The Heartless

The next day found us in the next town over, a small farming village full of stout cottages and open pastures. Petra briefly suggested we snag a few vegetables from whichever farmer’s harvest looked the most plentiful, an idea I promptly shot down with a reminder that we don’t steal. She was not deterred, however, and I caught her more than once snatching a handful of berries or an almost-ripe cucumber out of some poor family’s garden.

On one such occasion, I caught her literally red-handed plucking raspberries off of a row of scraggly bushes behind a small cottage overgrown with vines snaking up the walls around a weather-worn wooden back door.

“Petra, how many times do I have to tell you to stop?” I scolded. “Every time I turn around you’re at it again. I thought we agreed before we left home that we weren’t here to steal.”

Petra stood up from her squatting position between the rows of bushes, dropping a handful of berries into her bag. “How many times do I have to tell you that I have done this a hundred times and have never been caught?” she retorted.

“You have been caught, Petra. Need I remind you yet again that I saved your life?”

“You and I both know that had very little to do with the food.” Petra stared at me incredulously, challenging me to argue further.

I took the bait. “Okay, fine, but that doesn’t change the fact that this food belongs to someone else.”

“Does it, Ace? Look around you!” Petra gestured broadly around us, at the overgrown house and untended garden rows full of weeds that came up past our ankles. To our right stood a run-down stable that looked like it hadn’t seen use in a very long time. I was beginning to consider the possibility that Petra was actually right when the back door clattered and a woman’s voice rang out over the garden.

“Do I know you two kids?” the voice asked, its owner scurrying through the garden towards us, holding a baby of no more than several months at her hip.

Serves me right, I thought, frozen in place at the woman’s approach like a deer at the sound of an arrow being unsheathed. Petra quickly hid her hands behind her back and kicked me lightly in the shin as if to say, be normal in front of this woman or I will leave you here and never come back.

“Sorry, ma’am,” I apologized when the woman stopped several feet from us, her free hand placed on her other hip. “My… sister doesn’t have any manners.”

At that, Petra kicked me again, this time not so lightly, though the motion was obscured from the woman’s view by the row of untrimmed bushes between us. I stifled a wince at the pain and shook my ankle discreetly, ignoring the odd look the woman gave me and every instinct in my bones telling me to run.

“Sorry, ma’am,” Petra echoed softly, sheepishly presenting her overflowing hands to the woman, and I bristled internally at how polite her tone was when she had kicked me moments before.

“Keep them,” the woman urged, to Petra’s quiet surprise. Then she examined our ratty clothing and, turning to me, she asked, “Are you both orphans?”

More or less, I thought. “Yes, ma’am,” I said aloud. “We’re on the road.”

The woman seemed to mull it over for a minute, rolling the idea around on her tongue for a while before she proposed, “Why don’t you help me clean up this place a bit? I’ve been so busy with the baby, lately, and there’s no one else here to help me. I can’t pay you, but I can give you some food and a place to sleep. I don’t have any spare beds, but I do have the stable. It’s been empty for quite some time, but there’s still plenty of hay to sleep on, and I may have some extra blankets.”

I had an excuse that I had been preparing the entire time she was speaking ready on the tip of my tongue when Petra broke in with a resounding, “We’d be honored, ma’am, thank you so much!” that gave me no room to protest.

“Wonderful! Let me put the baby down to sleep and then I’ll show you where the tools are.” The woman shifted the baby’s position on her hip and turned to go back inside. She called back over her shoulder, “My name is Esther, by the way!”

“I’m Petra, and my brother here is Ace!” Petra called in reply. Esther smiled wide and entered the house. When the door shut behind her, Petra turned on her heels and fixed me with her most exasperated expression.

“Why did you say yes? We could be caught!” I hissed before she had a chance to open her mouth.

“Caught doing what?” Petra shot back. “She already caught me stealing and is still choosing to be kind to us!”

I lowered my voice. “What if she figures out what we are?”

Petra narrowed her eyes at me. “How is that you’re the one who has lived on the outside and yet you’re more worried than me?”

“Because you need to learn that the more you press your luck, the closer you get to someone finding out the truth, and that never ends well.”

“You need to learn that not everyone is out to get you all the time. It’s not like you’re walking around with a big sign over your head that says, ‘Hey, look, I don’t have a pulse!’ If anything, acting like a paranoid weirdo all the time is what’s going to put a target on your back!”

I was going to argue further, but Esther returned then, carrying several baskets not unlike those we’d seen at the market the day before. She set them down amongst the raspberry bushes and gestured to a battered wooden bin by the back door.

“There should be some garden tools that my husband left behind over there,” she explained. “But let’s say we start by picking these berries before the animals get to them, and then next week one of the neighbors can take them to the market. That sound good? You can eat as many as you’d like—Well, not too many. I’m going to make some beans for supper.”

That seemed like an amicable enough arrangement, so I agreed, and Petra and I set to work while Esther went back inside to check on her sleeping child. We spent the rest of the afternoon filling basket after basket with the garden’s best raspberries, and taking breaks to lie back in the sun-baked dirt whenever Esther would come outside with something for us to drink or another story she wanted to tell.

When the blazing sun had just begun to dip below the horizon, Esther poked her head out the back door and called, “Supper is almost ready. Would you kids like to come inside to wash up?”

The prospect of “inside” felt daunting to me. Crossing the threshold into this strange woman’s home felt like overstepping some unspoken boundary, one that existed only in my own head to separate the relative safety of emotional distance from the dangers of familiarity. Out in the garden or in the forgotten stable, I could be merely a passing stranger. Entering the house, even if only for a few moments, felt like encroaching on something intimate and personal. Nevertheless, I trailed behind Petra into the tiny cottage, leaving my anxious thoughts in my wake.

The back door led into Esther’s small but lively kitchen. The windowsill was lined with tiny potted herbs, and in the corner stood a faded wooden table surrounded by three chairs to match. At its center sat a vase of striped carnations that made the whole house smell vaguely sweet. The walls were adorned with old portraits and photos of children and happy families, many with Esther and a man I assumed to be her husband. Esther stirred an old pot on the stove, the wood crackling softly as it slowly burned itself out. The baby could be heard cooing somewhere in a different room.

We ate our beans by the light of a small lantern out behind the house where it was cooler, out of small wooden bowls with delicate silver spoons that had clearly seen years of use but still managed to shine in the last fading sliver of sunlight.

Esther was a lot like that herself. She was a kind woman, soft around the edges, but she carried herself with the self-assured air of a person who knew she only had herself to count on. As the moon rose above the trees to replace the blistering sun, she told us about her life, as the baby slept in her arms. I learned that Esther’s husband had vanished on her about a year ago, leaving her to tend to their small farm by herself. She had been pregnant at the time and unable to work, and as time went by she was forced to sell what few animals they had and most of their equipment, leaving behind only what we saw before us. Since then, the farm had fallen into disrepair, and while it seemed clear to me that Esther’s neighbors were supporting her, I knew all too well the feeling that it simply was not enough.

“It gets a little lonely sometimes, with just me and the baby here,” Esther confessed. Then she smiled. “You two are welcome to stay here as long as you’d like. I welcome the help, and the company.”

I glanced down at my side, where Petra had already dozed off in the grass, before looking back at Esther and saying, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

I swallowed hard and averted my gaze out over the rows of raspberry bushes, the question laying heavy on my tongue. “What do you think it means to be alive?”

Esther hummed. “I think that would be different for every person. But to me, the point is to be happy, and to be a good person. Nothing more.”

I nodded. For the briefest of moments, I thought about telling Esther the truth. But the fear of being rejected, or worse, quickly swallowed that idea whole, and just as quickly as the thought had arrived, it was as if it had never existed.

The baby blinked back into wakefulness and stuck out a chubby arm towards me. Unthinking, I reached forward, and the baby pressed its tiny hand against my palm. The contact elicited a soft inhale, but I was left breathless. Esther merely chuckled. This baby, this precious child, knew nothing of curses or of what unexplained evils my calloused palms might hold. To them, we were one in the same, two pieces of the same star, floating under the same sky. I could never be sure if it were true, but that night, I had never been more certain of it.

After supper that night, Basil and I sat in the tall grass behind his house, waiting for the fireflies to emerge as night fell over the village and the woods just beyond the yard. The summer heat was fading slowly into the gentle warmth of night, but I could not sit still.

“Stop fidgeting or the fireflies will get scared away,” Basil urged in a whisper.

I hesitated, twiddling my thumbs in my lap. “Basil, do you think that story Marcus was telling us is true?”

My best friend tensed momentarily. “About the curse? Why do you ask?” His voice was uncharacteristically flat, as though he were trying to keep it from wavering.

I shrugged in response.

“Well, I mean, I don’t think it matters if it’s true.”

“Maybe.” I paused. “M-Maybe we can go ask your parents if they’ve heard of it before.” I pushed up from the ground to walk back to the house.

“Don’t!” Basil’s hand quickly reached out and grabbed my wrist, sending me falling back to the ground. The fireflies rose from the grass and scattered.

Horrified at the contact, I tried to pull my arm away, but Basil had a vice grip on it. “W-Why not?” I yelped.

“Because if you tell them about it, they might send me away!” he blurted. We stared at each other in shock; Basil didn’t move, but a certain desperation had suddenly filled his eyes. A single brave firefly landed on the hand around my wrist, glowing against his skin, but still he did not move. As realization replaced desperation Basil slowly released his grip at last and quickly averted his eyes toward the dirt. (I wondered if he had noticed I had no pulse.) After a moment’s hesitation I reached a cautious, shaky hand out toward him, but he flinched and pulled away. Instead, I grabbed his hand and pressed his palm against my chest, ignoring the ingrained urge to flee that began to buzz beneath my skin. Basil tugged for a moment, until I felt his hand go still and saw the panic in his eyes settle into calm confusion; when I let go, he brought his hand to his face and stared at it in disbelief. Basil’s expression evolved quickly from shock to awe to relief, and when he tackled me to the ground in a hug, I released a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding, and I cried at the feeling of being understood for the very first time.