NaNoWriMo: Read the Novel While I Write: Prologue

 Prologue

The Cottage

"Run." Her voice skittered over rocks and trees. It was in front of me, behind me, beside me, just as she always had been. Two as one. Never alone. Never apart and on a day that gave no sign, no hint, we were divided. 

"Run." and I did because she told me to, because she was the one who was brave. Because I did as I was told and delighted that she did not.

"Run." I did because I had no skill and no practice in defiance. I ran until I outran even her voice. I ran until the air ripped from my lungs.

I ran until everything I should have done and said caught up with me. Every way I could have saved her. A fracture in the world where us became I. That I would stop and at the tree break she would appear. A whoop and a grin that she had yet again outrun catastrophe and death itself. It would happen at any moment because it had to. I obey and she wins. That is how the universe spins.

She would laugh loud enough to challenge the birds in the trees to revel in our bravery. We would fall together on the grass. Her arm under my neck. We would watch the clouds while she told me of the brave things she had done while I did as I was told. The tree break was empty. Us was me. Me standing at the hill. Me obedient. Me alone to think how this had happened. A lifetime to wonder if.

A cracking in my chest, slow, every second the forest edge remained bark and needle. If I sobbed, if I screamed my rage to the sky I would be rewarded with the humiliation of explaining my behavior to her, when she came. A bargain a plea. When she appeared holding me against the dark telling me how silly my mind was. Had she ever not broken from a scrape? It would have been a rabbit that startled us. It was imaginations running wilder than her. A lifetime of if echoed back from the forrest. Our adventure had taken separate paths.

I could have made a better case for chasing fairies in the kitchen garden but that was my joy. I could have tempted her with teasing the gnomes by the rock outcropping. I could have pretended not to see the ring on her finger. I could have told her to wait one more day with me.  Demanded for the first time in our shared lives. Told her to stay. Stay with me. For one more year at least. I did not have to pull her sleeve. I did not have to follow her into the forest. She told me to stay and I could not. I followed until she could ignore me no longer.

We could have stayed with safer dangers. Less terrifying challenges. But terrifying challenges were her joy. From the late nights our toes tangled under blankets and her tales of all the girls who had lived in that very room before us. The long rambles to town. Tales of The War after we found spear heads in the meadow. She loved a tale of brave, starting over, a new horizon. Always a new horizon.

I stopped and spun. In front of me as every tale our mother, cousins, and aunties had told us was the impossible cottage. No path, just a perfect thatch roof with two geese and a white rabbit chasing each other behind the roses. The girl who came out looked concerned and not entirely old enough to live by herself.

"You look like you have a big story and a larger problem little witch." She said as I sat by her gate and cried for everything I knew I would feel. She stood in front of me and extended her hand. "You are alone when you shouldn't be, when by birth you were promised you never would. What is lost will always be returned if you know how to see it. Come, have tea. Tell me your story and I will see if there is more that I can do for you little Eleanore than to listen and give you safe passage." I took her hand because she was there, since she asked me too, and when a strange girl in the middle of the woods knows your name it is best to oblige even if you had not grown on tales of the girls who never got older and lived in a cottage that only appeared when you were not searching for it but had a great need of either shelter or of the sisters. "My name is Alice. My sister is traveling so we have all the time in the world."