Juniper & Thorn(54)

Impossible. It was impossible. I had watched the broker walk through the door with Mama’s bracelet clinking in his pocket. Suddenly, as if the metal had turned too hot in my hand, I dropped it, thrust it away from me and let it skitter to the floor, under my bed. A swell of terror came over me so swiftly and powerfully that it could be nothing but magic. Bad magic.

Curled on my chair, knees tucked up under my chin, I replayed the conversation with the broker over and over again. Inside the theater of my mind, I watched him take the bracelet from me and put it in his pocket. Once, twice, three times. I watched him hand Rose the bag of rubles.

If I told my sister, she could not accuse me of imagining it. The gold chain was gleaming at me from beneath the bed like the dead monster’s eyes. There was proof I could hold in my hand. I scooped up the bracelet again, even as its dark, eldritch power seemed to singe my flesh, and tucked it into the pocket of my housecoat.

I was a few steps away from Rose’s door when I stopped. I remembered how she had implored me to spend my secret on her, and how she had scowled at me with such virulence when I had refused her. It occurred to me for the first time that I could not rely on my sister for answers. I had always thought Rose the clever one, but what had she ever done to truly prove it? She was as trapped here as the rest of us.

I could not rely on my sister to save me. I turned down the hall and went to Papa’s room instead.

He always left the door open so I could go inside and clean. Now there were clothes strewn all over the furniture, pants crumpled on the seat of his armchair and shirts spread-eagled on the floor. His bed was unmade, pillows crushed in with the shape of his head and blanket curling around the edge of the mattress like banked snow.

Every time I came in I imagined how my mother’s body had looked in the bed, back when she was still a woman and not a bird, all mortal and soft. Her breasts were lumpy from nursing us, nipples masticated by our baby teeth. Papa said it was only the curse that had made him stop loving her, but hearing Undine’s words echo I wondered if he thought that she’d been spoiled, too, by the mean banality of motherhood. No longer any good to him as a woman or a wife, better as a bird in its cage.

Out of sheer instinct, I gathered up all of Papa’s clothes into my arms. I thought briefly of washing them—that might ebb a bit of his anger; it had worked before. But now I imagined hurling Papa’s clothes over the railing; I imagined pulling them into one giant heap and setting them aflame. I imagined beating my fists against his chest and snarling at him like a petulant cat, or like my eldest sister. The possibility bloomed in my stomach and then rose up my throat into my mouth, something I wanted to vomit out.

I had already done the worst thing I thought possible—disobeying my father, sneaking out from under his spell—and I was still breathing thickly and my legs had not turned to chicken feet. What did it all matter now?

Standing there amidst the strewn clothes, charm bracelet burning a hole through my housecoat, I wondered why I had come in here at all. I had turned away from my sister’s door because I knew that whatever she said or did would not sate me. Undine had already spoken all the wisdom that she knew, but I was still empty. Yearning.

Suffused with an emotion that I could not recognize or name, I tore through the clothes the way that Papa had torn through our dresses. As if I were a beast with fangs and claws. I had only the strength of a half-trained witch, but I managed to tear the buttons from his shirts and rip the seams on his pants. I used my teeth to work at the leather of his belt until it broke into two pieces. And then, standing in the ruin of it all, I felt my stomach settle, as if I’d eaten a fat meal and had no urge to spit it back up again.

While I was reaching for a pair of pants, something slipped out of the pocket and fluttered to the ground. I knelt down and picked it up. It was a thick square of paper, slightly water-stained, ink blurring the letters so that they looked like wet eyelashes. I could still read them if I squinted and held the card up to the light.

fisherovich & symyrenko 3454 vorobyev street.

My heart careened in the silence. I knew, I knew that I had not taken the man’s card, just as much as I knew that I had given him Mama’s charm bracelet. I tried to smooth out my memory like a white tablecloth so that I could see any stains or splatters, but everything was ivory and pristine, and not even curling at the edges. The broker had come and gone without leaving anything of his behind.

Possibilities flowered up in my mind: perhaps Papa had chased after him and taken his card. Maybe they had met before, a long time ago, and forgotten each other’s faces. But all my imagined reasonings seemed to wilt under scrutiny.

I was filled with icy uncertainty, like the slush that collected on street corners in the winter. Hurriedly, I crammed the card into the pocket of my housecoat alongside the charm bracelet, and clambered down the stairs.



By the time Papa came home the sky was dimming to the color of a bruised peach and he told us that he had posted his signs all over the city. Rose and Undine had used needle and thread and a bit of spellwork to mend their dresses, and they both were so beautiful it would make your eyes well up to look at them. Undine wore her gown of peacock blue and Rose wore one of deep scarlet; they reminded me of little jeweled sucking candies that came inside bronze tins, except Undine’s eyes were dangerous and Rose’s smile looked mean.

I had chosen my least ruined dress, a pale pink gown that was too snug in the waist and had one of its corset bones snapped. Undine was right; it mattered little how I looked. Papa swept right past me without even a glance. He was standing with his arms drawn over his distended belly, staring out the window.