#thewritinghat

One year we had a nasty, brutal winter. The snow on the roads was more ice and mud than snow. The snowflakes were all greyed up with chimney soot. Every icicle looked like a rusty Sword of Damocles hanging off the edge of a roof. It was so cold that it bit, like an animal. By the time spring grudgingly made its way over, all of Hannah's bees were dead. Too little nectar gathered in summer, a sour hint of disease, the cold fingers of winter, all conspired to wrap their hands around my wife's hives and squeeze. Hannah was devastated without bees to nurture, and I've never been any good at being nurtured, so I went to the pet shelter and brought home a half-grown ball of yellow fluff we named 'Marigold'. Hannah doted on Marigold (she made all her meals by hand) but she didn't (couldn't) forget her lost bees. One night and I caught her murmuring, into a glass of last year's mead, "Too delicate. Too delicate, too small." Again, and over, and again. She was fiercely protective of that mead, and the last of the honey, and the carefully harvested beeswax. She was even secretive about the dead bees. I offered to get rid of them; I didn't want her sighing over their sad little corpses, but Hannah insisted on dismantling the frames herself.

The house is an hourglass; filling with sand, which could almost be cheerful, a whole house full of beach, if not for the almost voice of someone who'd been a friend. who is now too far away to hear words like "sorry", the water is rushing in so quickly and loudly into that hole. Their eyes and nostrils and mouth and ears are full of grit.

Everyone is covered with grit. Their legs and arms and hair and homes are all full of sand. The same stuff the worked so hard to shovel out of that small, unwelcoming hole. It should have just been a nice day at the beach! They didn't plan to do anything that would make them so, so, sorry. They didn't plan to come home short one friend.

Oh, their friend, their friend! Oh, their poor friend, in the wrong place at the wrong time and covered and buried in grit. Oh, their friend who will never hear them shout and screech "Sorry!" Oh, poor them, who thought it was over and behind them and of course they were just a little but not worryingly coated in sand. They'd just come home from the beach! Oh, the beach, the beach they thought they'd left behind them but nothing stayed; nothing stayed in that hole.

They'd dragged her, bloody and broken, towards that hole. Once she was just a crumpled mistake, just shaped like their old friend. There was so much dancing and drinking and so many sharp rocks on that beach. You could trip and fall and scrape your palms until the cuts were full of blood and grit, you could slide and fall and land, laughing, in the powdery embrace of sand, or you could be very gently pushed and fall and you could make your friends so, so sorry.

Now they shout and spit around the sand filling their mouths: "Can't you hear us you bitch we're sorry!" "Just leave us alone and get back into your goddamn hole!" Nothing they say has any effect on all that sand. Some of it shifts and lifts and whirls into something that almost might be the shape of a friend, Some last shadow of friendship they've made of cowardice and grit, They cry out to the watchful silence of it, cajoling and cursing as they sink deeper into the sudden beach.

Kis-

-met over the same corpse, this was years ago, you crouching over the rib cage to take bloody bites of the heart, me sitting back on my heels, plucking out nuggets of intestine. "You've got some tendon in your teeth," I said, matching your beautiful, blood red smile.

We were married in the hot middle of July. We were so in love we thought it was romantic to keep back that wonderful, terrible urge as we held each other close. Wrong. And we might have rotted if Beloved, you hadn't loved so fiercely with all your heart and your teeth and your stomach, and when the moment came that you could not bear for me to spend even a second apart from you (outside of you) I thought of the day we met-

it was just an extra puzzle piece. a splotch of black fur that didn't fit into a basket of ginger kittens. and then it was an eye in a bush full of roses a tooth that didn't belong in a copse of pines a little spot of black (much much much too black) out of place in a bright blue sky i should have kept them on a well-lit shelf (or not saved them at all) (what was i hoping to build what was i) not put them into an empty shoebox in the back of the closet in the musty dark where they were free, unseen, to multiply

The day my mother was killed was one of those hot, drowsy, bee-blessed days that always made me think of the Yeats poem. I'd come in from dawdling my chores just before noon, ostensibly to help Mother set the table for lunch, but mostly just to drink lemonade.

Dad was in the kitchen instead, squatting over a body and weeping fit to die. He'd had to do it, he'd told me. She'd come up to him and told him the truth; that she'd come out of the forest years ago, when I was still just a slip of a thing, and eaten my real mother up. So he'd killed it.

I knew it was true right away because the blood he'd gotten all over his hands and sleeves when he'd stabbed the Mother-tree in the stomach was bright green. It was just the color you'd get if you scraped the thin skin of bark off a living branch.

 Whatever my father had killed had just been some thing that had come out of the woods, wearing his wife's face and laughing at him behind it, so I should really say that my mother died ages ago, but the fact was that the only mother I'd ever known died on that nineteenth of June.

Later, during the short trial where Dad's innocence was declared beyond any doubt, it came out that she'd been starting to rot. That's why she'd told him about itself. Those things don't like to compost peacefully. They like to stir up trouble before they go.

But they're too stupid to know the color of their own blood.

I didn't blame him. It's not like I blamed him, or like I didn't understand. He and my real mother had been married fifteen years before I'd come along, and he'd been crazy about her, always kissing her cheek and calling her beautiful and bringing her little things like blown-out bird's eggs from nests that hadn't hatched and little yellow flowers and strips of poetry he'd rewritten by hand.

(That's how I knew about the Yeats poem.)

He'd been crazy about her, the real her, and he'd gone mad with grief all in a second when it had started whispering to him. Everyone understood, and no one blamed him.

Even I didn't blame him. But nothing about blame or forgiveness changed the fact that I was ten, about to turn eleven, suddenly motherless, and all alone with a father about set to die of grief. And then he did die of it. It took him all winter to do it, getting weaker day by day, too heartsick to hold himself strong against the bitter cold.

It wasn't his fault, but I had only just turned eleven, and I was all alone on that little farm near the forest, with no one but the chickens and one elderly goat to keep me company.

And I'd been crazy about him. My dad had been just about my favorite person in the whole wide world.

So when spring came, I walked freely into the woods.

"He's a fine young man," said Kanna's mother. She spooned more jam onto Kanna's plate, and gave her braids an absent stroke. "A nice, strong jaw. Good hair."

Thousands of mothers must have said almost the exact same words to their thousands of daughters, probably over nearly identical breakfasts, but Kanna knew her mother meant them. Pakku was strong, and bright, and ambitious. A good hunter. A skilled bender.

With everything that was happening south of the Pole, a bender with Pakku's was bound to go far. He'd already caught the attention of a teacher from the capital, and he’d come home big with consequence from a winter spent training with the other prodigies, and had probably met all kinds of girls when he was there. Kanna was lucky not to have lost his interest. His wife wouldn't have to settle for a three room hut in a port town. Pakku's wife would have a house in the capital, with new windows once a week, and furs on every surface, and imported Earth Kingdom dishes! That stuff they called 'china' with the flowers painted on them.

Her mother glowed with her own inner ambition. " Real china dishes , Kanna. You remember."

Kanna did. In her whole life, Kanna had only taken one trip to the capital, and she remembered that shop window. The dishes had been a creamy white, a little like the inside of a mussel, and painted in a dazzling array of colors, colors she'd never seen, even when she looked up at the lights of spirits in the sky. She hadn't known plants could be that color.

When Kanna's grandmother was younger, air nomads had come every year on their flying bison, laden down with rainbow cargos. They had thrown festivals where they sold exoticly scented blossoms and brightly colored fabrics for extraordinarily cheap prices.

That . . . didn't happen, anymore.

(No one liked to talk about why.)

There were always fuzzy purple crocuses, of course (Pakku had brought her an armful just last week) and those little yellow and white flowers like stars that grew near the hot springs, but-

"Kanna," her mother interrupted, scattering Kanna's thoughts in every direction. (Just like falling petals.) "Wouldn't you like to have a home of your own?"

Of course Kanna wanted a home of her own. She was already almost twenty; much too old to still be sharing a room with two younger siblings. Much too old to still be eating meals could barely tolerate just because her father liked them, and much too old to still be wearing her cousin's hand-me-down clothes, and braiding her hair in certain styles just because her mother liked them.

If she married Pakku, he would build their house himself, with as many rooms as she wanted. She'd have bride's clothes, and new beads for her hair (beads of polished stone, and carved shell, not the plain bone beads that unmarried girls (children) wore). Kanna could plan all their meals herself, and braid her hair in simple styles that didn't tug all day at her scalp, and she wouldn't have to share a room with anyone -

- except her husband.

Would it really be so bad? Surely it would be better than growing old under the parent's roof. She could - she would -

Pakku came by after lunch. He found Kanna in her front yard, mending careless holes in one of her father's nets. He'd brought more crocuses, and a very sure smile. There was a ribbon poking out of his pocket.

A blue ribbon, silky and dark as the water beneath the ice.

Kanna looked up at him, squinting against the afternoon sun, and tried to see her husband in his face.

But he was just a boy , like every other boy she'd known her whole life. A sketch of muscle and noise, almost a stick figure: a little more arrogant, and a little more talented. In nearly every way that mattered, he could have been easily swapped out with any other man in town.

Maybe that was for the best? Why not marry the man her parents had chosen for her, when every other man was no better, or worse? She'd already put off their betrothal for as long as she could. She knew Pakku loved her. Everyone knew Pakku loved her.

Everyone said Pakku loved her. They were always saying it. She couldn't go a single day without Pakku's love ringing in her ears.

He had the necklace in his pocket.

She had the necklace around her neck, later that night, in a candlelit cave that smelled like hot fat. Pakku had rubbed his thumb against it, possessive and smug, as he'd lain her down on the newly tanned furs he'd hunted for himself. He'd crashed into her like the waves from the worst of the winter storms.