Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

by V.E. Schwab

Born restless, her father used to say. Which was fine for a son, but bad for a daughter.

Only later did her mother say that not all sins were boulders, that most in fact were more like pebbles. An unkind thought. A hungry heart. Small weights like greed and envy and want (things that didn’t seem to her like sins at all, but apparently they added up). More disappointing still was when María discovered that some who walk the pilgrims’ road are not guilty of a sin at all. That they make the trip not to atone for their past, but to secure their future. To ask for miracles, or intercessions, or simply pave the way into God’s grace.

But María has known, all her life, that she is not meant for common paths, for humble houses and modest men. If she must walk a woman’s road, then it will take her somewhere new.

Alice shrinks, is swallowed, disappears. No—disappearing would be better, because maybe in the absence of Alice she could become someone else. One of the feral girls, who have been planted and watered in their bodies, who have pruned their looks, or let them grow wild, the same girls who turn their full brows into a wolfish power, their painted lips into a weapon.

“One can be alone without feeling lonely,” she muses. “One can feel lonely without being alone.”

“Simple? No.” Sabine discards one card and draws another. “But you cannot have what you want until you know what you want. And once you do know,” she adds, “it’s only a matter of what you’re willing to do to get it.”

“The world will try to make you small. It will tell you to be modest, and meek. But the world is wrong. You should get to feel and love and live as boldly as you want.”

“It’s a lie, you know, that you only get one story.”

And here is the awful thing about belief. It is a current, like compulsion. Hard to forge when it goes against your will, but easy enough when it carries you the way you want to go.

It is easy, isn’t it, in retrospect? To spot the cracks. To see them spread. But in the moment, there is only the urge to mend each one. To smooth the lines. And keep the surface whole.