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To the ones who hunger— for love, for time, or simply to be free
Born restless, her father used to say. Which was fine for a son, but bad for a daughter.
“And how is a miracle different from a spell? Who is to say the saint was not a witch?”
“Careful. In nature, beauty is a warning. The pretty ones are often poisonous.”
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.
“You will learn, it is better to bend than to break.” María stared into the hearth. “Why should I be the one who bends?”
Nothing fits, even if it’s fitted, because it’s not really about the size of the body or how it fills the clothes, but how much space it takes up in the world.
Alice doesn’t look at them, because that would mean looking away from the violet girl, with her tinted curls, and high cheekbones, and wide brown eyes.
Brown, the most common color in the world, but there is nothing common about them.
But that’s not why she stands out in the rain. It’s because there’s a moment, pressed beneath the weighted blanket of the storm, when her body stops fighting, when all the voices inside her finally go quiet, and her shoulders loosen and her lungs unclench and her skin goes numb and the line between girl and world gets smudged, and she is washed away.
(She is used to wanting plenty, but it is another thing to be wanted.)
Everyone insists it is her purpose, and it drives her mad, the idea that the shape of her body determines the shape her life must take.
And if by some unlucky spot I ever get with child, I will take them there, and let them frolic on your bones.”
“One can be alone without feeling lonely,” she muses. “One can feel lonely without being alone.”
“Bury my bones in the midnight soil,” he begins, infusing the words with the air of theater. “Plant them shallow and water them deep. And in my place will grow a feral rose.” He leans down to Renata and cups her face, running a thumb across her bottom lip. “Soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.”
“We are the roses that grew in the midnight soil,” he says, eyes bright as candles now. “Our thorns are sharp enough to prick. We are watered by life, and with its bounty, our roots grow deep, our blooms unmarred by age. In fact, for us, time fortifies, renders us more noble. We are no monster, no mean thing. We are nature’s finest flower.”
She can’t just sit there, going to class and killing men in cars.
Never walk alone at night, they tell you, if you’re a girl. And it isn’t fair. Because the night is when the world is quiet.
He claims he has long made peace with Alessandro’s choice, his inevitable decay, and insists they still have years, that even mortal life lasts far beyond the blooms of youth.
What is the point, she thinks, of loving something you are doomed to lose?
mortal as it is, to consider him a friend, and now she feels like she’s been slowly poisoned.
But now his grief is splashed against the floor, it slicks the walls like paint. It is all Sabine can smell. All she can taste.
“But Sabine is here now. And surely she will be more fun.”
“Bene,” he murmurs. “Show me then who I can eat. I’m really very hungry.”
After all, what grows in the midnight soil is not a different flower, only a bolder bloom.
Sabine has no way of knowing that this one night will tip the balance of her life. That this one girl will be both the beginning and the end of everything.
The wind is full of whoops and howls, and even though the only ghosts are kids in sheets, eerie eyes cut out of cotton, the air smells like woodsmoke and dying leaves, ripe with mischief, and magic, and more than a little menace, and if she were alone, it might get to her, but she’s not.
“Madness will take you before hunger ever will.”
You are the kind of bloom that thrives in any soil.
And perhaps it is the pain that brings her back to earth, dampens her momentary wonder, and reminds her she is just a girl, and the ball is just a house, and both of them are simply playing dress-up. Pretending to be what other people want.
Sabine. That name. Charlotte does not know, then, how many times over the years it will spill out of her, as a longing, or a plea, or a curse.
“It will make your life harder,” she said into her daughter’s hair. “But it will also make it beautiful.”
The odd light in her eyes when Charlotte said that she was sorry for her loss, and Sabine leaned in and whispered back, I’m not.
“It’s the way you cannot hide your feelings. If they do not spill out of your mouth, they shimmer on your skin. They fill the air around you, so loud they almost shout.”
“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.”
(she has a sweet tooth, though she’ll deny it, seems to think that if the sweet is small enough to swallow in one bite, it does not count).
As if he isn’t there to ruin everything.
and then to her horror he begins to talk about how deep his feelings run, how surely she cannot be surprised, given that he’s been quite bold in his affection.
“How dare you—I am here! I have just fled my own proposal to lay my heart bare at your feet.”
And perhaps this is all it is, she thinks. This is how to take what you want, to live as you want, this is how to be free.
Charlotte feels a blanketing relief—there is no other word for it—the sudden certainty that she will be okay.
Sabine sighs and blinks, returning to herself, and says, “Your mind is very loud.”
“Only the destruction of your heart will end your life. But sunlight will make you sick. And grave dirt will draw you down.”
It is a lie, Sabine told her, that you only get one story.
By night, they are like children, set loose in a garden of delights, the darkest hours turned into a playground of the senses, a festival, a ball.
They dance. They drink. They dream.
The way Sabine’s whole demeanor shifts, the smile dropping from her face as her amusement dies. Anger strikes like flint behind her eyes.
Charlotte gasps, and Sabine crooks a brow. “What is it?” “Think of all the books that you could have read!”
She decides early on that she will only take the lives of men.
“Did you find someone brave enough to love you?”
