Issue 134 November 2024

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Editorial: Defining Rural Fantasy

by Jason A. Bartles

November 1, 2024

Editorial

Rural Fantasy might at first sound redundant. Aren’t many major fantasy stories set in rural places? The Hero’s Journey, for example, often begins with a farm boy or a hobbit in a pastoral setting. However, in its typical progression, the hero leaves their rural homeland to venture into the larger world in order to save it. When they return at journey’s end, they tend not to fit into their village. They have transformed into a figure of worldly stature.

Urban Fantasy, in contrast, often takes fantasy into contemporary cities. Wizards might go to great lengths in these stories to hide their powers from those without to blend into the modern world. This genre also extends its arms to include any fantasy story that takes place in a world that has undergone urbanization or technological development. The majority of the story need not take place in an urban setting, only in a world in which urban life is predominant, even if the protagonists are primarily rural or suburban.

Defining a genre is inherently an impossible task. If there’s one thing that literature and art always do, they defy boundaries, upend expectations, and resist any neat categorization. Still, genres can help us to make meaningful arrangements of texts that speak to one another and to us. Without wanting to lay down an iron-clad definition of Rural Fantasy, I will offer the following: Rural Fantasy is fantasy that takes place in a rural setting.

I will take it one step further by offering a few negative definitions to distinguish Rural Fantasy from other stories. Rural Fantasy does not see the rural as a mere starting point, as an unrefined or unlucky birthplace that needs to be transcended. In these stories, rural spaces are not uncivilized backwaters or fly-over country. At the same time, they do not offer mystical antidotes to the ills of the modern city. The former notion relies on classist assumptions about the superiority of urban living, while the latter reinforces many racist and xenophobic arguments. Both attempts at dividing the rural and the urban into a hierarchy assume an essential superiority of one group over the other. This type of thinking is neither creative nor can it lead to anything other than violence.

The Rural Fantasies I was interested in for this special issue challenge this divisive way of thinking. In particular, I looked for stories that pushed back against the harmful tropes that paint rural places as little more than regressive strongholds or essential wellsprings for a unified national identity. So much gets lost when this is all we can see in rural places.

The stories that follow meet my definitions of Rural Fantasy, yet each story offers something that exceeds this category as well. As good literature does. These stories are rural fantasies and more than rural fantasies. They fit together within the loose bounds of this special issue, and each will easily feel at home alongside other stories that center other generic conventions, tropes or themes. For now, I invite you to read them for what they have to say about rural places and the people who inhabit them.

“To Curse with Needle and Thread” by Vijayalaxmi Samal takes us into the violent throes of colonization with all of the messy ambiguities that arise over time as survivors and their descendants have no choice but to live in this transformed world.

“Hazards of Being Related to the Chosen One” by Emmie Christie offers a fun twist on the Chosen One trope. Here we do not follow the person assumed to be the hero but rather his sister who stayed in their hometown and all of the crap she has to deal with.

“The Inside of the Outside” by Angus McIntyre is this month’s reprint. This story in search of demons seems to flip on its head three times before everything sorts out in the end.

“An Acre a Year” by Gregory Marlow follows a secret deal a farmer’s wife made with the Fae. The future quickly catches up with her, as she rushes headlong into the consequences of that deal.

“Little Bird” by Aggie Novak rounds out the issue with an unlikely friendship, and perhaps a little more, among an outcast girl and a mostly forgotten spirit.

My thanks go to everyone who submitted to our open call. You truly made the work of selecting stories a challenge. Special thanks as well to Rebecca Halsey for her assistance at every step of the way, and to the entire team of readers and editors at Flash Fiction Online for the tremendous amount of work that goes into this and every issue. Of course, thanks to the talented authors whose work appears in the following pages. It was a true pleasure to work with all of you to put together this special issue on Rural Fantasy.

* * *

Ⓒ Jason A. Bartles

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To Curse with Needle And Thread

by Vijayalaxmi Samal

November 1, 2024

With my thread, I write murderer. I write colonizer when I patch up the soldier’s clothes and I hope they wear it to their graves.

Ma, you taught me threadwork charms on a kitchen smock, just like your mother taught you. On your lap, I learnt to embroider love onto my future husband’s shirt for when he goes off to fish. I would bind hope to his heart on rough days and when the ocean lashed his cheek with cold sprays, maybe he would remember my warm hand and follow the thread back home.

I am not sure if I believe in these old housewife’s charms anymore. The law of nature is clear. Swords cut through gentle threads and no husbands return home.

Still, like every girl, I learnt to sew well with steady hands, to repair old, worn away charms and to knot prayers onto our fishing nets. You taught me how the prayers for fortune were really prayers for trickery. A good trick catches enough fish to eat, to gorge ourselves on, to salt and pickle and keep.

It has served me well to know it. They need women to mend, to cook and clean, which keeps me and Janani alive long enough for the priests to find us. When I am scrubbing the black off the pots, one of them approaches me with a rosary and asks if I want for salvation.

“By who?” I ask, but he doesn’t understand my language well. He teaches me to say yes in his tongue. It would do me and my daughter well, he says. 

Yes, yes, I do. I want to be saved.

So he saves me with a few words. He cleanses me of the sin of desire, gives me a rosary to carry and gives me to a good soldier for taming.

“Keep him well and you are saved,” he promises, holding my hands, with black still under my nails.

The soldier does not … hold my hands.

Here, my bed is warm, if not gentle, and I have many clothes to mend. I meet and crouch with other girls. We share our labors. I gut the fish and make my Janani roll flat breads for the camp. Someone else bakes them on the open flames. We are better off, we tell each other. Better this than dead, like our family, like other heathens.

Over time, the girls talk of home and what their mothers have taught them. They teach me charms from their mothers and aunts and I grasp what I am collecting on my smock. I am building a language.

When I embroider nettle on the sleeves, the soldier laughs at my art. What else can he expect of a small Veran girl won of conquest? She will always be uncivilized, believing in quaint superstitions. Still, he indulges me in my quirks. 

The invaders never bother to learn the language of the people they crush, so I don’t bother to hide what I am writing. There is not much my needle and thread can do, but if as wives we can write prayers, then as concubines, can we not write curses?

“Do you want to learn?” I ask Janani, who has your sharp eyes and quick hands. She is just as young as I was when you taught them to me, Ma. Perhaps it is time. 

I teach her the beneficial ones first. The ones you embroidered all over my smock to remember. One for the first night so she bleeds none at all. One for childbirth so she bleeds slow. One for endless dreams. 

You thought much good of the world and of my future. If you were alive, you would say, this will end, Masha, and I would believe you.

I teach her trickery too. I teach her to soak the thread in blood that drips from their armor and to sew terror into their heart. I teach her to smear the thread with molasses, so their feet slip the ground in the face of an arrow. 

Upon their return from razing our neighboring homes and shores, we smear the thread with filth so the wounds fester and rot. If our hand can draw the grace of a god, I am betting on the ire of a demon. 

Someday I will take her back to the life we lost. Until then, I teach her to remember. I teach her to remember you, Ma, and what it means to remember.

* * *

Ⓒ Vijayalaxmi Samal

Comments

  1. James Miller says:
    November 1, 2024 at 1:05 pm
    So beautiful. Really well written. Great voice.
  2. himani says:
    November 2, 2024 at 3:07 am
    Stunning!!!
  3. Haji SM says:
    November 26, 2024 at 8:10 am
    Excellent story
  4. Story Notes : To Curse With Needle and Thread  – Vijayalaxmi Samal says:
    March 13, 2026 at 12:22 am
    […] You can read it here : https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/to-curse-with-needle-and-thread/ […]

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Hazards of Being Related to The Chosen One

by Emmie Christie

November 8, 2024

You would think it’s hard when the villain’s henchmen strafe our house with photon lasers. Every Tuesday they saunter up next to our chicken coop, mustaches twitching in unison, and blast the house full of holes. They always seem surprised when no bodies are there to pile in a heap in the yard because we knew they were coming and are down by the river. Pisses the chickens off to no end, of course. Malthazar the rooster doesn’t take to laser fire, no matter how often he hears it. He chases them off, pecking at their heels, just like he did to the “Chosen One” when he didn’t like the color of my brother’s socks. Or maybe he just didn’t like the magic aura around the socks.

But those hazards aren’t hard, not really. We’re used to it. We patch the laser holes with mud and clay from the bank, which has notes of orange and blue and even some purple. Our house holds smears of rainbow in the shutters.

You’d think we’d mind when the villain kidnaps one of us. Usually me, the sister, the slender tyke with the big eyes who can’t stay on her own feet. Sometimes the villain goes for Mom, of course, but last year the villains snatched me eight times in a row, and that’s three more than her overall. We have a tally mark on the refrigerator to keep the score.

But I know how to get to them. The villains have a strong aversion to when I talk about Aaron Geger, the farmer’s son from the ranch a few acres over, and his perfect, swooping hair. They hate when I talk about my nail art or belt the latest banger from a HarpyPop band. I have a separate scoreboard just for when I manage to make the villain dump me back home before my brother rescues me. If the villain tries to kill me because I excel at the annoyance factor, I just remind them that my brother would only become stronger at my death, and have Revenge Armor, and that’s enough for them to deflate and portal me back home, or just stick me in a soundproof chamber. 

You’d think I’d get annoyed at the training montage, when my brother returns home and lifts all those logs, throwing them over the entire house with his weight-shifter magic or whatever he has. Or when he decides to drink eighteen eggs every morning because he must strengthen his bones enough to withstand a minotaur body-builder’s charge. Mom isn’t happy about that one because he sneaks all our eggs and we don’t have any to sell at the market the next day, and doesn’t he have any sense at all—!

She breaks sometimes, of course. We know the dangers, we’ve taken the course, we’ve signed the waivers. The signs were all there when he was born: the light illuminated him from the sky through our roof, the three sages meant to train him appeared and gave him different kinds of body cologne, and he was strong enough to lift Bessy the Barn at seven years old—and Bessy doesn’t tear off her foundation easily. The sages informed us of everything we would go through as the family of the Chosen One. But being told something and going through it are trolls of a different stripe, you know?

It doesn’t bother me. I don’t break. Not when he calls down lightning in the yard to impress me at 23, and I remind him it sounds like photon lasers, and that’s why Malthazar’s son pecks at his heels. I don’t break when he comes home at 32 years old, his face haggard and scarred, the fatigue carved into his eyes the same depth as Dad’s. Or when he parades home wielding the sunrise, his magic calling forth the morning on the other side of the planet just to warm our hearth in the winter.

It’s not a hazard that he thinks it’s a small thing to turn our nights into days, to switch our darkness to light. It’s not a hazard when he disappears for years, for over a decade, and then rushes down the old path in a panic, saying his magic has left him, and he doesn’t know what to do with himself anymore. He defeated the archvillain, but the price of it was his special-ness, his unique-ness, his Chosen One-ness, and now he just sits in the yard and watches the chickens peck the dirt. Sometimes, Malthazar’s great-grandson hops up to him and nestles in his lap. Now that his magic aura has left him, the animals don’t fear him.

I don’t know how to help him. I can’t do anything because I’m not Chosen. That’s my own personal villain that kidnaps my sanity every minute of every day; that I’m forced to stay weak, and vulnerable, and annoying, even at 45 years old. Even Aaron Geger must have thought so, because he never responded to the letters I snuck to him at school, and he ended up marrying that nymph girl from Waterside. And being weak is in the official guidelines and training course for the Chosen One’s relatives, so it must be true.

I’ll tell you one more thing that doesn’t get to me… When my brother tells me I’m the strong one. Strong because I never had any magic or power, but I could still weather him.

I know the hazards of being related to the Chosen One. And it’s not that.

It’s not that, at all.

* * *

Ⓒ Emmie Christie

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The Inside of the Outside

by Angus McIntyre

November 15, 2024

The house sat a little back from the road, its leaning porch and sagging roof giving it a slump-shouldered look. In the front yard, the rusted shell of a pickup perched on blocks amid an ocean of weeds.

Connor pulled his rented Acura off the road and studied the house for a while. Aside from a couple of hens scratching in the dirt, nothing moved.

He climbed out, picked his way along the overgrown path to the front door. It stood slightly ajar, revealing only darkness inside.

“Hello? Anyone home?”

A minute passed, and then he heard the soft slap of bare feet on board. The door opened.

The girl looked to be about fifteen or sixteen, lank dark hair framing a pale face, faded dungarees revealing thin arms dusted with freckles. They studied each other in silence.

“I’m looking for Jacob Hutchings,” Connor said at last.

The girl pulled the door a little wider. “Hutch!” she called into the darkness.

When Hutchings finally shuffled into view, the family resemblance was evident. He had the same long face as the girl, the same lean frame. A dense white beard spilled down the front of his coverall.

“Ah’m Hutchings,” he said. “You?”

“Keith Connor. They said you could help me.”

Hutchings jerked his head. “C’min.”

The interior of the house was cluttered with rusted tools and ancient furniture that breathed an odor of dust and damp as he passed. A television, perched on a stack of yellowed newspapers, was showing a football game, the screen a brilliant square of green in the gloom.

“Out back,” Hutchings said, gesturing Connor to follow.

“You know why I’m here?” Connor asked.

Hutchings turned to face him. “Only two things people come to me for,” he said, “You ain’t here for the one, you mus’ be here for the other.” He coughed, a dry rasping that shook his whole frame.

The back door of the house opened onto a yard in which Connor saw more weeds, more hens, and a pickup even older and rustier than the first. Behind them rose a red-painted wooden barn.

“In there,” the old man said.

After the chaos of the house, the interior of the barn was shockingly neat. There was something almost church-like about it, the walls whitewashed, the boards freshly swept and sanded.

“We knew you was comin’,” Hutch said, and Connor could not tell if it was a joke or a simple statement of fact.

In the center of the empty space stood a windowless wooden hut. The old man paused with his hand on the door.

“We do’em in here,” he said.

“I had a hard time finding you,” Connor said, as he followed the man inside. He looked around. The inside of the hut was as spartan as the outside. Four tall white candles stood in tin cups on the floor, beside a yellow box of salt.

“Yep,” the old man agreed. He bent over the candles, flicked a lighter that he pulled from the pocket of his coveralls.

“Not many left who do what you do,” Connor said.

“They’m dead,” the old man told him. He finished lighting the candles and picked up the salt.

“What’s that for?” Connor asked. The other straightened up and gave him a look of vague contempt.

“Make a circle,” he said. “Then them as you summon cain’t get out.”

“Does it work?”

“Aye,” Hutch said. “Well enough. Demons cain’t cross salt.”

Connor watched as the old man tilted the box and began pouring out the white crystals.

The resulting circle was surprisingly neat, the line of uniform thickness all round. The old man studied it, as if assuring himself of its near perfect roundness. Satisfied, he set the box down again.

“Is it big enough?” Connor asked.

“Et’ll do,” the old man said. He brushed his hands on the front of his coveralls. “Now — who you want to call?”

Connor hesitated for a moment. Finally he said a name.

The old man seemed to think for a while. “Five hundred,” he said at last. Wordlessly, Connor reached into his pocket and took out a billfold. He counted out the money and passed it to the old man, who tucked it away in his pocket.

The transaction completed, the old man began to chant in a low tuneless voice. There was something unpleasant about the sound, the words that might not be words blurring and blending into each other in a way that made his skin crawl. Without intending to, he took a step toward the salt circle.

The old man stopped. “Don’t break ‘et,” he warned, then resumed his chant.

At last, his voice trailed off. The interior of the salt circle remained resolutely empty.

They looked at the empty circle in silence. At last the old man shook his head and frowned. “‘spose you’ll be wanting your money back.”

Connor smiled. “No need,” he said in a voice as smooth as honey. “I am here. You called, and I came.”

The old man took a step backward. “You,” he said. The candles threw horned shadows on the walls of the wooden hut.

“My brothers and I are tired of your kind,” Connor whispered. “Tired of answering to your petty summons.”

The old man took another step back. “You’re the one killed the others,” he said.

“Yes,” Connor said. He grinned wide, revealing his teeth. “All but you. And now —“

The old man held up a wrinkled hand. “Something you might want to see first,” he said. He pushed open the door of the hut and pointed. Reluctantly, Connor looked in the direction indicated.

The girl stood outside the door, a box of salt in her hand. At her feet lay a curving line of white crystals, an outer circle of almost geometric perfection.

Connor turned back to the old man, who stood now inside the inner circle.

“You —“ he began.

The old man smiled. “We knew you was comin’,” he said.

* * *

Ⓒ Angus McIntyre

Originally published in Factor Four Magazine, October 2, 2022. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

Comments

  1. Nic Vine says:
    November 17, 2024 at 8:55 am
    The build-up imagery, the double twist – love it.
  2. Haji SM says:
    November 26, 2024 at 8:18 am
    Plot twist within plot twist. Great story!
  3. Olatunde Howard says:
    December 15, 2024 at 6:09 pm
    Very engaging! I agree with both comments. I definitely want to read more from you.

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An Acre a Year

by Gregory Marlow

November 22, 2024

An acre a year was all they asked. I agreed. Fifty acres was too much for William to work anyway, even with my help.

The first year, William didn’t notice. I stood on the hill behind the house and surveyed the fields below. Cows, hay, alfalfa, corn, sweet potatoes. It looked the same as the day I married William. Maybe a few corners rounded off in the distance. Or was that my imagination?

What was not my imagination was how the little men delivered on their promises. Travelers willing to work for a meal and a bed for the night. Cows delivering calves effortlessly. Neighbors offering to trade a tractor for a fraction of its worth. Fields of corn yielding twice the expected amount, allowing William to sell the excess and use the money to hire help.

And William, in my bed at night again. The man I married, not the exhausted shell dragging himself in after dark with barely enough energy to eat supper, much less tend to a lonely wife. The fields had been his mistress of necessity. She provided, but not nearly as much as she took. If I had not agreed to the trade, she would have taken him forever.

I discovered them in the loft of the barn, five tiny men ducking behind the hay, never completely leaving the shadows, never letting me fully see them in the dusty beams of light that spilled between the planks. They proposed a deal–our happiness for land. There was no contract, just a prick of my finger on a dry piece of straw and a drip of my blood into a bale of alfalfa in the far corner of the loft. They said the bale would bind the deal, an incorruptible yield from the very acres I had promised.

I worried, but I never regretted the decision. If fifty acres were too much for William at twenty-five, how would he handle the burden at seventy-five? Would we even live that long? The land would break him, and he would die young like his father.

I was pregnant with Billy by year two.

In year seven, I found a troubled William at the hilltop overlooking the farm.

“It used to feel so much bigger,” he said.

By then, we were living a comfortable life, with regular hands working the fields for cash on the barrel. I still went to the fields but for leisure instead of labor. William would sometimes join Billy and me for afternoon picnics.

I asked the tiny men in the hay loft where the land went. They explained that the acreage had not disappeared. It had been moved within the boundaries of a world I couldn’t see. It was in the world of the Fae.

“Do you farm it in Fae?” I asked.

“Others do. Those who understand the land like you and your husband.”

By year fifteen, William began to obsess over the diminishing farm.

“Am I losing my mind?” he asked.

I tried to soothe his worries with affection, kisses, and reminders of how blessed we were.

In year twenty-two, he had the land surveyed. When the report came in the mail, William retrieved his deed to the property from the lockbox under our bed and sat down at the table to compare. The numbers matched: twenty-eight acres, not the fifty he remembered.

I feared he would have a mental breakdown. His land was the one thing in this world he thought he truly knew.

So, I told him everything.

He had never been angrier with me. I took him to meet the tiny men. He asked if the deal could be reversed and if he could buy the land back.

“Money is meaningless,” said one of the men.

“Land is eternal,” said another. “Like us.”

That night, I tried to reason with William. We were getting older. We would have more security and less work in our golden years.

“What about year fifty?” he asked. “They will take it all, and we will have nothing. What then?”

In year twenty-five, Billy married, and with the money he saved over the years, he bought a small farm of his own, a manageable fifteen acres. In year twenty-six, they gave us our first granddaughter.

Only William and I noticed the disappearing land. In year thirty-two, we made the hard decision to sell the cattle. In year forty-one, we stopped growing alfalfa. One lonely bale remained in the loft.

As our hair grayed and our joints ached, we found ourselves down to a few acres that nearly managed itself with the help of a single hired hand.

The tiny men were firm. “The deal is binding,” they said from behind the bale of hay that held my blood.

“What if we refuse to leave?” I asked.

They did not answer.

“We can move in with Billy,” I said as we stood at the hilltop overlooking our last acre. “Build a small house and help him on the farm? I could watch the babies and–”

“No,” William said flatly.

“We have money in the bank to buy an acre. We don’t need more than that.”

“This farm was my life. I won’t leave it.”

When the last day arrived, William got up early, paid the hand, and told him he would no longer be needed. William killed a chicken, and I dressed it and put it in the oven. I picked tomatoes, corn, and zucchini from the backyard garden and onions from behind the barn.

Billy, Sarah, and the kids came for supper. Billy and William talked about tractors, and I gave Sarah my yeast roll recipe.

We watched from the doorway as they drove away.

I took William’s hand and led him to bed early. If we woke in the morning, if we woke in Fae, I wanted us both to be well rested. Fifty acres is a lot of land for one man to work. He would need my help.

* * *

Ⓒ Gregory Marlow

Comments

  1. Chris says:
    November 22, 2024 at 6:09 pm
    Greg,
    I absolutely love this read! It is mpressive to experience so much imagination and wonderfully structured delivery in such a short piece. Again, I love it! I want to know where they woke up! ????

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Little Bird

by Aggie Novak

November 29, 2024

Adnela slipped the still-warm duck egg into her apron pocket and smiled. For the first time in weeks she would have something to eat besides thin porridge. On her hands and knees, she backed out of the coop, straw fouling her skirts.

She was halfway across the poultry yard when something struck her in the back of the head.

“Jebemti!” If the Belavićs caught her on their farm, she’d be flogged or worse, but there was no one out in the dark winter morning except Adnela and the ducks.

Rubbing the sore spot, she hurried for the gate. An unseen force yanked her ankles and sent her sprawling.

“Who’s there?”

A woman appeared, like a flash of sun on water. She was stout and curvy with a downy cloud of brown hair that puffed out around her head. She was clothed in mismatched feathers—duck, goose, and quail—and her fingers ended in chicken claws. It’d been many years since Adnela saw a spirit; most had faded, deserted in favour of the Christian God, and she’d never seen one like this.

“What are you?”

“I am Živinica.” Little bird.

Adnela pushed herself to her feet, sodden skirts chilling her legs. “Is that your name, or what you are?”

Živinica tilted her head, regarding Adnela with beady eyes. “Both. What are you? Other than a thief.”

“I’m a woman.” Adnela crossed her arms. “What else would I be?”

She felt Živinica’s attention on her face, on the dark birthmark spread across half of it.

“I never saw a woman who looked like you, with hair loose like a child’s.” The bird-woman darted forward, hissing like a goose. “But whatever you are, stay away from my birds. Iš iš.”

Her taloned fist dug into the ground, making a ball of slush and duck shit. She lobbed it right at Adnela’s face.

Adnela ran, spitting. When she looked back, Živinica was gone. She patted her pocket and found the egg still whole.

But the next morning, when she cracked it over her porridge, a rock fell out instead of a yolk.

* * *

Hunger drove Adnela to the Belavić farm again two weeks later. No one else in the village had food to spare.

Bright morning sun sparkled on the snow, but Adnela wasn’t worried about being seen—the other villagers were in church. Skipping church would earn her disapproving mutterings, but she received those anyway, a side-effect of her poverty and the off-putting mark covering her left cheek—enough to draw suspicion of witchcraft. If they knew she saw spirits too, they would have killed her ages ago.

Hoping Živinica was a nocturnal creature, Adnela let herself into the poultry yard, armed with a small wooden cross, just in case.

Apron heavy—with two eggs this time, to make it worth her efforts—Adnela crawled backwards from the coop, and right into a closed door. The opening was barred shut.

“Sranje! Let me out.”

 Živinica appeared, her torso seeming to sprout from the coop floor. “Give back my eggs!” She held out her chicken-foot hand.

Adnela grasped her cross and thrust it towards the spirit-woman. Živinica cringed back, her essence fading into translucence.

“Let me out!” Adnela shuffled closer, cross outstretched.

“No.” Živinica’s voice went soft as a breeze, as if travelling from far away. 

But this time, when Adnela nudged the door with her boot, it swung open.

She scrambled down the plank to the ground and set off towards the gate at a near run. Her hand was on it, when Živinica spoke again.

“It’s been a long time since someone saw.”

Adnela’s hand fell to her side. Živinica looked even worse in the full light of the sun, barely there at all.

Adnela shrugged. “The Lord comes for us all, they say.” Christian prayers or spirit offerings—neither had proved useful in her experience.

 Živinica clucked her tongue. “Then why aren’t you in church with the others?”

Adnela laughed, leaning back to rest against the stone fence. “You said it yourself. What sort of a woman am I? Talking to duck spirits and stealing eggs to survive.”

With one claw, Živinica stroked the wine-red stain across Adnela’s cheek. It tingled under her touch.

“They are scared of things that are different.”

Adnela looked away. “Why do you protect their birds, if they don’t even remember you?”

“The old housemaid remembered, but she died last year.” Živinica jumped onto the fence, perched next to Adnela like a roosting hen. “It’s my nature.”

Already half regretting it, Adnela reached into her pocket and pulled out one of the large brown eggs. “Here, take one as an offering? We can both survive.”

 Živinica snatched the egg and jumped to the ground. Then she spun and brought her lips to Adnela’s cheek in a soft, feathery kiss. “Thank you.”

* * *

Adnela made the trek to the Belavić farm almost every day after that. She didn’t take anything and staved off her hunger with scraps pilfered from animal troughs and middens. Instead, she left offerings—small things that didn’t cost her like polished river stones or the iridescent feathers of ravens. With every gift, Živinica grew more substantial and more beautiful. She could stray further from her ducks, if Adnela was there to sustain her, and they would wander, hand-in-hand, in the marshes beyond the village.

They sat together on a log, basking in the spring sun. Živinica played with Adnela’s hair, braiding it and unbraiding it. Adnela savoured the touch, the taming and un-taming of her wild hair.

“You seem sad,” said Živinica, “even though the weather is beautiful.”

Adnela leaned against Živinica. “Gđa Belavić didn’t give me the rye loaves she owed me for my embroidery.”

They both knew there was no point disputing the snub.

Živinica hissed. “I’ll fill her stockings with duck shit.”

They laughed together, devising punishments.

The next morning, Adnela awoke to find three speckled duck eggs, nestled in the pot by her stove.

* * *

Ⓒ Aggie Novak

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