Imagine once more, the lake by the summerhouse.
The lake is green, mellowed with soft sunlight and the whisper of reeds. Two swans, one white and the other black, sailing between the ripples, their willowy necks and beaks curved into a heart-shaped gap.
Look through it.
There on the other side of the world where it is always winter and starlit, the swan maidens shed their feathers for gowns of snow. A towering castle looms before them, icicles dripping from its spires. The sisters kneel on opposite sides of the frozen lake, eyes red with longing, their reflections wavering in the dirty ice.
Every summer after the accident, they send us away to Grandpa’s house in the city. The house is over a century old, cloaked in dust and shadow, full of murmurs. On the ground floor, Grandpa keeps a musty antique shop crowded with rickety chairs and cabinets filled with old toys and dolls. A marble statue of a lady with a scythe guards the doorway. The bookcases that wind up the stairs all the way to the attic are crammed with leather-bound first editions of writers whose names we cannot pronounce and faded National Geographic magazines with pictures of far-off places.
We don’t mind, really. Granny bakes choco-chip cookies every day, lets us watch cartoons on a black-and-white telly and doesn’t hit us if we mistakenly spill the milk at breakfast. Grandpa is even better, telling us stories of the twins who live in an invisible treehouse on the mango tree whose branches keep trying to creep in through the windows of the sitting room. Each evening, he brings us toys to play with.
They are secondhand, abandoned, often broken, and we take them in, the little orphans. Grandpa is always buying, fixing, and reselling old things. Sometimes he takes the toys back after a week, if a stranger comes to the shop looking to buy it. But that is okay, because he kisses our cheeks and pats us for taking good care of it and gives us something new in return.
That is how we find each other again.
One morning while clearing the attic, Grandpa discovers a small wooden swan figurine with a chipped beak.
“Take it,” he says. “Do you ever miss the summerhouse?”
I am only half-listening as I cradle you in my arms again. You look at me with your sad, glazed eyes and I smile at you, the way long-lost sisters do, with tears. I caress your hard feathers, kiss the curve of your neck, and place you on my pillow, beside me.
You are broken but whole, just like me.
On afternoons, a drowsy heaviness falls upon the house. Grandpa, with his newspaper, waits contently among the teak and mahogany and the hint of varnish (that clings to his shirts no matter how many times Granny washes them) for that gentle tinkle of windchimes signaling an intrepid customer. Meanwhile, Granny sets a cake to bake and stretches her frail milky limbs on the vintage chaise lounge.
Golden sunlight seeps in through the wooden blinds. Hidden behind the broken busts and porcelain heirlooms, we carefully watch the swirl of dust motes and vanilla icing. Sometimes we lurk beneath tables with wood-sprites carved into their sides or lie still in the gaping dark of a wardrobe so big it can hide our entire family. At times, we even climb onto the sun-blistered terrace to listen to the pigeons humming in the nests they made in the cracks of the abandoned brick-walled house opposite ours.
There is not much to do, so we tell our stories, over and over again, sworn sisters and swan maidens of the sacred lake. In our castle of ice, the twin guardians tend to the moth-eaten teddy bear, mend a ballerina’s leg with cheap glue, teach a vintage toy car to skate across the dusty floor.
When they leave, we try not to cry, breathing snow and mist down our wet slender necks, as we stand side by side at the edge of the lake, watching our loves sink into the murky depths.
“Do they ever miss us?” I always ask.
“Yes,” you reply.
(But sometimes you don’t, and the world tilts as if in a dream.)
There is an old marble bathtub in the attic with a cleft on one side and a lion clawfoot missing.
One day, we pour water from a rusty tin bucket and climb inside, soaking in the mossy wetness. A broken flower vase sways on the window; the walls are mildewed, plaster peeling off in strange patterns like tiny rivulets. We try to follow the trail but fall asleep with a picture-book open on our laps as the water seeps through our petticoats. We dream of swimming amidst flowers and ferns in that shadowy dark-green lake, little silver fish tickling at our webbed toes.
We sing of a girl who drowned but we know not where the tune comes from, what caverns in our hearts keep those secrets.
Grandpa comes for you, eventually.
We’d fallen asleep beside each other; when Granny splashes cold water, I wake up and you are not there. Grandpa is at the doorway with a porcelain doll. She wears a picnic hat and a summer frock and her lips are half-open and that is not you, that can never be you, I never wanted another sister or friend, just you, you.
I am screaming so much, like I will never sing again.
“MY SISTER, where is SHE—”
Granny tries to stop me from shaking. “The swan had to go, but we’ll get you another one.”
“Where is my sister,” I plead, “Where is SHE?”
Gone, like the lake, like the summerhouse—
But we promised each other!
In the middle of night, I crawl across the floorboards of the silent house, desperate, breathless. There, in the basement of my Grandpa’s shop, stands the old wardrobe with its cracked hinges, wet with the scent of polish, gaping like the mouth of a cave. I slink into that amniotic darkness, shut the doors, and wait.
Then, softly, I hear it.
The rain, the first rain of that summer, crashing down upon the sleepy houses lining the dirty streets, through the holes in the ceiling, into the cracks of our wardrobe. The rain licks my neck and my toes and I close my eyes and dream of us, two sisters swimming in the lake so many summers ago.
To lose a sister is to drown, endlessly.
Imagine falling, falling down a fathomless darkness, the cold air slicing against your cheeks, your closed eyes, then the knife-edged softness of water.
You’re swimming through an underwater cave, through narrow winding passageways, through the dreams of women who drowned their children. The limestone walls are traced with their names but you do not know how to read. The curious lines blur in your mind and you dream of rivers, a map, constellations, a night-lit world.
The water keeps rising and your tired fingers fumble, slipping down the walls. The water rushes through you, pulling you under, and in vain you try to curve, but your mouth is filled with song.
Your mouth is filled with water.
Your mouth is filled with blood.
I do not know how they find me, knee-deep in rainwater, shivering inside the dusty closet, my dead sister’s name upon my lips. The basement is flooded and, as they carry me away, I see broken pieces of wood swirling in the dirty water—the missing leg of a table, an eagle-shaped doorknob, a figurine of a ballerina, all floating, like corpses.
If only we were swans, I think, we could swim away from here.
I beg you to take my hand.
You smile sadly at me from the other side.
A feather falls softly between us, floats.
Not yet.
Sometimes, in that glittering dark when I’m not dreaming of you, I think I can hear Granny and Grandpa arguing. They seem so far away, like the echoes of ghosts.
“A good buyer, don’t you get it—”
“Yes, but she’s in so much pain!”
“It’s been so long and she still can’t accept that her twin—”
“Can you get it back? Maybe those foreigners haven’t left town.”
“I’ll…I’ll see what I can do.”
In the end, it is you who learns to swim because when I wake up, you are there beside me. The same wooden swan figurine with a chipped beak that Granny places in my trembling, out-stretched arms as she kisses my hair.
Warmth spreads through me, tendrils of golden light coursing through my veins. I had not known how cold I was.
Grandpa is here too. “We didn’t want you to leave with a broken heart,” he says in his warm, gruff voice. “I tracked down the buyer and bought it back. You can take it home with you.” They look at each other and something passes between them.
But the car is waiting, the mango leaves are rustling, and our parents are at the driveway, ready to take us away to home or boarding school because summer has ended.
We imagine the castle waiting for us, snow falling softly on the frozen lake.
We are not afraid.
We have known winter and our hearts are full of song.
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Archita Mittra is a writer, editor, and artist, with a fondness for dark and fantastical things. Her work has appeared in Tor, Strange Horizons, Anathema Magazine, Hexagon, and elsewhere. Her stories and poems have been nominated for the Pushcart and best of the net prizes, and long-listed for Toto Award for Creative Writing in 2020. She completed her B.A. (2018) and M.A.(2020) in English Literature from Jadavpur University and has a Diploma in Multimedia and Animation from St. Xavier’s College (2016). When she isn’t writing speculative fiction or drawing fan art, she can be found playing indie games, making jewelry out of recycled materials, reading a dark fantasy novel, baking cakes, or deciding which new tarot deck to buy. She lives in Kolkata, India, with her family and rabbits, and can be found on Twitter and Instagram @architamittra. |