A scream rises from the bush. One last call to the living: a warning of pain. Katarina’s heard that same sound more times than she’s had hot dinners but still a ribbon of unease unfurls in her gut. She sets her cleaver down for a moment, shifting from one foot to the other until she hears the pop-pop of her hips settling back into place. She stills, head cocked. There’s a man’s voice coming from the front yard. Ruby’s in the front yard, too. There’s her little laugh, high and breathy. Her girl’s near gone fifteen with the same laugh as when she was five.

The dying thing ain’t quite dead yet. It screams again from deep inside the tangle of lush green that edges around the house, where yard turns resolutely into nature.

Katarina’s been up since before dawn, to catch the chickens while they were still sleepy and too stupid to run. She keeps on working. Katarina’s hands don’t fumble. Moving the chickens she’s killed from the water bath to the hanging cones doesn’t take thinking. Dozens of shiny-wet bodies already dangle in neat rows, even though the sun is hardly up. Ruby liked to name the birds—the living ones. Katarina doesn’t let her come round during the cull. There’ll be enough bloody mornings for her to look forward to without adding more.

Faint giggles and half-formed words carry on the morning wind.

There’s a man in the front yard. Katarina’s hands tighten around the knife. Another scream from the bush rebounds into the distant laughter. How long does it take a thing to die?

It should be quiet in the yard. Mother Marnie says Katarina’s greatest responsibility to her child is to shut the hell up. (It’s better to say as little as she can. She could track her stupidity all across Ruby in black marks and fingerprints.) Katarina’s head is full of sinful useless nonsense. Not even her own words. Stories. The most foolish of foolishness.

It should be quiet but it isn’t. Ruby’s up when she wouldn’t be, normally. And there’s a stranger. All she can do is clutch her cleaver tight. Stories boil up out of Katarina’s memory, nagging at her while she tries to work like flies hungry for warm blood.

A good woman would be silent. Katarina whispers stories to the chickens as she holds them down to the block. Quickly, before sunlight can warn them of the glint of her knife.

Once upon a time—thwack!

There was a princess who fell in love with a duppie—chop!

Duppies have bright eyes, and sweet words, but no heart to give—whack!

Another burst of laughter tolls from the front yard. As if the man who laughed did not care who could hear him nor what they would think of his presence so near to dawn.

Katarina hesitates, a moment’s tremor in the hand wielding her cleaver. The cut goes awry, the bird not killed clean, a half-gurgled scream boiling up through the wound. She looks down at a beady black eye, and flinches.

• • • •

She always washes herself twice after morning slaughters. The first with plain soap and water—freezing out of the tap. The second bath with Dettol. She hates the cold pine stink of it, the smell of weeks sitting at her father’s bedside as his body collapsed in on itself and he refused to look at her face ever ever again.

Mother’s lip would curl and her nose scrunch as she sniffed the air around her daughter, Katarina trying to cringe away but knowing that moving meant steel-cored pinching fingers pulling her back. She would make her wash all day, unless Katarina stripped herself raw and clean with the antiseptic bottle.

So she closes her eyes when she douses herself with it, pretends she’s not in her body at all. The words are waiting for her right behind her eyes, nudging at her softly.

Away. We’ll take you away.

When she was a girl, books of fairy stories had been her candy. Stories of blonde princesses and blue-eyed princes who wore hose and led keen horses on adventures.

Like the worst kind of stain, they couldn’t be rubbed away. Their colors bleed out from under the locked doors of memory into her dreams and hopes. She’s wicked. A dirty little thing, she knows, telling herself bird-butcher stories to endure becoming clean.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful queen in a castle.

Fox-bride in a wood.

Firebird hidden in a cherry tree.

She comes out of her own thoughts groggy and uncomfortable. The sounds of the world press back in on her, itchy and painful across her skin. Chickens and goats call in the yard. Wind rushes through the lane banging doors and spirit bottles into a warning chime.

The only blood on her is her own when she joins her mother in their old kitchen, cuticles butterflied and bleeding. Mother sniffs conspicuously in her direction, but returns to her knitting without comment.

Katarina aches with the tightness in the air. If she were a bush bird, she would find a safe nest to hide in. But being a woman, she’s not nearly so lucky. She can only make a plate of food, set it down in front of her mother and wait.

“This soup is bland Katti.”

“Sorry Mother.”

“And the dumplings too salt.”

“Sorry Mother.”

Mother Marnie pauses. Katarina waits with the patience of a mouse who knows the owl has not yet passed on by.

“You do this on purpose,” Mother says.

Ruby walks in smiling, cheerful and rosy with health. Sometimes Katarina wonders how such a bright beautiful thing came out of her. Certainly the process of having her left no impression of coming grace or delicacy. Ruby has the same dark eyes as Katarina, the same full mouth. But the golden-brown of her skin, the loose ringlet curls that Mother Marnie made them hot comb straight . . . those were all someone else. Sometimes looking at her daughter makes Katarina want to cry.

Under the small table, Marnie reaches over and pinches her thigh. Steel-strong bones digging sharp fingernails into flesh like a spade through gravedirt. Shuck Shuck. Katarina raises her soup spoon to her mouth, eats, and doesn’t make a sound.

• • • •

Katarina writhes under the tangled caul of her sheets, body hot and limp, muscles aching. The morning air is stretched heavy and pregnant with thunder that won’t come. She panics for a moment that she may be sick—already hearing Mother’s complaints about her laziness—until she recognizes the sign of hot slickness at the apex of her thighs. If only it’d waited a day. Any day but Sunday. But her body’s never obeyed her wishes.

She’d bled onto this same bed in spite of hours squeezing her legs closed trying to stop the baby from coming. A wave of vertigo tugs her under, and for a moment she’s suspended between the pain of memory and present nausea.

It’s no better in church.

Sitting in the old wooden pews, the press of her family and neighbors around her, pain radiates up from the bowl of her hips. Pulsing in time to the sound of the metal guitar up front and the rise and fall of Pastor’s words. She wants to close her eyes, but she’ll fall asleep. She’s heard this sermon so many times. Vicar Greene has a singular theological focus. Sin and the inevitable fall into it. Sometimes Katarina dreams of that look in his eyes, and his voice, chasing her down an endless fall into the dark.

Rise, brothers and sisters, and turn to your neighbors—

For the third time that morning, Katarina pulls herself up, one hand braced against the back of the pew in front of her.

A soft gasp makes her turn around. The girl behind her points down to the back of Katarina’s dress, marked with a wide bloodstain. Queasy heat blooms behind her eyes. Before Mother can turn to her—she dashes towards the aisle and the small room at the back of the hall.

Leaning against the thick whitewashed door, keenly aware of the press of bodies on the other side.

Need a minute . . .

There’s no chance, the door is pulled open from behind her, sending her stumbling and sprawling against the floor. The girl from the pews stares down at her.

“You all right, auntie?”

“I’m . . .”

Auntie?! I’m not much older than her. Wasn’t much older than her when—

Katarina looks closer at the young girl, her throat closing around her breath.

The child’s pregnant.

(How does she know? How does like know like? They can smell it.)

The child—girl, indeed, her cheeks still round with baby fat and hope—is carrying another child inside of her. When their eyes meet, the girl’s expression peels away, concern melting to terror.

You see me.

What’s her name? Josie . . . something. Lives with her aunty up the cane road. Poor as church mice, but she’s so pretty—such a sweet voice!—those bright new ribbons make her look real nice. Pretty color, like new leaves. Can’t be more than fourteen. She thinks this all in a garbled rush, hunched over with blood sticky between her thighs, muscles in her back twisting.

“What is going on in here!?”

Mrs. Vicar Greene forces her way into the already too-small room with a man right on her heels, his face eerily like hers. Katarina feels a nauseous surge of vertigo at the almost double vision. Ah, the prodigal brother she was not to make a fool of herself in front of. Marnie’s warning pinch is still throbbing hot on her arm. And here she is anyway. Always on your back. Such a ridiculous scene, her on the floor, the girl wide-eyed with fear. Mrs. Vicar is too aware of her position to laugh, but he isn’t.

She’s heard that laugh before, wafting in from her front yard. Her hands clench around a knife that is not there.

The girl-child looks at the man—and oh!—Katarina sees a secret. The way her eyes light up with hunger and hope and knowing. The way his slide away, smooth as glass marbles, opaque.

“I have to go,” she warbles. Runs away, out through the back door of the church, before she spreads any more blood across the floor.

The singsong chorus in her mind wails as she runs, green ribbons. Green ribbons. Green green ribbons.

• • • •

Katarina walks home through the bush. There is quiet but for the call of birds and the rush of wind through the infinite trees. Sap and fermenting fruit replace the stench of incense on her skin. The sounds of town, people, church, the feeling of being watched fade away as the trees grow close together, blade-shaped leaves overlapping to block out the sun.

She smells the water before hearing it, feet moving automatically towards the source of coolness in the air.

Bet that water’d feel nice.

Katarina doesn’t know where the idea comes from. But she’s so sticky, more and more aware of her own fecund heat with every step. The pool would be deep enough to cover her head—if she were to wade in. It would be a sin to feel that good. She shouldn’t. But her body is moving and her dress is off—and her mind is blissfully strangely silent. Under the water there is only silence and the distant thump of her heart. Blood flows up and off her skin, the trail of broken carnelian mist no longer feels dirty.

Nothing to be ashamed of.

This thought lifts her up out of the water, it’s so peppery-bright and unafraid. A feeling so strange it takes her a moment to realize her clothes are gone. She’d left them there—by that flat rock. Not abandoned, carefully folded. Obviously belonging to someone—belonging to her—and she’d not been underwater for so long. There’d been no one here. No one!

The path she’d taken to get here seems misty and smudged as her own memory. She spins around frantically, looking for her clothes. Finding nothing, her mind goes blank with panic. What will she do? Mother—anyone could come on her now and!—

“If you’re looking for your clothes, dear, they’re over here with me.”

Katarina freezes still as a startled possum, her eyes glassy, pupils blown to nothingness.

“Over here, dear.” The woman’s voice is calm. One trembling footstep after another, Katarina finds herself outside of a very strange house.

The front wall is made from the same blocks as her own home, concrete poured into molds to look like stone fretwork. But the contours of the open spaces shift under the tree cover. Empty eye sockets and gaping mouths arrange themselves in the spaces where flowers and trefoil crosses should be. Crimson hibiscus blooms along the foundation, the wind ruffling the leaves to reveal what cannot be massive chicken feet. The white gate is warm under her hand, warm as bone. The hinges do not creak, they sigh.

It’s deliciously cold inside the house, her skin flushing with goosebumps. Before Katarina’s eyes can adjust to the dark, a figure by the fire speaks.

“You’re letting all my cold out. Sit.”

Katarina acquiesces as silently and politely as she would to a church matron. The old woman covers her shoulders with a soft blanket and places a cup of tea in front of her. She drinks, all the while knowing that she shouldn’t. But the blanket is cozy and the tea’s warmth melts the pain in her back and hips into nothing.

The woman is old, and either white or high yellow enough to pass. At least she looks old, sometimes. Her hair gray and face wrinkled white like over-bleached linen. The light from the strange hissing fire throws even stranger shadows against the walls. Shadows blend and pull away from each other like globs of oil in vinegar. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising when the duppy moves its head, it looks young one minute and old the next.

“Don’t worry about your clothes, duckling, they’re drying over here by the fire.” With not a sign of a scratch or stain on them.

That broom by the hearth is no broom. Katarina’s cut up enough chickens to know a leg bone when she sees one, even one as long as the old woman was tall. Bone gone ivory with age, the top end whittled down—were those teeth marks?—and split.

Half her mind gibbers, the other half picks up her tea and drinks. It tastes of smoke. Only when her cup is empty does the duppy turn from her work by the fire and take the seat opposite Katarina’s.

Maybe she should’ve stayed on the main road and let half the island point at her dirty ass on the walk home, or risked a van-man cursing or beating her for getting woman’s blood on his bus seats. Maybe that would’ve been safer than where she’d ended up, naked in a strange white woman’s cottage. Katarina knows from white women. The ones up at the resort, faces stretched with boredom—they had smirking husbands who hunted dark meat in dark corners. Or the watery-eyed nuns whose lips disappeared, eaten up by rage, as they caned your palms for writing with your left hand.

But this woman had picked up her bloody clothes, and cleaned them. Dried them. They looked bright and clean as new. Katarina’d never been treated so kindly before. Gooseflesh sprouted along her arms.

“What are you?”

The old woman smiles, constellations of creases forming across her face, mesmerizing and beautiful.

“Oh, you know, duckling. But call me Baba . . . or Grandmother, if you prefer. It means the same thing.”

“You’re nothing like my grandmother.” This foreign witch is no more native to this island than the cargo ships in the bay. “Why are you here?”

Baba shrugs eloquently, vulture-like shoulders rising and falling with malice and amusement.

“Well, my bones are so very old. One gets tired of fir trees and snow. One might even yearn for . . . a vacation. Or perhaps one has a grandchild, a good ice-sharp bone-cracking wind born over tundra to rule over frost and reindeer, who has a thought instead to go a-roaming. And in some foreign corner of myth he meets a dark eyed warm wave of coral seas. So, one morning you receive a letter dropped from the mouth of no bird you’ve ever seen the like of before—asking you to preside over the birth of a hurricane.”

Baba wrinkles her lichen-gray eyes and smiles. Her teeth shine like razors.

“Or maybe things like me take the shape you need me to take. Though you may not be one of mine—you don’t have the smell of it—I heard your name, Katarina, in the blood you gifted my pool and the rattle of chicken bones in my pot. And it reminded me of home and of a girl who had something of the same look as you do.”

“She looked Black?”

“She looked trapped.” Baba chuckles, and Katarina’s heart stutters to a stop. Baba pats her lap. “Now why don’t you tell Baba all about it.”

Katarina knows she should be afraid. Distantly in the back recesses of her skull. She should run.

But she wants to talk.

Oh, she wants to tell her everything! It smells of blood in this room, rich and familiar.

But she doesn’t.

A sound from outside; thin and faint with distance, but it makes Katarina jump. Her back goes rigid to the point of pain. The church bell tolls, one . . . two . . .

A moan wiggles out of her mouth to die as a whimper.

Katarina’s gone so fast she could be magic herself. Snatches her clothes from the rack by the fire. Feet stumbling and tripping over each other, falling at the edge of the road she walked just a short while ago. The sun shifted in angle in the sky, the path behind her misty even with the heat of the afternoon. She dresses her shaking limbs, wondering if she’d dropped the witch’s blanket as she ran. Pondering the punishments of witches and waiting mothers.

She’s home before Mother and Ruby, but gets a slap regardless.

“You find new ways to shame me every day,” says Mother.

Katarina returns to her chickens. Her hand shakes to hold her knife close. Monday morning she wakes to the haunting echo of a man’s laugh, half delirious with fear. Out of the side of her eye, she watches her daughter. Ruby sighs when she means to smile and gives a smile where a sigh should be.

Mother does not notice. She thinks silence is goodness. As if wrapping the girl up tight will do anything but make her dream of escape. A dream anyone can promise if the girl is willing to believe.

But what can she do? The single tremble in Katarina’s hand breeds tremors. She tries not to think of a house in the woods with chicken legs peeking out from under the foundation.

• • • •

Mother has gout. It seems very brave to Katarina that gout would dare to have Mother. It means her foot hurts too much to make a delivery to the vicarage cook. Two fresh young birds, killed, cleaned, and plucked.

The van ride into town is a rare treat. Obeah charms and painted rosaries chime, dangling above the windows for luck on the roads. The sound is soft and lulling under the voices of chattering passengers. Katarina holds her breath a little as they top the last hill into town and she can finally see the water, counting every ship slipping into port, the flags of distant countries flapping in the sea wind. Knowing that other places existed had once been of great comfort to her.

She gets off in front of St. Anne’s School, and near-jogs away from the iron and stone gate. Her body propelling her as fast away from that old familiar place as it can get.

The school and the church are all on one estate. Weekday afternoons, lines of uniformed girls make the short walk from class to chapel for afternoon prayer. Vicar Greene’s home was only separated from them by a neat little garden.

Young miss, would you take a walk with me?

She can drop off the package before more venomous memories jump up from the manicured yard. Surely, she can.

But the person who opens the parsonage kitchen door makes her entire body go numb. Katarina had last seen Yvette Brown—when? Fourth form, it had to be. Katarina had to leave right after Christmas because she’d started to show. But they wouldn’t remember her, it had been so long—

“Katarina Basile?” Yvette’s expression shifts from recognition to amusement. Worse, another voice from inside the kitchen.

“. . . is Teeny back?” Mrs. Vicar Greene, come to see what the fuss was.

The wind shifts underneath her skirts. Dettol and the whisper of blood. Katarina nearly flings the cold-packed basket towards the women before retreating.

She tries not to run, she really does, it would be so much worse if anyone saw and told—but she can’t bear hearing what they’re already saying.

“. . . looking like that . . .”

“. . . always was above herself . . .”

They wouldn’t bother to be quiet. Why would they care if she heard?

“. . . not even sixteen . . . who knows really . . . spread her legs for . . .”

She does run. Like a child from calamity, all elbows and desperation. It was better than turning back and yelling that her daughter had eyes like her father’s. That she had eyebrows the exact same shape—Katarina knew them so well, she could trace them in the air right now. And so did Mrs. Vicar. Her small son’s eyes were the same.

The same!

She runs until her legs and lungs burn, only stopping to see where she is. God in heaven, she’s near the center of town. Down a small-cobbled road, an alley—but anyone could have seen her! Shame is only a second behind fear, shoving her words and anger back down sharp as shattered chicken bones.

The sound of familiar laughter pulls her out of her haze and towards the display window of a store she’ll never be able to afford. She looks past a blood red dress, into the store behind, and sees him.

He’s laughing with the round-faced clerk behind the haberdashery counter. Teeth white and straight, skin no darker than a milk tea. He’s holding the counter and laughing, hard, the same laugh that’s been haunting her front yard. Her hand clenches around air.

It reminds her of the chickens—(Her whole life is spent between the chicken coop, slaughter pen, and Mother’s thumb. Of course, something reminds her of chickens)—a cock. Men laugh like that when they’re with each other. Leaning back from their stomach like a rooster struts.

Katarina squints, bent forward because she has to see even though she doesn’t really want to, doesn’t want to know anything about this man. His eyes are dark for someone so light. Dark and round like flies drowned in a cup. Dark and round and beady. He holds a line of ribbons in the palm of his hand—buy them by the gross and save!—one color for each day in the week.

• • • •

In the morning before school, she presses Ruby’s hair so it will be bright and smooth. The hot comb heated to a glow on the kitchen stove, Katarina pulls it through her daughter’s hair, curls melting helplessly into straight strands. She puts the flesh of her hand between the heat and her daughter’s scalp. The sound of curled hair being made presentable: blue-scented hair grease popping and sizzling, burning hot oil ricocheting across the bare skin of her arms.

Ruby squirms in her chair, holding her ears down, away from the hot metal comb with the determination of someone who has felt it kiss her skin at least once.

“Baby?”

“Yes, Mama?” Ruby’s nervous feet swing girlishly from the edge of her seat, tick tock, to the beat of the old wall clock winding down time.

“Heard you talking to someone in the yard. Who was it?”

“Nobody, Mama. Someone was asking for directions.” The answer falls smooth and perfect out of her daughter. Clean as coconut water.

It’s a good lie. Would’ve worked on Mother. (Thinks the liar.)

It’s easy to lie to people who are more interested in being obeyed than in knowing the truth.

“Hm.” Katarina pulls another lock through the loom of her hand and cards it straight with the hot iron, only letting the hair fall once it has finished steaming.

But she never even asked which day I was talking about.

Hair pressed, Ruby puts her own final touches to her hair. Two new satin ribbons woven into her braided coronet, red and bright as fresh fallen blood. Katarina tries to take a deep breath but chokes on the smoky air.

• • • •

Mother Marnie sleeps. Ruby is at school and then a friend’s afterwards. Katarina is on her own. And it’s only with a shaky look backwards that she is out beyond the boundaries of her family’s plot of land, feet taking her past the carefully planted rows of provisions. There’s barely a rustle among the green as she passes, vine and leaf hushed and ready to keep her secrets.

Giver of blood, the vines whisper along her ankles.

The path back to the strange house by the water rolls itself out for her smoother than any queen’s carpet. It’s a bare moment before she is by that death’s head gate. And though her breath is gone, it’s not due to the length or the difficulty of her walk. She hasn’t been able to pull enough air into her lungs for days.

The witch herself is knees-down bent over in the patch of garden by the front door. The metal gate moans a greeting under Katarina’s hand.

“Could do with a cup of tea,” Baba calls over one bony shoulder. She is already up and halfway to her front door before she looks back at Katarina, who is still wavering inside the gate.

It’s even colder inside the witch’s house on her second visit. Maybe because she’s certain this time, where she is and what she is speaking to.

“Mother would kill me if she knew I was here,” she whispers after a sip of strange black tea.

“Oh? Waiting for an opportunity is she?” Baba stares over her teacup.

“She’s . . . she just wants to make sure nothing else bad happens.”

“What bad thing happened before?” Asks Baba.

“Me,” says Katarina.

Baba grunts as she takes up a long wooden pipe and lights the tobacco in the bowl with a wink of her left eye.

Go on, she waves. Go on.

“Mother named me after a girl she’d read about in a book. She’d wanted to go to school. She got my father, and a little house with room to grow some provisions and raise chickens.”

“Chicken’s a good animal,” Baba murmured, giving the kitchen table a fond tap with the bowl of her pipe.

“She . . . can’t stand the smell of them on me. Says it’s always there. Waiting to turn her stomach.”

“And?”

“She gave me a book name even though her family said it was silly. Put her hopes and dreams on me too. Study. Going abroad. Not carrying banana to sell.”

“They fit you? Her dreams, I mean. They don’t always fall the same way on different people.”

“They fit fine enough. I always loved bookish things. Papa loved seeing me read. But . . . carrying her dreams, it was, well, it was something like being loved, wasn’t it?”

“Mmm, something like.” Baba blows two smoke rings, one quickly after the other, so they stack like a bullseye. “Do you still love them?”

“What?”

“Your fairy stories.”

“Doesn’t matter. There’s nothing in fairy stories to help me.”

“Says the woman sitting in my kitchen, drinking my tea.”

Katarina looks around the room again, partly to avoid looking at the creature across the table. The shadows inch closer to Baba, huddling warmly around her shoulders like an old coat or folded wings. She stares into corners and many eyes stare back. A witch’s kitchen. And she, a Lilith of witches, original and abominable. Of all the stories . . .

“Why you?” Katarina asks.

“Why not me, daughter of Eve? Would you be happier if some other story had answered you? Not something borrowed from far away, a gentle goddess who could pass as your grandmother?

“Ha! Maybe if someone’d told you a story like that . . .” Baba shrugs. From a reflection she flicks a sharp light that becomes a silver knife. A guava forms from the shadow cupped in her left hand and she begins to slice into it. The flesh is dark, peppered with twinkling seeds.

“Smell the blood on you? That bitch of a mother of yours is right about one thing. It’s in your hair, under your nails, between your legs. Blood, red as garnets. You’ve dreamed hard and long, begging over that butcher’s block, your hands washed with blood. I know what you are, what you could be.”

“What I could be . . . Is there still time for me to be anything?” Katarina pauses, as if laying something down, a burden so old it has almost grown into her skin. It feels as if she’s cutting the words out of her one by one.

“It’s funny,” she continues, softly enough it could be that she’s speaking only to herself. “I used to dream about what my life would be like when I was finally grown. Jesus, I was such a dumb kid. Only fourteen myself, younger even than Ruby. Though . . . I suppose he was young then, too. Twenty-five maybe? But so much older than me. Almost a lifetime, really.”

“How’d he get you alone?”

“What? H-he didn’t. He . . .” She pauses. Thinks. Turns her memories over and around. “There was a garden path, with a bench. Sometimes I would take my lunch there. Sit and eat with a book. One day, he was there. He . . . we talked.”

Katarina’s eyes focus on the flicker-flicker of the silver knife, pulling her words from the vault of memory and shame.

“He’d been away—a scholarship to seminary—and was back to become the new curate. He was nervous.”

“He told you that?”

“Yes.”

“And did it make you feel like such an adult, proud and wise, that a man might confide in you? Take you into his secret confidence. Because you were more mature than most girls your age? Wiser?”

Katarina doesn’t know what feels worse, her shame or pity for the girl she was. It bubbles up hot and spitting. “You act like you know my story already.”

“Oh, I don’t, duckling. I don’t.” Guava finished, paper thin slice by slice, Baba Yaga returns to her pipe. “I’m merely familiar with the outline. Someone like myself has seen many things, twice and thrice again.”

Of course, Katarina thinks. It all goes round and round, like a chicken with their head cut off.

“He made me feel like I had dreams of my own. Not hand-me-down dreams,”—does her voice always sound so weak? It’s no wonder—“He called me beautiful when I’d only ever been called smart. So when he asked . . . I gave. Didn’t understand what I was giving half the time.”

“And what’d you get out of it?”

“A baby girl, with her father’s face.”

“And her mother’s heart?” Baba cackles, sending smoke clouds over her head in the shape of skulls.

Yes. Katarina nods miserably.

Catch them while they’re still sleeping. Catch them while they’re still slow, and soft, and fresh, and egg-dumb. They’ll never wake to see the knife.

“What’s your girl like?”

“What?”

Startled from her thoughts, Katarina is horrified to see that her right hand has raked deep grooves in the table. Gouges that look like they would be made with claws rather than nails. Blood pools in the furrows.

“I said, what’s your girl like?”

“Young.”

“You’re all young to me, honey-lamb.”

“Some girls are not allowed to be young safely.” Katarina’s bleeding. Glossy pools of blood on the wood reflects shadows and hoards light. Shouldn’t she feel pain?

“Tis true. Tis true.” Baba agrees, her wrinkled head nodding along.

Splinters explode up from the wood, under the press of Katarina’s nails, digging into her flesh.

“The path for many a girl-child has been laid with rocks and thorns. Although . . .,” the witch’s voice fades into silence.

“Although what?” Katarina asks, voice taught as a spring in a rat trap.

Baba takes Katarina’s wounded hand and breathes pipe smoke over it. The blood turns black in the dim room, glinting old script in the wet reflections. When the smoke clears, she’s healed, the blood gone. Baba’s fist is firm around her wrist, a vise tight enough to grind bone against bone.

“Thorns can be cut.”

She releases Katarina’s hand with a grim laugh, exposing a smile flashing white one moment and gap-toothed black gums the next. “As long as you’re not squeamish about a little blood.”

Outside the church bell tolls, three . . . four . . . Katarina feels a pressure in her chest as if she is miles underwater and trying to climb back to the sun.

“I can’t be here,” she gasps.

• • • •

Katarina lights coils of incense before dinner, places them under the beds so the smoke rises up through the mattress and pillows before making a languid trail up to the corrugated tin roof. It’s the first of her nightly tasks of shutting up the house. There’s counters to be wiped down and clothes to iron. Katarina does them all with thoughtless repetition. Like that first morning, a sound snaps her out of her daze. She hears them as she’s returning from shutting up the goat pen for the night. The man with eyes like marble, Mrs. Vicar Greene’s brother, is outside the window talking to Ruby. Ruby is limned in innocence, lamplight, and the smoky haze of incense.

Supposed to keep night things from biting . . .

The background chirping of night frogs rises to a roar, sweeping away all other sound. She watches the shape of their mouths as they lean toward each other.

He’s singing her a love song. He has a good voice, the bastard. The kind of tenor that would have been the star of a schoolboy choir. The pit of her stomach swells with nausea. Ruby shakes her head softly and lamplight glints bloody across the satiny bows in her hair.

Red ribbons shining.

Green ribbons shaking.

He’d held all the colors in his hand. How many colors does he have? One for every day of the week.

She shakes her head. The window is shuttered, light peeking out at the edges. The yard is quiet but for the chirping of frogs. How long has she been standing there?

Katarina slaps shaking hands over the mosquito bites she’s received standing still as a stunned bird. It’s another buzzing discomfort, alongside the ache in her gut and the ringing in her ears. She feels as if she’s going to fly apart when she sees Ruby, bent over in the old wicker chair by their bedroom window.

“Ruby, where’d you get that?”

Her daughter paints her nails by lamplight. The same squint on her face as when she struggled with an essay.

the same eyes as her father . . .

“Oh this? Isn’t it pretty!”

“Y-it matches your new ribbons. Red.”

Ruby nods and blows air over the still wet lacquer on one hand.

“. . . your nana get you that?” Marnie will bust like a volcano when she sees Ruby’s nails.

The girl smiles the way her father did when he was lying—lips curled up at the edges like old composition paper, shakes her head no. “Bought it myself.”

Katarina feels her right hand spasm, clutching at something not there. She backs out of the room, not knowing where she’s going until her back hits the kitchen table, knocking a glass to shatter against the floor. Clearing the mess with trembling fingers, she cuts herself.

Blood blossoms on her fingertip, falling to pool in her cupped palm like a rose petal.

Red ribbons. Green ribbons. A rainbow clutched in a laughing man’s hand.

Her mind is sluggish and thick with her daughter’s smiling lies and the memory of a very different kitchen table in a house where the shadows held blood and sweet fruit.

Would you like to come take a walk with me?

Adoooooooooooo! goes the cockerel.

Why have a princess locked away if no one is meant to break her out? Born to be stolen.

Adoooooooo!

The boy climbs into the firebird’s nest. Ruby red, blood bright bitten.

• • • •

The witch doesn’t even turn from where she sits in the water—the same pool where Katarina’s blood had flowed off into the dark and rocks. Baba, elder, maiden, and mother, greets Katarina in threefold voice and beckons her into the water.

“Why have you come?”

She knows why, they’ve talked of nothing else. But this is a story and certain forms should be obeyed.

“I need to be more.”

“What more? A remover of obstacles? The bearer of dirty hands?”

“Yes.”

Baba grabs hold of her hands. Under the witch’s grip the skin around Katarina’s nails, half stone-callus, half raw-pink scar, splits and bleeds.

“You’ve already given blood to this water. Would you give more?”

“Yes.” She’s good around blood.

Her arms are pulled down into the water and it burns. Worse than any pain she’s ever felt. The water closes over her head and there is nothing but darkness and pain. The inverse of birthing Ruby. Like she’s the one birthing herself. She screams.

A voice speaks through the pain.

“Wake.”

Katarina’s right hand aches as it closes resolutely around a familiar weighted haft.

Surfacing from the pond, the knife gleams as a solid piece of silver from shaft to handle. Its head is square and edged like the chicken cleaver she’d left back home. Baba peers at it, her faced scrunched in a most un-spectral manner.

“Hmmm. Didn’t expect that one,” she says, and laughs like shattering bones. “But then again, a girl once came back up with a sewing needle.”

Katarina laughs with her, howling. Their laughter is the sound of those who fear nothing in the dark, for it’s the dark that should fear them.

• • • •

Katarina comes home, her blood-blackened fingernails darker than the space between the stars, and in her right hand—a silver cleaver fit for a Queen of butchers.

Inside the house, Ruby sleeps soundly. Until her mother wakes her softly, speaks to her of red ribbons, green ribbons, and long chains of hearts collected and broken. She’s a smart girl, smarter than her happy disposition implies. Ruby is disappointed but not disbelieving, and lets her mother hold her tight. She falls back into dreaming, wary and wiser.

Katarina lies on the bed she shares with her daughter, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, her veins still bubbling over. Was it a dream? The old woman, the water, and the blood? Under her pillow her hand reaches for and finds the handle of her cleaver. She sighs peacefully and falls deeper into sleep.

Only to wake with the light of the moon gone behind the trees. A voice sings in the dark.

“You hear him?” Ruby whispers.

“Yes.” Katarina is already sitting up in bed, her face turned to the window. “I hear him.”

She almost startles when her daughter presses a tender kiss to her cheek. A hint, a memory of her baby scent, lingers.

“I told him to stop before he woke you up. I told him,” says her baby.

“Go back to sleep,” she tells her child.

Katarina waits until Ruby’s chest rises and falls smoothly with sleep, then moves silently from the bed to the yard. Her breaths are soft even as her blood rushes quick and joyous through her veins. She can’t see it, but Katarina has never looked so beautiful as she does now.

She melts out of the night ahead of Mrs. Vicar’s brother. She’s wearing an ancient night dress, the cotton thin and paler than a waning moon. Feet bare, her braids are wrapped under an old kerchief.

His suit’s fawn silk, pinstriped. A golden chain dangles from the waistcoat pocket. He stands like a man who has never been stopped before in his life. Because that is what he is.

“I heard you,” she says. “Singing love songs outside my window. Calling my baby girl to come out. Come out for what? You got something to give her?”

That laugh again. He takes a deep pull on his cigar, and the lit end flares, lighting his eyes from below in red flame. So bright, it dazzles.

“Why? You want to take it instead?” He drawls his words, unhurried and unafraid. After all, why should he be? A woman—already used and worn—is nothing to him. Less than the ash falling from his cigar to be blown away by the night air.

He laughs, the same cockerel shout he shared with the department store clerk. But marbled with derision, spiced with dismissal, conjoined to the curling of his lips and fist. The latter whips out towards her in an effortless arc. But she’s no longer in the space where she was a heartbeat ago.

Katarina is closer, so close she can inhale the breath shuddering out of him when her own fist punches into his gut. Her hand wraps around his neck easily, her lips at his ear, knife hand already moving smooth as a rich man’s cutter in the bay. She is always at her best with a knife in her hand, when blood is on the ground.

“Once upon a time a girl sat at her window . . .” she says to her daughter’s would-be lover, shoving him against the earth. “Her mother in the bed nearby . . . a man singing in the dark below.”

“You shouldn’t’ve woken me.”

He squirms, but her grip is firm.

thwack!

Black ribbons dance through the air, liquid, sparkling in red drops from the edge of her knife. A clean stroke: no time to scream or flutter, beady eyes staring at nothing.

• • • •

“Katti, is you make this soup?” Marnie waddles scowling from the kitchen.

“Anybody else round here does cook?”

Ruby gasps before she can hold it back. She holds her hands tight against the edges of her stool as if the ground has begun to shake under her.

“What did you say to me?” Marnie’s shadow stretches out to them from the doorway, as if ready to block out the light and her insolence with it.

“I said what you heard. Yes, I cooked it.” Katarina is painting her nails red. She holds them up to the light, ignoring the silence and shock from her mother. The morning light shifts and a sliver of rainbow cuts across the edge of her blade, sitting on the table next to the nail lacquer and a bottle of beer. She moves her cleaver to her lap. It feels warm and friendly in her hand.

“It’s not time for slaughter yet.” Marnie steps closer, startles from a bright light in her eyes. Stops still.

“You been to the coops lately?” Katarina knew she had not. “Was time. One of the cocks was acting up. Put himself in the pot.”

“Well, if you ask me . . . ”

“I didn’t. You want some of that chicken foot soup, you have some. Could bring me and Ruby a bowl too, if it’s not too much trouble, Marnie.”

Katarina holds her painted nails up to the brightening sky. Red shines as prettily in the light as it does in the dark. Her fingers look good wrapped around the neck of the cold bottle of beer sweating in the rising heat. Cold fizz going down her throat feels even better. Feels like waking up for the first time in a long time.

Ruby watches her grandmother out of the corner of her eye, taut and ready to dodge. But the old woman is staring in a furious confusion at her daughter’s back, a relay race of emotions chasing across her broad face. Anger is common. Fear, an uncharted territory. Ruby reaches out for her mother’s hand, clasps it between hers.

Katarina looks outside instead of back at Marnie. The wind riffles through the banana trees and over the orderly bounty of the yard. It’s peaceful. The only laughter there is hers.