Anastasia

by Sophie Lark

This is my fantasy of the happy ending Anastasia deserved. Not because she was a Romanov, but because she was a human.

“I’m glad you know that poetry ought to be heard, not read.”

It’s not that I wanted to misbehave, but the most interesting things were always forbidden. My curiosity was a demon that lurked inside me, awake and watching. When something caught its attention, the demon took hold.

skin. But she wasn’t happy, not often and not really. She’d known grief all her life. “I can’t stand it,” I said again, weakly. Mama pulled me against her side. “It hurts because we love him. That’s the balance of life, hard as it is to accept. A heart open to joy is a heart vulnerable to sorrow. There’s no family without loss, no love without pain.”

This year of endless winter had brought out the worst in people—I’d seen men and women behave like savage beasts. But also I’d seen acts of bravery, selflessness, and incredible compassion in the darkest of circumstances. Take Katinka’s neighbor—he never would have given a damn about a rabbit before. Suffering changes you. Either you become cold and bitter, divorced from human feeling. Or the opposite occurs, and you can’t bear to inflict the pain you’ve felt on anyone else.

“How come the swan had to die in the end?” she asked Anna. “Because,” Anna said, bending herself in half like a paperclip with no apparent discomfort, “the most beautiful things are fragile and can’t last. That’s what makes them precious while we have them.”

Though the memory-keeper was silent, I heard my mother’s voice, as if she were whispering directly into my ear: Even if you see how dark the world can be … choose to believe it could be better. Life had been beautiful once. It could be beautiful again.

That was her real gift, over all her others. To find the smallest shred of hope and amplify it like a beacon. I charged her up, but she illuminated everyone around her. I loved my people. To her, everyone was her people. She really was a princess, not because she’d lived in a palace or worn a crown, but because she took that mantle on her shoulders and never shook it off. She was the people’s princess, my people and every Rusyan’s. That hadn’t changed, no matter what had happened to her. Pain can poison people. It can twist and deform them. She suffered pain, but she never closed her heart.

The truth is a blade that only cuts a liar.