Their face was already screwed up in its familiar sour lemon pucker, tightening further at her words. “Be that as it may, your mother thinks one or two of her boxes may have been moved into your little shack here. I’m just going to check for —“
They made a move to step through the doorway, but Harper refused to budge, blocking entry to her new home.Not today, Satan. Not today.“They didn’t. I’ve already gone through all the boxes the movers brought in and sorted them into the right rooms. They’re all mine.”
“I think I’d feel better checking for myself. No offense, darling, but you’re not exactly known for your thorough workmanship.”
“I said I’ve already checked through the boxes.” Her voice was sharp, her feet planted firmly.They’re going to need to knock you down and force their way in. She would double-check as soon as Ilea had left, but there was no way she was allowing the familiar into her home. They would taint it with their very presence.
The cat had resented and despised her from the moment she’d been born. Ilea had been with her mother since she was a teen, a status symbol in the world of hereditary witchcraft. Taking the shape of a fluffy, silver point persian cat, they hovered at her mother’s side in the dozen framed photos that adorned the sitting room wall in her grandmother’s house. Ilea had gone with her to school, to the Collegium, moving away from Cambric Creek after she met and married Harper’s father, himself the son of a witch. Fully entrenched and completely comfortable . . . until Harper was born.
Harper didn’t know the specifics. Only that Ilea fast depleted their welcome, once Harper had arrived, a squalling bundle who came between witch and familiar. Ilea had pressured her mother, encouraging her to turn her attention away from her newborn daughter, back to her craft, until Harper’s father had put his foot down, deciding his leniency for the cat in their home had reached its end. Ilea had returned to Harper’s grandmother’s house, being given a choice to either wait out infancy or return to the Coalition of Magical Imps for a new placement.And they’ve hated you for it ever since.
Ilea and her mother had fallen into a pattern of long-distance study and assistance once Harper was a toddler, coming to stay with them for two-week stretches of time every few months, stretches that gradually lengthened, a pattern that lasted seven long years until Morgan was born, sealing the cat out of their house for good.Until now.Harper had always been the target of their ire, as if she had collaborated with mystic forces in the womb to force Ilea from their home and her mother’s side.
“If it turns out I’m wrong, I’ll bring it over later. And if my mother needs something right this second, she can come over and get it herself.”What are you doing sniffing around my doorway, anyway?
Ilea snickered as they turned from the doorway after stiffening for the space of a heartbeat. “If. Harper,“ they drawled her name in a mocking manner, clicking their tongue. “Sweetie, we all know there’s no if about it.Ifyou’re wrong.”
Her insides clenched against whatever venomous words were about to come dripping off the cat’s barbed tongue. Rationally, she knew she shouldn’t take anything Ilea said to heart, but rationality was in short supply these days, and the lizard who lurked in the back of her brain loved latching on any and all outside negativity, feeding it to the black hole in her chest.
“Failing at things is practically second nature for you now, sugarplum. You being wrong is a given.”
She watched them saunter back up the gravel drive, an echoing gong seeming to come from the empty place inside of her. She knew Ilea was hateful and cruel . . . But that didn’t mean they were wrong. A hateful truth wasn’t any less true.Fucking Ilea.
She stepped back into her little cottage after locking the door behind her, surveying the mess in the kitchen with fresh, wearier eyes.You don’t need a shelf. You need to get rid of all this stuff. You haven’t cooked a real meal in almost a year. You don’t need to make room for another abandoned hobby. You need to sell this shit at whatever secondhand store will take it because, oh yeah, you flunked out of school, and you don’t have a job.
The chastisement came out of nowhere, and Harper sagged, defeated. The voice in her head had grown steadily louder over the course of the year, the most wretched year of her life, drowning out her other thoughts until she wasn’t sure where it ended, and she began.
In any case, she thought heavily, it was probably right. Cooking had been fun once, but the thought of going through the motions, the work of putting together a meal for one, left her exhausted.For that matter, you can probably get rid of most of this crap. Abandoned hobbies, projects you started and never finished, a waste of space. Why bother unpacking it? As a reminder that you’re incapable of finishing something you start? Are these your emotional support crochet supplies? You’ve never even finished a scarf.
The cottage windows did not yet possess any curtains, and she was forced to turn the loveseat around, its back facing the front door, leaving her free to curl up invisibly. There were only two times when the voice could not reach her — when she was lost in a book and when she was asleep. Her books were still packed away, and her enthusiasm for turning the cozy space into a real home had vanished.
It was self-care to sleep when she was tired, she told herself, tucking her knees to her chest as she lay against the loveseat’s cushions. She was exhausted and heavy and tired offeeling, and escaping the voice in her head seemed more important than unpacking the boxes of evidence of herimperfectionjust then. Closing her eyes, Harper let the world fall away until her conscious mind was silenced at last.
Shehadn’trealized,atleast not until that past year, that there was a right way to grieve.
Grief, Harper had always assumed, was a personal thing. That the crushing agony of loss lessened with time, as everyone claimed it did — that she would be overwhelmed with sadness until the day she simply wasn’t. Most importantly, everyone around her would either be feeling similarly or, at the very least, understanding and patient.
The past year and a half had been instructional in showing her just how mistaken she was. There was, she had learned, in fact, a wrong way to grieve. There was good grief, and there was bad grief, and it was likely a surprise to absolutely no one that she had somehow gotten tangled up in the latter.
Good grief was pretty and sympathetic, organized and pragmatic, and most importantly, it was finite. Good grief was her mother’s brave face at the funeral, poised and somber in her black sheath dress and dark glasses, graciously welcoming the endless line of people who had come to pay their respects. It was the way her mother and Ilea had descended upon the closet in the master bedroom a month later to strip half of it bare, filling bags for the donation pile, and then again when they had downsized the furniture as the one-year anniversary loomed, preparations made to sell the house Harper and her sister had grown up in, where her father’s memory lived in every room, lingered in every doorway and corner, where she was positive she was still able to hear the echo of his laughter across the kitchen.
It was just a house, her mother had said.Too much space with the girls leaving the nest. Too much property to look after on your own. You have enough on your plate. Best to downsize, think of the future. Extended family and well-wishers were quick to agree that the house was merely a house.
It was just a house, Harper had agreed in a stupor — just a wooden box, no different from any of the other wooden boxes on the tree-lined street, if they were all stripped down to their studs. The tree-lined street where she and her sister had learned to ride bikes, where she’d taken the first photograph she’d ever entered into a contest — the full moon ringed in a crimson halo through the sparsely-leaved branches of the ancient oak tree in the front yard. And it wasn’t even a house she had lived in for several years, despite still having a bedroom full of belongings there. Belongings and memories in the wood smoke smell of the forge drifting upwards to the house every afternoon, the comforting smell of her father andhome.
It was just a house, she had reminded herself the first time she’d walked into it to find it empty, not a stick of furniture left. Every little sound echoed noisily across the hardwood floors in the empty rooms, drowning out the echo of memories and laughter and happiness.It was just a houseas she pulled away from it for the last time.
Bad grief was driving from the empty house that was no longer their home straight to the liquor store. She’d wound up at the playground where she and her sister had played every afternoon as children, where their father had pulled them in the wagon until she was too big, and then she walked beside him, leaving Morgan in the wagon with her doll.
She’d sat at the top of the monkey bars — the same ones she’d fallen off when she was ten, splitting open her lip, the same ones her father had lifted her back onto just a few weeks after her fall, encouraging her not to be afraid to try again — polishing off the bottle she’d purchased, her shoulders shaking with the force of her sobs. She had screamed like a feral animal, like the banshees from whom they were descended until her throat was hoarse and her bottle empty.
Bad grief was waking in the middle of the night in the bed of a stranger, with no idea who he was or how she’d wound up there. She would collect her tights from the floor, when she could find them, a swift look in the nearest mirror showing her the reflection of a gaunt wraith, smeared black eyeliner and mascara melting into the deep shadows beneath her red-rimmed eyes, giving her a raccoon-like appearance, and she would turn away, frightened by the dead-eyed foreigner in the mirror.
Bad grief was missing lectures and labs, several days’ worth of missed classes a week. Absences followed by unfocused apathy when she did manage to be present as if her meat suit had navigated its way across the Collegium’s campus, but her consciousness was still cocooned in bed, unable to find the will or energy to rouse itself.
A witch’s education was different from the standard university experience. She’d acquired a fine arts degree at the neighboring state school, attending classes at the Collegium several days a week throughout undergrad for core competencies, but her formal education in witchcraft did not truly begin until her undergraduate studies were complete. A gap year or two, either traveling or working and then choosing the specialty to which she would devote herself and her craft, not becoming a fully accredited member of the coven for at least another decade, once she’d proven herself adept in her field.
That she’d spent her gap year burying the only parent who’d ever understood her seemed inconsequential to the planned schedule of events.
