Time crawled when you were invisible, when your days werespent talking to yourself and watching others live their bestandworst lives.
When I uttered a word it vanished into the ether, never to find the ears of anyone. The only time I ever felt heard was when I walked the woods at night.
I still feltherwatching me, listening to my pleas volleying through the forest—that witch who took glee in my misery, in the spell she cast on me.
Not a day passed without sensing her shadow over me, without feeling a buzzing energy around me, but I felt her most keenly in the winter, on those cold, cold nights when the moon was at its zenith high overhead, like the night she first cursed me, and I suspected she had some affinity for that time of year.
In the short-lived days of summer, like now, I felt her less.
My steps crunched over the road, rutted by horses and carriage wheels alike. Linnea lived on the opposite side of the village. The quickest route was the most direct way through town.
The sun was out. Clouds absent from a sky so blue it almost hurt the eyes. For once, fog didn’t choke the atmosphere.
Passing down High Street, I lifted a plum off a vendor’s wagon—not even glancing to verify that another one, identical, the same in every way, color, and structure, remained, still sitting among the bounty of fruit. I knew it would be there.
The chatter of villagers surrounded me as I walked, biting into the fruit, plum juice running down my chin unchecked. Fresh produce like this would be impossible to enjoy a month from now. Soon we would only have pickled vegetables and potted fruit and copious amounts of brined cabbage and turnips to eat alongside our salted fish and meats.
I strolled with a clear destination in mind. Visiting Linnea gave me something to fill the chasm that was my life. It took the edge off the ache...and helped me pass the time when time was all I had.
I entered Linnea’s house just as her husband was readying to leave. The blast of screeching children was a welcome sound after the silence of my house.
“Morning, Isak,” I greeted as I strolled past him.
He stared fixedly ahead, his whiskery jaw working as he swallowed the last bit of his breakfast.
His tannery shop sat strategically downwind of the house, but that didn’t spare Linnea or the children from its noxious fumes. Isak himself bore the stink of his profession, wearing it like a second skin even though he bathed each night (winter months, too).
I much admired him for the consideration. Many men did not perform such a courtesy for their wives, and it spoke to his thoughtful nature. Even so, the aroma of decaying animal flesh, dung, and urine clung to him. I held my breath until he was clear of me and down the path.
Only a year older than Linnea, he possessed wavy dark hair and craggy features that only grew more handsome with age, the hard lines and edges giving his face more structure and angles. The round-faced lad who once chased us around the village was long gone.
Still, good looks or not, it was difficult to abide his odor. Linnea, evidently, did not mind. She married him and continued to share a bed with him.
Of course, the village did not boast a plethora of eligible prospects—then and now. Allowances had to be made if a girl wished to marry. Isak had certainly been at the top of the list. Good looks. A dependable livelihood. I wondered if I had not fallen prey to my fate...would I have chosen him?
Wouldhehave chosenme?
After my disappearance, he chased only Linnea around the schoolyard, when once it had been the both of us. Well, to be fair, Linnea did not spend a great deal of time frolicking and running through the schoolyard after the night of my presumed death. A part of her vanished, too, alongside me, the vestiges of childhood ending that night for the both of us. She quietly sank into her sorrow, subdued, no one aware (save me) that she cried herself to sleep routinely.
I would drift into her room many a night and slide into bed beside her, rolling onto my back so that we rested shoulder to shoulder, grateful that she loved and missed me even as I tried to impart what comfort I could with my phantomlike presence.
Time has a way of dimming the pain though.
Eventually, she turned from her sorrow.
Turned to Isak. Embracedhiminstead of tears, and I was happy for her...even as I was jealous.
Jealous that her grief found relief.
Jealous that she still had a life—that shelivedwhile I was an empty husk.
That was when I learned that two different things could exist inside the same space. It was possible to feel two conflicting things.
Life was like that. A conflicted, complicated, tangled jumble where hot and cold, hard and soft, love and hate could thrive hand in hand.
Linnea and Isak grew from friends into...more. Into a couple that would slip behind the schoolhouse for stolen kisses and then, eventually, groping hands under clothes and panting breaths and Linnea moaning as Isak spent himself against her skirts, cursing, “I’ll die if I can’t properly fuck you soon.”
All the things I could not have.
