Bloodsuckers & Ballrooms

Chapter One

It's a curious thing, really, how easily one's path in life can not only change, but pivot in a different direction entirely on any given afternoon.

It can change quickly—so quickly—or it can change so slowly that one hardly notices it all, as the tide changes the shore, until the shore erodes and collapses at last into the ocean with no one around to see. 

No one expects their lives to change irrevocably on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. Such pronouncements, after all, seem to belong more to fairy tales than to the practical world until they actually happen. 

It changes with the setting of the sun, and the rising of the sun, and then the setting of the sun again. It changes with the moon, too. It changes with the sending of a letter, and sometimes with the receiving of a letter.

In this case, it changed with the receiving of not one, but three letters.

-

Roslin

This particular Tuesday was one of those days where everything felt perfectly mundane—almost pleasantly so, even. Roslin was outside, wrestling with the laundry that hung from the line. Eastward, the sky was grey-black and roiling with a storm approaching much too quickly for Roslin's comfort.

"Come on," she coaxed a mostly-dried blanket as if she could will it into cooperating. "Get down from there." She caught the line in one hand and unpinned the blanket with the other before tossing it into the overly large wicker basket the sisters used for laundry day.

Finally she pulled a pillowcase from the line with a satisfied yank, imagining for a moment that it was cooperating out of respect for her efforts.

She kicked the door to the farmhouse shut behind her just as the first raindrops began to fall. And then, with a huff, she overturned the laundry basket onto the kitchen table for folding.

So went laundry day.

First, she folded the quilt for Gia's bed, then for Wyn's bed, then at last for her own. Roslin's hands paused over her favourite quilt. Her only quilt at present. The once-vibrant patchwork was now faded and nearing threadbare from years of use and love. She sighed, running her fingers gently over the worn fabric.

Fabric. Something so simple had become a luxury—a highly taxed luxury—just as everything else had.

Their first winter together, the three sisters had sat by the fire and stitched together quilts with remnants of fabrics from gods-only-knew-where. It wasn't just a blanket, no. It was something they could hold in their hands, something real of the life they'd built together.

But even symbols could not stave off the harsh realities that winter would soon bring.

They had no animals to provide neither meat nor eggs, no food stockpiled in the cellar, and, come winter, no forage to be found for miles. The land's soils had long since been stripped bare by generations passed, and now little other than pumpkins and sickly-looking potatoes could weather the patch of dirt the sisters still insisted was a garden.

Many and more of their problems could be remedied if only they could work, but gods forbid a woman was considered for a job.

Breasts, it seemed, dismissed them of any capabilities in the eyes of the township.

Roslin's thoughts turned darker as she imagined the bleakest of outcomes. What would happen if they couldn't make it through the winter? The sisters might be forced to marry themselves off to whatever wretch would have them, each going their separate way, losing what it was that had kept them strong: independence, and more, each other.