Hilde and Hedda stand in a corner.
Thin and pale, their silver hair hangs limp—almost floating in their stillness—like cobwebs swinging from the corners of rooms that are purposefully forgotten and shut away.
They try not to look at Papa.
They watch Alicia, playing in between her mother and their father.
Their blue-grey eyes study Octavia, smiling and laughing, “dear Arthur,” her touch light on his shoulder, her glance at them sharp like the teeth of a wolf on the hunt.
They make no motion or sound; they know better than that. Octavia doesn’t even have to look at them anymore to warn them. It is her house now, not their mother’s, not even Papa’s since he took Octavia as a bride. They feel her staring at them regardless of where she is in the house. They feel it like the depths of December, an ice grown deep into their bones.
This is their story, but you will be forgiven if you, like they do, sometimes forget that.
Arthur Thoreson was a banker. He wore wire-rimmed glasses balanced at the tip of his nose, kept his hair neatly parted down the middle, his moustache curled, and a smile constantly on his face lately, ever since he had remarried. His colleagues had often noted that he had more than any one man might have, because at the end of a productive day, when all the ledgers had been balanced, figures had been counted, collected, reconciled and more, Arthur ran home with a spring in his step. Surprising, they’d say, given that the man had lost his first wife so tragically. He had the gait of a man who had never known a difficult day in his life.
Upon arriving home each evening, Arthur would call to Octavia, Alicia, and the other two girls. All four would greet him like he was returning from battle, Octavia standing at the top of the stairs above the entry, an empress ready to fete her returning emperor from his daily war with the weary world. Alicia would cling to his hand, her dark curls falling around her face like smoke rising in the winter against the newly fallen snow.
The other girls would call his name, but their words were heard as though from a distance, like the soft, sad wail of train whistle miles away.
He would ruffle each child’s head, plant a kiss on Alicia’s velvet cheek, and then leave them behind as he ascended the stairs towards Octavia, who extended a hand to him, drawing him towards a door, shutting out the upstairs light on the hall below.
After dinner, Alicia sat on Father’s lap. Mother sat across from them, both parents’ armchairs silhouetted against a great fire in the study where they retired each evening. Father showed Alicia a silver horse figurine he had purchased for her on his way home that day.
“Mother, it’s silver like the necklace Father brought you tonight,” Alicia giggled, moving the bauble in the firelight to see him glint. Mother frowned. She let Alicia keep the bauble, but she never touched silver. She shuddered at the thought of wearing anything but gold.
Alicia smiled at her stepsisters, standing quietly in the back of the room. If they were nice later, she would let them look at it closer.
Arthur rocked a sleeping Alicia in his arms that night, watching her cradle the tiny silver horse in her palm. He looked up at Octavia. Her slight smile at him caused palpable shockwaves for Arthur.
He nodded towards Alicia. “Maybe it is time for the children to go to bed?”
Octavia glanced at the clock and raised her eyebrows. “So it is. Olga!”
An older woman in a dark wool dress appeared. Her gown looked more like a torture device than a real wardrobe choice, Arthur thought. He could never remember what had possessed him to hire such a severe-looking woman and. in a moment of panic, hoped she wasn’t too rough with the children.
Olga grabbed the other girls by the elbows and led them out of the room. Octavia rose and gathered a sleeping Alicia from Arthur’s arms.
“I’ll be along after I finish her hair.”
Arthur sighed, losing himself for a moment in the starlight of Octavia’s sapphire eyes. “Darling, could Olga do it?”
“No, I only trust Alicia in my hands.”
Octavia pressed her lips into a fine line and inhaled slowly. After a moment, she smiled at Arthur.
“I’ll be along in a moment, Arthur.”
She whispered tenderly into his ear and Arthur fell back into his chair. As Octavia left the room, the fire seemed to dim. A chill crept up around his limbs and into his chest. He was stranded in a sea of uncertainty.
Where were the other girls just now?
He wanted to turn and look, but a sadness had entered the room with the sudden, emanating cold and it froze him in place. A heaviness had settled into his ribs. Ilsa? Freya? He tried to picture them as they were that night.
Surely, they had been in the room. Olga had…had Olga led them to bed? He tried to stir his mind to action. The recollection of them at dinner eluded him. Nora? Thea? He had to know them. He pinched the bridge of his nose with his fingers and shook his head. The work at the bank must have been more exhausting than he had thought. A wriggling shame that bordered on some unnamed emotion—hunger? pain?—frightened him as he searched his mind for the names of his children.
But as he managed to push himself up from the chair with the purpose of going upstairs to find his daughters’ rooms, Octavia rejoined him. She placed her hands on his shoulders and whispered words into his ear.
Arthur’s eyes widened in delight. He stepped back, admiring her raven hair reddened by the fire that had, once again, lit up the room and his heart.
He sat back down beside her, content.
Hilde sits awake in her bed after they are sent upstairs to the attic.
She can hear the house settling below, like creaky bones moaning about their age at the end of the day. She gets up, as she does every night, and tries to remember.
She does not keep notes on paper. Octavia had found her early journals and that was when Hedda suggested they use art to keep track of what was happening in the house from day to day. They use symbols to hint at the players and recurring themes. They make them elemental, universal.
They know Octavia does not care for their art, but they need to know that when they see their art the following day that the images used will be recognizable as their own work and their meanings clear, no matter what was lost from the day before.
They use charcoal to draw, or the occasional crayon that has been discarded by Alicia. Under Hilde’s bed are oil paints that belonged to their mother. She uses these sparingly on a canvas kept hidden underneath her bed, hung from the slats in the frame so that the picture faces the floor all day long, waiting with its secret for the middle of the night.
Hilde waits for the entire house to settle into a calm. She gets up, tiptoes to Hedda’s bed and rouses her sister. Hedda’s cheeks burn bright red in the night, her thumb jammed into her mouth. Hilde, at the age of fourteen, doesn’t remember ever feeling as young as Hedda looks and acts. She wishes she could let Hedda sleep.
Hedda crinkles her nose at Hilde, but nods with only one or two moans as she slides out of bed. She is six and doesn’t understand the whole of what she’s lost, only the modicum of what she is losing on a day to day basis. Hedda runs around during the day singing. She tells herself she doesn’t mind getting hit by Olga whenever Octavia arches her brow toward the housekeeper to keep her and Hilde in line. Of course, Hedda minds. The knots forming permanent creases between her eyebrows tell a different story. But what matters right now is the story the girls tell themselves.
Hedda tries to pretend she’s immune to pain. She can’t think well unless she’s moving and she can’t move unless she’s willing to be punished. She draws Olga hitting her in the drawing room. Olga hitting her in the kitchen. Olga pushing Hilde up the stairs, down the stairs. Octavia above them all, drawn at the top of the picture like an owl perched on the roof of the house. They feel her big eyes most at night, although they don’t know how they’d record the day without punishment if she truly could see them. Both sisters seem to think about this at the same time because they stop, put down their art supplies and look around them in the dark attic. Lunar patchworks falling through a lonely transom provide them light to draw by. They shiver and summon the nerve to keep at it.
“If Octavia was watching, she’d put a stop to this immediately,” Hilde whispers. “Keep going. Don’t forget that Father didn’t speak to us tonight. Draw that.”
Hedda nods and grunts, reaching for a red crayon to layer over the charcoal house that contained all the day’s scenes: father’s back towards them, silhouetted by the flames, is drawn messier and larger in scale than any other room or person on the page. Hilde draws a void and wishes she could remember her mother well enough to fill it.
Alicia was four when Mother married Father. He had been married before; she didn’t know to whom. Alicia was not one for names. Her own dear father had been a Duke, or a Count, or a Prince. The story changed in her mind because Mother did not tell it to her, so she imagined a nice story for herself. Mother must also have been the daughter of a duke or a prince or a count from some far-off land. She was very far from home. She had come from an island, she knew that much.
“Your birth does not matter as much as your death does,” Mother was fond of saying often and only to Alicia at night when she would comb through her daughter’s dark hair. “How we come into this world is not our fault. We decide who we are. We create our own fate.”
Alicia would nod at this. Mother had decided they were noble. They had married into a family in trade. It was understood that even this was temporary, a stop on the way to getting to where they belonged.
Mother would comb through Alicia’s hair at night, whispering words her daughter couldn’t understand: a song or prayer of sorts, but also a muttering of impatience and of spite. She had whispered these words every night of Alicia’s life and though the nights in the elegant mansion that Father had bought for them shortly after marrying Mother had all blurred together in a daze of happy memories, Alicia remembered every bitter night before Father, since the time when her mind had been old enough to latch onto memories.
They weren’t full memories: they were acrid tastes and foul smells that would haunt her. They were chills and dimly lit rooms she couldn’t place. The sound of shouting and glass shattering would echo through another memory. She couldn’t remember who was shouting or where they were when it had happened, but she remembered the feeling of fear. She remembered her mother had been angry.
Each night before bed, Mother worked the ivory comb down Alicia’s scalp. It was an elegant tool, filigreed above its tines with owls flying against the moon and clouds, their wings forming the long arch of the comb. Crown of the head to just beneath the elbows, Mother would pull her hair, staring upwards and speaking to foreign ghosts beyond Alicia’s sight. All her thoughts from the day, every care and worry, faded away as she listened to the words until all that remained was an unwavering feeling that nothing would ever be wrong again. She and mother would never be cold, never sleep where they weren’t wanted, never compete for their place again.
She, Mother, and Father would never want for anything.
Arthur’s Aunt Nora died that spring, leaving the earth as all the pink, lacy blossoms were beginning to creep out of their creaking winter sheaths. Arthur thought it was a most contrary time for death to take a person and felt pained she’d not lived to see one more fine summer at the lake where she spent her summers. Her wealth was considerable and that meant for Arthur a considerable burden on him as her estate manager. He had not read her will, but knew that he would have to put his regular business on hold for at least a month to process all the paperwork, and divide her fortune between her family and their children.
Nora’s attorney had arranged for a reading of the will at Arthur’s bank. He arrived, along with Nora’s sons, daughters, grandchildren, and his own daughters. They looked so grown up in their black dresses, ushered in by Cousin Irena, Nora’s eldest daughter.
Cousin Irena was an older woman with a jaw cut like the prow of a ship, her eyes blue-grey, her white hair with a streak of sunflower yellow stretching back from her forehead over her right eye. The girls held onto Cousin Irena, whom they’d always called Aunt Irena. She frowned at Arthur, her hands gripping Hilde and Hedda’s shoulders. Hilde. Hedda. Their names came back to him like a slap of bracing cold air. Hilde kept her eyes on the unbreakable line of her aunt’s jaw, but Hedda snuck furtive looks at Arthur. She looked scared.
“Hedda, come here.”
Hilde’s head snapped back to him, her eyes bright with tears and wide with shock. Hedda looked at her for permission, and then took a cautious step toward her Papa when the door swung wide open.
Octavia—dressed in crushed crimson velvet, her corset bound close around her spine—walked through the crowd of family gathered and took her place behind Arthur’s chair. She took out a handkerchief and dabbed at an invisible tear she intimated was in the corner of her perfectly clear eye.
Arthur turned from his daughter and took Octavia’s ring-clad hand.
“Thank you for coming. I felt undone without you.”
Octavia bent to bestow a slight kiss on the crown of his head. She nodded at Cousin Irena, who narrowed her eyes at her, before turning to the attorney.
“Frederick, so good to see you.”
Frederick, or Mr. Halvorsen as the rest of the room knew him, blushed and turned away with a boyish grin on his face. “It’s good to see you, Mrs. Thoresen.”
Irena’s eyes bulged as she watched the attorney move closer to Arthur and Octavia, the latter of whom placed a hand on his shoulder and smiled. “You go ahead. You’ll do marvelously.”
Mr. Halvorsen nodded, cleared his throat, and opened his attaché to remove the will.
As he began to read, Arthur gazed up at Octavia. She squeezed his fingers and smiled.
“—and to the matter of Mrs. Nora Aasen’s estate. With gratitude to Mrs. Aasen’s daughters, Irena, Tove, and Therese, and to her sons, Torvald and Thomas, she leaves her many libraries of books, both in her mansion in the city and in her summer home at the lake.” The attorney paused and raised his eyebrows at the heirs and their children, intimating to them that this was the moment to be humbled by their mother’s magnanimity. When he received nothing but looks of confusion, he continued. “To her nephew and his wife Octavia, who has been a constant comfort to Mrs. Aasen in the last year, she leaves the rest of her estate.”
There was silence in the room as Octavia suppressed a smile and squeezed Arthur’s shoulders. Irena was the first to break it.
“Snake!”
She let go of the shoulders of two girls who had been hiding behind her as she marched towards Octavia.
Arthur squinted in their direction. They seemed ill.
He shook himself out of his reflection only at the sound of Irena slapping Octavia’s cheek. He jumped up.
“Cousin Irena, how could you?”
“How could I? Arthur, she is a thief. My Mother’s estate! How have you allowed this woman to do so completely—” She pulled the two pale girls forward and shoved them towards Arthur. “What have you to say to Hilde and Hedda? What would Sigrid have said about the way they are being raised?”
A wave has hit Hilde. She grips Hedda’s arm as the name “Sigrid” seems to burn like fire in the oxygen around them.
The hairs on her arm are electrified. She makes eye contact with her father.
For a moment, he seems to see them. But pain is filling his eyes, more pain than Hilde has ever felt, and she has already felt too much. Octavia’s hands move, sensing this, to his shoulders.
The veil shrouds his eyes once more, and Hilde tries to find words to interrupt the grownups, knowing it will mean punishment, but she can’t think of anything that can come out of her mouth that isn’t a cry for “Sigrid.” She searches the aching within her heart. The name is tethered to a need.
Arthur smiled at Octavia, feeling her hand on his shoulder. He turned back to Irena.
“I do not know what you are raving about,: his speech slurred, soporific, as Octavia hung heavier about his shoulders. “Clearly, grief has driven you to this state.”
Irena hissed at Octavia. “I will take the girls with me. They are a part of this family’s wealth you shall not have.”
Octavia laughed and patted Irena’s cheek, “Take your family and grieve. Leave me mine to do with mine what I wish.”
Her hand dropped down onto Irena’s shoulder.
Irena looked as if she was choking on the air in her mouth. She tripped backwards haltingly, tears falling down the sharp lines of her cheeks, fear growing in her eyes. She let go of the girls and left the room without a word, followed by her siblings and their children.
“Why did she leave those children behind, my darling?” Arthur asked, his speech slurred, as he stared at Hilde and Hedda, to his glazed eyes, the two unknown girls whom Cousin Irena had been protecting throughout the last hour.
The oldest burst into tears hearing this.
The youngest threw herself around the older girl’s chest, as if she alone could stop the dam from breaking, her tiny body a pebble in a gaping hole torn open.
Hilde cannot stop screaming.
Something has snapped. It has severed like a cord and Hilde cannot stop whatever it was binding from being released. There is a river rushing through her heart, torrents of tears escaping her eyes, her nose, mixed in with her screams. She cannot breathe. The muscles in her throat are tearing. She tastes blood in her mouth but she cannot stop. She feels Hedda around her chest, her arms trying to hold Hilde together, to keep her from shattering. She mustn’t shatter. Who would be there for Hedda if she broke?
Octavia comes towards them both and grabs Hilde by the shoulders and begins to whisper words Hilde cannot understand but knows all too well.
“No,” Hilde gulps. “Stop it.”
Octavia smirks as she continues. The room begins to blur. Hedda releases Hilde and falls to the floor. Not again. Hilde screams louder.
She swallows the tears as if they contain every scrap of evidence in the room: the smell of Papa’s papers, the ink on his desk, the picture of him slumped over in his chair, barely regarding the scene before him. I will inhale it all, she thinks as she wails. I will trade everything for this sorrow so it’s never forgotten.
She screams even as her body hits the floor.
She continues to weep as sleep takes her over.
Hilde wakes up in the attic.
Hedda is on the bed next to her, playing with a doll the two of them created out of discard wooden sewing spools. Hilde sits up, her head aching, and touches the bruise on the side of her face. The pain sends a wave of nausea and a stinging shock through her body. A hesitant smile appears on her face. She remembers hitting the floor, screaming, her father’s gaze sharp and then fading. She remembers the way the entire room seemed shaken by one moment, when Aunt Irina had uttered a single name. Hilde remembers the name “Sigrid.”
Hilde wakes up every morning and touches her head. It still aches, but it hurts less than it did the day before. She has limited time. Octavia usually erases each day like a chalkboard: memories, emotions, facts all floating like dust in the air after she wipes the family clean.
But now, Hilde follows the pain like lines on a map. Healing is not the hope now; all would be lost if this ache slips away too soon. Finding the memory where all the other injuries spring from is the goal—it is the grail—the lost continent of the heart.
Hilde feels shapes forming in her mind’s eye: cousin Irena clutching her shoulder, Hedda approaching Papa—Hilde’s heart beats faster—Octavia entering and Papa turning away.
There was a fight.
Irena had slapped Octavia.
“Octavia took Irena’s inheritance,” Hilde hisses to Hedda, who rubs her sister’s back with concern.
“Stop then,” Hedda whimpers. “You’ve remembered enough today.”
Hilde shakes her head. She holds her bruised head. She must remember. Sparks appear against the backside of her eyelids as closes her eyes.
She is back in the room, facing her father.
She is screaming, in the attic, and in Papa’s office. She sees Octavia backing away, the events of the day rewinding. Octavia stands back by Papa, who is slumped over, Irena’s slap is reversed, then everything pauses.
“What would Sigrid have said?” Irena cries.
What would Sigrid have said?
Irena’s words, swimming back to Hilde through the pain, repeat like someone hitting a drum. She hears the name in her head, her heart, in her very bones. Hedda takes her hand. Hilde opens her eyes, still choking on her tears.
“What happened?” Hedda asks.
“Hedda,” Hilde smiles as she continues weeping, “our mother’s name was Sigrid.”
Alicia loved the lake house. Mother had inherited it from Father’s Aunt Nora. The air smelled like honey and wet grass and was never too warm. Every now and then, a gust of cold would barrel down from the mountain peaks like it was escaping something terrible at the top. She would watch it stir up sapphire-indigo waves on the surface of the water and would laugh as a tiny whitecap would decimate the paper boat she and Father had sent out from the shore.
Life had altered since they had left their townhome in the city for Aunt Nora’s larger estate in the mountains. Alicia did not want to be ungrateful, but something had changed for Mother since they had arrived.
During the day, Mother would disappear into the woods.
She did not take Alicia, nor would she say where she went. In fact, when Alicia asked her about it, it seemed that Mother could not hear her. She was angry lately. At night, she had ceased to comb Alicia’s hair. She would hardly touch her dinner, retiring early to bed.
In her absence, Alicia had begun to play with Hedda. Alicia’s hair grew wild, which she loved, and with scuffed knees and bright eyes, the two of them spent every day enjoying each other’s company. She and Hedda played with toys in Alicia’s room, read in the library, and Hedda had even begun to teach Alicia how to paint in exchange for using Alicia’s superior art supplies. Hedda liked to draw her day, and Alicia enjoyed the practice, though she preferred to write in an empty ledger she’d taken from Father’s office. There was something cleansing about capturing the day, both the good and the bad.
Alicia wondered why, given their shared age, it had taken them this long to discover their shared interests. Had she asked to play with Hedda before? She was sure she had but as she looked for the memories they slid from her like soap in the wash basin. She had always wanted a sister and on the shores of the lake, without Mother’s presence, she found one. They held hands and created secret languages just for themselves.
She felt a tiny anger growing that it had taken so long to find this love underneath her previous indifference, which she could not account for when she began to look for its cause.
Hilde stands in the middle of a clearing in the forest.
She leans against a large, monolithic stone. She takes a deep breath, centering her shoulders above her hips, her hips above her heels. She stares into the tangle of fir trees and thickets and shouts.
“Sigrid! Sigrid was my mother’s name!”
Every day for the last seventy-three days she has done this, and every day Octavia emerges from the dark woods, paler than the day before.
Hilde smiles. She remembers the day before. And the day before that. They are clinging onto her like the vines at her feet cling to the earth and the stone and the tree trunks around her, binding the forest together. She is no longer forgetting.
“Sigrid was tall,” she sings into the air, tears stinging her eyes. “Sigrid was kind—she helped anyone who needed her! She made chocolate cake for my birthdays. She read to me at night. She made up silly songs to sing as she walked around the house. When I sing, I sound like her.”
She hears it as she says it. In the years since Mother—
In the years since Octavia had arrived, Hilde had been so quiet that she had not noticed her voice deepening. As she cries out, she hears the sound of her mother ringing out her throat.
“Sigrid was my mother! I am her voice left in the world.”
Octavia arrives, her hair that she had worn in a pompadour in the city has fallen, covering her shoulders like a dark cloak. She doesn’t wear a corset, a vest, or elegant gown, but rather comes daily in a muslin shift. Her arms are outstretched, balancing herself on the air above the forest floor. In her finger tips, Hilde senses that Octavia feels the oxygen emanating from everything growing beneath her.
She braces herself. Octavia no longer looks at her with smug composure. There is a heavy-lidded menace in her eyes.
Hilde shifts her weight.
“Sigrid was my mother’s name.”
Octavia sneers. She begins to shout words that Hilde does not understand, but that she feels. A whirlpool of gravity begins to swirl around her, the temperature in the clearing rising. Hilde sways. A heaviness blankets her, but she raises her chin.
“Sigrid was my mother’s name, skogsrå!”
“I’m not a skogsråskogsrå,” Octavia spits back her. “You have no idea what I am, stupid girl. You have no clue where I’m from.” She begins her incantation again and once more Hilde feels the familiar spin into oblivion.
“I am Sigrid’s daughter,” she wheezes. “Elsa was her mother. Brunhilde before her. I am the sum of my mothers before me and we do not submit to you.”
This had been the point lately where Octavia had fallen down and fled. The first time, it was only after Hilde used her mother’s name at dinner. But every day since, both of them could endure more from the other. Hilde remembered more, but Octavia withstood each breakthrough Hilde made.
Remembering her ancestors felt like such a victory the other day, Hilde had been sure it would work again today. But Octavia stands across the grove, chuckling to herself over Hilde’s words. She continues on with her spellwork. Hilde’s knees buckle. She peers across the clover and tendrils of ivy; Octavia is walking towards her. With each step, Hilde feels memory chewed away, dissolved by Octavia’s words. She gasps for air.
“You say you are a daughter. Who is your mother? Where is she now? Do you even remember who I am?”
Octavia lifts Hilde’s chin up with a long finger.
“You knew who I was once.”
Hilde falls, as she has half the times since they began dueling this way, and hits her head against the clearing’s center stone.
Once upon a time, there was a young girl named Hilde.
She had golden hair and a kind smile that had faded under the grief of losing her mother the winter of her seventh year. Sigrid had been lost to a fever shortly after Christmas. It had taken her so swift that neither Hilde nor her sister Hedda had said goodbye.
Hilde’s last words to her mother had been petulant. She had been upset that her Mama had not come to her to read a story. She had no way of knowing what was happening. Parents often seek to conceal the truth as a strange kindness that backfires in the minds of those they try to protect. When Hilde had sensed the impending unfairness of the coming loss, she fixated on the only thing she knew that had changed: the lack of a story. She burst into her parents’ room that final night as snow swirled around the frosted window and whined that Mama must not love her anymore. Sigrid had reached out for Hilde, but she was pushed from the room by a panicked physician who yelled about exposure. It was this memory, where fear and confusion replaced Hilde’s childish tantrum, that ate at her.
The summer after Sigrid died, Hilde and her father and sister went to stay with Aunt Nora at her lake house in the mountains. Father had almost entirely stopped speaking after Mother’s death. Hilde could not stand to be in the house with him, his sadness followed him around like a nameless ghost. When she and Hedda cried, his eyes would fill with tears that he would blink away as he fled to another room to focus on the work he had brought with him.
It was in those mountains, one day when Hilde was in the forest above the lake with her sister, that she met a creature deep in the woods.
Hedda had stopped to rest, her naptime long elapsed, but Hilde wanted to press farther in. Hedda’s exhaustion angered her, and she hated herself for that. Everything angered Hilde since Mama died. It wasn’t Hedda’s fault.
“You stay here. I will keep exploring,” Hilde said.
She kept moving deeper into the forest, thorns tearing at the fabric of her dress, into her skin, catching her hair. She did not care. All she could see was Mama’s outstretched hand flying away from her.
Hilde broke from the dark woods into a clearing. The trees had formed a circle around a stone, and on the stone sat a woman with long dark hair.
Hilde could not see her eyes. She was rocking a child to sleep in her lap and singing in a light tone, in a language that sounded to Hilde like the tinkling of crystal chimes in the wind.
“Who are—” Hilde asked as she crept into the grove.
“Lhiannan,” the woman spoke, touching her chest.
“Do you live around here?”
The woman shook her head. “No, we live nowhere. We are travelers.”
Hilde tilted her head. “We’re on vacation too.”
Lhiannan shook her head again. “No. I am from a different world—stranded. We have wandered very far looking for a home. My daughter was born to me after I came here,” her voice sounded broken, both reverberating from her and from behind Hilde. “My kind is not supposed to mix with yours. I do not even know if I will ever be allowed back home, but if I am, she won’t be—she is not like me.”
The woman shook herself out of her musings and raised her chin toward Hilde. “You have lost something too, have you not?”
Hilde nodded.
Lhiannan smiled, hunger in her bright gold eyes that peered out between the dark strands of hair in her face. “Who?”
“My mother. Sigrid. She died of fever in the winter. I didn’t say goodbye. I thought only of myself. I—” Hilde broke off and began to cry.
Lhiannan laid her child on the bed of clover at her feet and came to kneel before Hilde.
“What if I told you that I could take away all that pain? You would not be haunted by that memory anymore. You would be free to live your life in peace. I would do this for you,” she gripped Hilde’s hand and whispered something into the earth before locking eyes with Hilde. “I would do this for your whole family. Just take me to them. Invite me in.
“I can help you. You see, the act of forgetting is an act of loss. The mind lets go of a detail, a day, a face, an emotion that you once felt so strongly but when you reached for it next, it eluded you like the edges of a dense fog. You try to comfort yourself—you protect yourself—from feeling loss by telling yourself that if it were important, you would not have forgotten it in the first place. In that absence, you can find temporary peace, until the memory comes back like a rabid dog to hunt you down.
“But there is another kind of forgetting that is not only an erasure, but a replacement within the mind. A real memory is dissolved by a fake one; the truth does not dissipate but is eroded beneath a layer of what we wished would have been. While most memory is altered in a similar fashion—details blurred and manipulated by either our guilt and our desire to be blameless—its veracity is usually only frayed on the edges. To replace whole memories with lies isn’t an act of mental entropy: there is no loss, only theft.”
The Lhiannon cupped Hilde’s face in her hands. “The theft is a gift. A gift we can give your entire family. Do you agree?”
Hilde wanted nothing more than to feel that gift. A freedom from pain. She nodded and then felt as if she was suddenly watching herself from far off and only connected to her body through a thin string about to snap. She saw herself lead the Lhiannon from the grove down the hill. When they reached the door of the house, Hilde opened it, a vacant look in her eyes.
“Come in,” she said. As the Lhiannon crossed the entryway, she pulled her hair back. Hilde’s father came into the room.
“Hello.” He frowned, eyeing Hilde’s blank expression with concern. “Can I help you?”
The Lhiannon lifted her chin and gave Arthur a serene smile. Her composure had altered from the earthy creature in the woods to that of a queen.
“Octavia.” She flashed him a dazzling smile as she held out her hand. “I met your daughter in the forest. We are staying across the lake and she invited my daughter and I in to join your family for supper. I hope that’s all right. She was quite insistent.”
A strange smile spread over Arthur’s face as he took her hand. His face had been gaunt from grief for so long. He had already begun fading from Hilde and Hedda, enclosing himself within a private mausoleum of the mind, long before the Lhiannon entered into the home.
“Of course, you’re welcome in our home,” he said, a brightness in his voice that Hilde had not heard in ages, a strange light she had never seen glowing green like swamp gas deep within his eyes. “Please come into the parlor. Let me get you some refreshment.”
By the time Hilde and Hedda came to dinner that night, it had happened. The Lhiannon had kept her word. None of them felt pain. They felt nothing but adulation for the newest members of their family, Octavia and Alicia.
After dinner, Arthur proposed. No one felt it was strange. He gave Octavia’s Sigrid’s ring and kissed her in front of his family. All Hilde felt was peace for the first time in a long time. The price of memory was not steep at first.
Hilde wakes up in her room.
She sees storm clouds rolling in from the lake. Her face is clean, but Octavia did a rushed job at it. Blood remains caked over her head, matting her hair and leaving rust-colored debris all over her pillow. She reaches out and touches Hedda’s shoulder. Hedda is playing dolls with Alicia. They jump.
“You’re awake,” Alicia says. “Mother said you fell after trying to climb a tree?”
“Where is your Mother?” Hilde grunts as she pushes herself up off the mattress.
“In bed. She looked pale. She said she had to walk too far to reach you and that you are getting too heavy to carry back.” Alicia stares at her doll and whispers in a low, guilty tone, as if each word she says feels painful passing through her lips. “She said if you fall again in the woods, she won’t bring you home next time.”
Hilde narrows her eyes at Hedda.
“I’m finishing this.” Hilde swings her legs over the edge of the bed. The room fades in and out. She grits her teeth and tries to stand. After a moment, she starts to move towards the door. Alicia holds the doll tighter. She has been working out the truth of her mother in the last few months. Tears fill her eyes.
Hedda rushes to Hilde and extends a hand towards Alicia.
“I know she’s your mother,” Hedda says. “It’s up to you. But we’re your family, if you want.”
Hilde blinks at the two of them as Alicia nods to her doll and sets it aside with a grimness that none of them should feel or recognize in the other. They clasp arms in the doorway and together, the three of them climb the stairs to where the Lhiannon is sleeping.
“Arthur,” Octavia whispered. He leaned over her, clutching her hand to his chest, worry lines creased over his brow. “You should’ve seen Hilde. She’s wild. I think she should be sent away.”
She placed a hand on his shoulder.
Arthur frowned; his eyes glazed. “Of course, my dear. We can dismiss any servant that acts out. They should know better.”
Octavia gave a weak shake of the head and turned from Arthur, shivering.
The door opened and Alicia entered along with two other girls. Arthur squinted. He couldn’t place where he had seen them before. The oldest one appeared injured.
“Sigrid was my mother’s name.”
Arthur fell to the floor, convulsions wracking his body. He moaned as air was siphoned from his lungs to form the word trembling at his lips: Sigrid.
As his heart constricted, he saw an image of a woman with gold hair smiling at him. He thrashed about and saw the two girls standing at an angle in the doorway. He stretched out a hand for them.
“Sigrid was my mother’s name.”
Hilde braces herself against Hedda and Alicia.
Everything aches as she searches for the memories: nausea, panic, as if Mother had died just a moment ago and not several years before. Hilde grabs onto the pain. She will not let it go.
“Sigrid was the daughter of Elsa, Elsa was the daughter of Brunhilde. She died of fever five years ago. I have not forgotten.”
Octavia rises from her bed, her gold eyes revealed, her body stretches to the length it was the day the two had met in the woods so many years before. She holds out elongated fingers towards Alicia. “Come here.”
Alicia looks at Hedda and at the woman floating over the mattress. There is nothing familiar in this form, in the gold eyes, in the cloak of hair that reaches around the room with its darkness. She holds onto Hedda.
“Sigrid was my mother’s name.”
Octavia winces but moves towards Hilde, beginning to chant. Alicia and Hedda begin to double over. Papa is still convulsing on the ground.
“Is it worth it, Hilde? To see them suffer? To relive your selfish moments, to regain the loss of your mother? Why are you throwing away this gift?”
“Living without memory is its own kind of death.”
Octavia hurls guttural words in her otherworldly language towards Hilde.
For a moment, the girl forgets everything. Her mind goes blank. She doesn’t know her name. She doesn’t know the girls at her side, doesn’t know the man on the floor choking for air. She knows the woman stepping off the bed means to kill her. She feels the guilt of forgetting her mother like a vice around her heart. She feels the fear of approaching death, of what might happen if she pushes this further: choosing to remember the loss and exposing the lie. The woman’s words send electric pain surging through the girl as she comes closer, searing every nerve ending, exhausting every muscle.
“Sigrid was my mother’s name,” the girl hisses through gritted teeth. “Your name is Lhiannon.”
The air in the room seems to rip and sputter. Papa takes a deep breath as Hedda and Alicia run to him.
Hilde plants one foot in front of another.
“Sigrid was my mother’s name. I did not say goodbye. I have to live with that. I will remember my failing if that means I can remember her.”
The Lhiannon’s eyes bulge in fury, but she cannot speak. A thousand words seem to roil behind her locked lips, but not one escapes. Hilde steps forward and reaches up to grasp the Lhiannon’s hand. She twists Sigrid’s ring from the creature’s bony fingers.
“You are disinvited.”
The Lhiannon shrieks as she hits the floor, drug by an invisible force towards the door. She reaches for Alicia but Hedda grabs the girl’s hand and blocks the Lhiannon from reaching her.
“I’ll find you again. You’ll lose more. You’ll meet worse pains than your mother’s death. I’ll be there. You’ll invite me back,” she hisses through jagged teeth. Her gold eyes flash as she claws at the floor. For a moment, fear steals the words in Hilde’s mouth. Worse pain than losing her mother? She imagines her father’s death, Hedda’s, whatever else may lay in store.
“I choose pain,” Hilde says, joined in the doorway by Hedda and Alicia. After a moment, a winded Arthur staggers behind them. The Lhiannon hits every step in the staircase. Only Hilde follows her down to the entryway, while Arthur leans on Hedda and Alicia above.
The Lhiannon is chanting and digs her fingers deep enough into the floorboards to halt the force pulling her towards the door.
“Arthur, please,” she pleads with her refined affectation once more, looking to the top of the stairs. “I’ve been good to you.” The Lhiannon casts a longing look from Arthur to Alicia, who turns and buries her face in her Papa’s chest. “Take care of her. She is of this world and mine.” Arthur’s right arm tightens around Hedda and Alicia. “She needs—”
“Sigrid is my mother’s name,” Hilde interrupts, chills raising all the hair on her arms. “We choose the memory of her death. You are disinvited.”
The Lhiannon shrieks as her form stretches another four feet. Her body fills the entryway like a shadow, only the outline of her visible as she is pulled underneath the front door, howling once more to Hilde. “I’ll be waiting on your darkest day—”
The house falls silent, the timbers groan as they rest, and Arthur gathers Alicia and Hedda in arms. They bury their heads against his shoulders. He holds out his hand for Hilde, shame and reawoken grief in his eyes.
“I’m sorry. Help me remember, Hilde.”
Hilde joins him and her sister, and Alicia, who looks up at the family now, unsure of her place. Hilde’s slender arms stretch to try and encircle all of them.
“Sigrid was our mother’s name,” she says, and as she begins to tell the stories of her mother, the family weeps in chorus, huddled together in the midst of the wreckage.
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Sarah Salcedo is an award-winning filmmaker, illustrator, and author. She was the Spring 2022 Writer-in-Residence for Town Hall Seattle and attended both the 2022 Tin House Winter and Summer Workshops for her short fiction, and Stowe Story Labs’ 2023 Writers’ Retreat in California. Her stories, essays, and poetry have been published in Kaleidotrope, Uncharted Magazine, Luna Station Quarterly, HAD, The Future Fire, Hypertext Magazine, and elsewhere. You can find out more about her work at sarah-salcedo.com and find her online at @sarahvsalcedo on IG, Threads, and Facebook and @sarahsalcedo on Bluesky, X, and Tumblr. |