Dagny hunts with Ma's knife.

I've seen him leave with it this past November, the old rust-iron hung off his belt like a long, jagged star. He leaves his slingshot on the shelf, and I track the time by the amount of dust collected in its wood hilt. Ma's knife is the only thing of Dagny's that he won't let me touch. We share everything—chores, cups, clothing. Even apples are split in two, the rind and core set aside for compost.

I wish he wouldn't use the knife to hunt. It didn't cut anything but yarn and hair before winter. Skinning, shaving, and shearing have blunted the blade—our letter opener would be better in a fight than that knife. It's lucky, Dagny told me, when I asked, don't be an idiot.

Lucky.

It isn't lucky, it's stupid.

Ma isn't dead, just sick, and she didn't stab deer, she shot them. Dagny brings the shotgun into the forest but I know he's not using it: every rabbit, badger, and pheasant he brings home is slit, not shot.

He doesn't clean the gun either, just the knife. Every night, he tries to scrape the rust off the metal to no avail. The shotgun lies by his feet, a crust of dirt ingrained into the chamber. All me and Dagny share now are chores— he filets the fish, I fry them; he washes the laundry, I dry it; he buys Ma's medicine, I bring it to her bedroom.

Dagny hasn't been to Ma's room since she caught the fever. He stands outside the door after dinner and stares at it until it's time to go to bed instead. It isn't right to blame Dagny for not wanting to see Ma die, but I do, I really do. He's never home anymore.

Not when I'm awake, at least—every morning there's a fresh stack of dishes in the sink and a dead animal on the countertop. Sometimes, if I sneak to the kitchen for an extra helping of food, he's shaving the fuzz off his jaw with Ma's knife. It's the only way I know he's still alive, most days. The shotgun and knife go with him. Dagny spends all day in the forest looking for birds to kill. It's rare he catches one. Gophers, mice, and lizards: this is what my brother can kill. I stretch what I can: render half the fat, dry half the meat, save half the skin. It doesn't matter—our cupboard is a bestiary for bone.

The day is cold and wet and gray. Snow settled onto the trees last night and the world is covered in uniform chunks of ice. Katydids cower in high green grass. Stew boils on the stove-top, a tiny sea: all the ships carrots, potatoes, and cheese.

Like every morning, I bring two bowls upstairs: one of broth and one of clear, fresh water. I didn't go to Ma's room before she got sick. Now I know it better than anywhere—I haunt the crusted-up carpet, cocooned in hills of leaves and feathers. It's windowless, lightless—airless, even. Both the walls and floors are soot-stained and grimy, each groove in the wood as dirt-filled as the underside of a fingernail. The sorrel and nettle died last month, so there's no distraction from the scent of rot and fever.

It takes the whole of the attic to house the enormity of my mother's bed: the colossus of the frame, the skeleton of the garden. Ma's room is a cell the size of the sky.

Canaries roost in the rafters, all their nests crafted from dried petals and vomit. When I was a child, the ceiling dripped with nettles and sorrel; greenery hung from the ceiling like a line of hooks. Every room in the house smelt like herbs, even downstairs, and I could find the wilted remnants of leaves in every shirt, every shoe, every stair. Brown needles stitched shut the seam of my scalp, unfastened the nail from each finger. Fever stole even that: by the second month of Ma's sleep, all the leaves fell from the stem and anointed her with gray, crumpled husks.

I set the bowl of broth on the nightstand and the bowl of water on the floor. Urine and sweat staple the comforter to Ma's skin. I flay the blanket from the pelt of her body each day. Snot suffuses the length of her in slime, soft with a fish-scale sheen. Phlegm chunks her jaw in hard yellow pearls. Her hands, hard with callous and scar, are rent raw from scratching at herself.

I spoon broth into my mother with all the carefulness I can muster. There is procedure to this—I coat the world in chicken-stock and slumber, sponge the aftermath from her skin. Stare into the black cavern of her mouth, watch soup slide through the gaps of her teeth. Palm the sides of her neck, massage carrot-chunks and cheese-curd to ensure she swallows.

It doesn't prevent the choking. It happens every time I feed her. Ma chokes like a snared bear. There is no daintiness to her, not even in the act of swallowing; all the air rattles out of her in shrill, frantic pants. Soup and saliva dribble from the corner of her mouth; mucus bleeds from the dark of her nose.

Choking is an ugly sound. I like it. It reminds me she's alive.

The canaries sing loud, loud, loud when Ma is quiet again. I wipe her clean. Ma is a bird like them, yellow-haired and sallow-skinned. Only now, when the dirt is stolen from her skin, do I begin to brush out her hair.

Ma would be furious if she knew I had the hairbrush. It was Pa's, and after he died, Ma told me to bury it out back. Bones, she'd stated, are bad luck.

The hilt of it is white, cold, and hard like a bone, but it's not a bone. Pa told me it was ivory, once, and wherever that grows, it must be prettier than any skeleton could be. I hid the brush in the hollow beneath my and Dagny's bed, where the wide-set wooden teeth couldn't spear anything but cockroaches and clumps of dust.

I force the brush through the wire-thin cords of Ma's hair. All her curls billow, a series of snarls made of drying drool and tangles. Wooden teeth disappear into her head like sugar on snow, yellow on yellow, all the birch grains and carved ivory embedded inside my mother's skull as her hair strangles me with golden rings and bracelets.

I wish my hair were long. In lieu of length, there is a thick, dull brown fuzz that won't grow past my chin. Dagny tells me it looks diseased at least once a week, but it doesn't matter: anything is better than being bald. Ma kept my scalp sheared—right down to the nub, my pale skin rife with ingrown hair and raised scabs—before she got sick.

She cut my hair off with the same knife Dagny uses now, for luck. Luck. I'm why the blade is so blunt, all the hair felled by slow rust-iron.

I swallow. Stack the bowls, stow the brush, stoke the fire. Tuck the sheets into the mattress, bundle Ma into an unstained blanket, stare at the wall.

My mother is a big woman. I inherited all her heft, her height—both our bodies stretch to fill the same space. We had the same thick, broad shoulders and stretched, ridged spines. Even our shadows were the same. But she looks withered now, and old. I kiss the blank, bare center of her forehead. It has a grit to it, a texture, a taste that I remember from countless funerals; cousins and neighbors and babies, all their faces kissed, until the skin stains itself with saliva and sweat all over, until everyone has tasted dead person and knows that it doesn't taste like anything but damp, firm skin.

Market comes twice: the beginning of winter and the beginning of summer. Everyone funnels into the cobblestone yard outside the square and trades. Dried fruit for fur, fur for firewood, firewood for flesh.

I do not need meat, marrow, or matches.

What I need is a cure. An overflow of syringes, pills and porridge, bandages and brownies. Some way to stave off the fever and kill it at last, be it in a vial, a pouch, or a needle. If I did that—if Ma got better, better because of me, then Dagny would have to hang the knife back up on the wall. There'd be someone else to go hunting, someone else to skin the deer and shoot the songbirds out the sky.

The courtyard is as green as it can be in the snow: rosemary, thyme, and yarrow are all tied to the rafters of stalls like dead men. There are less stalls than there were last summer. Fever found the healthiest handymen, the most hopeful housewives. Even babies, Dagny tells me, are dying of it now.

Four stalls remain. Merchant, mason, miller, midwife. Most huddle around the merchant's cart, every hand in the pit of glass bottles and silver bullets. Poultices, potions, and powders line the back wall of the cart, each of them some shade of fuschia or tangerine too bright to be natural.

Dagny brings Ma's medicine home from the merchant's stall: a pouch of ground herb, root, and seed. It's all we can afford—no one sells real medicine for squirrel’s tongue and skunk eyes. There was nothing in the cupboard this morning but bones. No organs, no hides, no intestines. Nothing for me to misappropriate.

All I'll be able to sell today is myself. I need someone who won't balk at a less tangible trade. A promise. A favor. A secret. Anything, as long as it isn't money or meat.

My sole selling point will be desperation—not for Ma, but for the kitchen. If there were food in the floor, water in the well, or chicken in the coop—that would heal her. It isn't just the fever killing Ma. It's the broth. Melted snow and cracked animal bones in a clay bowl. Even I hate it. It's no wonder Dagny doesn't come home; we're too hungry to do anything but talk about the food we want to eat. And the only person as desperate as me is the midwife.

Granma Fray is no true midwife. Dagny tells me so. He heard it from the butcher: all the stillborns she delivers, she eats. All the babies who survive her are stunted—that, he used to say, is why I'll always be bigger than you. I outgrew Dagny last fall.

Granma Fray isn't anyone's grandmother: she's been around so long that her real name died a long, long time ago. Her stall is as old as her—splintering, dilapidated, peeling—wheels stuck so deep in the black mud that ice has formed around each of them.

Unlike the other tradesmen, Granma Fray is inside her cart: within, she is visible through gaps in the wood. A mass of gray, thick hair wraps her like a coat. Fray herself is a woman like an owl: all curved, yellow nails and bright, angry eyes. The hair on her arms is raised high like feathers.

I rap my knuckles against the counter: it is hard and wet like a tooth. Granma Fray spins to greet me. Her mouth is small—smaller than small, it's tiny—and the ripe, red edge of her tongue lolls past her lips, a lofty line of drool. Dagny's wrong: there is no way she could fit a baby inside her.

"Why," she croaks, "a little birdie, roosted at my stall. Show me that sweet face of yours, Wren. You're taller than ever this summer."

"Not as tall as my brother," I say, "or as sweet as you."

"What a little flatterer you are now," Granma Fray cackles. "Who died?"

"No one," I answer. "Not yet."

Granma Fray pinches my cheek. "Don't lie!" Spittle swings from her lower lip. It collects in her collarbone, a pale sapphire. "Someone's always dead. Come inside, birdie. There's snow coming and I've a candle to burn."

The wagon doesn't have windows. Every wall is redder than the reddest ruby, even more scarlet in the dim light. The floor is pink and swollen with sweat. Rivulets of snowmelt run like rainwater onto the sticky white stools scattering the interior. Granma Fray putters around the stall, her arms full of cards and keys and clocks.

"Sit down," Granma Fray rasps, "sit down. I don't bite. Neither do the stools, for that matter. Or the carpet. Choose and sit."

"I don't have time to sit. I need medicine."

Granma Fray lights a candle, the same color as a fawn and about as thick. Dried wax crusts the sides of it. The fire sputters and surges into orange light.

"Sit down," she repeats, and I do. "Who's sick?"

"Ma," I mutter. "It's not too bad. She's caught a cold, really."

Fray smiles at me. Her candle spews, a kettle.

"Wren," she says, "if you're going to lie, lie well. No one likes a bad liar. Not even me."

I glare at the floor, so swollen with snow and rainwater that the wood bulges like a bloated stomach. Granma Fray is wrong. I'm no liar. Liars can't help lying; it's their craft, their calling, their racket. When a liar opens his mouth, all his teeth are gold, all his tongue is silver. My teeth are bone. My tongue is red. I lie when I have to.

"It's a cold," I repeat. "Can you help?"

"No," Granma Fray dangles a hand in the flame, plies the white wick with the tips of her fingertips. "Not that you could afford."

"You don't know that." I inhale the smell of wax and herbs. "I can pay."

"What would you offer me?" A second spit-sapphire spills down Fray's wrinkly chin. "Strawberry jam?"

"Do you want strawberry jam?" Smoke from the candle doesn't taste like smoke: it isn't wax she's burning but tallow, uncooked fat—lard and lather collect in the column of my throat. "I'll make you some."

There is a full necklace of spit across her neck. "No, birdie. I don't want jam." Fray smears the necklace into nothing: wraps her hands around her throat like a choker. "Give me something to grease my palms on, would you? A game, a riddle, a—a wager, even."

"A … wager?" I parrot.

I've never bet on anything before.

Ma used to gamble a few times a month before Pa died. The whole town gathered in our house with dice and decks. Every room was draped in dense clouds of cigar smoke. Pa sponged the stains off the tile and dreck off the walls after the night ended. Dagny pushed the cleaning off on me every time. I didn't mind—it wasn't the cleaning itself that I liked, but the aftermath of a good card game. The last hand splayed on the table, cigars abandoned in the folds of the tablecloth. All Ma's winnings heaped on the windowsill.

When you're old enough, Pa told me, you'll be one hell of a poker player.

Fray knocks on the table, knuckles down. Pa used to do the same thing, to call a round—it sounds like dice hitting a table.

"You gamble?" Fray asks.

"I don't have anything to give."

"That's not true, Wren." Granma Fray smiles. "You can bet anything. I once bet a man the apple of my eye. He's eating it still."

"Did he like the taste of apples that much?" I finger the underside of my stool for splinters. A burrow hides where the joint meets the wood; my thumb catches the edge. She doesn't answer me. I hope the stool stains. "There're crabapples in the yard. I'd give you those."

"Aren't you adorable," Fray coos. "I don't think so."

"You sure?" I bury my thumb into the wood. "Apples are about out of season."

"Like you?" Granma Fray pulls my hand out from beneath the stool. "All grown up, and what've you gotten for it? Cooped up in that henhouse of yours, carving all the death off the walls, serving soup and stupidity and weakness to everybody—it's embarrassing. Animals like you oughta sing, not sulk."

"I'm—I'm not," I splutter. Fray waits. "I'm not stupid." Stupid? Stupid? "You're the stupid one; you, what, you're this old and there's not anyone left to love you? Where's your family? Where's your friends? No one even knows your name! You're just—," I heave a breath. "You're just nothing."

"Nothing?" Fray frowns. "I'm everything, birdie. Every last needle and thread knows me—even you. When a sock is darned, when a shirt is hemmed, when a hole is stitched shut; there I am, there I will be, there I have been, at the fraying of things."

"And I'm the idiot?" I laugh, breathless, hysterical, furious. "You don't make any sense! You know what, if you want a wager so bad, I'll give you one." A skein of smoke unfurls like yarn. "If I find something worth my mother's life, you fix her."

"Find?" Fray's mouth opens. Her eyes shine like Ma's dagger on Dagny's belt, two long jagged stars compressed to the roundness of a pupil. "Oh, birdie.Granma Fray smiles at me. The candle spurts like a broken drain; the back of her throat glows like a star. "Stay safe."

Smoke eats all: the wagon, the world, even the last two women in the stall, but the market continues. Someone empties out the merchant's stall—the last pearls clog the caravan's coffers, white on brown, snow on soil, salt on field. A miller breaks the final loaf of bread out for a tired washerwoman. An old, old midwife closes up shop: she unsticks the wheels from the mud, she unsticks the girl from her stool, lays her to rest in a flock of dead—dying—bluebells, and leaves a lit candle on the child’s chest. The girl dreams of clouds and cement, custard and coronaries. She dreams of a sky gone sick, the blue soured by a crowd of black-winged canaries.

An old midwife sighs: quenches the candle with a flick of the wrist and her own thirst with a stained, steady stream of snowmelt. Somewhere in the forest, deep enough that winter hasn't caught it yet, a young boy jams his gun.

I have ivory feet. So white, so cold. I cannot feel them, even when I pull the soaked velvet of my father's dancing shoes from my heel and tie one to each wrist. Both toes are sod with slush; every shoelace is brittle with ice.

Pa's shoes were the darkest violet when he was still alive. He tied the laces so tight that Dagny cut through the leather with a cleaver to bare Pa's feet before the funeral. I stood watch outside. Leather shuffled on the sharp edge of the metal: shuffled and worked and mewled. Don't be such a baby, Dagny groused, no one should be buried beautiful. Don't you want to sell these? I hadn't, not at all, but the shoes were already buried in the hollow of wood beneath our bed. Dagny covered the velvet with wool and eiderdown.

Later, I would keep Pa's hairbrush there, too.

When Ma saw our father's bare, bruised feet in the coffin, Dagny lied. He said I'd stolen the shoes from our father—that they'd been hawked off to the merchant for an extra roll of ribbon. No one listened to me. I screamed, I cried, I shrieked. Ma still sent me home. I didn't say goodbye to anyone, not even Pa.

I did not go home. I ran away.

It was summertime and it was hot and it was easy. I filled my belly with beetles and berries—baptized hazelnuts in the river and roasted rabbitsfoot over leftover fuel. Dagny started to look for me, after the first month, but he never saw me. When he called my name, I climbed to the top of the tallest trees and catacombed myself with the caterpillars.

The storm made me go home. Wind tore bark off the branches. The rain was so fat and full that I was sure I was going to drown, that the whole ocean had upended and crashed back to flood every piece of land there ever was. The orange flick of Dagny's lantern cast his shadow in a lank spiral.

Wren! he kept saying it – Wren, Wren, Wren, until it wasn't the word he was saying, but another: when, when, when. When would the storm stop, when would the clouds go, when would the thunder quiet?

When, Wren, When.

Dagny said, once, that he only found me because I was crying louder than the lightning. He said he climbed up the tree and saw me shaking and rocking and that there were butterflies on my bald, white head. He said that he had fallen off the tree twice trying to get to the top, that his shirt was plastered to his skin, that he thought he'd never be dry again.

Where were you? Dagny asked me.

He said that I laughed at him—I pushed him out of the tree and laughed so hard at his screaming that I fell out of the tree, too. We were speckled, he said, with mud and soil and manure. Like sparrows. He said that he brought me home but I would not stop laughing. He said he could not get me to eat, sleep, not even bathe.

Not 'till the storm ended, he said, not 'till it was over.

He did give me the shoes. I remember that, I do—later when the fire was dead and he couldn't get away from how I was looking at him. Wild-eyed, he called it. Livid. The velvet was unearthed from the eiderdown and wool with little fanfare. It was too dark for me to see what he was doing. Ma already thinks you stole 'em, he shrugged. It can be true.

Pa's shoes were scraps of dawn. The snow whittled them into wilted orchids.

The forest never looked so thick from the house. Dagny never told me how it tangles, how the thickets and thorns catch clothes like burrs. The roots of trees surge out of the dirt like hands, fingers large enough to picnic on. Mud cakes into sludge, sheltering grass with wet dirt. It's hard to breathe and it's harder to see. Everything about this place tells me not to not inhale. The air is not clean here, just thick. Nothing seems to live here.

When the moon has risen, the woods are loud: bugs, bears, bramble all chirp and creak and chime and call. Even the canaries in Ma's bedroom join in the chorus. It is too quiet now, the wrong sort of quiet, the quiet that comes after a gunshot, when everything cranes toward the gunfire but the shooter, who knows where it came from.

When we were little, Ma always said that the forest isn't quiet until a killer is inside. Coyotes, foxes, falcons—even me, sometimes. Nothing wants to sing when death is near. Dagny never believed her; still doesn't, says he doesn't think it can be, because whenever he goes to the woods, it's so loud he can't escape it, so loud that there's nothing but loud, loud, loud in him and he has to scream.

What does it mean, then, that I am what makes noise here? Breath, heart, feet. Even the sun does not deign to shine—a thatch of large, red leaves blocks out the whole of the sky. Light spills through like flint: the world catches fire and turns mud into ash, bark into burnt wood. I, just a match, waiting to strike.

Granma Fray told me to hunt: I will. Find her something worth Ma's life—I've squashed enough ladybugs to know lives aren't worth as much as we think. We're worth what kills us. A bite, a bullet, a bruise, a burden.

Pa wasn't worth much more than a shovel. Neither is Ma. Neither is Dagny. Neither am I. The slippers hang limp around my wrist. I fumble the candle, imagine it lit. Imagine what I could find, here, if I spent enough time looking—butterflies, bumblebees, birds.

"Wren?"

Dagny is in a tree: up, up, up, up—his shirt wet and white with loose threads on the hem and Ma's knife in his left hand, the blade long and shining.

"I didn't see you," I say. "What are you doing up there?"

Dagny's face goes red.

"Scouting," he mumbles. "Aren't you meant to be home with Ma?"

"Oh, well," I stammer. I can't tell Dagny about the wager. He'd be furious, and he'd drag me home, and he'd hold it over my head for the rest of our lives. "To find you!"

He raises an eyebrow. I climb up the tree and sit next to him.

"It's nearly dinnertime, you know? I wanted to make sure you ate something. We have roots in the garden, so much bone broth, and a lot of—cider! Unopened. It's all in the icebox."

Dagny wrinkles his nose. "Ew," he says. "I hate roots. I'll find something out here."

"You hate roots? I forgot. Silly me," I lie. "You killed anything yet?"

"Of course you forgot," Dagny mutters. He runs a hand through his hair and down his face. "I found a few dead blackbirds. A fox was eating 'em, but I scared it off with the gun."

"Why didn't you shoot it?" I ask.

He flinches. Dagny's big on flinching: every crow, creak, and clammer stiffens his spine, straightens his shoulders. He looks to the sky, still obscured with autumn leaves, and sighs. The forest is so red, it dulls out the doe-black of his eyes. We sit in the quiet. His skin seems even more pallid for how vibrant everything is, his hair even greasier, his teeth even grayer.

"Put your shoes back on," he tells me. "You'll freeze your feet."

"When they're dry," I promise. "It's not too cold in the woods."

"All right." Dagny knocks my shoulder. "You oughta go home; Ma needs you."

"Fine. Go get that fox for us, 'kay?" I tease. Dagny grimaces. He's still staring at the sky—thick brown branches cage us in. A pale, pronounced spot of blue peeks through the leaves, tinged white at the edges.

The river is full of castaways. Salmon, mud, and seed all drift in the water, each blank-eyed and belly-up. It is not a fast stream, but a slow one: water sludges past the riverbed, sparrow-steady. There has to be something to find here: no tallow candle or velvet slipper is worth a life.

The forest grows the deeper I go—really, grows—with long, curved trees heavy with apples creeping with fruit flies and red, red skin. Gouts of sap bleed from the branches and pool in the mud, sticky circles of yellow that pull at the soles of my slippers.

Nothing's here. Nothing but birds and fish and brothers: no golden apple, no unicorn horn, no ivory tree, naught but orange and red and yellow and a rotting, full river. If we're worth shovels, where are they? Where are they hiding?

Granma Fray's candle lights, leaks smoke like a faucet. It burns, burns, burns, burns, wick never lowering, wax never dripping down. It smells not like fat or lard but honey, fresh honey, the sort found in the untapped throat of a beehive or a lush, long line of honeysuckles.

I shift the candle from one hand to another, look at it. I've never seen a candle light itself, but here one is—a wick wrought of raw ember, hotter than a bonfire, brighter than a lantern. Smoke, even more of it, so much of it, too much. Not white like it was in the pushcart, or gray like it's meant to be, but brown.

It seethes. I let it loose, watch the wick re-emerge, watch the smoke wander back into the sky. Ma used to say clouds were all made of smoke, that every fire in the world collects together to remind us how long we've been alive. If that's true, we ought to set less fires, 'cause if we don't, then soon the whole sky will be full of smoke and we'll never see the stars again. A sharp, loud bang echoes from behind me: a shrill, high whine follows it, so harsh, so loud, so howling, so inhuman it must be a coyote or a fox, something animal and afraid.

I turn around—blow out the candlewick.

I find it a few yards past the river. A badgered, bleeding body. Like the apples in the trees—the skin is punctured and swollen. Dagny's shotgun is abandoned in the mud nearby. A row of large, vicious bite marks mar the barrel. I step toward the body.

It doesn't look like an animal I've seen before, but it's big.

Big and red, so red that if the soil wasn't so dark and wet, I'd assume it were another pile of leaves. It must have bit the front of Dagny's gun before he shot it—or stabbed it? Neither seems right: a rough, fist-sized hole is in the center of the animal's skull where the snout should be. Bullets aren't big enough to make a hole like that.

It's not small enough to be a fox. Dagny must have been in the middle of skinning it before he wandered off. Stupid, not to take the gun with him, but at least he's got the knife. I kneel down, dip my index finger into warm, wet blood. There's so much blood: more than there should be, more than there can be. I drag a hand down the hide, pause at the left paw.

The animal is holding something. I unfurl torn, ripped-up fingers—half-eaten, some of them, half-gone—and see a leather-handled knife. Silver-shine, rust-eaten, blood-covered. The innard of a wrist with the vein torn out, pale, unfurred skin limp and still hot.

The hole, where the snout—his nose, his mouth, his chin—should be, is pink. Pink: Dagny hates pink, he's always hated pink, it's his least favorite. He doesn't even think it's real, he always called it light red just to bother me. The hole is pink and lurid, dark black-red, muscle and bone obvious inside of it, like a nest full of eggs.

The eyes, above it, are blown wide: brown and dull as a doe.

Granma Fray's candle is a poor headstone. I surround it with leaves and mud, beg the wick to light. It does not. There is no wind beneath the dirt, there is nothing but mud to soothe his skin, leaves to fill the center of his skull. I light the wick myself with the flat, pointed edge of a dry stone. The candle burns and burns; it will billow him a smoke-song, blot out the stars someday.

I walk and walk and walk. The forest isn't quiet anymore: birds sing, water rushes, and the candle is gone. My hand finds the lip of my belt and I feel it: slick, sharp, staining. Ma's knife, thick with blood. I hilt my hand on the handle, tight as I can.

The house is warm with yellow light. I didn't close the door when I left and it swings, back and forth, with the wind. The soles of my feet are deskinned, full of pine needles, acorns, mud and blood. Dead cicadas and crickets clutter the slats of the porch like moss.

Within, a half-full mug of tea.

Even from the door, I smell sugar and honey, apple butter dissolved into chamomile. Chairs circle the kitchen table, teeth: some yellow, some white, some missing, some there. I sprawl across the floor and palm my knees, Dagny smeared across both of them. He fits over me like an envelope.

I wait to scream: to shout, to seize, to snivel. My mouth will not open, dead and gone, red peeled back to reveal a dormant silver sheet. I rub me into gold, ripen the hair into a bloated, unjuiced peach. The canaries in Ma's room croon: it is a lilting song, a shoe-shined syllabic tune, horrible, horrible, horrible. I hope all the birds catch fever and die.

Their beaks peck a hole through the attic floor and they chimney through—a flute of gold, not metallic, but gold like cornflowers and ladybugs. It is a gold that moves, molts, and soars. Ma's room is exactly how I remember it: everything a statue, all stone-still and hanging. Fever frames the attic like a portrait. Ma's bed is quilted with blankets and bracken; pillows line the rail like headstones, gray knobs of eiderdown. The hole in the floor is surrounded by feathers, petal-soft, yellow-bright.

Her bed is empty. I stare at the divot in the blanket, the indent of sweat Ma laid.

I hear before I see: my mother sits in a wooden chair by the closet, her hands clasped around a bowl of cold bone soup. She draws it direct to her mouth, no spoon, no napkin, only her undulating throat and rivulets of broth leaking from the corners of her lips.

A cornmelt coronet clings to her brow.

"Wren." Ma puts down the bowl. "You grew out your hair."

"You're awake?" I fumble the knife. Rust flakes from it, dead skin.

"Oh." She pauses. "I just am. I don't think there's a reason for it."

There is: smoke, candles, unburnt trees. Dagny.

Me, too, somehow. One hell of a poker player.

"Where's your brother?" Ma asks. "The woods?"

"No," I answer—it's not a lie, it's not. Dagny's not in the forest. He's on my dress.

"Mmm," Ma nods. "We oughta cut your hair soon."

The knife gleams. I looked stupid bald: red fuzz on my scalp, nicks from the shave plugged with cotton. Dagny didn't cut his hair. It fell to his shoulders, loose but for ribbons he let me knot into the strands. I could apologize; no one but me would ever know why. The knife, on the floor, is sharp enough for hair—I could cut the curl from me, I could strip my skin, hang it in the closet and be bones forever.

"Bathe," Ma tuts. "You're filthy."

"I'll wash up. Sorry."

It's too late for snow and too early for stars.

Twilight nets the sun, everything blue and lavender. The moon bulges from the gloom like an eye, and all her craters gleam like unmelted snow. If I cut myself with Ma's knife, would I bleed soil? Would Dagny's blood fertilize it, sprout a sapphire off the vine?

It's my fault. I am an idiot—now I know this, more than I know all else. If I find something worth my mother's life, you fix her, I said. Idiot, idiot, idiot. Worth—worth? What was worth it? What could ever be worth it? If it was the knife, it wouldn’t be with me now. If it were the shoes, I would have left them with her then. Dagny and Ma weren’t meant to rest. None of us were. We were meant to have a bonfire, and Ma could’ve left for another room while Dagny and me crept onto the roof to watch the forest like we did as kids. He used to tell me unicorns hid in the hollows of snowflakes, that their hides were what made snow so soft. A unicorn would not have been worth Ma’s life, much less his.

I had thought to find a rack of candied apples, a bottle of wine, some thousand six leaf clovers, and leave it at Fray’s door. If she’d bid it, I would have swallowed them, would have held the treasures beneath my heart until I calcified into a diamond. I would have combed a meadow for clovers until my eyes rotted out my head, until my fingers fell off the bone, until all of me was dead and gone and drifting. All that, I could have tucked in my apron and pardon. But not Dagny. Deader than dead, when I found him, deader than anything: plump with it, flesh distended, face stolen, too dead for even the flies to land on him.

I have to take him home.

The forest is not a fire at night. Red becomes brown, brown becomes black. The path is blue and blank—no longer a match, I am a hose. Rain issues from every pore; a stream of sweat waters each and every flower. Owls and wolves stalk: all hoot and howl, snarl and slather, hunt and sniff. Thorns tear not my clothes but my hair, snarls of brown hung from the thicket like snares. All the blade of Ma's knife can capture this late is absence: the whole of the wood is dark and deep, unfurling. The river fruits for the moon, not the sun. Water swells with bubbles, foam, and fish. Trout flash gray-green scales in the frothing, white water.

A row of tire-tracks indents the leaves, digs into the mud. Smoke trails from a nearby wreckage. Granma Fray's stall is abandoned at the mouth of the river. Water rushes the opened door, drowns the interior with rocks and fish. Bleached algae floats across the brook like a flag. I haul the wood from the water, heave the hull from the gutter: it's a lighter load than I thought it'd be. Every chair, every clock and card, all curios and collections and tallow candle careens from the caravan and into the river. A yellow-bellied grayfish floats to the surface, eyes sightless and deadened in the socket.

The river unsticks most of Dagny from me: the cleanliness is wrong. I should be dirty. I should be red-kneed and red-handed, all of me stained wrong and bloody, all of me a memorial for him.

I hear it: a hiss, a murmur. Wren, Wren, Wren.

"Dagny?"

But the fish do not answer me. Ma's knife is tight in fist, blunt and broken. I know the boy who steps from the trees. Brown-eyed, long-haired, baby-faced. He holds a candle—my candle—housed in a lantern with his right hand. Fire blossoms from the wax to cast a shadow on the corners of the thicket, dancing in the night. Dagny shifts his posture from heel to heel, shimmies in stasis, like his feet need to move. Smoke pours out of the candle like a nosebleed, like a kettle, like an eye.

"You're dead." I clutch the knife.

Wren. His teeth flare white as driven snow. Dinner's on the stove. Got lamb tonight. It's your favorite.

"That's a bad idea, Dag."

Why? Even his voice is the same. Even his mannerisms, the way he fiddles with the handle of the lantern, how he cocks his head like a lark. C'mon. I miss you.

"Stop," I tell him. "Just stop."

The lantern burns blue. His smile has not wavered. Dagny's shirt is white, unstained cotton: no sweat, no mud, no blood. Every candle burns. He is clean as dishes, sardine-blue from the lantern light. His boots are new and unworn, the leather uncracked and laces untied.

"Not these." I gesture at Fray's unlit candles, bobbing in the water. "They're too wet."

Dagny stares at me. He never stared at anything before; he never looked anywhere longer than a moment. Even me—Dagny couldn't have said what my eye color was and he never knew when my birthday was so every year he would guess a different month. By the time I was thirteen, none of us were sure if I had been born in spring or summer.

Wren. He frowns. His fingertips brush against the cotton of his shirt. Red leaks through in nosebleed increments: watermelon red, radish red, bright, bright red. He bleeds and bleeds and bleeds, no clots, no run-out, just maroon. What's happening?

"You're bleeding," I tell him.

I don't get it. Smoke and saliva spill from Dagny's mouth. His teeth whiten into sapphire-shards, saliva spills off his tongue. The outline of his skull becomes white and obvious, and all I can think is that someone has filled his skeleton with stars. Wren, don't leave. Dagny stumbles forward, hands pressed to his chest. It hurts. I don't answer. His eyes catch mine, wide and frantic. C'mere, please, I can't, I can't.

"I want to. I don't think I've ever gone a day without wondering where you are."

Wren?

"I'll come down soon," I lie. "Okay?"

When? Wren?