Juniper & Thorn

by Ava Reid

he was gently stroking Sevas’s cheek. I felt as sick as Fedir.

I saw Derkach’s lips move against the shell of Sevas’s ear,

There was a mark of red where Derkach’s hand had rested against the back of his neck.

What had Sevas offered Derkach, to earn his easy acquiescence?

I would prefer not to see you at the ballet theater again. Ever since your visit this week Sevas has been more inattentive than ever.

Youre joking

I could feel my gorge rise, even though I had eaten nothing that day.

But there is tonic that Oblya can provide. It is time for my witch-daughters to marry.”

But a change had come over him recently, a greater hunger, a new appetite.

Perhaps I would have been clever too, if I did not have so much carnage behind my eyes.

Powerful

You’re not doing me, or yourself, any favors by pretending not to mind when you get hurt.

No. He wants daughters with teeth. The hurting is the point.

A woman’s worthless and spoiled once she’s been bred. That’s why Papa can’t stand the idea. He can’t stand the idea of anyone spoiling us but him.”

But no one had ever told me that I was allowed to scream.

!!

My own belly growled and I felt terribly embarrassed at the sound, wondering if everyone else could hear it too.

I was thinking of how big a man’s hands could be when they were reaching for you.

I was the one who knew Papa’s cruelty better than either of them. It had taken me so many years to realize this, but there were things I understood that my beautiful sisters never could.

If you fed a man a potion that drove him to eat his neighbor’s heart, you too would taste a bit of blood in your mouth.

It makes no difference whether Marlinchen bathes or not. We all know that she will not be chosen for a bride.”

my lie.

my bath.

I was very hungry.

It was Mama’s charm bracelet.

Bad magic.

I wondered if he thought that she’d been spoiled, too, by the mean banality of motherhood. No longer any good to him as a woman or a wife, better as a bird in its cage.

And then, standing in the ruin of it all, I felt my stomach settle, as if I’d eaten a fat meal and had no urge to spit it back up again.

I knew, I knew that I had not taken the man’s card, just as much as I knew that I had given him Mama’s charm bracelet.

courage and insatiable hunger.

to eat the truth out of him

And Dr. Bakay walked nonchalantly after them.

damask paper was peeling away, exposing the yellowed plaster underneath.

thinking of nothing but peeling wallpaper.

Thinking of Dr. Bakay always made me so hungry.

He said that I looked hungry. He took me downstairs and fed me pork varenyky and black juice.

I supposed, I had only been ruined at Papa’s orchestration,

what had happened to make me forget it all?

Quiet as a mouse. I had never once tried to protest when he touched me.

“I’m hungry too, Papa,” I said. “I need to eat.”

“Am I a woman because I was ruined? Was I a girl before? When will I be spoiled enough that you have to turn me into a bird and be rid of me?”

You cannot make a flower unbloom.”

But what had been my life was in a ruin behind me

There were so many hideous things drifting through my mind, the same thoughts that I visited upon myself every night before I fell asleep: those small, imagined violences.

You’re too delicate, too precious, too wanting.

cruel tenderness,

“That and more, but not since I was a child. I think it makes him angrier than anything to know that I don’t desire him, that he repulses me.

Derkach is meant to be my father and my master and my lover and I’m not meant to want for anyone else.”

Oblya is already in love with you.”

for someone to steal the wretched, awful burden of it away from me, and to explain precisely how wretched and awful it was. I wanted someone to write it down like a story in Papa’s codex so I could know what lesson there was to be learned.

And there it was, the neat dissection of my life: girl, woman, witch. Three small things that were easy to swallow.

something even crueler than grief.

It occurred to me then that perhaps this was my magic: that the secret I’d held in my belly without spitting it back up and the lie I’d told over and over again to keep the secret safe were now made manifest.