Story Excerpt

The Invisible Bone

by Stephanie Feldman

On New Year’s Eve, at family dinner, Kee announced her plan to take the Year Walk. At midnight, she would walk to the church, circle it three times, and look through the window for a vision of the year to come.

She passed the bowls and left her plate clean; she was already fasting in preparation for the ritual. “Girls,” her father muttered, and stirred his bowl of greasy barley, his spoon clinking against a bone. Young girls who attempted the Year Walk usually hoped for a glimpse of their future husbands. Silly girls, stupid girls.

Even though Kee was fifteen, she didn’t care one bit about a future husband. She couldn’t reveal her true plan, either. She sat quietly while her father slurped and her mother urged her older sister, Soley, to eat. Then she marched outside and roared, rousing the birds from where they rested—a thousand black leaves blowing away, turning the trees back into skeletons.

“Hey!” Erik called, rounding the house, jogging up to stand beside her. He always waited for her to come outside; he always pretended it was just a coincidence. Soley used to tease Kee, insisting that Erik loved her. Kee didn’t know how she felt about him, exactly. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I’m doing the Year Walk.”

Erik kicked at the dirt, only a couple feet away from where Soley’s baby was not buried, and stared into the trees, where the baby’s ghost crawled or rolled or floated, keening in a tormented register only Soley could hear.

“It’s dangerous,” he warned. 

“They shot the wolf. Haven’t seen any more.”

“Not animals.” He listed the malicious spirits and creatures that stalked the winter roads, threatening any human foolish enough to walk alone at midnight, especially the charged midnight between years. The beautiful women with cow tails, who would just as well dance with you as suck your soul from your throat; ravens with death in their eyes and illness radiating from their tattered wings; horses with backward hooves and a compulsion to drown their riders. 

“Aren’t you afraid of mylings?” he asked. The angry souls of unbaptized babies who climbed on backs and begged for Christian burial. If the hapless bearer was too slow reaching hallowed ground, the myling drilled them into the dirt, burying them alive. 

When Kee didn’t answer, he shook his head. “I guess you don’t believe in all that.”

“I do,” she said. The orange sun was just above the trees now, soon to be pricked by clawed branches, soon to melt away, like blood into quilt scraps. “But I’m not afraid.” 

Erik accepted her answer. He was gentle and kind. He would never beckon her into the shadows, like his brother had her sister, and even if he did, Kee knew better than to follow him. Knew in ways she wished she didn’t. But still, when she daydreamed, she imagined standing close to Erik, very close, but not so close that she might end up like Soley. 

Kee wished she could tell him why she was doing this—wished she could tell him everything—but she couldn’t.

When the truth was so awful, was it love to lie? Was it love, to let someone lie to you? 

 

Kee’s year had been a series of midnights. 

It was midnight when Soley left their shared bed to meet Nicholas—Erik’s brother—in the woods; when Soley sobbed, because Nicholas was marrying another; when Soley tumbled from the straw mattress to retch outside the cottage. At midnight, Kee found Soley crouched where their property gave way to the forest, eating dirt in the moonlight. At midnight, Kee pressed against the wall, because though Soley could conceal her belly with bindings and aprons, the new mass fit poorly among her bones, leaving her a restless sleeper.

It was midnight, in late summer, when Kee could no longer ignore her sister’s pregnancy, and she whispered, “What are you going to do?” Soley silenced her with a sharp elbow and began to cry. The jab barely hurt. It was the wound inside Kee that swelled. The sisters had once told each other everything. Now they were adults. They knew each other’s secrets, but had to pretend ignorance.

It was another midnight, after the autumn chill thickened into winter freeze, when Soley started bleeding. Kee had no choice but to tell their mother the truth; all she had to say, though, was “Soley needs help,” and her mother rushed to her eldest daughter’s side. So her mother had known, too, perhaps longer than Kee had—and had said nothing, done nothing, as if ignoring the baby could make it disappear. 

She sat between her daughter’s legs, folding and refolding fabric scraps, soaking up blood that smelled of infection. When day came, Kee’s father left the house without a word, and Kee started a bonfire and waited. 

Soon Erik appeared, and they laughed and gossiped as if nothing was amiss. It was frighteningly easy to pretend what was happening wasn’t happening. Was that love—how his presence erased her troubles?

When her mother called, Kee shooed Erik away. Her house was angled toward the woods, and he wouldn’t be able to see her from his own kitchen window, but still she felt him watching as her mother handed her a tightly wrapped lump. 

“It’s gone,” her mother said. “Bury it.”

Soley strangling her torso, starving herself, crunching soil; Soley vomiting and bleeding. Which came first—Soley’s assault on the baby, or the baby’s assault on her? Or was its death just luck? And was that luck good or bad? 

Kee couldn’t ask. She could barely get out the words, “In the woods?”

Her mother’s eyes flicked to the trees, gone smokey with coming night. “No. Stay close.”

Kee dug a hole. The earth, despite the fire’s long exhale, resisted; she stabbed the small patch until she could reach down to her elbow. That would have to be enough. 

Standing over the hole, though, something tugged at her—something as wordless as the house had been all through Soley’s pregnancy. Kee unwrapped the fabric. No tiny hands and feet. No puckered face. Just pieces of chord, webbed chunks of flesh, boneless. Afterbirth. It was, all of it, afterbirth, and Soley had been pregnant for at least eight months.

So Soley had already given birth, perhaps during one of her long walks in the woods. She killed the baby swiftly, with her own hand, or slowly, by abandoning it to the elements and hungry animals. Perhaps she dropped it in the river, though the way her mother had looked at the trees suggested otherwise.

Kee did as she was told. She buried the infected remnants that had attempted to wrench Soley from the living like a vengeful umbilical cord.

In the days that followed, Soley bound her distended belly, sat hunched in a corner, weeping and expressing milk into soiled clothes, more insidious laundry. Soley whimpered in her sleep, tossed beneath their shared blankets, stared glassy-eyed out the windows at nothing.

It was at midnight that Soley whispered, “Stop crying. Stop crying. Stop crying.” She dragged her fingernails down her cheeks, but they were bitten low and left no marks.

Kee turned toward the wall. She was determined to ignore Soley, like she was supposed to, but then her sister threw herself out of bed. Soley rocked back and forth, pulling her hair. The moonlight caught the glow of her scalp, her bruised shins, her bony feet flexing. 

Kee’s mouth shaped her sister’s name, but no sound came out.

“Stop crying, stop crying,” Soley begged, and then, animal-like, crawled across the floor and butted her head into the wall. “Stop crying,” she repeated, a sick melody, while her skull beat a terrifying rhythm against the house. 

Her parents had to hear, they had to, but they didn’t stir. It was up to Kee to grip her sister’s shoulders, to hug her tender waist, to drag her across the floor. To lie on top of her damp back until she stilled. Until silence, except for Soley’s ragged, unconscious breath. 

Silence to Kee’s ears, but not to Soley’s. The baby was dead, but it was still here, earthbound, wailing, and as long as it persisted, Soley would suffer.