Juniper & Thorn

by Ava Reid

“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.

Magic was always like that: it had ugly undersides. Wanting anything was a trap.

But there’s hardly anything in life worth doing that doesn’t make somebody angry.

It wasn’t that I was so scared of red-bellied snakes and centipedes; they were harmless, I knew that much. I was more afraid that every time I walked through the garden, I was trampling hundreds of living things without even realizing it.

It’s no fun stamping through old dirty snow. People want to ruin things that are clean and new.

My eldest sister was right; I would smile blithely if someone tried to saw off my leg. But no one had ever told me that I was allowed to scream.

But there was another part of me that wanted to scream his name through empty hallways so I could hear the way it echoed. I wanted to whisper it into the ear of every person I ever met; I wanted to burn it onto me like a brand. I wanted, most of all, 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.

Once you turned into one thing, you could no longer be what you once were. A cat turned into a cat-vase lost its whiskers and darting pink tongue. A carriage turned into a gourd lost its wheels and glass windows. And once you became a woman, you gave up all the trappings of girlhood, all its precious bounties.

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?

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.”

Stories weren’t meant to be questioned; they were answers in and of themselves. They were meant to preempt any question you might ever have, to steal the words right from your mouth.