Except for when I drink just enough, I didn’t add. Or smoked so much that my thoughts sparked around each other like a school of minnows, slippery and silver, impossible to grasp.
You can sing like you always could, and still she doesn’t even hate you.
“I’m sorry,” Lina whispered, struggling to meet my eyes. I knew she could feel the roil of my emotions, that it chafed her not to sing it back at me or soothe me, but sometimes I couldn’t curb myself just to ease her. “I know that’s hard for you. But maybe it’s better this way? I can sing, but that’s all it is—weird, maybe, but just song. There’s nothing for anyone to see. But you, it used to be like New Year’s Eve when you made things bloom. And you know we can’t be all flash and glitter like that. It’s not safe for any of us.”
I clenched my teeth until my jaw burned. Safety was Mama’s eternal refrain. It was why we’d only eaten the moon together at nighttime in the tiny garden behind our house, hidden by the trellis of creeping roses and oleander, back when Lina and I were little. “Only in the dark, cveti?u, and only with each other,” Mama would whisper in my ear, holding my hands in her strong grip as I bloomed the starlight dappling through the canopy of leaves above. “That’s the only place we’re safe.”
I couldn’t remember the last time our mother had called me “little flower,” or touched me with such tenderness. As if I had grown into a cactus instead of something softer, and she didn’t want to risk my spines.
“The townsfolk with the pitchforks, I know,” I said. “Lovers and neighbors and friends, all turning to burn the witches. But don’t you wonder sometimes if it’s worth it, giving up so much? When we still have to keep folding ourselves so small all the time?”
Lina looked away, a soft flush rising on her pale skin. “Of course it’s worth it,” she murmured. “Beauty’s worth it even in the smallest scale. You have your glass, I have my violin. It’s enough, like Mama always said.”
Yet even as she said it, she began humming under her breath. The back of my neck prickled, and a wash of goose bumps spread down my arms. Even after all these years, hearing Lina harmonize with herself always gave me chills, the way it sounded like three voices in one. This melody was subtle, three layers of a bittersweet arpeggio that split and reflected my emotions like a prism: the anger, the loss, and the biting sense of injustice, along with a gentle apologetic undertow that was her own offering.
There was another hue to it, too, a tinge of guilt that didn’t feel like mine. Even as the song melted my annoyance with her like spun sugar in water, I frowned, trying to place it.
She caught herself abruptly and cut off the melody.
“Sorry,” she said, clenching both hands in her lap until her knuckles turned white. “I know you hate it when I do that. Do you—will you be going to the square after your shift today? If Nevena stays longer at the café, I could leave early and bring my violin, come keep you company?”
Coming from Lina, this was a fairly high-level peace offering. I sold my glasswork figurines to tourists in the Old Town’s Arms Square, and Malina’s singing and playing always meant I’d sell more that day. It made customers pliant, more willing to part with their money for a pretty piece of glass. Mama had no idea we ever did it, of course. And if it felt a little swindly to sway people like that, it only added to my thrill. Lina had never liked that part of it as much as I did, even if she was only making it easier for people to do what they already wanted. It baffled me how much this bothered her; what was the point of power at all, if she shrank back from it anytime it caught and flared?
Especially when hers still gleamed so brightly while mine guttered by the day.
“I thought you had a violin lesson with Natalija this afternoon.”
“I can cancel that, if you want. I already saw her earlier this week.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said curtly, stepping back into my flip-flops. “I only have a few pieces left from the last batch, anyway. Not enough to show.”
She sighed behind me. “Riss—”
“I’ll see you later.”
I could feel her eyes heavy on my back as I left.
TWO
OUTSIDE, THE MORNING WAS FRAGRANT WITH THE SPICE of the oleander drifting from the back garden. Our bicycles leaned together against the chain-link fence. Above them, a warm rainbow of bougainvillea clung to the links, fading like twilight from fuchsia to orange, yellow, and peach before nestling into the green of stems and leaves.
I paused for a moment as the flowers burst into their usual spectacle. Each separate blossom multiplied, over and over, until the tangle burgeoned into sparkling symmetry, a fractal sphere like a honeycomb. I saw these flowers every morning, fiercely grateful that their dazzle never dimmed. That was my gift, my variant of the gleam. I didn’t just see flowers; I saw them to the nth degree. Each bloomed into a little galaxy that I could cup inside my palm, the sticky stars of its pollen caught between my fingers. Petal nested within petal, each level of the pattern cradling tiny versions of itself, stamen and pistil and vein and leaf swirling in concentric patterns like a nautilus shell.
It hadn’t always been just flowers. When I was younger, the whole world had bloomed for me. Sunlight through summer leaves had spiraled into a blaze of gold and green, an infinite pillar of fireflies swarming into the sky. Pebbles and stones beneath my bare toes would whirlpool into cream and slate and gray. Even the crosshatch of tanned skin on the back of my own hand would fractal for me, layering like dragon scales.
Back when Mama still let us practice the gleam together—eating the moon, she always called it, like something out of a fairy tale, like the three of us were strong enough to swallow the sky—I’d even been able to share what I saw with both of them. Even the memory of that happiness was painfully fierce, a bubble of vast joy that strained my lungs. In the summer dark of the garden, the sigh of leaves and crickets stirring the silence around us, Mama would let me bloom balls of tinsel or twine, handfuls of beach glass and jars filled with seashells, bowls clicking with tigereye marbles. When I made each explode into fractal fireworks between us, Mama would slip one of the moon-shaped truffles she made for those nights into my mouth—dark chocolate, sea salt, and a sweet curl of jasmine, the taste of the summer night dissolving on my tongue. Then Lina’s song would settle over us, her triad of voices clear and lilting as a flute, the precise pitch of wonder.
We had been so beautiful together, reflecting one another like a family of mirrors.
The word for “witch,” ve?tica, meant “deft one,” and that was what we’d been: deft in beauty, versed in its tastes and sounds and textures as it wove like a ribbon through our fingers. It was an heirloom we carried in our blood, a legacy of magic passed down from womb to womb. All the women in our family had it.