She is sitting in the window when I find her. My entry into her apartments teeters entirely on this precarious pair of facts; one, I am small; and two, I am armed with Mother’s message. My older brothers may wander down this hall, if they are feeling brave, but they never touch the door, preferring instead to press so far against the opposite wall that their shoulders bump into the gilded picture frames, crooking the faces of our ancestors, giving their scowls purpose, a reason. My shoulders never bump anything. Older brothers are complicated in a fundamental way that I am not; the baby brother, youngest of the youngest. It is easy to love the elder sister, the only sister. It is not my responsibility to protect, nor provide. Often, I feel frozen in time. Always the newborn, wrapped in a blanket or smock, held in the arms of a sister, or a mother.
Off I go, down the hall, weak-kneed at the swinging sword of knowledge that I am the sacrificial lamb. Sons are meant to be precious, heirs and living legacies. But there are better sons than me creeping through the halls of this house. Smart sons, smart enough to stay away from this hall. Smart enough to grow tall and wide, so as not to be a target. Smart enough to have the good sense to hide from our mother, and our sister. They never stumble over their feet when they flee Mother’s presence. They walk with great purpose, great intention. Live another day, live today without the agony of acknowledgement. Then there is me. The weak brother, the littlest brother, who will likely not live to adulthood, should I not wise up. Stop clinging to your sister’s skirts! She, who curls and coils in the grass, striking with a wide jaw. Snakes have been known to eat lambs, and yet I go in, regardless.
I do not knock, because the noise might disturb her, and she is loath to be disturbed. It is a liberty, to even open her door, but the message must be delivered and her ire is rarely directed at me. The door is wooden, though it feels leaden; it has to be pushed open, a slow and laborious effort. Behind me, it snaps itself shut. Goosebumps raise themselves on my exposed skin. Anticipation, and the sharp gusts of air that cut across the room. The largest window is wide open and the wind rolls over and under the many tapestries decorating the walls. Thick and woven, the tapestries make a solid noise as they move. I have never been to the ocean, but I like to think this is the sound of waves crashing. Like her wall hangings, my sister’s hair flutters and trails behind her as though she were running. One stockinged foot brushes the stone floor beneath her, the other folded under her skirts. The layers of skirt have twisted just so, and I can see the hilt of the curved dagger she wears eternally at her hip, like a gunslinger. It is the knife she uses for all her dissections. Once, she held the dagger a breath away from my nose, so close I could hardly see it for my sight had gone cross-eyed, and then she moved so that the tip of the blade was against the highest knob of my spine. “If I stabbed you right here—” she had said, applying a bit more pressure. The blade was very fine, and later, I would be unable to explain the cut to Mother. “—you would never walk again.”
Her slippers have been kicked haphazardly near a stepping stool. My sister studies a plump dove before her on the ledge, the silly bird cooing and ruffling its feathers. He struts about, never straying too far from her. Her left hand is open and filled with crumbs from a sweet cake. The dove puffs out its chest and bends to peck at her open palm. He gobbles down a crumb or two, then dances away from my sister to walk another circle. As he rounds the curve, he will return to her hand and the awaiting bits of cake. Through the open window, my sister raises her right hand, fist closed around a chunk of rock. She moves fast, never stuttering or tripping over her movements.
Crack.
A feather floats down to where her foot is. She drops the rock, smeared with a splotch of red gore. It lands with a heavy thud, and she raises her hand to her mouth to lick the remaining crumbs away. She adjusts herself and pulls the dead dove into her lap. I do not wish to look at the head, a shock of red and white left exposed beneath the delicate grey feathers. Straying down, and I can see the neck is twisted from the force of the blow. The round, black eyes are vacant, though the birds Mother keeps in cages bear a similar look. Little glass beads, perfectly lifeless. I wonder if birds have thoughts, if they feel pain.
“Hello.”
“Hello,” I say back.
She holds the bird with both her hands wrapped around its chest. Its head flops backwards, limp. I am not allowed to play with dolls anymore, and I am not meant to think of them. But the bird’s head reminds me of a marionette conducted by a particularly thoughtless puppeteer. It is a comfort then, I soothe myself, that my sister is a tremendously deliberate person.
“What does Mother want?” she asked.
“Tea, with the mother of a duke she thinks you may like.”
“May marry, you mean,” she corrects. My sister likes to correct, for she is always, and endlessly, correct. She lays the bird back in her lap, and pets it. I do not believe dead things enjoy such caresses.
“I do not … Mother did not say that,” because she did not.
She holds her hand out to me. I walk further into her room, imagining that with every step I take, another door slams shut behind me. Definitive, and permanent. I take her hand. It is bigger than mine, with long fingers that curl over my hand like a spider wrapping itself around a fly. Being a part of this family often leaves me feeling like a prey animal. Being alone with my sister leaves me feeling like a prey insect. “Let us see, then, shall we?” She sits up, further onto her knees, towering over me. The bird is laid out onto one of the stones of the window ledge. She moves with confidence greater than a trained doctor. My sister produces her dagger and traces it down the belly of the bird. Quietly, she hums to herself and her thumb drums a little rhythm onto the back of my hand. I am pathetically grateful she holds my hand through it. She frightens me so, but she is also the only one capable of soothing the welling tide of horror. Even now, as my sister cradles my hand, I feel feverish.
The blade curves, nasty and promising, and the handle is light and ornate. A gift from our father. It is meant to look girlish, with rubies inlaid in blackened iron. Girlish, I think, is the best word for it. My mother and my sister are the most girlish of girls I have ever known. They are delicate looking, with large, flat eyes and long hair twisted back into severe holds, but the moment they open their mouths I can feel the tip of the dagger at my spine. Never walk again.
My brothers shoot single barrel guns. My father hunts elk, and vanishes into the dark wood to do so. My brothers let me sit and watch as they load and reload their guns, hitting their mark after a loud pop that leaves the air smelling of char, but they do not frighten me half as much as our mother and sister. Two years ago, during a hunting trip I was not invited to, a man broke into our house. He pointed his own gun at me, even though his hands shook. I was sat on my sister’s lap, and though our burglar trembled, she did not. She smiled into my hair, I could feel that familiar tilt against my skull. Why? I had thought. What’s so funny? And then my mother, shaking the shadows off herself, bludgeoned the man with an ornate lamp. He sank to his knees, she hit him again as my sister openly laughed, and he landed on his face. They dragged him to the meat cellar and left him there until Father came home. I never heard him scream, though my sister promises he never quite stopped.
The fear is not a deterrent, I have found. I cannot bear to spend too much time away from my mother or sister, my brothers often teasing that I should take tea with Mother and her ladies. The tea, I have found, also makes me feel ill. It is my sister’s tea that quiets my mind, a respite. I told her this, once. In return, she showed me her wrists, carefully bandaged beneath the neat sleeves of her dress. She peeled back the white cotton to reveal smooth red lines. She had patted my cheek and told me she thickened my tea with her blood to strengthen me. “It’s because you are the baby,” she had insisted. “Mother’s womb did not feed you the way it should have. I don’t mind.” I had tried to avoid her tea service after that, but nightmares invaded my waking hours and before I knew it, I was back for more. It would have been easier had I come from her, instead of our mother. I might have had that thick skin, might have managed better. Pretending is not a hard thing to do, but I tend to pretend my sister is my mother, rather than that I am strong, I am capable of surviving this life.
A little girl dressing up as a mother, holding me on her hip and walking around the house with me. “My baby,” she had called me. Silk bonnets tied under my chin to keep my ears warm, stories read to me before bed, frightening and often invoking tears, but useful. Don’t touch the fire! It’s the devil’s hand, and if you touch, he can touch back!
Now, my sister’s own hand wields the dagger that pierces the dove’s chest. The blade vanishes into the body and blood bubbles up as my sister’s hand cuts down.
"Excellent first incision, doctor,” I say, my voice too high.
But it works, she laughs. “I’m pleased you’re paying such attention, nurse.”
Her laughter and the winter wind save me from the flush of nausea. I have been unlucky enough to catch my sister seeking out her answers like this in the summer months. Getting sick in her work area ruins the ritual and when the ritual is ruined because of me, there is no one to direct her rage at me but me. A storm of slaps rained, and pure luck that she had dropped the dagger when she heard me retch.
Steam rises from the dove’s chest and abdomen. She releases my hand to peel back strips of skin and muscle with her fingers. A feather sticks to her pointer finger. She blinks at it, and then offers her hand to me. “For you,” she says with a smile. I take the feather and hold it with both hands; try to focus on it, rather than the bird. It is not white, it is grey. How strange. I always thought that doves were white birds. But now, with the feather in front of my face I can see that no, it is grey. I study the feather, determined. I can hear the wet slick of my sister digging through the bird’s entrails.
“His name,” she announces, “is Mort Payne.” Another wet sound. “He is a duke,” she hums. Her dagger clatters onto the stone, I can hear the drip drip of blood. “He is to inherit, after his father dies, of course, thirteen plots in the northern country. Second son, but the first one died.”
“The new first son,” I say. Her laugh is more of a chuckle.
“You saw him.” I had. Through the window of Mother’s tea room, he stood with my eldest brother, holding a shotgun up to eyelevel.
“Do you think he is handsome?” she asks.
Who cares? She should not want to marry him, even if he is the most handsome man ever to walk the earth. I ask, “The dove does not say?”
“No,” she answers. “I think this bird has said all that it can.”
The curls of steam rising from the lush, wet red of the bird have petered out, and I wonder if that is why it has fallen silent. Like a house cat, my sister swipes at the bird and it falls out the window. We are too far up, so we do not hear the sound of it hitting the ground. Once, it hit a maid. That we heard.
She pats my hand with her bloodied one. It is a gargantuan effort to hold myself still. My sister does not appreciate my little signs of weakness—my tells, she calls them. A wince, a flinch, always met with worse than what I was averting my eyes from. She hops down from the window sill and calls for a maid, her voice high and piercing.
“I should like to have my hair done and my skin cleaned before I meet this Mort Payne.”
“Why?” It is his mother she is meant to be meeting, but these little set-ups always end with her meeting the man, leaning her face close to his to whisper.
She smiles in the way adults do when children say something simple. “He is to be my husband.” I like the way she says it. Like he will belong to her. And yet, regardless of her ownership, she will be leaving. Vacating the house and crossing the ocean to go rule over his thirteen plots. Northern country … we are not a hardy family! Harsh winters would not do her any good. Though, the thought of her finding a great southern lord to recline on a beach with is not nearly the comfort I should like for it to be.
“So?”
“He is to my husband and I should like to enchant him the first time we meet.”
“But why?”
She sighs. “Someday, you will be enchanted and then you will understand.”
Three nervous girls in simple cloth dresses slip through the slight gap they manage in pushing the door open; the wood creaks, but their feet are silent on the stone. It is hard to think of them apart as individuals. Their chins are tipped down to avoid eye contact. I am not the only one incapacitatingly wary of the mistresses of the house.
I tug on my sister’s skirts. “I do not wish to be enchanted,” I tell her.
The maids take one look at my sister’s bloodied hand, all six eyes finding it at once, and move further into the room. My sister was already meant to be taking her tea with Mother. I do not remind anyone of this. One maid breaks from the trio and hurriedly scrubs at my own hand with a wet cloth. It is better to leave certain things inside my sister’s room, as opposed to letting them loose into the open daylight of the house. I try to look the maid in her eye. My sister hates the maids, all of them. Sneering and brushing too close to them in the halls to watch them jump and skitter, but, when I was even smaller, there was a maid I knew by sight, could discern by her footsteps and smile. I hugged her, just once, and then she was gone. I cannot decide if she left us, or if she melted back into the faceless sea of help.
My sister laughs and pets my head, like she did with the dove. She pets me with her bloodied hand and the maids all wince. Their right hands twitch forward, as though to pull me away, prevent me from getting any filthier. But my sister considers herself my keeper, which is something similar to ownership. Possessive, territorial; like a circling wolf. The maids are familiar with my sister, and her mercurial moods. They know better than to hazard a touch when yellow canines are revealed beneath a curling lip, a reminder that she is faster than them, and has no moral compunctions doling out her miserable bite. They let her smear blood into my hair. They flinch, an action perfectly acceptable when enacted by a maid, a subcategory of human that my sister long ago dismissed as weak. “Perhaps you shall do the enchanting, then. Shall I teach you?”
“Does that mean you’ll stay here, if you have to teach me?” The promise of a candied apple, dripping in sugar.
“I do not have to teach you,” she says, her voice sharp. Biting through the apple to taste almond—swallowing the poison because you would rather die with a smile and dignity, than live and spit. “But I do have to go with my husband.”
“He’s not your husband, though!” I do not want to cry in front of her, not with the maids watching on, as silent and grave as the Greek chorus. “You’ve met with others, I remember it! You did not marry them.” And it is true. Men have been visiting our estate for as long as I can remember, inquiring after my sister. Their shame at failing to seduce her has created a tradition of them sneaking away under the cover of darkness. Not even the moon or starlight illuminates their carriages as they flee. All there is to find in the morning are the tracks of their carriage.
She considers me, her hand moving to grip my chin. Her fingers stick to my skin, and if it were not for the metallic smell of blood, I could pretend it was crushed berries she is smearing onto me. Thick blackberries crushed between her fingers to pat onto my cheeks. Blush! For the prettiest princess! I can hear her tease, a jest she is allowed only because I am the baby, and there are three older brothers who our father prefers to focus on, and has high, endless hopes for. I like to pretend it is instead because my father finds my sister to be too great an adversary, and does not wish to risk butting heads with her, only to lose.
In the hall, a maid has broken from her gaggle to call for my own bath to be prepared.
“I think I shall take you with me. Move you into my apartments at my new estate, how is that? Keep you forever,” my sister declares with an oily ease. It is this confidence, this cunning, that allows me to put faith in her against my father.
I could cry. “Will Father let you?” I would let her steal me away, if Father says no. Abandon me in a tower, alone in the forest or sequestered to the edge of the Payne’s estate. She can curl around my tower, her fearsome, scaly self and eat all knights impetuous enough to ride to rescue me.
She waves her hand. “I shall enchant him, too!” she declares. “Besides, he has so many other sons.”
I nod. So many, so many I might as well not exist. “Sometimes, I pretend I am your son.”
She squishes my face. “If you can read as I can read, perhaps you are my son!”
The maids gasp. My sister was but eight when I was born. If she were to start declaring me her son, no one would marry her. I think she should shout this from the highest tower of the house so that everyone can hear.
“Miss,” one of the maids whispers.
“Yes, yes,” she says without looking away from me. She leans very close to me, pressing her nose to mine. My sister is a very tall woman, eyelevel with Father’s nose, and when she dips, her hair falls in a curtain around us, hiding our conversation from the maids and the guards. “Find me tonight, and we shall see if you can read. If you can, you shall come with me.”
A fourth maid joins the gaggle. “The baths have been readied.” The great, singular blur of attendants.
My sister pats my cheek again. “Go on,” she says, turning me around. Her hand is light between my shoulder blades. If I had wings sprouting from the bone, she might try to read me, too. “I shall see you tonight.”
I have never known anyone who can read besides my sister. Mother can speak to the dead, and likes to speak to the dead at her séances, to which I am never invited. Father, and my brothers, are likewise banished to their rooms when the guests arrive. It is impossible to keep track of the mere ten who waltz up the drive and into the house. I like to dangle out over the wrought iron rails of my balcony. Every time: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten! guests. Mother and sister make twelve, one for each hour on the clock. When the sun starts to bruise the sky, nine will leave, maybe eight, but never the full set of ten. It reminds me of my sister’s suitors, arriving, but never departing.
After the front door slams itself shut for the last time, my sister will appear in my room. Our little ritual. Her hands will be bloody, and she shall pet my face until I match. Once, I asked, “Do you read the future for the guests?”
She laughs; strands of long, dark hair in my mouth, cloying smoke packed tight against the walls of my throat. “No, séances are for speaking to the dead.”
“What do you do, then?”
“I make them speak.”
Despite her supposed help at these séances, Mother does not care for my sister’s fascination with the birds she reads. It started with bugs, before I was born. The prettiest of butterflies, pinned behind glass or trapped in jars, fluttering and flitting until they lay still on the bottom. Father, I am told, indulged in this collection, his only daughter should be given that which she wanted. He encouraged his merchants and traveling business partners to return with the most exotic-looking butterflies. An artist once presented a string of butterflies for my sister to hang. Their delicate wings bright with color and pattern. When the string moved with a gust of air, the butterflies danced as though still alive and in flight.
The birds came later, the natural successor, for they too can fly. Unlike the butterflies, proudly shown off to any who lingered in her presence for too long, the birds are treated with an air of secrecy. They hold answers, written in blood vessels and fine layers of fat, that only she can parse.
Any bird will do, she says. She prefers the smaller ones, because it is easier to grab them. My sister has a shockingly strong grip and moves with incredible bursts of speed; a coiled serpent, lurking in the grass, every muscle primed to strike. The bird itself matters very little, it is their entrails that she desires. She will slit the bird open and pick through their guts, turn over their organs, seeking out her answers and future. She does not say why it is that birds hold the secrets of the future under their skin, but I think it is perhaps that she, personally, has marred them with death, and so their bodies whisper her future. A removal of one future is such a violent act that it pierces that veil holding apart the truths of time. She must act quickly, or these secrets bleed out, and the bird is wasted.
“You have a weak stomach,” she tells me. “Boys need to be lined with steel.” But I am not. Horrified by these birds, I can no longer stand to eat meat at all. It started with simply being sick at the thought of eating chickens and turkeys and pheasant and then duck, but soon, it was all meat. My sister reads birds because they are easy for her to catch. Foolishly, after all these years, they will land on her window sill if she leaves out an offering of sugar bread. Looking at roasted venison, however, I worry that my sister would read the inside of a deer if she were a man, taken out with my father on his hunts. The maids are conscious to keep any meat away from me at meal times. My sister says it is my eating pastries at all meals that rots my resolve. I think we both know the truth, but keep quiet for the peace.
When I return to my sister’s apartments that night, it is the first snow of the season. I love the cold, I was born in the winter. Mother says that is why I am so quiet. “The world was quiet when you were born, and so you only know a hushed peace.”
My sister is once more in the window. She wears what she must have worn to meet her suitor. Her dress is a thick velvet, with fluttering sleeves and a boxy neckline. She holds herself perfectly still with the exception of her wrist and finger. She’s tracing snowflakes as they float in through the window. I see no bird. Perhaps, I hope, they have all gone to sleep.
She turns to me, her earrings fluttering about her jaw. “Come,” she calls to me. She lifts me easily once I am within reach and stands in one, smooth motion. She places me where she had sat, where she had killed and read the dove. My feet do not touch the floor. “Sweet baby,” she coos. “Let us see who you belong to, truly,” she whispers with a secretive smile. Her mouth is crooked and I feel special. She taps my nose. “Wait for me.” And she sweeps away from me. I feel very tall in this window. The sill is stained with splotches of rust coloring. I watch her disappear through the door to her bedroom and then look over the ledge. I would not fly if I jumped, I would land on one of the spikes directly below.
My sister returns holding a cage with a nightingale. The bird has perched itself on the provided ledge and watches me with solid black eyes. It’s a dusty brown and white and when it opens its beak, it sings for me. And oh, I do not want to hurt it. But my sister places the cage down on the floor and grabs the bird, her hand wrapping around its breast it is so small. With her other hand, she passes me her dagger. I have seen no one but Father ever handle her blade, and even then, it was only to gift her the horrible thing. I want to pass it back, but giving the blade back would mean giving up my sister, so I curl my fingers tight. She smiles.
“I don’t want to hurt it,” I whisper.
The bird does not struggle in my sister’s hand, seemingly content to be held in a vice. She pats my head. “You’ll learn,” she promises. And with her free hand she traces the bird’s neck. “Nice and fast, it won’t hardly notice.”
I notice. I cry and shiver in the open cold of the window. I want to be the bird, neck snapped like it was never even attached to my head nor my shoulders, like it was not death I just doled out. I want to be the discarded bird, pushed from the window and left to rot on the ground. Worms will eat me and I will disappear.
This time, I am not spared the smell, not when I am curled over the body, not when I am holding the knife and the steam erupts in my face. I gag. She peels back the skin and muscle for me, telling me to watch carefully so next time I can do it myself. “Use your fingers to look around. Using the knife might cut something and will ruin the reading. Don’t be squeamish!” My fingers are slick and I do not see anything but red and white. I do not understand.
“What am I looking for?” I warble.
“The answer to your questions,” she says, as if this is very obvious. Her mouth is just at my cheek. “What do you see?” she breaths. Her breath rolls out like a dragon puff, mixing with the steam from the bird.
I can hardly stand to look at it, can feel my eyes glaze over as the steam and breath fogs in front of me. What are my questions? How to make her stay, how to keep her forever bound to me, in this house, where I will never have to leave. Oh! Please do not make me go hunting! If I leave the house, move into the world and put on my hat that says ‘man,’ I shall melt into a shallow puddle. No one will find any pleasure in splashing me, either. Low levels and pallid water. I want to sit on the floor of my sister’s sitting room, with my head in her lap. I want to be tugged around corners, my feet bare on the imported carpet, burning when I run. I want to drink tea with blood in it, and pretend I do not see stains elsewhere. And there it is, is it not? The disappearances, never ending, looping and repeating, patterns that make a picture I did not hazard to look at until now, and the blood and the violence and the fact that even our brothers cringe away. I look through the fog, before my eyes and around my brain, and down at the bird. “You don’t read from birds at Mother’s séances.”
Her hands wrap around my upper arms, nails sinking into soft fat, and she squeezes. “Brilliant boy. Just like me, reading,” she croons, rubbing her cheek to mine. A big cat, scenting its littermate, its cub. “But the past, you can see back, and I can see forward. Gemini twins.”
Urged on by whispers and petting, I say, “You haven’t killed him, yet. Mort Payne. He’s still alive.”
“Good boy, good boy. What else do you see?”
Nothing! No windows, and a door that locks from the outside. Where can you store a burglar who will scream and scream until Father comes home? “The cellar.” I startle, feeling another stab of nails, she wants more. All I can see is blood and guts and the curl of ribs. From thy rib I am borne. “There’s a lot of blood,” I whisper.
She laughs, the sound tripping over itself. “Poor Mr. Payne, in so much pain!”
“My head hurts, again.”
The nails vanish from my arms and the knife is plucked from my hand. Her hand shoots out and pushes the bird through the window before she turns me to face her. “Oh, my baby,” she coos, and wipes at my face. Tears. Always crying, always weak. “You did so good,” she tells me, taking my hands into her own. For the first time, the blood passes from me to her. “So good. I’m so proud of you.” She kisses my cheek, over and over, whispering to herself. “You should have been mine. My son, my daughter. Only girls can read, why can you read? Extraordinary little thing. Wonder baby, I wish you were mine.” She takes her newly bloodied hands and runs them down the side of my face, clapping them over my ears to kiss my forehead. “It’s almost like you’re mine, anyways, isn’t it?”
I nod. “I could be your son. Then you wouldn’t need to marry.”
She laughs. “If you were my son, I couldn’t marry!” She leans in, and says, “And then where would we find our subjects, hm?”
The night air is thick, with the moon above swollen and low in the sky. It seems to me that the sky is about to finally collapse under its own weight, all to fall and crumple on me. Crushing, pressing in and bearing down. My sister lays one hand on my shoulder and leads me in from the balcony.
“Come,” she says. “I feel it, too. But you must be a brave boy tonight. Everyone is waiting.”
I think of Eve. Every step away from my balcony, my Eden, is taken on shards of glass. The sea of stars is my ocean. I want to step off the railing and swim in them. I feel it, too. Back to paradise, we go again.
My sister leads me down the hall, and then down the stairs, flight after flight. To the parlor, where Mother and her ladies are waiting.
“What if I do it wrong?” I ask. Because there it is. The truth. I will. I will fail. I can do nothing but fail. I know my sister; some days I even think I know my mother. But these women? How am I to know their secrets, their patterns, their innermost likelihoods?
We arrive at the parlor door. The hand moves to pet my hair. “You cannot do it wrong. All you have to do is look, and read. You’ve already done it before.” Have I? “The first time is the hardest, now the gift has awoken, you’ll never be lost again.”
She crouched down behind me and hugs my middle. She kisses my cheek and I remember staining her hands. “I’m tired,” I tell her.
“So am I,” and she sounds it, all of a sudden. Weary. Like she feels the night weighing down on her, too.
“You’ll keep me now, won’t you?” I ask. “I mean, you won’t get married and leave, will you? You’ll stay here, with me, and take care of me?”
“You won’t always be little, you won’t always need me to look after you,” she tells me, her smile against my skin.
“Yes, I will.” I have always been the baby, I have always been tended. There is no conceivable universe where I grow up. “You can …” I turn to her, our noses close. “Keep me in a box!” I declare. “That way I won’t grow.”
She laughs again. “Oh, I’m sure we can think of something. But yes, I’ll keep you. And this house.” She leans in to whisper in my ear. “We’ll get rid of the older ones and I’ll be queen of the castle, no one can tell me what to do then.”
I nod, this is an excellent plan, I think. “And you’ll keep me?” I ask, again, just to be certain.
“Oh, yes. Forever and ever. My little prince.” She stands and turns me back around to face the door, which she pushes open with ease. “Come on then,” she says, her hand returned to my shoulder.
From the head of the long, oval table, my mother stands in a smooth motion. Her high collar laced and frothy at her neck. As she stands, nine other faces at the table whip around to stare me and my sister. Their features are blurred, hazy from the plumes of incense. Female, but otherwise mysteries shrouded in drop curtains of sheer lace. I can discern mouths, open and gasping. Red and slick, the inside of a bird. The bite of an apple.
My sister takes her seat at the opposite head of the table, pulling me up to sit in her lap. Instead of a Ouija board, there is a naked man tied to the table, alive, and awake. He thrashes as much as he can, but the bindings make it appear as mere twitches. His eyes are wide, and when he screams, no sound comes out.
My mother is speaking, but all I hear is my sister, her mouth hidden by my hair, “Recognize him? Mister Payne isn’t so high and mighty now, is he?” The sneer in her voice is lost under the crashing blood in my ears that sounds like the ocean, like the tapestries on her walls, as she presses her precious dagger back into my hand.
