Rose was greeted by real screams as soon as she stepped outside. She ignored them, closed the creaky front door as quietly as she could, and grabbed an empty bucket that was just sitting around on the ground. Eyes down, she took a deep breath. The warm, fresh air felt good. So did the soft dirt beneath her bare feet. She gave herself permission to wriggle her toes around in it and enjoy a short massage before she headed off to the well to get water.
As she started walking, she looked up. Way up. The beautiful blue sky took her breath away. Staring at it, into it, suddenly scared her a little bit. The sky seemed disconcertedly deep. That it had depth, like water, was not something she had ever considered before. Everybody knew the sky was flat. Everybody. But what if it wasn’t?
Where did that crazy idea come from, she wondered.
Then she remembered her nightmare. Just thinking about it made her palms sweat. She had been so scared when she woke up. Scared of what? She couldn’t remember much. Thankfully, most of the bad dreams had faded away fast.
I think I was old, and the whole sky was green. It was raining too, but I didn’t get wet. Everyone else did, and they all died. She couldn’t remember exactly how or why it happened, but she knew it had something to do with them getting wet.
Rose was distracted from the scary ruins of her dream by more screams. She heard a lot of laughter too. Unlike the screams, the laughter was a lot harder for her to ignore. It unnerved her. She couldn’t relate to laughter like she could screams, and she was jealous of people who laughed a lot. Was it really such an easy thing for them to do? It made her mad at them. She was ashamed of herself for feeling that way, but sometimes she couldn’t help it.
When she reached the waist-high stone well somebody she couldn’t see said, “Hi!”
Rose knew who it was. She stood on her tippy-toes to peer over at the little boy who was kneeling in the dirt on the other side of the well.
“Hi, Galen,” she said back.
The filthy child was building a small pyramid out of smooth stones that were painted with monster faces. He finished and immediately smashed it to pieces with a wooden turtle that was barely being held together by some frayed string.
“Gruk just destroyed the haunted fortress where all the evil soldiers live,” he proudly proclaimed.
She already knew what he was going to say next.
“Wanna play with me?”
“I can’t,” she said (for the one-millionth time) before she filled the bucket with water and went on her way.
“Bye,” Galen said behind her.
“See you later,” Rose sighed, rolling her eyes. The boy always sounded so disappointed.
“My mother and father are taking me to the festival soon,” she heard him say.
“Good for you,” she muttered, and mostly meant it.
She took a few more steps and stopped to stare at the little house she lived in. The poor thing was leaning dangerously to the left like it was too sick to stand up straight. Or too drunk. She turned around again and looked beyond the well to where the big weeper tree was hunched like an old crone over the windy creek that split her village in half. On the other side of the creek, happy people were enjoying themselves at the festival. It looked like everyone who lived in the village was there.
Well, almost everyone.
Rose put the heavy bucket down when the wind blew savory smells her way that made her mouth water. All kinds of delicious foods were being roasted, boiled, smoked, salted, fried, and baked. She closed her eyes as lively music began to play and imagined she was one of the rich people who lived on the other side of the creek. Clothed in a clean, beautiful dress, she pirouetted from one obliging cook to the next, eating anything and everything her heart desired.
The brief spell was broken by more screams and that laughter she couldn’t relate to. She honestly didn’t want to be anything like most of those rich people. She worked for some good ones sometimes, but others wouldn’t hire her because she was so poor, or wasn’t quite the right color. A lot of people hated her mama too. That didn’t help things any.
A filthy beggar is all they see when they look at me with their smug, sideways eyes. No one in the village who really knew her could accuse her of being a beggar. No one really knows me, though, and I would love to have a nice, new dress.
Rose opened her eyes and went back into her listing house without looking back.
Her brother and sister were sitting next to each other on the floor, right by the door. They both waved at her and grinned. Across the room, her mother’s bedroom door was closed. She’s still sleeping, even though it’s nearly noon. Thanks be to The Others for that.
“Rose,” her little brother whispered, “where’s the water?”
Where’s the water? Rose had to think about that before she shook her head at herself and whispered back, “I guess I left it outside, Maln.”
“Why did you do that?” her little sister whispered too.
“Well, I didn’t mean to do it, Parva. I’ll go get it later.”
“Why not go and get it now?” Maln asked her. He wasn’t being crass, just curious.
“Because I’m really tired, and I’d like to get some rest before I have to head off to work at the widow Wren’s house for the rest of the afternoon.”
“You have to work today too?” Parva whined.
“Why do you have to work when everybody else will be at the festival?” Maln argued.
“The widow Wren won’t be there,” Rose told him.
“It’s not fair,” Parva said. “You’re always so tired, Rose. It’s not fair.”
“I’ll get the water for you,” Maln announced. “And we can go with you to that old lady’s house and help you get all your work done faster.”
Rose placed her finger over her lips to remind her sweet siblings to keep their voices down. “You know what?” she said softly, with a smile. “I think you two deserve to watch the festival for a little while.”
Maln and Parva were so excited they silently screamed for joy and only pretended to clap their hands together. It was something they had been forced to get very good at to avoid making too much noise when their mother was asleep. Or awake.
Rose hated that they had to do that.
She placed a heavily calloused hand on each of their soft heads and gently guided them over to a window. Even though it was such a beautiful day, the shutters were closed, just like all the other windows in their house always were. As she opened the shutters, thick sunbeams that were shining through a big break in the clouds burst into the house like happy old friends and gave them all warm hugs.
“Who remembers what these kinds of sunbeams are?” Rose asked.
“I do!” her excited siblings said softly at the same time.
“They’re the eyelashes of The Others,” Maln said.
“That’s right,” Rose replied. “And why are the eyelashes of The Others so special?”
Parva answered before her brother could. “If they are shining on you, it means The Others can see you.”
“That’s right. It means The Others are looking right at you. And that means…”
“It means The Others know you are going to do something special someday,” Maln said.
“Yes! But the choice is yours, right? The question is: Will you do something good or something bad?”
“Something good!” the kids said.
Rose had to hug them. “Promise me you’ll always stay this way,” she whispered in their ears.
“We will,” they told her.
“I wish we could go outside,” Maln said sadly.
“Me too,” Parva said.
“I know you do. It’s just not a good idea right now. You know Mama meant it when she said you can’t leave the house, and we don’t want to give her any reason to get any angrier.”
“I know,” Maln replied miserably.
“Why did we get punished?” Parva asked. “She knocked her drink over, not us.”
“Mama is always angry at us,” Maln said. “Right, Rose?”
His big sister was too captivated by something she was staring at out the window to answer him.
“What is it, Rose?” Maln asked. The window was too high for him or his little sister to see out of.
“Something is happening at the festival,” Parva exclaimed as quietly as she could. “We must be missing something amazing.”
“Let’s go get chairs so we can see too,” Maln told her.
Rose seized them by their arms and held them there.
Many sumyrs before Rose was born, a succession of devastating lightning strikes caused a raging inferno that burned a swath thirty leagues long straight through a vast area of the woods that surrounded the village. New trees had yet to grow back in the ash-smothered soil of this charred wasteland everyone called the Dark Scar, which began just beyond the field where the festival was being held. This narrow strip of open space is what allowed Rose to see a sliver of the far-off horizon from her window.
At first, she thought a wall of storm clouds was coming her way. But I’ve never seen them move so fast, she thought. And storm clouds don’t glow green.
The rapidly approaching anomaly was spreading across the entire sky. It reached the tops of the trees at the edge of the festival in far less time than it would have taken a flock of the fastest birds to fly there.
It looks like… water. It looks like the whole sky is turning into a stormy, upside-down sea. But how can that be?”
Sheltered by the surrounding trees, and distracted by fun and food, none of the people at the festival had any idea something was wrong with the sky until the massive waves rolled silently by them overhead. As the sun sank beneath the waves, its yellow rays were usurped by a dismal, emerald light that hardly illuminated anything. The adults collectively cried out in terror while the children shouted and clapped for joy, thinking this had to be some visiting magician’s astonishing trick.
Rose instinctively ducked as the churning waves surged over the house. She held her squirming siblings’ heads down and forced her frightened self to look out the window again. Galen was standing near the weeper tree. Like most of the other kids, he was enthralled by what was happening to the sky, not scared.
In my dream, the whole sky was green and it was raining, but I didn’t get wet. Everyone else did, and they all… died.
“I have to go get Galen Roth,” she said.
“Rose, you’re hurting my head,” Maln told her.
“Why is the light green?” Parva cried. “I’m scared, Rose.”
“I know you are,” Rose told her hurriedly. “I’ll be right back. I have to get Galen.”
“But Mama never lets us have anybody in the house,” Parva said.
“And she hates the Roths,” Maln added.
“I know. Mama hates everybody. But I have to go get him.”
“Please don’t leave us, Rose,” Parva begged.
“We’ll come with you,” Maln said.
Rose’s long fingers were already wrapped around the loose door handle. “No! You will both stay right here. Hold hands and sit together on the floor. Keep your eyes down and don’t look up at the window. You hear me? Keep your eyes down until I get back.”
“Yes, Rose,” they replied, trying not to cry.
Rose hoped the smile she gave them appeared sincere enough when she said, “I’ll be right back.”
Galen started screaming as soon as she opened the door, and it began to pour. The little boy’s entire head was engulfed in gray, swirling smoke, and his screams were the most spine-chilling sounds she had ever heard. Rose never imagined anyone, or anything, could produce such awful sounds of absolute agony, which were accompanied by the hissing steam that was steadily rising from his boiling skin. Blind, he slipped on one of the slimy pieces of his own flesh that were sliding off his skull and landing like wet rags on the roots of the weeper tree. Galen howled while he writhed around on the ground like a big, burning worm until everything but his clothes and his bones just… melted away.
Rose moaned. Then the terrifying new sky unleashed booming moans of its own that made the whole house shake. Maln and Parva were clutching each other and crying out right behind her, but she couldn’t hear them.
All of the people who were outside at the festival were melting to death too. Rose did not want to watch them die, but she could not stop her horrified eyes from staring at them as they crumpled to the ground, surrounded by that horrible hissing smoke. Their steaming bones soon faded away in the thickening fog their disintegrating skin was forming.
Rose slammed the front door shut. The sky stopped moaning, but the kids did not stop screaming. As she threw her arms around their bony shoulders and held them tight, she closed her eyes so she would not have to look at any more of that eerie, green light. There was nothing she could do to stop her ears from hearing the rain, though. It kept pounding away on the roof with its impatient fists.
The noise! If Mama wakes up, we’ll have even worse things to worry about.
Rose lifted her head and gasped when she saw her stooped mother swaying there in the middle of the living room. Her tangled hair was stuck to one side of her sunken face with old sweat, and the front of her frayed nightgown was one big, red stain. She anchored one of her shaking hands to the top of the open trapdoor that led down to their small cellar and leaned against the side of it to steady herself.
Rose stood up slowly and carefully. As she did so, she tapped each of her siblings three times. The kids knew all too well what their big sister’s signal meant, and they immediately huddled together at her back with a different kind of dread beginning to grow bigger and bigger in their bellies. But they were ready to run when Rose told them to.
Rose could only see one of her mother’s eyes. It was glassy and glaring at her.
“Hi, Mama,” Rose said slowly and carefully. “Do you want me to go into the cellar and get you some more wine?”
Her mother’s wet and gravelly voice was a hillside of sliding rocks in the rain. “It’s the end of the wuld, Rose,” she said sluggishly, “and there was more of that mangy peddler’s piss in those bottles than bad wine. Why do you think I’d want to drink more of a mangy peddler’s piss when the wuld is coming to an end?”
Rose trembled. Her mother was somewhat sober. She is always worse when she is this way. And yet, there was something about hearing her own mother say it was the end of the wuld that made Rose start sobbing.
“They’re all dead,” she said. “Everybody melted, Mama.”
Her mother staggered over to her so fast Rose was too stunned to move away. The collision spun Rose about and she felt her mother’s lanky arms wrap around her neck and waist like constricting snakes. Now that the window was right in front of her, she was forced to face the tempestuous new sky again. What she saw still didn’t make any sense. There were no more clouds. There were no more moons. There was no more sun. The beautiful, blue sky had turned into a dismal, green sea. It was a seasky.
The seething and swirling waves made Rose so dizzy she had to look down. She found herself staring at little Galen’s gleaming bones, which were lying on a bumpy bed of the big weeper tree’s twisting roots. The roots looked like a mass of tentacles that were struggling to free themselves from the saturated ground and claim the child’s meager remains.
“The little boy who lives next door melted to death too, Mama.”
“Shhh,” her mother whispered. “Shhh.”
Rose smelled vomit and stale ale on her mother’s breath and stiffened.
“You did that to him, Rose,” her mother told her, squeezing her harder. “The Others punished him because he was your friend. How many times do I have to tell you why you can’t have friends? How many times? If someone sees those bruises on your body, no one will understand that your wicked ways made me do those things to you. I have to punish you all so much because you are such bad children. But they won’t believe me. They’ll blame me! All those holier-than-thou busybodies in this dung heap they call a village will come in here, in my house, and they’ll take me away and you won’t ever see me again. They’ll kill me! They. Will. Kill. Your. Mother. They’ll separate you three and you’ll never see each other again. Do you want to be separated from your brother and sister, Rose? Do you want them to kill me, Rose? DO YOU? If you don’t, then you can’t ever have any damn friends.”
“There’s nobody left to be friends with, Mama,” Rose cried.
“I know why we didn’t die,” her mother hissed in her ear. “Listen to me, Rose. Listen to your Mama. The Others put the rest of them out of their misery real quick, but we’re still here because I’m being punished for raising such bad children. And you’re the worst one, Rose. You’re the oldest, and you were supposed to help me raise the other ones right. Why didn’t you do that? Why did you have to fight me every single step of the way? You were always such a selfish and spiteful child. You always had to make everything so hard for me. Why couldn’t you just be a good girl, Rose? Why did you have to be so damn bad all the time?”
Rose felt the old ire she always worked so hard to suppress stirring in the center of her chest. It grew so rapidly she could not stop it from suffocating the sensible part of her brain that was telling her to keep her big mouth shut.
Instead, she blurted out, “But I’m the one who takes care of the kids. I’m the one who takes care of you. I’m the one who’s had to find work every day since Papa left us so we won’t starve to death. He should have been a better father. And you should have been a better mother, Mama.”
One of her mother’s eyelids twitched twice. “I will be a better mother, Rose. The Others didn’t kill you because they want me to do that deed myself.”
The kids screamed, and Rose saw the emerald-tinted reflection of the carving knife her mother was raising behind her back. She barely managed to block the blade with her left arm before it plunged into the space between her shoulder blades. As her mother kept trying to stab and strangle her, Rose shouted to her siblings, “Run and hide! Run and hide!”
Then she remembered the rain. “But not outside! NOT OUTSIDE!”
Rose smashed into hard furniture that made her shins bleed while she whirled around and around the room, suctioned to her sticky, grunting mother. She could hear her little brother and sister yelling.
“Stop, Mama!”
“Leave Rose alone!”
“Leave Rose alone, Mama!”
“Stop hurting our sis–”
Their shrill voices were drowned out by more earsplitting moans from the seasky.
Suddenly, Rose was falling. Then her back struck a solid surface and she stopped. Everything went dark and it was hard for her to breathe, but it gradually got brighter and she was slowly able to take deeper and deeper breaths. Her wide eyes saw a shadowy beast that was silhouetted by the sickly green light. It was crouching high overhead, but instead of pouncing on her, it backed away on its bent haunches. As soon as it was out of sight the green light started to shrink.
The seasky stopped wailing away and Rose heard her siblings shrieking.
“Please don’t leave Rose down there, Mama!”
“Leave it open, Mama!”
“Don’t close it!”
That is when Rose realized what was really happening.
“Wait,” she whimpered, trying to get up.
The cellar door slammed shut above her. Rose staggered to her feet in the dark and managed to wrap her weak hands around one of the splintery rungs of the rickety ladder that led upstairs. She was desperate to reach the top in a hurry but could barely convince her battered body to move.
A thunderous BOOM sent violent tremors through the floorboards. This was followed by a grinding groan.
Mama overturned the heavy oak table she’s forbidden us to sit at since father left. She’s pushing it over the cellar door so I can’t get out.
Rose went berserk and began ramming her head and shoulders against the underside of the unyielding wood. “I’m sorry!” she shouted out at the top of her lungs. “It’s not their fault, Mama! It’s me! You’re right! It’s all my fault! I’m the bad one, but I’ll be better! Leave them alone, Mama! I promise I’ll be a good girl from now on! Please let me out so I can take care of them! LET ME–”
Rose hit her head so hard she fell again and finally succumbed to the irresistible kind of peace and quiet that only oblivion was kind enough to offer her.
