Maria Elena sighs. I watch as she makes her way through the labyrinth of threads that fill the room and block the door. I have to admire her agility; she somehow manages not to catch that leg of hers on even one loose thread.
I open my hand and peer at the thread Maria Elena just gave me. It sits curled in my palm, quiet and complacent, like a docile garter snake. Most of Maria Elena’s threads are thick like ropes and just as sturdy. But this one is feeble at best. A weak little wisp of a thread that is growing more iridescent with every passing minute. It is so fragile, its color so faint that I fear if I drop it, I’ll never be able to find it again. And neither of my sisters has the capability to help me either. Maria Elena weaves the threads. That’s her role. It is my job to decipher which ones need to be cut.
It is Rosa who must cut them.
The uneven thumping sound of my younger sister’s steps draws my eyes to the door. Maria Elena’s face emerges from the web of threads, quickly followed by our elder sister, Rosa, though she certainly doesn’t look much like herself. I stifle a laugh and she glares at me, shaking her foot free from a tangle of threads and rubbing her hands sloppily over her tired eyes. Rosa is typically the epitome of refinement; that she resembles such a disaster in the morning is the only reason I can bear to love her.
Rosa stretches her arms over her head and yawns noisily. “Well, where is it, then?”
Maria Elena points at me before shuffling to her loom and sitting down heavily. She runs her hands up and down the length of her impaired leg, kneading the sore muscles there, and I feel a twinge of guilt at having asked her to wake Rosa.
My older sister peers at the frail thread I hold out to her. “It’s ready, then?” she asks me. I nod and then I hear it. We all do. It starts as a low thrumming sound, as if someone has reached over and plucked the string of a harp or a mandolin. The thread has begun its death song.
Rosa gives an irked nod, and a pair of large shears appears in her outstretched hand. She leans over and plucks the thread with the glinting edge of one of the shears’ sharp blades. I want her to examine it, as if she can check the thread’s vitalidad as well as I can, but that isn’t Rosa’s role. And it isn’t her way, either. With barely a sigh of hesitancy, Rosa instructs me to pull the tiny thread taut. She cuts it in half with a quick snip of those mighty shears. I let them go, and the two pieces flutter to the ground like wounded birds, the silver sheen fading to a dull, lifeless brown. The task now complete, Rosa turns on her heel and ducks through the labyrinth, swinging her shears in time with her steps.
There is something that I find particularly frightening about those shears. Perhaps it is simply the rigid way she wields them. They once called her She Who Cannot Be Turned, and it was a proper moniker if there ever was one. There is no compromising with Rosa. Things are black or white with her; it is life or death. There is no in-between. Folks around here are swayed by the silk slippers on her dainty feet, the tortoiseshell comb that rises from the back of her elegant head like a crown, but they shouldn’t be. Rosa is as empathetic as a wild animal. As benevolent as a disease. If she is a queen, she is one to be feared more than beloved. And the mortals used to know this. They used to fear her. They used to fear us. But, as I’ve learned, it is quite difficult to fear three young girls, especially ones that come in such beautiful and fragile forms as my sisters.
I glance over at Maria Elena. Now crouched on the ground, she is running her hands over the threads that carpet the floor, as if she can find the tiny thread by mere touch. “You read the stars last night, didn’t you?” she murmurs.
I hesitate, considering my answer before I speak it aloud. My younger sister is all heart. She makes up for the sympathy that Rosa lacks. Perhaps it comes with the territory. It is, after all, by her small hands that the threads of life are spun. She needn’t burden herself with the responsibility of determining the fate of another living soul. That is my job. And she certainly doesn’t need to know the real reason I was out there, that it had very little to do with the brief life whose thread we just cut. So instead, I merely nod and allow my sensitive sister to grieve the short life as she pleases.
I still find it strange to look at my sister and see the face of a twelve-year-old girl staring back. And yet, despite the freckles that splash across her turned-up nose and the perfect ringlets that spill down her back, I can still see every lifetime we shared circling her brown irises like the rings of an ancient tree. Maria Elena has the eyes of an old soul, eyes that are, at the moment, brimming with tears.
I pat my sister’s head, waiting for her sorrow to pass. I can tell by the patch of sunshine moving across the floor that the morning has faded into day and it is time for Maria Elena to pass the torch to me.