No, Iris thought, blinking back tears. You only needed money to buy more alcohol.
She slammed the front door and walked through the living room, around the bottles, into the small, dingy kitchen. There was no candle lit here, but Iris had the place memorized. She set the dented loaf of bread and the half carton of eggs down on the counter before reaching for a paper sack and returning to the living room. She gathered up the bottles—so many bottles—and it made her think of that morning, and why she had run late. Because her mother had been lying on the floor next to a pool of vomit, in a kaleidoscope of glass, and it had terrified her.
“Leave it,” Aster said with a wave of her hand. Ash fell from her cigarette. “I’ll clean it up later.”
“No, Mum. I have to make it to work on time tomorrow.”
“I said to leave it.”
Iris dropped the bag. The glass chimed within it, but she was too weary to fight. She did as her mother wanted.
She retreated to her dark room and fumbled for her matches, lighting the candles on her bedside table. But she was hungry, and eventually had to return to the kitchen to make a marmalade sandwich, and all the while her mother had lain on the sofa and drunk from a bottle and smoked and hummed her favorite songs that she could no longer listen to, because the radio was gone.
Back in the quiet of her chamber, Iris opened the window and listened to the rain. The air was cold, brisk. A trace of winter lingered within it, but Iris welcomed its bite and how it made her skin pebble. It reminded her that she was alive.
She ate her sandwich and eggs, eventually changing out of her wet clothes for a nightgown. Carefully, she laid the sopping Inkridden Tribune on the floor to dry, the monster illustration more smudged now after being carried in her pocket. She stared at it until she felt a sharp tug within her chest, and she reached beneath her bed, where she hid her grandmother’s typewriter.
Iris pulled it out into the firelight, relieved to find it after the radio’s unexpected departure.
She sat on the floor and opened her tapestry bag, where the beginnings of her essay now sat crinkled and damp from the rain. Find something good to write about, and I might consider publishing it in the column next week, Zeb had said. Sighing, Iris fed a new page to Nan’s typewriter, fingers poised over the keys. But then she glanced at the ink-streaked monster again, and she found herself writing something entirely different from her essay.
She hadn’t written to Forest in days. And yet she wrote to her brother now. The words spilled out of her. She didn’t bother with the date or a Dear Forest, as she had with all the other letters she had typed to him. She didn’t want to write his name, to see it on the page. Her heart felt bruised as she cut to the chase that night:
Every morning, when I wade through Mum’s sea of green bottles, I think of you. Every morning, when I slip into the trench coat you left behind for me, I wonder if you thought of me for even a moment. If you imagined what your departure would do to me. To Mum.
I wonder if fighting for Enva is everything you thought it would be. I wonder if a bullet or a bayonet has torn through you. If a monster has wounded you. I wonder if you’re lying in an unmarked grave, covered in blood-soaked earth that I will never be able to kneel at, no matter how desperate my soul is to find you.
I hate you for leaving me like this.
I hate you, and yet I love you even more, because you are brave and full of a light that I don’t think I will ever find or understand. The call to fight for something so fervently that death holds no sting over you.
Sometimes I can’t draw a full breath. Between my worry and my fear … my lungs are small because I don’t know where you are. It’s been five months since I hugged you goodbye at the depot. Five months, and I can only assume you are missing at the front or are too busy to write me. Because I don’t think I could rise in the morning—I don’t think I could get out of bed—if news came to me that you were dead.
I wish you would be a coward for me, for Mum. I wish you would set down your gun and rend your allegiance to the goddess who has claimed you. I wish you would stop time and return to us.
Iris yanked the paper from the typewriter, folded it twice, and rose to approach her wardrobe.
Long ago, Nan had hidden notes for Iris to find in her room, sometimes slipping them under the bedroom door or beneath her pillow, or tucking them into a skirt pocket for her to find later at school. Small words of encouragement or a line from a poem that Iris always delighted to discover. It was a tradition of theirs, and Iris had grown up learning how to read and write by sending her grandmother notes.
It felt natural to her, then, to slide her letters to Forest under the wardrobe door. Her brother didn’t have a room in their flat; he slept on the couch so Aster and Iris could have the two private bedrooms. But he and Iris had been sharing this closet for years.
The wardrobe was a small recess in the stone wall, with an arched door that had left a permanent scratch on the floor. Forest’s garments hung to the right, Iris’s to the left. He didn’t have many clothes—a few button-down shirts, trousers, leather braces, and a pair of scuffed shoes. But Iris didn’t have many outfits either. They made the most of what they had, patching holes and mending frayed edges and wearing their raiment until it was threadbare.
Iris had left his clothes in the closet, despite his teasing her that she could have the whole wardrobe space while he was gone. She had been patient the first two months he had been away at war, waiting for him to write to her as he had promised. But then her mother had started drinking, so profusely that she had been fired from the Revel Diner. The bills could no longer be paid; there was no food in the cupboard. Iris had no choice but to drop out of school and find work, all the while waiting for Forest to write to her.
He never had.
And Iris could no longer bear the silence. She had no address; she had no information as to where her brother was stationed. She had nothing but a beloved tradition and she did as her nan would have done—Iris gave the folded paper to the closet.
To her amazement, the letter had been gone the next day, as if the shadows had eaten it.
Unsettled, Iris had typed another message to Forest and slid it under her closet door. It too had vanished, and she had studied the small wardrobe closely, disbelieving. She had noticed the old stones in the wall, as if someone centuries ago had decided to close off an ancient passageway. She wondered if perhaps magic in the conquered god’s bones, laid to rest deep beneath this city, had risen to answer her distress. If magic had somehow taken her letter and carried it on the western wind, delivering it to wherever her brother was fighting in the war.
How she had hated enchanted buildings until that moment.
She knelt now and slid her letter beneath the wardrobe door.