Juniper & Thorn

by Ava Reid

My sisters were beautiful without ruse or artifice, which was my curse, really, not my father’s. My father’s curse was never to be satisfied with anything, so to him my sisters were beautiful, but not beautiful enough.

“what do you do when you’re twenty-one and you’ve already achieved everything that most people can only dream of? You have the rest of your life in front of you, but nowhere else to go.”

You should know, of course, that there are only two kinds of mothers in stories, and if you are a mother, you are either wicked or you are dead.

But I could see my reflection in it, warped and tiny, a minnow trapped in a dirty gather of rainwater. I felt as if my whole childhood was caught in that drop: my long, matted hair like dust gathering on a bald china doll, my father’s hand around my wrist, my sisters’ beautiful faces, my mother’s shed tail feathers and the seed that her stories had planted in my belly, invisible to everyone but me.

How could I explain the knot of fear and wanting that had coiled in my belly and was now curling up my rib cage?

If you ever loved me, it was only because I was a soft thing you threw down into the bottom of a pit to break your fall.”