Some had even died for it.
Lina and I had been seven when Mrs. Petrovi? next door saw one of my fractals bloom. Maybe our light laughter had woken her, quiet as we always tried to be, or maybe she’d caught a thread of Lina’s song in her sleep and it had drawn her to the window. The next morning, Mama had trotted us next door and talked her down easily, with a basket of warm trifles from the café and her own cool and perfect poise. Lina and I had been playing with firecrackers, she lied smoothly, because we were young and silly and overly bold, too used to running free during the long hours she was gone. Yes, the colors were very unusual; she thought maybe that kind was called a snapdragon, wasn’t that charming? No, of course, sweet names were no excuse for such a fire hazard, and her without a man to tame that unruly garden in the back. We should still have known better, and now we knew never to do it again.
It wasn’t until she brought us back home that her hands began to shake. She had us kneel with her on her massive sleigh bed, its swooping wooden headboard polished to a honey gleam; ?i?a Jovan had made it for her from reclaimed wood. She’d let us sleep in it with her on the nights we ate the moon together, and it had always felt to me like the safest place in our little house.
But now, the devastation that swept over her face when she turned to us made my stomach drop, Lina’s clammy fingers curling into mine like a reflex.
“That was the last time,” Mama said, running her tongue over her teeth. The movement pursed her lush mouth and bared the strong, Slavic bones of her face: a squared jaw and cheekbones that cleaved air, a bold but dainty falcon’s nose. The large, thick-lashed gray eyes she shared with me and Malina sparkled oddly, and I suddenly realized what it was—she was trying not to cry. “No more eating the moon for us, not ever. I should have never—I’ve let you both practice for too long. A little longer, and I won’t be able to hold on to you. There’ll be no tamping you down.”
“But why?” I demanded. “Who cares if she saw me? She looks like a shrunken head.”
Malina smothered a snicker next to me. “Smells like one, too,” she whispered.
“Quiet,” Mama snapped. An electric eel of fear raced down my spine, leaving a hot flush in its wake. Lina dropped my hand in shock. Mama never spoke to us so sharply. Even when she was at her wits’ end, her low, throaty voice only dipped lower, softening like a velvet warning.
Her gaze flicking between us, she knelt so we were face-level with her, gray eyes meeting gray. “You know we have no family,” she said. “I’ve told you that much. The three of us, all alone in the world.”
“And ?i?a Jovan,” Malina added. Only we got to call him “?i?a,” Old Man Jovan. From us, it was both affectionate and respectful, the next best thing to calling him our grandfather. “That’s why you named the café after him. Because he’s like our deda.”
“Yes, as good as a grandfather—maybe even better—though he isn’t blood. But before I had you, I had a twin sister of my own, and a mother, too. They would have been your blood, your aunt and your baba. If they had lived.”
Lina’s breathing went shallow beside me. I could see Mama’s turmoil, but my sister could feel and hear its buzz. That’s what our mother sounded like, Lina told me later. Like she’d swallowed a beehive, a high-pitched panic of wings and stingers.
“What happened to them?” Lina asked, and from the pained way she said it I knew she felt it already, and that it was terrible.
Mama was still young enough then that we could sometimes read her face, and I could see the splitting inside her, the battle between tell and don’t.
“Ana and I were eighteen,” she said, her voice colorless and thin like onionskin. “Ana fell in love that year, even though your grandmother forbade it. Love makes us even brighter than we are, until the gleam grows into a roman candle, impossible to contain. Everyone can see us shine with it, then, and it’s the nature of the human beast to fear what it doesn’t understand.”
I struggled to make the pieces clasp together. “But didn’t our grandmother love our grandfather?”
“She never loved him,” Mama said. Her face had smoothed out flat, until she looked just like she sounded. “That’s why she thought it was safe to accept when he asked her to marry. And why she thought it would be safe to stay with him, once Ana and I were born. We lived in a mountain village many hours from here; Tata raised goats to make cheese, and Mama brewed medicines. And perfumes too, the prettiest you ever smelled, so fine they made you feel things.”
“The way your treats make people think of places?” I asked. That was our mother’s gleam: the sights of the world translated into flavor. “Was that Grandmother’s gleam?”
“It was,” she said. “Ana’s was bigger, and much more wild. When she danced, it was like watching legends come to life, paintings that breathed and pulsed to the heartbeat of her steps. And when she fell in love . . .”
Mama’s eyes grew distant with the memory, soft and diffuse like the fog that sometimes gathered above the slate waters of the bay. “She danced and danced. Love stoked her flame, and she showered the sparks of her gleam all over everything, until they spread to your grandmother and me. That’s what it’s like, when the women in our family eat the moon. We’re bound to one another, braided together. And when we catch fire, we burn as one.”
“And then what, Mama?” Malina said. Her hand had crept back into mine.
Mama’s gaze sharpened back into focus. “Then, we all grew stronger. Your grandmother stopped blending her perfumes, but even still, the house was full of the most wonderful scents; they simply rolled off her, like sea spray from the water. I stopped baking, but your grandfather said he tasted sweet and savory things even when he’d eaten nothing for hours, tastes that made him think of places he had never been. As if ghosts were feeding him morsels. He muttered constantly about vila women and witches, and wore an evil-eye bracelet to fend off curses.”
She worked her jaw back and forth, then drew her full lower lip, softer even than Malina’s, through her strong white teeth. “And one day he walked in on Ana dancing. I was outside in the barn, but I saw him drag both of them out of the house, Ana by the hair, Mama by the arm. Mama had tried to come between them, to lull him with one of her quieting scents, but it only made him more furious. How long had we all been bewitching him, he wanted to know. Were Ana and I even his daughters, or children of demons?”