Not a single mote of dust lingered in even the narrowest corner of Annistyn Snow's house. And for that matter, money scarcely came to her family.
Regardless of that, Mama Annistyn traded her last gold beads to an herbalist for a concoction. Honeysuckle pollen, wings of snow bees, and a sprinkle of blueberry dust. Dust, here, was a source of money, thus good luck. You could gather the motes of dust thickening your windowsills in exchange for beads of silver, if offered to the right merchant; that was why you wouldn't be surprised if you visited Tear for a fleeting time and caught an itching cold the following morning.
When she got home, seven-year-old Kodiak was sipping the blood of the cockatoo Mama Annistyn's son had gifted her. Mama Annistyn wrenched back Kodiak's crimson-speckled winter-blue hair, and tipped the wretched fluid down the child's throat. At the searing touch of the brew, drained to its dregs of tattered frost wings and beads of pollen, Kodiak stilled in her squatting position and dropped to the floor on her hard back.
Mama Annistyn sighed, placed the glass phial amongst its relatives along the window, flooded in light and soon with hope and fervent prayer, it would be filled with dust. As Kodiak slept wide-eyed, Mama Annistyn made for the enclosed chamber, where Kodiak's mother lied in bed, her skin torn in gashes of dark-blue veins and caked in dried dribbles of blood. Both the mother's arms and legs were restrained by chains, melded to hold for as long as it took. Her head, was fastened with a leather belt, tied to the headboard, worn and thin. Mama Annistyn feared it would not hold long.
YOU ARE READING
THE DREAMER'S LAMENT
Short StoryIn the hearts of dreamers, lament will always linger. Sadness can bloom into the brightest, lambent shades, like the rain giving way to the phantom of a rainbow, like the promise of hope. But sorrow may also wind down a darker, colder path. Our hear...
