way back from collecting her weekly post. She’d stopped in the middle of crossing the road and turned toward the sidewalk. “Say that again,” she’d charged the muttering duo of women. They’d stared at her headscarf, at the lilac envelope in her fingers as if they could smell the perfume on the paper, and then they’d glanced away as though they’d never laid eyes on her, never heard her, never called her from a warm bed that welcomed her in order to uphold their traditions.
But no matter. She hadn’t come for that reason anyway.
She said as much to C.Z. without shame or restraint. “Didn’t come back for you, girl. Came for him. He wants to call my name, thinking I’ll frighten? Well, I ain’t God; got consequences for doubting me.”
“What’s that to do with Myrene?”
“Everything,” she said. “Everything.”
Then she’d gone silent, watching the clouds bloat on the horizon. Another storm coming—the slow turn of the seasons she’d predicted had been full of pounding water, like spring had demanded a violent birth, a babe holding fast to the womb of winter. Deedee opened the window and splayed her palm to the heavens. Damp clung to her skin. Her fingers curled, catching something unseen in her fist. The wind quieted. “Who’s next?” she spoke into the silence.
Next, so it came about, was Daphna, the sister of the innkeeper. She’d never married and had grown old on the last pew of the church. Hers was a premature aging—maybe a decade on Deedee but fading to parchment with a voice that wheezed like a draft got into her throat and took up residence. C.Z. didn’t know her except the row she took on Sundays—from back when C.Z.’s parents still lived to take her to prayers—but even she’d noticed the change. Daphna looked no younger, that wasn’t it, but there was something that simmered a youthful flush to her cheeks. Fever? Fear? Rage? Every day, a little redder, and every morning prior, Deedee would press her lips against the gaps in the window frames and whisper, “I remember.”
I remember, I remember. The breeze needled. Another sign of the season refusing to roll gently over?
C.Z. followed her aunt through the house the next morning, mute with some instinct not to interrupt the ritual, then, at the last sill, demanded, “What’re you doing to her?”
“Reminding.”
“Don’t you gotta ask who I’m meaning?”
“Hell I gotta ask for, whole town saying her name? Listen.” She cracked the window. The cold air wafted, redolent and biting. And keening, almost like speech. How many years? it shrieked, How many years?
“How many?” C.Z. repeated.
Her aunt studied her a heartbeat then nodded approval. “A life’s worth. Gotta lay that grief at someone’s feet.” She snapped the window shut. “And I know the pair.”
The fire flaming Daphna’s cheeks finally burst that next Sunday. C.Z. wasn’t there to hear, nor Deedee, but rumors spread like gospel, something insidious whether wanted or healthful. And before that news traveled, even, while scrambling eggs in the late morning, Deedee began her ewe’s laughter. C.Z. had gained an inkling just by the sound, especially following a sour dawn, her aunt up early and bent over her ever-mounding collection of envelopes on the table. She’d held the open flaps to her nose and inhaled the fading perfume. “Wait,” she’d bid into the slit in the paper, like it could be resealed and shipped back to its sender to convince her. “I ain’t finished here. Just a little longer.”
As the gossip told it, Daphna had called the reverend a bastard and worse, and the whole church got so hot, hot, the sudden return of the lingering winter when she barreled her exit gave her brother a heart attack from shock. Or maybe her words were the direct cause: Revelation. Divinity is known to wound, so the book tells us, in delivering Truth.
“But is it?” C.Z. asked, “Is it true, really, what she said he did to her?”
“What d’you think?”
“What about the part after? How he said it’d be good for her? God’s healing?”
“Don’t be asking questions you know the answers to.”
C.Z. waited in the wake of Daphna’s departure for who would be third, for she was certain it was not over. After all, the days still dripped with so much moisture, and the chill left the dirt tough and unyielding. Yet, it did not occur to her that the trio would be completed within her own home.
The following week passed restive. Deedee was agitated with her newest letter added to the collective. It wasn’t purple this time, and it was scentless. She split it open with a thumb, read its contents, snarled, “Choose, she says, choose, like I’m doing nothing, like it don’t matter.” She crumpled the paper and hurled it toward the fire. Before it landed, she’d already lunged for the hearth to rescue it. The ridges blackened, singed, and she snatched a furling edge, smothering the embers before they could spread. She cursed and choked on tears as she smoothed the letter carefully open upon her leg.
C.Z. spied on all of this. She wasn’t ignorant. Her aunt made no effort to hide the envelopes or warn against reading them, her candor so bold it verged on performance. A point being made, a display of the lover she left behind. But which did she wish to demonstrate: that the woman existed and pined, or that Deedee refused those comforts to prolong her punishing winter?
Either way, she kept returning to pick up the post, as if her need would cause it to arrive any faster. She sent envelope after envelope of her own, entreating. But that Sunday, like clockwork, she turned stoic and opened the box of cordials, its contents depleted slowly thanks to C.Z.’s disdain for the flavor. Three shiny pieces remained. She selected the first and placed it on the floral tiles of the hearth before the lit fire. Orange light rippled across the glossy surface of sweet and ceramic. She selected two more cordials, and stacked the trio one atop the other, a chocolate and cherry snowman to suit the stubborn weather. She nudged the bottom bonbon with a finger, so the top two tottered, but held, as if the confectionery man were a drunk teetering closer to the warmth of the fire. He glowed and glowed like sunrise, and then he began to melt. Tempered, the chocolate, yet it dribbled so quickly over itself. The shell of him sloughing off, puddling at his feet, exposing the glaring red sheen of the cherries, their skin semi-translucent—drained, dyed, made radiant—and seeming to pulse. Three syrupy hearts.
“What’re you doing?” C.Z. murmured. She stared at the dark, spreading pool on the tile.
“Assigning penance.”
“What’d he do?”
“What’d I say about asking questions you know the answers to?”
“I meant to you.” She crept toward the hearth and sank to a careful knee beside her aunt.
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to, either.”
“But I do.”
“No, girl.” The snowman’s head toppled. The bright red cherry rolled across the floral tile and burst, leaving a small, sticky stain where it popped. “You don’t.”
The next morning, she collected the post. Another white envelope. Deedee opened it and said nothing, just stared and stared until two tears traced her cheeks and dripped off her chin to splatter the paper. She folded the letter, returned it to its packaging, and set it atop the pile.
C.Z. waited until midnight to read it, while her aunt slept and the embers dozed with just enough light to illuminate the words. “Then you’ve chosen,” they said, “If you’re not back by the solstice, don’t come back ever.”
C.Z. had to check a calendar and didn’t believe it. The solstice in a fortnight already? With these temperatures? Had the days even gotten any longer?
A creak on the floorboards. She flinched. Her aunt blinked blandly at her from the doorway to her bedroom. C.Z.’s hands tensed, primed to hide the evidence as though she hadn’t already been spotted.
But Deedee showed no greater propensity to hide than she ever had and raised no scorn at the sight. It emboldened her niece.
“You’re leaving?” C.Z. asked.
“Can’t.”
“Two weeks, she said.”
“I read it. Not ready yet.”
C.Z. didn’t know what Deedee was waiting for, and didn’t know why she wanted to rush her aunt. Maybe she’d gotten some notion about coming with, fleeing the town of Falaron. It was a desire she hadn’t known existed within herself until it was threatened.
She began to pester her aunt, but Deedee would not relent. “Not yet,” she said, “Not yet.”
“When then?”
“Until he repents.”
“Ain’t that for the guilty?”
“What else is he?”
But guilt was a feeling, and could not be forced, though Deedee carved her blocks and whispered to the windows and melted bonbons until the cherries popped. She messed with salt and enduring crocus blossoms, and knelt every night at the hearth, but remorse did not come. Rashes did, upon the reverend’s thighs and palms and around his mouth, and resentment from the town—against the man, sure, but against her, as well, for the discomfiture of Truth, for traditions eschewed. And the letters stopped. The white, scentless ones. Then they disappeared from the tabletop, and C.Z. didn’t know where they had gone. She felt something frantic in her gut, a feeling like being trapped someplace dark and small. The scent of metal was on her tongue, and smoke, a lowing bellow. What now? Would her aunt go and leave her to the town? Or, with no bed to return to, would Deedee remain here forever, the two of them bound to an impotent retribution?
C.Z. recalled the shrieking wind and the odor of myrtle. Scent and sound: two fleeting things. She envied them their transience. And more: their lack of substance. They fled unburdened by their neglected griefs, their loss and loneliness, though surely both were haunted.
So why linger? For an aunt more prone to vengeance than picnics, who admitted without hesitance that her niece was a lesser concern? Or for a town that now extended its resentment to her, though she remained a child with hands pure? Was it the home itself, perhaps, that she remained for, with its good memories of family she refused to explore for fear of the hurt in accompaniment?
C.Z. gazed at the front door. Seven generations, and only one who left the threshold—and she, only to return. A town of traditions. They died slow and hard.
Another evening set, and Deedee pressed her cheek to the tiles as if against a woman’s breast, listening to her heartbeat, to the house’s. The room smelled of smoke and lilac. She fell asleep there, and C.Z. crouched on her heels beside her slumbering aunt. The girl gently tucked fleecy, white strands behind Deedee’s ear that had escaped her printed headscarf. She felt her aunt’s warm breath against her wrist, and heard in it the familiar whisper of the past. I remember.
“So will I,” C.Z promised—quiet, so as not to wake Deedee—then she slipped into her aunt’s bedroom and stole the cash. She didn’t know much about being on her own, about the outside world, but she knew she’d need that.
She stepped over the threshold, closed the door behind herself, and didn’t look back.
Mikaila Nalbantova is a speculative fiction writer with a focus on the epic, the folkloric, and the Classical. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming on Apex Book Company, in Club Plum, Tension Literary, Vine Leaves Press’ 2026 “50-Word Stories” Anthology, and others. You can find more of her work through linktr.ee/mikaila.nalbantova.
