"Star-shaped flowers grew all around the hermit’s house, but he didn’t notice them, not until he met the witch." A shor...
Posted on Wattpad.
Mood music
Author’s note: I’m not sure how much I like this one, but look at this at me practicing my short story writing skills! I’m much better at novels, but I like the idea of being able to produce more short, self-contained stuff. A girl’s got to practice! :) I hope you enjoy this little piece nonetheless, it turned out very different than what I expected.
Warning: contains some violence, mentions of blood.
Roughly 4000 words.
A single piece. Hope you enjoy it ! It came to me this morning on the subway. It’s a bit... different, I guess, but I hope it’s enjoyable nonetheless. (plus, witches.)
Mood music : I Will Never Die, Delta Rae.
528 words. Fantasy.
Don’t bury me.
I know the way you think, priest. You believe that a holy grave might preserve what is left of my wretched soul. You think you would be doing me a kindness.
Don’t bury me.
They will not burn me: they are too afraid. They have heard tales of witches who escape the fire, who evaporate in a puff of smoke to adopt new, terrifying forms in the night. There is fear in the air they breathe.
Instead, they will separate my head from my body. Afterwards, they might burn my corpse or simply throw it in a ditch, letting it become a banquet for hungry animals.
Let them.
Know that when vultures and rodents start filling their bellies with my flesh, it is my soul that will feast.
I see the anguish in your eyes, priest. You do not understand me. My ways frighten you, confuse you, repulse you, but kindness bleeds in your heart, like a golden vein. You look at me, but you don’t see your devil in my eyes. Oh, how you dream of saving me ! You would have my skin drenched in hallowed water. You would lead me by the hand on the road to your eternity.
You believe I need salvation.
You have good intentions, but an ignorant mind and blind eyes.
I do not forgive, but I do not resent.
Don’t bury me. Let them do what they please with my remains. And then, priest, wait.
Wait for the rain to flood the earth, for the ground to swallow my bones. You will see my death germinate. My body go from flesh to seed.
Watch, priest, as grass stems from the dead witch. See tangled roots claw their way out of the ground like greedy hands. Moss will gather in shapes that will remind you of my limbs. Memorize the shape of my arms, remember the wobble of my knee. You will see it again, priest, in a crooked strand of barley.
Then, there will be flowers.
Black flowers like you’ve never seen anywhere, with a purple heart and red leaves curling around the stems.
Thorns will prick those who will pluck them carelessly. But the danger will have its reward. Soak the leaves in water, and this brew will bring health, soothe the body and calm the mind. It will fill the drinker with the boundlessness of nature : one sip will cover your heart in stardust, drown your eyes in misty hills and gorge your lungs with southern winds. You will be free.
Even you, priest, might find this little draught pleasant.
But beware, for the liquid will burn the insides of those who would rather behead a woman than listen to her voice.
Don’t bury me, priest. Do not bury the witches. Let us bleed forall to see : for humanity, for the stars, for the crows, even for your god. Let us fester and ravage the world with the wildness of our hearts until our angry corpses turn everything into woodland.
It is my wish, priest. My last wish. Don’t bury me.
But the end, it does not matter. You might not respect my wish. You might think yourself magnanimous once more and offer me a grave, thinking you have saved me. I will claw my way out nonetheless : moss and thorns will cloak my tomb until the stone has disappeared.
Those who watched my head roll to the ground, bloody and undignified, will see it float above their beds for years to come, funeral or not.
A single piece. Hope you enjoy it ! It came to me ... an hour ago? I was thinking about betrayal and lost love and this happened. I’m not sure how good it is, but it was interesting to write.
Mood music
1829 words. Fantasy/romance
I can’t lie and say nobody warned me.
The signs weren’t lacking. Voices, adamant and pressing, assaulted my ears like noble warriors, ready to tear down the fortress I built around us. But I had defenses on my own, and your smiles kept my soldiers fighting until the end.
When I first met you, I didn’t trust you. Your grin seemed like a ruse, an illusionist’s trick, meant to divert my eyes away from your hands as they slipped behind my back armed with a knife. I was the first to warn myself against you: I should have listened.
I did not trust you. I did not like you. How simple it was, how safe, to have you be non-influential, a mere breeze unable to sway my helm. My clever ears made me wince every time you opened your mouth. You annoyed me, with your sarcasm and oh so witty quips. But you were handy with a bow, and we worked towards a common goal. So I trusted you – barely.
I shall not trust you, I told you once. My seriousness made you laugh uproariously. Your eyes twinkled and my stomach twisted.
I shall not trust you, I repeated solemnly.
That was a lie, although I did not know it then, so I do not think it counts.
You saved my life once. I thanked you, but I secretly labelled it as a fluke. Then, you did it again, and you made it hard for me to dismiss this act. I saw you bleed, I heard you whimper as skin revealed bone, and I had to watch your pain contort your face, knowing it was all for me. You had jumped in front of the spear to shield me, like the noble knights you mocked openly. You had shouted my name so loud the gods could have heard it – but you never believed in them and neither did I.
But I covered your wound with cloth, and you looked at me like I was holy. Your eyes, so blue and clear, so sincere – a work of art, a masterpiece of treachery. How did you lie so well, so seamlessly?
You told me, one day, that the secret of lies was a simple one. The key to believability was to draw from the truth: instill some into the lie, weave enough veracity into the tapestry. Throw some real gold with the fake coins to cheat the eye of the buyer.
Where did the truth end, where did the lie begin? I still don’t know. I never will. If I believed it had been all lies, that you had forged love out of nothing, it would be easy for me to slice that piece of you I carry and throw it away like rotten fruit.
But you had to be cruel. You had to unlock your heart just enough to distract me with vulnerability. You exposed your honest scars to my eyes, and yet you knew you would soon give me some new ones. Your voice shook as you confessed secrets to me – you told me you didn’t know how to love, that it always came out as poison with you. You warned me away from you. You stared at the ground, forlorn and pretended you didn’t want to hurt me.
That was a lie.
Or maybe not. Maybe you didn’t enjoy it. Who knows, with you?
I kissed you first, and you had the audacity to look stunned, enraptured. You stared at me for centuries, and your gaze blurred the rest of the universe, as though we possessed the only ray of sunlight in a world of rain. You murmured my name softly, gently, and you kissed me again. Later, I giggled out of sheer joy and whispered sweet words in your ear.
You seemed so nervous. It was endearing.
Darkness closed in on the world, but not on us. You seemed happy. I know I was. You understood me better than anyone could. You listened to the weight of my silences, you noticed the burden of my responsibilities hunch my back. You told me I was allowed to be weak, and you made me realize I was strong.
Oh, you lied and you lied, and then you lied again.
You knew me. I thought I knew you. I was so certain that I knew you, so convinced of your sincerity that I threw my indignation at those who questioned your loyalty. Suspicions started to arise, but I never believed any of it. I had seen your tears, I held your bleeding heart in my hands – stars reflected in your eyes when you looked at me. Your voice turned to honey when we were alone. You had exposed your shattered soul to me, over and over again. How could I doubt ? How could I betray you ?
“She’s a spy. She’s been seen with our enemies – she’s been giving them information, from the start. Teaming up with us, that chance meeting in the woods? It was all a trick, all a lie from the start.”
“She saved my life. She saved yours!”
“All to gain our trust. You have to be careful.”
“No, you should be careful. You should know better than to doubt your friends, to doubt me. She has fought for us, with us – how could you even think that she’s not our side ? If you don’t trust her, trust me.”
You heard one of those exchanges. I remember. I saw you outside the tent, and I apologized. I told you not to worry about it. That the others were anxious, frightened of the dark clouds coming from the west. I placed my hands on your face, and I smiled, heart thumping – I didn’t want you to feel hurt.
And then, you looked at me.
I swear, in this moment, I knew. For a second, maybe more, I knew everything. You stared at me with such sorrow, such regret, and my breath caught in my throat and my chest started to tremble – but then, you thanked me for my concern and kissed me, and I let it go, like a fool, like a stupid little fool in love. I hated myself for considering the alternative, even for a second. I felt like I was betraying you.
And then, the day came.
They caught us by surprise. Sounds of battle wrenched me from my bed: when I woke up, you weren’t by my side. My heart rose in my throat. I feared something had happened to you.
I soon discovered the reason of your absence.
You were fighting on theirs.
During the night, you murdered Meerah. Meerah, who accepted you before I did – Meerah who trusted you, Meerah who named her daughter after you. Now, that child is an orphan who will curse your name and hers forever. I wept for my friend, but the loss of Meerah was nothing next to the sight of you with them, knives twirling in your hands as you prowled on our territory like a hungry wolf.
When you saw me, you looked at me, but our eyes only met for a second. Soldiers seized me, moments later – did you ask them to take me captive, to spare my life instead of killing me? Did you bargain, or did you not care?
You visited me once in my cell, but I did not look at you. I did not speak to you. If you had come two days earlier, perhaps, when tears were still pouring from my eyes for my fallen friends and my shattered love, I might have collapses to my knees and begged you to explain, begged you to tell me this was all another ruse. That you were still on our side, still mine. But you came too late.
The truth is, I didn’t understand what drove you to betray us, to betray me. I still don’t. I don’t know if you planned on it from the start, or if you were truly with us, for a time, before you turned. Perhaps the constant mistrust from others made you bitter: maybe you decided you wanted them to be wary for a reason. That sounds like your style.
I escaped a few days later. I didn’t look back. We never met again.
Now, they tell me you died. Some say one of our people impaled you on a spear. Others say you betrayed your superiors and perished, tortured and broken, in a dark and dirty cell, somewhere across the river.
The second theory disturbs me. I do not like to think of you suffering, odd as it may sound. But I find a strange comfort in the idea of this supposed treason – I tell myself that perhaps betrayal was in your nature. Fire doesn’t choose to burn: it cannot help it. If that was the same for you, then… it makes me feel better. Like our parting wasn’t my fault, nor yours.
You cannot jump into an ocean and blame it for drowning you. You cannot touch red coal and hate it for the blisters.
Perhaps you tried to dim the flames, for a time. But your true nature suffocated your wishes like smoke.
Maybe you tried to love me. What happens to fire, if it loves the wood?
I have never been very skilled with words. Poetry and metaphors were your strength, not mine. You were a word-smith with a silver tongue. It mesmerized me.
But you didn’t leave me in ashes, not truly. You came close, but I still live. I still breathe and I still ache – and I think I shall love again, someday. Would it hurt you to know this? I hope it would, but at the same time, you have probably suffered enough.
They tell me that in this spot lies your grave, although so many bodies are buried there that I cannot be certain. There is no name on the stone, no symbol of any kind.
I tried to pick flowers. I settled on roses. I think you liked them the most, even though you might not deserve them.
The first one I plucked was too smooth, too soft. The second one slash my fingertips with its thorns. The third one’s petals spilled on the ground like rain, but the fourth one seems fit. The petals are red as blood, with a hint of dusk pink. It has enough thorns to prick the careless, but the stem is smooth in places. You can hold it, if you proceed delicately, with great care.
I am going to leave it here. I am not going to cry.
I cried over you three times. One, a few weeks after we met. You stared at me across the fire after a long day, and you mocked my passion, you insulted my ideals. I tried to jab you with quips of my own, but I was severely outmatched against you. You hurled insightful, yet harsh words at me like projectiles: you unfolded my old wounds and stung my heart repeatedly, mercilessly. You drowned me in my own demons and I couldn’t keep my head above the surface. I walked away from the clearing and hid my tears from you. You never apologized for it.
I cried for days when you betrayed us. I count it as one time, since I did not stop once I began.
I cried again when they told me you died. I am, as you would say, still a tender-hearted fool.
I shall not cry a fourth time. I shall bow my head, leave the rose on the stone, walk away, and only think of you on cloudy days, when the sun stops keeping your ghost at bay.
I shall not cry.
I shall not cry.
It seems like I am the liar, now.
Sequel to Blossoms of Blue, part of the Glass Jars universe. 3900 words. Fantasy.
It took a while for the shadows to become bodies again.
Milo saw it all happen, bit by bit. In a way, the changes that affected the town were so subtle, so slow, so deeply hidden beneath the surface that they were hard to distinguish, but he had always been an observant little boy. From a very early age, one of his favorite habits had been to observe people, to examine the patterns of their behavior, to study them as though they were particularly interesting birds, flapping their wings helplessly against the bars of a cage.
And the day the City Thief appeared, that is exactly what the habitants of Mirrornest became.
Mirrornest was nothing but a small village, lodged between a wide, teal lake and vast, bright, purple fields of lavender. Isolated, leafy trees circled the small houses and, in the spring, birds burrowed into the branches, building homes out of twigs, chirping merry melodies that soared through the air over the roofs.
The modest town didn’t seem like it would interest anyone of importance. And yet, in the wake of winter, just as the frost thawed on the ground, the City Thief threw his sheer net over the village and captured it, crystallizing it at the heart of a glass jar.
None of the inhabitants knew what was happening to them. After all, in an isolated, country town such as this one, the infamous City Thief was nothing but legend. They had heard of him, of course, in bard’s tales and fools’ ramblings, but none of them truly believed he even existed, until they found themselves caged into one of his silver orbs.
The magic that trapped them worked in ways they couldn’t comprehend. They were caught in an enchanted sphere that was no bigger than an apple and yet, they saw no change. The village remained the same. The only difference was the wall of glass that went from the ground to the sky, creating a shimmering, opaque dome they couldn’t see beyond.
A crippling panic took over the small village. As the inhabitants realized just how true the tales were, people cried out in terror, thinking that they were sure to die from suffocation, from hunger or thirst. They were utterly powerless, and as much as they banged on the glass, with their pitchforks, shovels and fists, they couldn’t even crack the silver façade. For hours, people relentlessly charged the glass barrier, but their efforts were utterly useless. Finally, families huddled together, trying to find comfort in closeness, as they awaited whatever fate this magical prison had in store for them.
However, they soon discovered that the enchantment at hand provided what they needed. The wind still whistled, the well was always flowing with water, and their provisions mysteriously refilled themselves through the night. Promptly, they came to understand that time was simply frozen, unchanging, completely still. Children didn’t grow, old men didn’t die. Mirrornest was sentenced to eternity.
They were preserved from death, but doomed to be isolated from the outside world forever.
Milo, from the start, was rather unconcerned with the fate of the town. All that mattered to him was the fact that he found himself alone, banging on the glass, bruising his little fists against the frosty façade. Milo was an orphan : his parents had left this world long ago, and his only family was his older brother, Wade. Together, the boys were vagabonds, going from village to village, scraping whatever food and money they could, through thievery or honest work. But Wade had been outside the city lines when the glass had closed upon the town like the jaw of a predator, and Milo had felt as though the ground was slipping underneath his feet. He was such a small child, barely seven, fragile-looking, with wide indigo eyes and sandy blond hair. He thought he would never be able to survive, without his brother to shield him as he always had.
Thankfully, the lost child didn’t stay alone for long. Someone found him.
A young teenage boy, not much older than fourteen, black-haired and pale-skinned, knelt on the ground next to Milo as the latter sobbed, his forehead pressed against the glass barrier. There was a comforting warmth to his hazel gaze, and he bore a small, mournful smile, grey and bright as the winter sun.
“You shouldn’t be here alone”, he said.
Milo could only cry, shutting his eyes tight. He opened them to look up with a tearful gaze, a broken little sob shaking his throat, and he couldn’t find it in himself to speak.
“What’s your name ?” the raven-haired boy asked softly.
“… Milo.”
“Are you alone ?”
The boy nodded, wiping his eyes with his sleeve.
“I’m Dimitri. My mother is the carpenter.”
“I know.”
Milo was an observant child, and he knew full well who the boy in front of him was, and what family he belonged to. Dimitri gave Milo another tentative smile, and stood up, offering him his hand :
“Come with me. I’m not going to leave you alone here. There’s room at our house for one more.”
Despite the crippling weight of his misery, Milo found a smile in his heart, and he took the boy’s hand.
Dimitri’s family took Milo in. Heavy were the tears the boy cried for his missing brother but at least, he wasn’t alone.
He was a quiet boy and although he helped around the house, he was often as elusive as a mouse, hiding in corners, climbing to the roof to wrestle with his thoughts alone. Like a hawk, like a poet, he observed people all the time. He didn’t think much of them, and his mind was too green to truly ponder their nature, but he still liked to watch them. It was an old habit of his, one that only intensified with each day. After all, in a village frozen in time, what was there to do but observe the immobility, hoping for movement ?
Often, Milo curled up, his arms around his knees as he sat on the cold tile of the roof, and he watched the old man who lived across the street. His name was Paor, and he often wore a bright, green coat that contrasted with the copper tone of his skin. He owned a bird, an elegant owl with feathers of white and bronze, and Milo watched as the man fed it seeds and mice alike. The owl had no cage and yet, it never tried to leave. Milo didn’t wonder why.
Two houses from Paor’s cottage, an old woman with wrinkly skin and grey braids chiseled statuesque shapes out of green bushes with a pair of heavy scissors. All day, she chipped and cropped and sliced, cutting away branches and leaves, letting the remains pile up on the grass. The look on her face was always very focused, as though there was nothing more important in the world than the precise angle of the scissor blade on a twig. The amount of concentration creasing her forehead made Milo wonder, sometimes, if the woman would be able to crack Mirrornest’s glass cage, should she try hard enough.
Other times, Milo glanced up at the opaque ceiling that masked the sky, and his heart clenched when he saw little birds hitting the glass with their beaks, desperately trying to pierce a hole so they could fly higher like they used to. The boy vaguely recalled a tale he had heard once, on the lips of a storyteller : the story of a little lark a greedy little boy had caged, only to find, over the years, that the bird was letting itself die, yearning for freedom like lungs need air.
Milo, already, foresaw the village’s fate.
There were a few others that Milo liked to watch : the teenage girl down the street, with red braids and a tall, white dog, the bald man who sung louder than the rooster every morning, the limping baker with white hair and small eyes, and the pretty young woman who always carried a willow basket on her arm and a bright smile on her face.
If he had much to view in the little town, there was also a lot to watch within the household he had been accepted in. If anything, the carpenter’s family occupied Milo’s mind more often than any other. To him, everything they did or said was a spectacle, in itself, and he was enthralled by human complexities he couldn’t quite grasp yet.
The family was a fractured one : the father was dead and had been for a few years. He was buried beyond the lake that was now far away from Mirrornest, in a small cemetery of white tombstones and dark green moss. Next to his grave rested the body of one of his sons, Keegan, who had died the previous summer, his drowning body sinking to the bottom of the lagoon.
Those deaths left behind a widowed mother, Nina, who spent most of her days chiseling wood in the workshop adjacent to her home, sweat glistening on her forehead as a white band held her raven braids back. Her hands were calloused, but gentle, and whenever she saw Milo, she always had a smile to offer him, even if it was a tired, bittersweet one. She wasn’t very talkative, but her silence was soothing and warm to the child : the little boy was content to sit beside her in front of the fire, in the evenings, watching the dancing silhouettes of the flames mirror a sunset on her face.
Milo, however, spent more time with her children.
The younger was Emma : a toddler, blue-eyed and rosy-cheeked, with a twinkling, star-like laugh. Milo often sat cross-legged on the floor with her and move his hands in front of a candle, creating shadows on the wall for the child’s amusement. He found it unfair, in a way, that the enchantment that captured the town froze time in such a way that Emma remained small, condemned to stay a child. He wondered if her mind expanded, while her body couldn’t, and if she resented the fact that while she was starting to have more elaborate thoughts, her baby mouth kept her from speaking them. How awful it must be, Milo thought, to be a prisoner of your own body. Emma was either the luckiest of them all, or the most tragic : lucky if her thoughts were still hazy and unformed as were those of a child, and tragic if she was starting to be too wide for her small body. Milo didn’t like to think about that. It hurt him to imagine the little girl in pain.
There was Dimitri, of course, and in the absence of Milo’s brother, the boy began to regard him as a replacement of sorts, a crutch for him to stand on. Dimitri had a warmth and a kindness that made Milo feel at home. His words were always soft and caressing like the touch of a flower, and his devotion to his family was fierce and grounding. More than once, Milo sat on the windowsill, shielded by a grey curtain, and he glimpsed, through the veil of the fabric, Dimitri adjusting a blanket over his sleeping mother, who had fallen under the weight of her day in an armchair. Dimitri never whined and never faltered : he was like a candle whose flame burned steady, bright and steadfast, even against the wind.
Milo loved him. Almost as much as he had loved Wade.
Dimitri had an older brother himself, a young man by the name of Aidan. He was tall, and although his features gave away his age, the lines of his face, angular, almost elfin, greatly resembled those of his brother. In character, though, they were nothing alike : Aidan was cold where Dimitri was warm, and his voice came in short, clipped, harsh sentences, while Dimitri rarely spoke less than gently. On the day the younger boy had brought Milo home, Aidan had narrowed his eyes enough to darken his gaze, and he had barked :
“You bring someone home, in times like these ? We have no idea what’s going to happen, or if we’re going to survive, and you bring us another mouth to feed ?”
“We’ll be fine. Don’t be like that – things will work out, you’ll see.”
Dimitri’s optimism seemed like a small armor in the face of Aidan’s harshness. Milo, already short for a boy his age, felt even smaller under Aidan’s scowl. To the child, the young man seemed severe and unkind, and he did all he could to stay out of his way. He viewed him as cold-hearted, unfeeling : Aidan was distant, even with his mother and his brother. Whenever Milo encountered the young man for more than a few seconds, he felt the frost of his presence bite him like winter. To Milo, Aidan could hardly be made of real flesh : his bones were made of steel, and his soul of stone.
The only person who seemed to ignite a fire from the boy’s icy coat was Ilse.
Like Milo, Ilse wasn’t tied to the family by blood, although she was treated as such. She had been Keegan’s fiancée and, after his death, she had remained in the household. On the brink of womanhood, with vivid green eyes and thick auburn curls, Ilse was rather volatile, equally impetuous and charming. She had a confidence about her that was intimidating, but Milo liked her. She made him feel safe, and she rushed to his defense whenever Aidan pointed his harsh glares like arrows at the boy.
Sometimes, Aidan and Ilse would shout at each other until their voices gave out. Dimitri would cover Emma’s ears and grow very quiet, and the argument usually ended with Ilse’s glare sending Aidan out of the room, slamming the door behind him in a huff. It was almost entrancing for Milo to watch : the way the frost in Aidan’s dark gaze turned into flames, the way Ilse’s chin lifted as redness hollowed her cheeks, the way both voices struggled to bury the other. Wars without soldiers, in the middle of a small kitchen.
One day, they argued so loud, for so long, that Dimitri took Milo outside, leading him with a careful hand placed on his shoulder. A light breeze blew wrinkled, dry leaves down the street, and the dome above was bleak and grey, like an early spring day. Dimitri summoned a smile to his lips, reassuring Milo with a few soft, teasing words, but the younger boy’s attention was elsewhere. His heels were digging in the ground, and he was staring with wide eyes at the house across the street.
Dimitri followed Milo’s gaze, and the arm he had raised to hold the child’s shoulder fell limp at his side.
The neighbor’s owl was perched on the decayed wooden fence, but the bird had none of her usual graceful tranquility. On the contrary, she was batting her wings wildly, and her eyes seemed wider than usual, like two black beads hollowed into her skull. She was moving her wings with such rapidity, such frenzy that the movement tore a few feathers from her body, sending them dancing through the air around her until they rested on the yellow grass. A high shriek escaped the owl’s opened beak, but it received no response from the one it was obviously intended for.
Paor was standing next to the bird, his palms resting on the edge of the fence, but he wasn’t looking at the owl. His eyes were downcast, staring at the ground beyond his feet, and he wasn’t moving at all. The color of his skin seemed to have faded slightly, making him look paler, and the breeze whistled in his hair, brushing grey locks against his thin cheeks.
Dimitri called his name. But Milo knew the old man wouldn’t answer.
The owl’s shrieks didn’t die down until nightfall.
It happened to others, too.
Soon, the woman who liked to tend to her garden, in the house down the street, let her heavy scissors fall to the ground. She let the green branches grow thicker, and the shapes she had sculpted into the bushes were soon buried into the foliage. Her once focused and clever eyes were now empty irises that reflected nothing more than the decaying garden surrounding her.
The red-headed girl who used to walk around the neighborhood, followed by the pitter-patter of her dog’s steps, stopped. She remained rooted to the ground, near the dry fountain in the lower part of Mirrornest. Her dog barked, howled, whined pitifully at her feet while she didn’t move, simply standing there, her empty gaze was fixed upon the storefront of the bakery. Inside the shop, hollow eyes stared back at her : the baker was frozen by the window, leaning on his cane, his limping leg curved at an odd angle. But his face reflected no pain. It reflected nothing.
The baker’s wife kept saying that she had seen him blink, that he was still here, that it wasn’t hopeless. Milo remained quiet, but he knew that it wasn’t true. Those whose skin had turned grey still had heartbeats, but they weren’t people, anymore. They weren’t bodies.
They were shadows.
Aidan was the first to try to touch one of them. When he saw Paor’s silhouette hunched over the fence, he crossed the street in wide steps, determined to put an end to this nonsense. But when the young man tried to take the man by the shoulders and shake him, he found that he couldn’t. No matter how hard he tried, his fingers couldn’t close around the fabric of his green coat.
“It’s useless”, Milo whispered.
Aidan, cheeks flushed and eyes wide with frustration, turned his head briskly, his gaze quickly finding the small boy. It was the first time that Milo had spoken up in his presence, and the young man’s surprise promptly turned into irritation.
“What’s he babbling about ?” he snapped, glancing at Dimitri.
The teenage boy tore his gaze away from Paor’s immobile silhouette to look at Milo. The little boy shook his head and took a small step, stepping in front of Aidan. While the young man looked affronted, ready to shout at the child, his mouth fell shut when Milo tried, too, to catch the edge of the man’s sleeve in his hand.
“You can’t touch him”, he said quietly. “He’s not really here. He is, but you can’t reach him. Like trying to catch water in your palm. Sand in your fingers.”
Aidan looked down at Milo, swallowing thickly, troubled.
“What now, then ?” he asked, his previous hostility a mere ghost, replaced by thinly-veiled distress.
“We wait.”
“For what ?”
“Our turn.”
Despite the warmth of the eternal spring weather, Aidan and Dimitri both shivered.
The bald man who used to bellow old hymns in the morning stopped singing. The pretty young woman who always smiled dropped her basket next to a well, and stayed there. It was happening all over Mirrornest : people called it the grey plague. It stole away children, men, women, tearing them away from life without carrying them into death.
Villagers stood in horror, powerless against the mysterious curse. And while Milo was saddened by the situation, heart tightening at the sight of the hollow gazes and lifeless statues, he felt like he was witnessing the panic rise and the despair take over without really taking a part in it. Mirrornest hadn’t been his home. The shadows were strangers, people he liked to observe. To him, it was like watching a beautiful artwork lose its colors : it was disheartening, frightening, but it didn’t reach his heart.
But the grey plague couldn’t stay away from the carpenter’s family forever.
One day, Milo came down from the roof to find Nina sitting by the window. It was a habit of hers, to stare outside at the spot where the horizon used to expand, showing her the distant cemetery beyond the lake, where her son and husband were buried. Next to her, Emma was crying in her crib, and the mother was making no movement to soothe her.
Milo didn’t have to take another step. He knew, before he even saw it, that her cheeks had lost their color, and that her eyes had lost the flame of the living. Tears burning in his eyes, the little boy walked towards her on wobbly legs, little hiccups lodged in the back of his throat as his chin quivered. He cradled Emma in his arms, delicately lifting her from her crib, but the child’s cries didn’t die down.
The sound of Emma’s bawls alerted Dimitri, who promptly entered the living room. He stumbled midway into the room, his wide eyes going from Milo to his mother, and his lips parted soundlessly. Salty water trickled down Milo’s cheeks as he watched Dimitri’s expression crumble, his eyes brimming with tears and his teeth burrowing into his bottom lip, biting back sounds. Ilse followed him into the room and she quickly fell to her knees in front of Nina, her fluttering fingers trying to reach out, in vain, to the dormant woman in the chair.
“Leave her be. It’s no use.”
Ilse’s green eyes sparkled with raw anger, and her hands closed so tightly on the armrests of the chair that her knuckles turned white. Her gaze found Aidan, who stood still in the doorway. And in that moment, the young man was more frightening to Milo than he had ever been before, although that fear was a new, deeper one. Confronted with his mother’s state, Aidan’s jaw was clenched, and his shoulders were stiff as stone. His eyes were shrouded in the dim light of the room, and his voice was crisp, without quiver.
“She’s your mother”, Ilse hissed out, tears in her eyes, the raspy whisper of her voice more deafening than her usual shouts. “Have you no heart ?”
Emma’s cries grew hoarse, her throat hollowing under the weight of her cries. Milo rested his chin on top of her head, and shut his eyes tight.
It went on this way for a while. Much like with anything, the villagers simply got used to it : the sight of those grey silhouettes, frozen in the middle of a house or a street, became familiar. It was easy to forget, sometimes, that those unmoving shadows had once been made of flesh and blood, that they had once lived and breathed and laughed ; they could have been stone statues, ornaments, artwork. Silent, beautiful, unyielding.
Even the carpenter’s children grew used to it : at first, they tried not to look at her, they tried not to stare into the void of her gaze, they fought the urge to address her as though she was still there – and soon, the attempts were no longer a struggle. It became part of their routine. During the day, they circled their mother’s silhouette next to the window aimlessly, as though she was furniture. They caught themselves forgetting she was even there.
And then, just when hopelessness was becoming a habit, things changed again.
The gardener woman who lived down the street dropped to the ground, and died.
At first, nobody believed it : the whole village gathered to see it, amassing in front of the small house, trying to see past the thick branches of her garden. She laid on a mattress of unruly grass, her skin still grey but now, her eyes were shut. Her body was tangible again, and villagers were able to pick her up and bury her underneath the trees of her garden.
It wasn’t long before Paor’s last breath quivered past his lips, as well. His owl dug her claws into his chest, drawing droplets of blood through his clothing as the old man rested on the ground, one arm sprawled under the fence.
The people of Mirrornest had a heap of questions that would never get answers : what caused the grey plague, why did it take people away for so long before stealing their lives for good ? Theories were hushed from lips to ears, but there was no truth, no concrete reality to fill the hollow of helpless ignorance. Mirrornest was caged, and there was no way of discovering answers that lied beyond its walls.
Milo knew. Or at least, he thought he did, and he told Dimitri as much, one night, as they both sad by the fire, looking up Nina’s silhouette, still by the window.
“It’s hope”, the little boy said, locking his arms around his legs, chin resting upon his knees. “I think at some point, you just lose it, and you have no reason to keep going. So you don’t. You just stop moving, stop everything. Like when you don’t want to get out of bed in the morning when you’re too sad. Except worse, and all the time.”
Dimitri gazed at Milo with that odd mix of awe and discomfort that sometimes gleamed in his eye when the small boy spoke like this.
“And then ?” he asked in a quiet breath, expectant.
“I don’t know”, Milo confessed with a sigh. “Maybe you get sick of that, too, and that’s when you die.”
His voice shook a little. Immediately, concern returned to Dimitri’s eyes, and he clasped a hand on the boy’s arm firmly, meeting his gaze :
“It’s not going to happen to us”, he affirmed. “We won’t lose hope, all right, Milo ? If hope is what it takes, we’ll keep it”.
Milo forced a smile on his lips, but it left no echo in his heart, because he already knew that Dimitri was wrong.
Nina died shortly after that.
Aidan dug a grave in the garden. He insisted on doing it alone, barking at anyone who dared try to help him in the process. Sweat pearled on his forehead as he worked, all day, to burrow a wide hole into the ground. Pale and feverish, Ilse watched him through the window, her forehead pressed to the cold glass while Milo watched over Emma.
As for Dimitri, Milo had never seen him so quiet. He sat at the kitchen table, his arms crossed underneath his chin. Tears glimmered in his gaze without falling and, every once a while, a little sniffle was muffled against the crook of his arm. An ache tugged at Milo’s heart : he wanted to reach out to the boy, wanted to bring back his smile but, despite his young age, Milo knew he couldn’t. His affection wasn’t enough to fill the mother-shaped hole in Dimitri’s chest.
Milo found himself staring at Nina’s grave every day. Somehow, it was harder to ignore than her grey silhouette, frozen by the window. He wondered why that was.
Meanwhile, the grey plague was unstoppable, and the villagers had never been so utterly desperate. People flickered like candles in the wind, waning, one by one, each light giving out, one after the other. It was terrifying – they were powerless against it, so powerless.
After Nina’s death, Milo noticed the process getting quicker.
Before, people became grey and lifeless long before their bodies fell limp on the ground. Paor, Nina, the baker had been unmoving for months (was it months ? it was hard to tell) before they died. But now, a flicker of greyness could come into the night and leave you dead in the morning.
It happened to Ilse.
One evening, Milo caught her in the garden, her eyes terrifyingly wide and hollow as she stood in front of Nina’s grave. She clutched at a pendant around her neck, and her knuckles whitened under the continued strain. The boy tried to touch her, but the hem of her dress kept evading his fingertips.
The next day, she was already gone.
The young woman laid upon the grass, grey-skinned and serene, like she was asleep. Aidan knelt down beside her and clutched her limp hand against his chest for hours : he sobbed like he had forgotten how to breathe, and he didn’t stop until halfway through the next night, when his body was drained, unable to move. Inside the house, Dimitri sat on the bed, staring into nothingness, tears falling sporadically from his eyes as he cradled Milo to his shoulder. The younger boy quivered in the dark and willed himself not to cry.
He missed Wade.
Once Ilse had gone, Aidan followed quickly. His sister-in-law had taken his soul with her, and the young man expired the following morning. Dimitri and Milo found him there, in the garden, his head resting against Ilse’s stomach and his fingers laced with hers. Dimitri watched them for a moment, his face gaunt and his eyes dry. One of his hands held Milo’s, while the other clutched at his chest, as though he was applying pressure on his heart. The teenage boy bowed his head, and his lips formed a thin line. He didn’t cry. He was too tired.
Milo was convinced, then, that the grey plague, the one he thought was called hopelessness, would come for them all. It was inevitable, now – they were all going to die and soon, the glass cage they were trapped in would contain nothing more than a ghost town, where the little houses were filled with grey, lifeless bodies.
Milo thought it unfair, to die so young, but was he even young anymore ? How long had he been here ? Years, decades, more ?
Was Wade even still alive ?
Before, panic had been running through Mirrornest, wild and trembling as a water stream. Now, it was replaced by the slow course of sorrow, the quiet, almost relieved acceptance of the fate that seemed to await them all. People no longer cried for those they lost : instead, they waited for the day they would join them.
And then, one day, there was nobody left but three children in the carpenter’s house. Milo walked down the village streets to realize that everyone else was gone.
Most of them were dead, and those who weren’t had already turned grey, like they were waiting in line for their turn.
Inside the house, Emma was sitting on the ground, toying with an old ragdoll in front of the chimney. No flames danced in the fireplace : they had stopped making fires long ago. There didn’t seem to be a point anymore.
Milo stopped in front of Dimitri, and told him that they were the only ones left. The two boys sat on the ground next to each other, their backs leaning against the wall as Emma continued to play. Dimitri shut his eyes and pressed his palm to his eyes, shaky little breaths exhaled past his lips.
“I’m sorry”, Milo said quietly, his chin trembling.
Dimitri’s hand fell limp to his side, and the teenage boy turned his head to look at Milo, his gaze watery.
“Sorry for what ?” he murmured softly.
“That we’re going to die.”
At this, a rueful, painful smile twisted Dimitri’s mouth and his eyes burned with tears as he shook his head. His throat wobbled, but he forced his voice out and said, in a reassuring tone that shattered Milo’s heart harder than any confirmation would have :
“Shush”, Dimitri whispered. “You don’t know that. Don’t – don’t lose hope. Something might still happen. A miracle could happen.”
“Do you believe in miracles, Dimitri ? Really ?”
“I…”
Dimitri’s voice quivered and gave out as he shut his eyes, limpid pearls escaping from his eyelids. Milo bowed his head and felt a tear trail down his cheek, nesting in the curve of his jaw. He linked his hands together in his lap as Dimitri put an arm around his shoulders, pulling him closer :
“Shhhh”, Dimitri said, fighting back sobs, his fingers curling into the boy’s shirt. “I’m here, Milo, we’re going to make it, you’ll see…”
Milo didn’t say anything. He kept his head bowed and his gaze on the wooden floor beneath his feet. He heard Dimitri hush incoherent words of reassurance into his ears for what seemed like hours and then – it stopped.
Dimitri’s grip on his shoulders loosened.
Milo slowly lifted his head, turning to glance at Dimitri. Grey skin was all he saw.
He inhaled sharply and shut his eyes, burying his face against his knees, muffling sobs into whimpers. When he opened his eyes again, Dimitri was slumped against the wall, his eyes closed, dry tear lines drawn on his cheeks. Lifting his arm shakily, Milo soon felt his fingertips collide with the cold skin of Dimitri’s palm.
He had gone from shadow to body in less than a minute.
How much time would it take, for Milo and Emma ?
The boy took a deep breath and wiped his face with his sleeve, before forcing himself to his feet. He took a few steps further into the room, his eyes falling on Emma, who clutched her little ragdoll to her heart, like a charm. Milo looked at her for a moment, the burn of his tears still warm on his cheeks, then he exhaled slowly, shutting his eyes only to open them again.
“It’s just you and me now, Emma”, Milo whispered, kneeling down in front of the little girl. “Just us”.
The eternal infant didn’t cry. She just blinked at Milo, her eyes wide and bright and he wondered, once again, just how much she understood in that moment. He gathered her small frame in his arms and went to sit against the wall, under the windowsill, right across the spot where Dimitri lied. Milo kept the child close to him and stared ahead as tears clouded his vision once more.
It was like Milo could still hear Dimitri’s voice in his head : that constant chorus of foolish, irrational hope in the face of adversity.
If hope is what it takes, we’ll keep it.
Something might still happen.
A miracle could happen.
In the end, that admirable resilience hadn’t helped Dimitri much, had it ? He was still dead. And he had to watch every one he loved die – it was unfair, it wasn’t fair and now, Milo was going to die too, unless, unless…
No.
It was useless to think of it. The miracle wouldn’t come. Milo could only hope that Emma would follow him quickly : that way, the infant wouldn’t be left alone.
The boy leaned his head against the cold wall behind him, lifting his chin, closing his eyes as a long, tired breath parted his lips. Emma was quiet and mellow in his arms, her little palm resting against Milo’s chest. The boy brushed his lips on the top of her head, then returned to his previous position.
Outside, a small breeze whistled along the street, slithering between the houses, but Milo paid little attention to it. He had heard this wind sing so many times before that its melody simply faded into the background, now.
The boy stared ahead of himself : his eyes were on Dimitri’s crouched, limp form, but he wasn’t really looking at it. He simply stared.
Aiden’s voice echoed in his head, ghostlike, summoned from a now distant past : what now, then ?
So, first try at posting a short story here. I'm incredibly nervous but hopefully, you enjoy this little piece. This is part of a series of short stories, all taking place in the same universe. Enjoy !
Part of the Glass Jars universe : Blossoms of blue.
3900 words. Fantasy.
As a child, Bonnie already dreamt of silver storms and ships with black sails.
Were those nightly images glimpses of her future ? Was her fate carved in her bones, inescapable, unavoidable ? Or was her very nature what had driven her into aswirl of storms, magic and sharp blades ?
Bonnie’s heartwas fierce as a wildcat, but that was something she had to put aside when shewas very young. At a rather early age, Bonnie had to trade the wooden sword forthe needle, and the sky for the kitchen ceiling.
At barely thirteen, Bonnie cared for her siblings like a dutiful mother. Her father was a sickly, weak man, and her mother was a hardened, steel-voiced woman, whose palm slapped more than it caressed. She rarely spoke for a purpose other than scolding, or complaining. Bonnie, stiff-chinned, kept quiet and took it.
Her days were a jumble of chores, whiny voices and aching feet. She rarely had a moment to herself. One of her siblings always needed something, her mother always had another errand for her to run, her father was constantly shaken by a terrible cough : Bonnie’s life wasn’t hers. It was fully devoted to others.
“You’ll make a good mother, little Bonnie,” people told her, looking upon her devotion to her family with admiration. “You’ll be a wonderful wife, too.”
And while Bonnie smiled and nodded, those words nauseated her, and her wild heart rebelled against the idea. She had already spent most of her years caring for others and now, she was told that the rest of her life would be weaved of the same treads ? The thought of it was almost unbearable to her. Inside her, a voice screamed that she had done enough. She had tended to her family for so long, and she was drained. She began to hate the life she was living.
Resentment grew like a tree within her, deeply rooted in her own feelings of confinement, twisting vines around her heart so tightly that Bonnie felt like she couldn’t breathe anymore. She felt caged by a life she desperately didn’t want.
She longed for the very early years of her life, during which her father could still breathe without choking, when her mother was still tender enough to smile at her children. Back then, Bonnie used to run through the moors, her olive skin glistening with the sweat of exercise, her raven hair flowing behind her like a banner in the wind. There were days when Bonnie would race along the hill until her knees buckled underneath her, and she would fall on the green grass with laughter on her lips, adrenaline pumping wild blood through her veins.
Her older sister, Myra, was the caretaker, back then. But Myra was married, now. She lived in another house, cared for other children. Whenever Bonnie saw her, at the market or across the street, it seemed to her that Myra’s long, grey dresses were cages in which her sister was trapped. There was always a child tugging on her hand, merciless, and it filled Bonnie with dread. At night, the teenage girl tossed and turned, praying for a miracle, hoping that something would take her away from there. It made her feel guilty, because it was a purely selfish desire : after all, her family needed her, and she was painfully aware of that. But she couldn’t stop her strengthening hankering for escape.
She told bedtime stories to her brothers and sisters, almost each night, and it was one of the rare times during which Bonnie enjoyed herself. In truth, as she recounted tales of adventures and triumph, it was herself that she imagined, vanquishing the monsters, traveling the world. In many fables, an unforeseen event pulled the hero from his routine and threw him on a different path, far away from the life he knew. That was what Bonnie craved. She wanted to be torn from the stale, suffocating fate that was hers.
When she turned sixteen, a boy from the village spoke to her of marriage. Bonnie refused immediately, without even thinking about it. In a way a husband meant leaving home, and while that was an alluring prospect, she would simply be leaving one cage to step into another. Instead of tending to her father, she’d have to care for her husband, one she doubted she would cherish as much as she was supposed to.
She rejected the boy in a manner that was almost harsh, discordant with the quiet, compliant nature she usually displayed. It was a mere flare of her hidden pyre, gleaming in the way she lifted her chin at her suitor, her eyes lacking any sort of softness as she broke her gaze, walking home with a quick step. His pleas (“little Bonnie, wait!”) were ignored as the young woman left him behind. Her boots lifted dust from the ground as she headed towards her house, and she dropped her basket next to the door, taking her shawl off her shoulders. Revolting visions of cottages and kitchen knives, cribs and brooms littered her mind, and she barely heard her siblings chattering over the sound of plates being dumped on the wooden table.
“ Do you think you could make one, Bonnie ? Bonnie ?”
“What ?” The young woman said, as if awakening, moving her eyes to look at her brother.
Elliott didn’t answer, it was his twin brother, Matt, who did, rolling his eyes.
“He wants a cape. A silken cape.”
“A cape ?”
“Yes,” Elliott said excitedly. “Like the City Thief.”
This captured Bonnie’s attention. As she made her way towards her youngest sister, smoothing down the girl’s unruly curls, she frowned and gave Elliott a questioning look.
“The City Thief ?” She repeated.
Bonnie looked up as her mother entered the room, looking highly irritable. The young woman spotted splashes of blood on her apron, and she felt her heart clench unpleasantly.
That meant her father had been seized by another coughing fit.
“Yes,” Elliot answered excitedly. “We were playing around the river, the other day, and we heard these fishermen…”
Bonnie’s sister, Abi, wrinkled her nose at this.
“They smelled so bad,” the little girl commented.
“Let me talk !”
“Eliott, be nice,” Bonnie chided absently, half-watching her mother remove her apron.
“And they were talking about this man, and his name is the City Thief. He’s tall, and he’s a hundred years old…”
“People don’t live that long !” Matt piped up.
“They can, when they have magic ! And he wears a big, flowing cape, and a big ruby on his hand…”
A movement from Abi made the young girl’s cup clatter against the table. Quickly, Bonnie seized a cloth, and started wiping the water before it flowed to the ground, glancing at her mother, who didn’t seem to have noticed. Elliott stopped speaking, throwing his younger sister an irritated glare.
“It’s all right,” Bonnie told her wide-eyed sister quietly. “Elliott, keep talking. A sword and a cape ?”
“Yes! He’s a magician,” Elliott said, nodding firmly, as if to prove his point. “He travels the world…”
“Does he walk ?” Abi asked innocently. “Or does he ride a horse ?”
“I don’t know, he just travels! He takes cities, whole cities, and he puts them into little jars, and then he keeps them for himself, hidden somewhere. He has a collection.”
Bonnie raised her eyebrows as she folded the damp cloth, tilting her head – trapping towns into jars ? It sounded like a rather ridiculous story, but it made Bonnie smile despite herself. There was an eerie imagery to it : little villages, sprinkled with twinkling lights, caged in the heart of a crystal orb. Bonnie was torn from her reverie by her mother’s scoff.
“They are just stories, Elliott,” the woman said. “Don’t listen to those absurdities.”
“But it’s true !” The boy insisted, wide-eyed, and thoroughly convinced. “It’s true, Mother ! People have seen him, and he has already stolen two cities on the east coast. I swear !”
“Elliott, quiet.”
At his mother’s commanding tone, the child fell silent, chewing on his lower lip. By the cupboard, Bonnie placed the folded cloth on a shelf, sealing her lips tight, a storm brewing in her heart. She shut the closet door a little harder than she needed to.
Oh, how she wanted to leave.
The following spring, one of her uncles, her father’s brother, came to the house and told Bonnie’s mother that he had room for her daughter in the city, if she was interested. He was offering to relieve the family of a mouth to feed, and he could make little Bonnie work with him in his shop. The young woman listened, heart pounding, clutching at her chest, as her fate was discussed in the next room.
“No. I absolutely cannot lose Bonnie. She’s too young to leave home, and I need her here. How am I supposed to do everything myself ? I only have so many hands !”
Bonne had to bite down on her closed fist to stop herself from screaming.
The idea of leaving became more than a mere wish. It descended into an obsession, consuming her every thought. With every waking second, her existence felt harder to bear. She found herself almost growling in frustration when one of her brothers scraped his knee. She had to stop her fingertips from crushing the wrist of her capricious little sister when she tried to climb a chair. She wanted to lash out at them, she wanted to hiss at them so they would leave her alone, she wanted to smother her father with a pillow until he stopped moving, until he stopped asking, until he stopped needing her so much…
As for her mother, Bonnie simply wanted her to disappear.
Lying on her bed, cradling her younger sister’s head to her chest, Bonnie stared at the reflection of the moonlight on the ceiling and made the decision to leave.
Of course, it took her quite a while for her resolution to take form. Bonnie had never been outside of the small city she was born in and she knew very little of the outside world. She had to open her eyes and ears, become more knowledgeable, carefully crafting her escape. She didn’t know where she would go, or what she would do, but she was completely set on leaving this bleak village and this stifling family behind. Although shame came over her, sometimes, when she saw the burning need in her siblings’ eyes, her guilt morphed into a murky pond, from which sprang a revived desire for freedom.
The little town Bonnie had grown up in welcomed its fair share of fishermen and sailors. After all, they lived rather close to the sea and Bonnie had, more than once, let her legs carry her up the hill to admire the distant waves, simmering in green and grey, along the shore. Frequently enough, she had thought about following the path to the ocean, and letting the tide carry her away like a seashell.
One day, she spotted a ship, in the distance, but she didn’t think too much of it, until she heard a few whispers in town. She was busy fixing her little sister’s coat, kneeling in front of her by the fountain, toying with the treads escaping from the fabric, when a word caught her attention.
“Pirates.”
Pirates.
The mere mention of the vicious sea outlaws was enough to tug at Bonnie’s wildly beating heart. She was caught in a vague memory of herself, tying a teal scarf around her hair, brandishing a wooden stick, declaring herself Blue Bonnie, fierce pirate captain, demanding gold from helpless victims.
“It has to be pirates,” the man who was speaking continued.
“I don’t think so,” a woman answered with a shake of her head.
“Well, it ain’t honest men, that’s for sure. What kind of ship doesn’t hoist any colors? What kind of ship has no name ?
“Word is the captain’s looking for a crew around Oldbay. But nobody’s seen the man.”
“The whole thing is fishy, if you ask me.”
“Who’s asking you?
As Bonnie headed home, her mind was restless. Pirates, in a city nearby? That was probably the most exciting thing that had happened in the region and instead of feeling scared, the young woman was thrilled. She found herself wishing the marauders would come pillage her town, spilling blood as they went, taking and stealing as they pleased. She cooked up scenarios involving cutthroat mercenaries, breaking down the wooden door, snatching everything they had of value (which wasn’t much, of course). She imagined them, blood-thirsty and savage, pushing her family inside the kitchen, laughing as they set fire to the little home.
In her darkest fantasies, Bonnie found a way to sneak out. She barred the door with a shovel, and let her whole family burn inside.
It wasn’t the last rumor she heard of those pirates. During the next few days, whispers of the pirate ship, and its elusive captain, reached Bonnie’s ears.
The following morning, sailing on an instinct she couldn’t explain, she slipped out of her bed before dawn, as shades of orange and pink flowered like rose in the midnight blue of the sky. Her feet fell into her shoes, and she wrapped her blue shawl over her shoulders, unbraiding her hair as she walked.
When she passed in front of her parent’s bedroom, she heard her father cough and squeak out a plea, and she pretended not to hear him. She was out the door in an instant.
Freedom was scarce, for her, and she inhaled the morning breeze with such hunger that frost seemed to settle in her lungs, strangling her a little. But the cold didn’t bother her. At first, she trailed her feet in the backyard, fighting the urge to throw away her shoes and let the icy grass bite her toes. The wind caught in her hair, lifting her shawl up above the fence. She chased it, but didn’t stop running when she caught it. Her legs carried her up the hill, and she stopped, out of breath, her palm digging in her side, to watch the bright, pure ocean glimmer in the sunrise.
Bonnie blinked as she spotted a shadow, on the shore. She wiped sweat from her forehead, and noticed that it was a ship. The sails were black as a crow, and the boat simply rested against the sand, without a harbor.
At first, the young woman thought she was imagining it. She stumbled down the hill, crumpling her shawl in her hands, and slowly, her heart began to thump harder in her chest, as she realized that the ship wasn’t fading away in the mist of reality. It was there.
There was no flag, for the ship hoisted no colors. Immediately, Bonnie knew it was the ship she had heard about : the pirate ship. The more she advanced, the more she found herself wishing she could fly to it. Her legs tingled underneath her dress and she forced her step to remain steady as she looked upon what looked like a phantom ship. She saw no crew on deck, and nobody on shore. Intrigued, her stomach twisting into knots, she let herself approach the coast, stopping at the edge of the pale-sanded beach.
Never before had she seen a ship up close, except in her imagination. Ebony sails rose from a tall mast, swelling along the sea breeze, sending fleeting shadows on the dark hull of the boat, dancing with the silver reflections of the water on the fringe of the wood. Bonnie watched as the surface of the ocean shimmered, and she felt as though it called to her, beckoned her to drown underneath the white radiance glimmering in the grey morning.
Bonnie was in a daze, fascinated by the view, and she didn’t even realize someone was standing behind her, until she heard a voice speaking.
”Pretty thing, isn’t she ?”
Bonnie shuddered, feeling as though she had been caught doing something she shouldn’t have, and she turned. A tall man stood behind her, wrapped in a blue silken cape, a hood masking part of his face. The cloak couldn’t hide the lean build of his shoulders, and a draft of wind revealed the crimson leather clinging to his chest, as well as the grin he wore like a blade under his mantle. His eyes, however, remained out of sight.
“The ship,” he added to clarify, gesturing towards it. “It doesn’t look like an ordinary ship. Does it ?”
The young woman turned her gaze back to the boat, and shrugged.
“I wouldn’t know,” she admitted thoughtfully. “I don’t know much about boats.”
“Neither do I. And yet, it has allure. Don’t you think ?”
Bonnie glanced back at the stranger with burgeoning curiosity. His skin was darker than most people who lived nearby, and the young woman could tell easily that he wasn’t from the region. He didn’t hold himself like a countryman, but, despite the richness of his clothes, his stance wasn’t that of a noble man. His voice carried the slightest hint of an accent, his tongue clicked harshly on some consonants, and the end of his sentences seemed to hang in the air after his voice had faded, like a remnant of smoke.
“Yes,” Bonnie said, glancing back at the ship wistfully. “It does.”
“The ship is looking for a crew, you know. Interested ?”
Bonnie laughed to cover up the way her heart leapt at those words.
“Me ?” She said, raising her eyebrows. “I just told you. I know nothing about ships. I don’t know anything about sailing.”
“We could always use a cook, or a cabin girl.”
The use of the pronoun made Bonnie look up sharply.
“We?” She repeated. “You sail on this ship?”
The man let out a bark of laughter, revealing his pearl-white teeth.
“More than a sailor. I’m the captain.”
Bonnie gaped. She wasn’t an easy person to shock, but her eyes were wide as coins as she stared at the amused man.
“You’re the captain ?” Bonnie stammered. “You just said you knew nothing about ships.”
“I’m a fast learner.”
The man’s grin fell somewhere between playfulness and arrogance. Bonnie watched him with a mixture of awe and wariness. This was the elusive captain villagers had been murmuring about.
“What’s your name ?”
“Oh, all the answers I could give you. They’ve taken to calling me the City Thief. But I’m looking for a better name.”
Bonnie was thunderstruck. Her face gave nothing away but, on the inside, her heart rattled in her ribcage. Elliott’s tales floated in her mind, surging forward into images of little towns trapped inside glass spheres. She remembered the picture her brother painted, the one of a mysterious, powerful magician, who wore a long silken cape, and a ruby ring on his finger. Bonnie’s eyes widened slightly as they followed the hem of the man’s midnight blue cloak. The wind lifted the rich fabric, and red glimmered on his right hand as the jewel he bore caught a ray of sun.
“You know who I am,” the man stated, with a flicker of amusement.
“I heard stories. I thought they were just…”
“Just stories? I figured. So, what do you say? Are you on board ?”
The young woman’s voice strangled in her throat, and she felt as though her knees were about to give out.
“You were serious ?”
“I need a crew.”
“Aren’t pirates only men ?”
“Says who?”
“Says everybody.”
“I don’t like following rules I didn’t make.”
Bonnie wasn’t sure if she was breathing too much or not enough. She felt dizzy, light-headed, yet her insides were churning. Her stupefaction obviously entertained the City Thief, if his sly smile was anything to go by.
Through the delirious clouds of disbelief, came a piercing blast of clarity, crystallizing in Bonnie’s mind as she gazed at the pirate captain who offered her the escape she had been itching for. The ruthless streak of her character pushed past the dutiful mask she had been forced to wear, and her amber gaze hardened. She lifted her chin with a surge of deep-rising pride, and declared :
“I don’t want to cook. I don’t want to be your cabin girl, whatever that is. I don’t want to do anything for anyone. Ever again.”
For a second, she thought she might have offended the man, but his face split in a razor-sharp grin, and he said :
“Spoken like a true pirate.”
Being compared to a pirate should have offended her. Bonnie was aware of it and yet, she felt flattered. She felt taller. Before she could speak again, however, the City Thief glanced to the side, his gaze moving to the sea. Bonnie followed his eyes to glimpse a small boat, rowed by two men, sliding towards the shore. The young woman watched the sailors for a moment. They were twins, alike in features if not in expression, both sandy-haired and fair-skinned. The wooden hull touched the sand as the boat came to a stop, and the ships captain smiled, before taking a few steps forward.
Bonnie’s protest died as her throat closed up, and her soul whimpered at the idea of her freedom slipping away so soon. Thankfully, within seconds, the man turned to her. This time, she met his vibrant, chestnut brown eyes, and her heart soared as the man lifted a hand, curling his fingers to beckon her towards him.
“Are you coming?”
She didn’t need to be asked twice. Her grip tightened on the cotton shawl she was still holding, and she nodded wordlessly, before stepping into the City Thief’s footsteps. His lips twisted into a smile as she joined him, and Bonnie beamed for the first time in years.
She climbed on the boat, and didn’t look back once.
She didn’t say goodbye. She regretted nothing. Guilt was too heavy for the water, and it would only drag her down. She left it on the shore, cutting her heartstrings with a merciless blade.
She had nothing left but the clothes on her back, and an irresistible hunger for freedom.
As the two men rowed the boat back to the ship, Bonnie glanced at the City Thief, who stood, mighty and proud, one knee against the wooden floor, his gaze fixated on the black sails. The young woman followed the direction of his eyes. Echoes of her laughter, surfacing from her childhood, reached her ears, and she remembered the girl she had been, the one that had chased the wind on the hills, the child whose mind was draped in ebony sails and howling seas.
The girl who called herself Blue Bonnie.
The young woman looked down at her hands. She was still clutching her shawl.
The cotton was blue.
Much like she used to when she was a child, Bonnie lifted her curls with one hand, and tied the fabric around her hair, twisting a knot at the nape of her neck. Vivid blue crowned black hair, and when the young woman stepped onto the ship, she was little Bonnie no more.
