Jesse Weiner

Graveyard Offerings

 

 

She learned the truth beside her grandfather’s deathbed.

 

It was early January. The winter was harder than most, want hollowing the cheeks of rich and poor alike. The shelves of the larder were filled with more cobwebs than jars, forcing Katia to hunt for whatever scraps the barren landscape had to offer; the rare cache of acorns hidden beneath the layers of ice and snow, the frozen bodies of hare or ground squirrels. She counted down the days until the first spring thaw and crossed her fingers.

 

Whenever Katia ventured out, the townspeople spat on the ground. “Changeling,” they’d murmur as she passed. “Wicked! Unnatural!” Katia had never fit in, but she didn’t understand why they blamed her for their misfortune. “I’m hungry, too!” she wanted to say. “I’m just as cold!” But she could never seem to find her voice when their eyes stared daggers at her heart. First the merchant’s daughters stopped making small talk, and then tanner’s boy stopped calling. Since her grandfather had fallen ill, Katia’s isolation had only gotten worse.

 

The air inside their little cabin was stale, thick with the scent of wood smoke and body odor. Katia had just stepped outside to sip at the wind when her grandfather called out in a panic. She rushed inside, crossing the small living room to his bedchamber.

 

“Katia!” He cried, his gnarled hands clutching at the covers, eyes rolling about in his head like clouded marbles. “Katia!”

 

“Shh, Dedushka. ” She leaned forward and smoothed back a wisp of his stark white hair. “I’m here, I’m here.”

 

The old man fumbled for her hand and she pressed their palms together. She rubbed a thumb over his sallow, mottled skin and wondered how it’d come to this. She understood all men must age and die, yet the process seemed unnatural. How could a person be full of fire and vinegar one day, and a hollow shell of his former self the next? Her grandfather was a king on his knees, a scholar of logic and science desperately clinging to the last vestiges of his sanity. It made her chest ache.

 

“Forgive me,” he rasped. “Forgive me, little moon.”

 

“It’s all right.” She squeezed his hand. “You’ve done me no wrong.”

 

He closed his eyes and turned his face to the wall. “Oh, but I have.”

 

It wasn’t the first time he’d talked like this. Last week, he worked himself into hysterics over some imagined infraction. Katia tried to change the subject. “Would you like some tea?”

 

He shook his head. “You’re not…real.”

 

Her heart broke. He’d called for his daughter before, the mother who’d passed with Katia’s birth. He’d jolted awake, screaming that winged demons hovered over his bedside. But it was the first time he’d included Katia in his delusions. She took a steadying breath.“I’ll make it sweet, just like—”

 

“No!” Her grandfather jerked his hand from her grasp in a surprising show of force. “Listen!”

 

Katia patted his knee with a shaking hand, her heart knocking about in her chest. “Tell me—” she swallowed against the tremor in her voice. “Tell me what you need, Dedushka.”

 

“I created you!” He flailed an arm. “Wrapped your insides in tree bark and spit in your eyes!”

 

“Yes, yes,” she murmured consolingly, feeling wretched for wishing death would soon take him. It pierced her to the marrow, this raving.

 

Her grandfather cried out and his back arched off the bed, his face contorting in pain.

 

Katia sprang to her feet, toppling her stool as she lunged to grab his tonic from the bedside table. The old man thrashed and moaned as if stubbornly wrestling with Lord Death himself. They weren’t religious, but Katia whispered a prayer all the same as she mixed the chalky white powder in a tall glass of water. Murmuring soothingly, she trickled the mixture past her grandfather’s chapped lips.

 

Gradually he relaxed onto the mattress, his eyes shuttered behind blue-tinged lids. “Sorry…” he ground out. “So…sorry.”

 

Katia set the glass aside and fluffed his pillow. “Are you comfortable? Is there anything else I can get you?”

 

“Read—” he paused, overtaken by a wet, wracking cough. “My notes.”

 

Katia pressed her lips together, overcome with emotion. Grandfather didn’t know what he was asking. He’d forbidden her from touching the leather bound journals that hugged the walls of his cramped and cluttered office, claiming she’d inadvertently douse them with tea or smudge their pages. The prized volumes contained his life’s work, years and years of meticulously recorded experiments and observations. His most recent tome, the “notes” to which she assumed he was referring, sat open on his desk. Katia had been too afraid to close it, worried her grandfather would fly into a fury when he recovered from his illness and discovered her treasonous act. Now she recognized her fear for what it was wishful thinking, a denial of her grandfather’s mortality. Mayhap he wanted to think on his accomplishments as he passed, but Katia couldn’t bear the thought of reading the forbidden works aloud. It seemed…wrong. An invasion of privacy.

 

She cleared her throat. “Why don’t I read you some Pushkin instead?”

 

He shook his head. “The notes,” he wheezed. “You must read them.”

 

Katia frowned. He’d never called her that before.Outside the wind howled, the snow piling up outside their door. She hadn’t left the house in days, and no one had come to check on them. It filled her with a quiet rage, a bitter soup that made her gut churn. Had her grandfather not given their last slab of pork to feed the miller’s little boys? Had he not trudged through a blizzard to tend to the smithy’s wife? Had he not denied payment of any sort from the carpenter, the tailor, the baker? The townspeople had tearfully praised her grandfather for his generosity, only to ignore him in his own time of need.

 

“Hurry, little doll,” he whispered. “Before…it’s too late.” His breathing became even more labored, his skin paling to a deathly shade of gray before her very eyes.

 

Katia refused to budge. The end was close. She’d remain to offer what little comfort she could as he made his departure from the world. She sat vigil, her existence narrowing to the stool. The window above the bed, framing the starless night. The crackling fire. Her grandfather’s frail form.

 

Later she awoke to a darkened room. The candles had burned out, leaving nothing but silvery moonlight to guide her hands and feet. Behind her, the fire was reduced to embers.

 

Stupid. Katia cursed herself for being so weak as to let sleep overtake her. She checked the slow, irregular rise of her grandfather’s chest before rising to stroke the fire back to life.

 

When she returned to her grandfather’s side, she sank to her knees. He lay motionless, eyes closed and mouth hung open in a final, valiant attempt to drag life into his lungs.

 

Katia placed her head in her hands, her vision blurring with tears. When she’d exhausted herself, she sighed and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. Yet no matter how she rubbed and blinked, she couldn’t restore the sight to her right eye.

 

A bright blue gem fell onto the bed. A raven’s feather followed it. Then another, and another, until the dingy patch of sheets below her face was coated in purple-blue-black feathers.

 

Katia raised a trembling hand to her face. “Oh,” she whispered. Her skin was peeling back in long, pale strips, like a birch tree shedding its skin. “O—”

 

***

 

The miller’s wife found the body a week later.

 

Tired of her husband’s stubborn and neglectful insistence that the old doctor was just fine, shewrapped herself in furs and trudged through the snow to his cabin with a few lard cakes to make certain for herself. The door was unlocked, the little home silent and frigid as a tomb. She set the cakes on the table and walked to the bedroom. There, she found the good doctor covered in his bedsheets. His granddaughter was nowhere to be found.

 

The miller’s wife shook her head as she stepped into the room. “Thankless girl.” Katia hadn’t stuck around long enough to give the poor man a funeral, hadn’t even bothered to tell anyone of his passing. The miller’s wife frowned as she approached the bed. A pile of raven’s feathers, long, delicate strips of tree bark, and two fine sapphireslay atop the sheets like a graveside offering.

 

Her gaze flicked up to the doctor’s shrouded face, his nose a miniature white mountain under the sheet. No one will know, she reasoned. With that, the miller’s wife snatched up the gemstones and dropped them in her pocket. No one will know.

 

 

 

Jesse Weiner is currently working on a YA Fantasy series. After graduating from the University of Colorado Boulder with dual degrees in English and International Affairs, she served as a teacher and Academic advisor in a charter high school. Now she spends her time writing and raising babies, both two and four-legged. Her favorite things include hiking, photography, travel, cooking, and coffee. Follow her on facebook @Jesse.M.Weiner or visit her website, Jessemaeweiner.com, to stay updated on her latest publications. Bienvenue au Danse, Jesse.