Juniper & Thorn

by Ava Reid

“A just-kissed girl,” I said. “A woman, maybe.”

glad that for once I was the one who had flustered him.

He laughed. “Who says so?” “I do.”

Transformations were a fickle, dangerous magic, and every spell came with a high and terrible cost. Once you turned into one thing, you could no longer be what you once were.

men wanting things that will kill them.”

And I’ve ruined myself from ever being in a good story again.”

fisherovich & symyrenko 3454 vorobyev street.

watching a spectacular and awful metamorphosis.

Any predator can choose to smile without teeth.

trying to track my own metamorphosis.

When they spit me out I was sixteen again, Dr. Bakay’s hands on my budding breasts; I was thirteen, eating my bird-mother for supper; I was eleven and Papa was dragging me down the stairs and into the foyer so I could tell fortunes for men with lust in their eyes. I was nine and lying awake at night as Papa’s footsteps made the wood ache and groan.

I wondered what he had done with the black dog, and then knew that he had eaten it, and then wondered if there would be any left for me.

I was his blade against the banal and grotesque.

Perhaps she would never let me go.

“Because there’s something useful I can do besides dancing,”

I had killed it to keep my secret. Perhaps that was the magic of it all.

Wary of his claws and his toothless smiles.”

Sobaka. He was nowhere to be seen.

His stomach was still distended, and I thought, I did that. I made him full.

Papa had let Dr. Bakay saw off my leg so I could only ever hobble around this house,

But of course Papa’s stupidest magic worked on you anyway—he convinced you that it was real.

They could have told me the truth, but why would they—I cooked all their meals too.

I saw a spill of golden hair in the dirt, and my beautiful sister’s body mangled and blood-spoiled at the base of the juniper tree.

What

You can’t make a spell out of just a mean thought.

She and Undine had conspired to keep this secret from me,

“I want to hear what’s inside your mind.”

but he did not know how much of Papa’s poison had seeped inside of me.

“I think my father is the monster,” I whispered. “I think he killed those men and ate them.”

And you love your father too. You would swallow any poison so that he didn’t have to.”

And what was a story except a berry you ate over and over again, until your lips and tongue were red and every word you spoke was poison?

You know the truth, Ms. Vashchenko. What you want is the courage to believe it.

two slashes cut into the back

“I’ll eat you,” I warned, my voice a whisper. “You have already tried.”

All of them killed by me and eaten by my father.

She was a good witch, and a clever woman, and she was a liar.

“You helped him,” I said. “Papa asked you for a potion that would turn me into a monster, and you went into this storeroom and crafted it for him.”

“You were as cruel to me as Undine,”

You didn’t mind that he ruined me as long as you were unspoiled and safe.

you ever loved me, it was only because I was a soft thing you threw down into the bottom of...

“But you didn’t mind all this time, the way he punished me for nothing at all?”

“I did nothing. It was your own hunger that made you eat.”

Fire

but I had performed the most spectacular transformation of them all. I had outdone even Papa.

He loves me.”

sleep with the windows open every night so that I can feel the cold and imagine what it must have been like for you, forced to become a cold-blooded killing thing.

Thats wild to say

I removed her grip and did not answer. I did not want the last thing my sister heard from me to be a lie.

but still, somewhere in the black space of those conflicting desires, we found each other.