Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

by V.E. Schwab

The trick to sewing, she is always telling her, is patient hands and patient hearts, but María came into this world with neither.

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?”

(She is used to wanting plenty, but it is another thing to be wanted.)

And María wants to say that Andrés’s hands have never stirred such heat in her. Wants to say she is still hungry, though her stomach is full. That she could stay here for a hundred years. So long as Ysabel stayed, too. “It is so quiet in the house, during the day.” Her gaze grazes Ysabel’s throat, traces the lines of her collar, the swell of her breasts. “It feels as if the world is empty, except for us.”

“Two kinds of women have leave to wander through this world alone and unmolested. Nuns, and widows. And I am not close enough with God to be a nun.” “So it is a lie, then.” Sabine taps the empty bottle thoughtfully against the table. “No. I did have a husband. Once.” There it is again, that flash of teeth. A smile so slight and yet so dazzling that when María sees it, the ground seems to pitch downhill. She finds herself leaning forward, the urge to follow, or to fall. “How did he die?” she asks. The widow’s smile widens. “Slowly.”

Sabine’s mouth splits into a shallow smile. “Strange, isn’t it?” she says. “The more you taste, the more you want.”

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

Earth and ash, the tangle of salt and rotten sweet. No longer living. Far from dead.

Death is a kind of freedom, after all.

sometimes, when she walks at night, Sabine imagines the widow at her side. And she feels a deep, simmering rage, because it does not seem fair that the only two choices she was given were to be alive and bound, or alone and dead.

“Those grown in the midnight soil are never alone.”

“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.”

“Is it life,” he counters, “if there is never death to balance it? Or is its brevity what makes it beautiful?”

After all, what grows in the midnight soil is not a different flower, only a bolder bloom.

“We are made for many things,” muses Sabine. “But surrender isn’t one of them.”

“Bury my bones in the midnight soil, plant them shallow but water them deep, and in my place will grow a feral rose, soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.”

“Madness will take you before hunger ever will.”

From that moment on, she insisted, she would read only romance. As if love and horror could not go hand in hand.

And there it is, that feeling the men have tried and failed to stir in her, that heady, ground-tipping mix of hope and fear, the hunger to move closer, and to shrink away.

you are the kind of bloom that thrives in any soil. And who knows, perhaps you will meet a worthy gardener.”

After all, there is no art without life to inspire 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.”

“Death comes, and sometimes it is kind, and often it is cruel, and very rarely it is welcome. But it comes, all the same.”

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. And in the morning, Sabine pulls Charlotte down into the sheets and whispers poetry against her skin, lines about midnight soil and soft red petals and sharp white teeth. And every time, Charlotte drifts off surrounded by the scent of her lover. Like damp earth and dry bark. And in the circle of her arms, she feels safe. She feels home.

“You know,” says Jack. “We think ourselves immortal, but we’re not.” Charlotte blinks, forcing her attention back to him. “Live long enough, and things begin to rot.” He draws a hand from his pocket, taps a fingertip against his chest. “Compassion, affection, humility, care.” One strike with every word. “They drop away like petals, till all that’s left is stem and thorn. Hunger, and the urge to hunt.”

“The fact is, whether death takes you all at once, or steals pieces over time, in the end there is no such thing as immortality. Some of us just die slower than the rest.”

Sabine is a ghost, haunting only Charlotte. And ghosts, like memories, have a way of losing strength.

After all, loneliness is just like us,” says Ezra. “It has to be invited in.”