The Twisted Tree

by Rachel Burge

If he knew I can tell a person’s secrets just by touching their clothes, I wouldn’t be on a plane right now. I’d be listening to the ramblings of a straitjacket.

Brian takes out a book and cracks open the spine. Anyone who does that is not a good person as far as I’m concerned. It’s up there with cruelty to kittens and nose-picking in public.

Pain like that stays with you; it seeps out of your pores and into the fibres of your clothes, and nothing can remove the stain of a soul.

‘A person who has a poor start in life can still weave a good tapestry, if they make the right choices.’ She whispered, ‘Strengthen what’s there, my child, and no one will notice the holes.’

with a gilded tongue. They will tell you who you are with such conviction that you may actually believe them, but this is a reflection, not the truth, for the story of you is not yet written.’

You write the story of you every day with your thoughts, words and deeds. You create yourself. You get to decide your story. No one else. You.’

At last I understand: Hel wrote her own story. ‘No one made you queen. You made yourself queen.’

‘Day and night, life and death, joy and pain … there cannot be one without the other. Where there is thread, there is a blade. The knife cuts the umbilical cord; without it there is no life. At the end, the Norn’s shears cut the silver cord.’

I brace myself for the talk – the one where she tells me off for running away and freaks out about the goth on the sofa.