In the cold dawn light, they carry the child out of the big house and down to the pond. The water is grey with submerged ice, striated mud frozen hard to its banks, and the reeds are swollen within whitish sheaths. The child is sickly. It shrieks and shrieks as they lower its thin body […]

The first time I saw the operculum necklace, it made me cry. Such a thing was scarcely unlikely: I was only six years old and had never seen such a thing before. Strung on a silver chain and adorned here and there with filigree, the necklace consisted of six discs that some might consider decorative. […]

The maids were busy with breakfast when Rosalía returned to her ancestral home, one hundred and eighty-four years after she left, known by no one. The house she found was not the house of her memories: the original building was demolished and rebuilt in fashionable Italianate style, three stories tall, with narrow windows, quoin, a […]

There were five of us at the start: mother, father, Ren, Penelope, and me. And now there is only me. Since mother and father passed, the garden’s upkeep has been lacking. They gave us enough knowledge to maintain the garden, but not enough to allow it to thrive. And since Penelope left, more than one […]