On the same day, exactly one year after his father’s death, Sorin stood next to his mother Serie, in front of his gravestone with his father’s name, his dates, and the words “To the stars and back” inscribed in the middle. The air was cool and the clouds were a greyish blue on the cliffside. From here, Sorin could see where the sea met the beach just a short hike down a steep, winding dirt path away. The crescendo of the waves always served to put him in a trance, lulling him deep into his thoughts every time he walked along atop here. Just beyond where the sea met the sky, if only his eyes could see, his father still sailed, commanding giant galleons filled with his army of pirates, pilferers, vagabonds, and rebels. He brandished his giant sword against gaudy fortresses, rising and sinking with the waves within the waters he told Sorin he protected. All while his mother wept awaiting him, as she shivered and sulked ashore. His mother lit two sticks of incense, passing one to Sorin, the smell of sage and lavender worked to pull him back in front of the stone. Then, after a prayer, they placed them in the lush green at the foot of the grave and began the walk home. 

“Ma?” Sorin started hesitantly as the walk home was usually quieter, while both mother and son lost themselves in their own ruminations. The soft whistle and the rustle of the grass, paired with the crunching dirt filled the silence. 

“Yes, love?” Serie replied softly in such a way as to appear as attentive as she could. 

“Do you think he still hears us?” Sorin said.

Serie peeked at her son from the corners of her eyes as Sorin glanced back down the sloping path to the stone for a moment, the distance from it growing as they walked. 

“What do you mean hon?”  

“Does he still listen?” 

Serie saw Sorin’s eyes trail down to the path below him. His fingers had begun to find shelter within his hands. 

“To our prayers?” 

“Mhm.” Sorin murmured.

Warily, against herself, she willed her voice calm in the way she had learned to become accustomed to the past year, the way that she believed was best for her son. “Yes love, all the time. He is always going to be with you, remember?” she said, swallowing. 

Sorin’s gaze still remained fixed on the ground. Serie thought his silence to be terribly eerie, as she began to steel herself. 

“What’s on your mind, love?” she said. They were almost out of the cemetery before she turned to him, breaking their pace so they could stand face to face and she could find her son’s eyes. But they avoided her. His vision seemed to run along the dirt path towards the small browns of their town, he fixated on the soft rolling hills that surrounded it, the sea of green that surrounded him and Serie. 

When he tried to speak, the breeze acquainted itself with the murmuring he did when he’s trying to think of his words. “I’m sorry ma, I just… It’s feeling harder, sometimes lately- with him.” It was hard to discern his feelings while his eyes refused her own. “I try to think of what father would say to me, or what he would wish… but it’s harder now. It’s like he’s only in my imaginations.” Slowly lifting his gaze to meet his mother’s, his eyes began to search through her own.

Sorin’s mother stood still in front of her small eight year old son. His eyes, deep pits of brown. Since birth, it was always impossible for her to know how best to cradle his stare. They seemed to tear right through her, as if he saw more than she did. The swirling suffering and the growing knowledge that he was too young to acquire. That knowledge made her feel powerless. So much so, that in that moment, Serie couldn’t help but remember the first time Sorin had to learn of death. 

A few years before his father’s passing, Sorin caught wind of a boy not much older than he was at the time, who had died at the hands of a predator. The poor boy had snuck out of the town the night before to try hunting in a territory he shouldn’t have. The fishermen found his mangled body resting on the bank downriver. Bloody claw marks and lacerations ran up and down the boy’s limbs and across his face. A large bite had traveled deep into the sides of his broken neck. Whispers traveled through the streets, windswept like autumn leaves as soon as his body was seen carried through the streets of town to be delivered back home. Even amongst starvation, the townspeople spewed their ugly notions, calling the boy foolish. They called the parents the same, labeling them as “disastrously inattentive,” while jeering that maybe the boy was unloved. Yet, amongst all the snaking rumors, and all the unease, that crept through the town; almost everyday, you could find the boy’s mother here in the cemetery, by her son’s grave, and amongst the lapping of the shore. 

Kneeling down towards his shortness, Serie gently pulled Sorin into an embrace in an effort to calm him, and to save her composure. Sorin remained still with his arms at his side. “It’s hard for me sometimes too. It’s not easy as time goes on.” She said, feeling her hands tremble in the way she wouldn’t let her voice. “We are growing, and we have gotten through many such things together, right?”

“No ma… I mean, I need to remember. They act like they don’t remember what father did anymore, the way he cared for everyone. So if I don’t…” his voice caught, and subsided in a way that made the waves seem to respond to him with the following gush and breeze that swept his dark hair.

“What do you mean love?” she said while orienting him by his shoulders so she could see him. “Who do you mean by ‘they’ love? Remember what I told you? Whatever people say when we go into town you are not to worry about them. Your father did what he thought was best, all for the people, whether they believe so or not.”

“No…” Sorin hesitated, to the light brush of the ocean. “Not just about father, ma. I hear the other parents when they say you’re no good- that you can’t take care of me, that you couldn’t be a good mom. They said only a fool would have a child with dad. It’s not fair.” Sorin’s face turned to a resolute frown. Through clenched fists and a clenched jaw, he felt the edges of his eyes pull at him, threatening tears. “They’re not here, ma, they don’t know us, they don’t see what you do,” he said, softly choking through his words. 

For a moment, Sorin’s mother found that she couldn’t move. Her fingers only flexed slightly and her wide eyes quivered. To her, Sorin’s anger was almost respite; it wasn’t misplaced. She hadn’t moved to the outskirts of town near the forest out of guilt from her husband or spite towards the town. She hadn’t bumbled over the “art of sword fighting” just because she was angry. She hadn’t lumbered into town, bloodied from head to toe, from the viscera of the skinned carcases she carried on her back to feed her son and her people just to seem “maniacal, rabid, and unwomanly.” It seemed no matter where she tried her best, the shadow cast over her husband loomed over her too.

 In the beginning after her husband’s death, the burden of Serie’s daily life grew ever-more-demanding, to the point of deep anger, to the point of deep fear. She felt her world that was once held up by the presence of two skies, had come crumbling down upon her two shoulders. “If only he weren’t such a fool, righteous until the end,” Serie once muttered under her breath. She began to think her husband was mad for exchanging himself for those who were taught to hate him. As much as she shared his hate for the king, she felt emboldened to argue that he did not think of his wife and son who awaited him back home. Now, nobody dared allot any grace to the widowed mother whose husband was charged with treason and executed by the navy. She was alone.

“Oh honey,” Serie said, looking at the warm haziness of her boy through glossy vision. “If only they could hear you now…” She said, knowing that it wouldn’t make a difference. If the townspeople had spent a moment in their home perhaps, but not now. “You’re right. They don’t know. So don’t let them get to you ok, And I won’t let them get to me.” She smiled to the point she could taste the saltiness of her tears in the corners of her mouth. Seeing her son’s silhouette against the oranges and yellows of the sun setting upon the deep blue behind him, she said, “Let’s hurry home ok?” 

Serenity was the name once cordially given to her from the town, by the virtue of her presence. The sound of it waned from her memory once she had married her husband. After his death, it became even more ghostly as she had begun to retreat more and more frequently into her home. She had done so in an effort to erase the incessant admonishment from every friend she once had, every disdainful look from every acquaintance around town. She had done so to hide the blight in her chest, the place where she locked away her temper against the people around her. The snapping, writhing, rumbling- creaking temper that slithered and snaked through her bones and crept out of her mouth. The innards of her mind became a grotesque force she blockaded her son and herself from, away within the walls of their home. Her anger rattled the doorknob of their front door, pounding incessantly to let itself in. Shaking the shudders and skittering underneath the floorboards. Raking across the rooftop, biding its time. Still, her anger watches her at the end of the hall, waiting patiently in the dark corners of every room. She had never known herself to be so afraid. 

In the night of the same day, Serie awoke languid to Sorin hurriedly shaking her by her shoulders at the side of her bed. 

“Ma, Ma! Please wake up,” Sorin whispered.

“Honey?” she managed to respond.

“-Shhhh ma,” he said, panicked. “There’s something in the kitchen” his voice trembled.

As Serie got up to listen, Sorin’s shadowy figure slowly helped her from her bed. He gestured, begging her to move quietly. Softly stepping to the doorway, and putting her ear to her door, she waited. She heard scraping downstairs, coupled with heavy thudding and shuffling. Seeing her son in the dim of the moonlight shining through her window. She saw no reason to suspect his fear while his breathing stuttered so awfully and he clung to her nightgown so tightly. Another moment listening, and the loud cacophony of banging pots and pans upon the floor startled her, striking urgency through her veins. She nimbly glided across the room to the foot of her bedside that nested a large chest. She knelt, quickly sliding her hands across the iron framing the deep brown of the hardwood chest. Her fingers careened over the embossed waves that rippled from the iron skull clasp in the center that boasted thick, giant tentacles that sprouted from it. As gently as she could, she opened it to reveal her husband’s sword and shield, inlaid with the same skull-kraken embossing and the pulsing whirlpool of waves around it.

“Ma?” Sorin said, frightened.

“Stay here love and do not come out until I say.” She just barely knew how to use them.

“No ma please don’t go,” Sorin said, wrapping around her side. The desperation in his voice stung her in such a way that it loosened her white knuckle grip on the hilt of the sword.

“I need to hon. I’ll keep you safe ok?” 

“Ma…” he wept, as she calmly released him, she smiled at her boy in reassurance while tears streamed down his face. She then made her way through the door into the hallway. Whatever it was in her kitchen, Serie knew it was not human.  For all the turmoil that the town brought upon her health, her family had no such daring enemies. No thief would be foolish enough to even appraise her little humble home, let alone scrounge so loudly through her kitchen. She needed to meet whatever beastly thing that found its way into her house, where it remained downstairs, lest it would eventually work its way up to where she sheltered her small son inside her room. The hours she spent in that forest, the short walk away from her front door blessed her this day. The forest took over her, crowning her eyes and ears, her smell, her stride with the title: Huntress. As she crept downstairs, every step she took was feather soft; she caught a whiff of the cold outside breeze that wafted into her home and laid kisses upon her cheeks. Another breath in, and she caught a whiff of the earthy musk.     

With every step down, their first floor slowly spilled into view. She saw her front door wide open, moonlight spilling into her home to illuminate a huge, round, dark, brown figure. Across her living room, in the kitchen, bumbled a large brown bear, its head deep into the cabinets of her pantries, clearly starved. It lapped and huffed as it ate. She heard the drool from its mouth slobber while its jaws snapped and crunched through the items in her pantry. She needed to remove it now, before it finished through her kitchen. Before noticing the two other cubs next to the bear, she hastily bounded toward it, raised her sword, and swung.

As his mother closed the door, Sorin moved to hide under her bed in the corner of his parent’s room, trying his best to stifle his crying. Across the room, a small painting of him, his mother, and his father on his mother’s easel watched him softly as he curled into a ball. He couldn’t help but mourn. He imagined his father, finally docking into shore with a smile on his face while his mother awaited him portside on the dock below. Another clang, roar, and his mothers yelp startled Sorin sick. The swing had connected, and in pain and rage, the bear swung around with its other arm, slashing against Serie’s right sword arm and tossing her and the sword to the side. Then, more clanging and splintering in quick succession came from below. If Sorin could imagine his mother winning whatever fight he could not see, maybe she would. But the bear bounded at Serie, as she raised her shield up towards her eyes and tucked in her feet as much as she could underneath it, the bear’s large jaws clamped down onto the top of the shield and the two mothers began to meet eyes. The bear thrashed Serie around, and she yelped as she desperately held onto the shield, the sword just out of reach. Letting her right hand free, she twisted violently, stretching out her fist to connect, square into the bear’s eye. The bear recoiled before roaring, then lifted upwards to come down with both paws onto Serie’s shield. Her arms became crushed against her chest as she bore the weight of the bear. She let out a blood curdling scream as her back became crushed into the floorboards, splintering underneath her.   

At that last scream from Serie, Sorin’s fear took over his head, shooting electricity through his limbs, and willing his arms and legs to scramble out from under the bed. He ran, bounding through the door then down the stairs to see his mother. 

Standing there, he saw her standoff in front of the drooling bear as it growled low in front of her. The bear had backed off, and his mother started to slowly get up, using the shield to steady her balance. He saw his father’s sword lay bloody on the floor next to his mother, whose forearm exhibited a claw marked gash from her elbow to the top of her wrist. He saw the bear displayed the same, with a large gash in its right shoulder. Behind it, Sorin spotted two well-fed cubs with their muzzles in their pantry, filling themselves with the leftovers of his mother’s cooking. The pace of the sound of their rummaging and clanging of cookware made obvious the extent of their hunger. The starving mother bear once rose onto its hind legs and began bellowing at Sorin’s mom as she raised her shield, warning her to keep her distance away from her children. It then came down once again with a large stomping crash as its paws hit down, emptying its weight into the floorboards, which Sorin felt underneath his feet. 

Serie, catching a glimpse of her son behind her, willed herself upwards onto her feet and instinctively retorted, widening her stance and giving her own raging roar back. She felt it slither and snake out of her like fire lighting oil within her body. Her voice pierced and sliced the back of her throat on the way out, emptying into the bear’s ears. A display she wished the whole town could see. In response, the mother bear’s cubs whined, calling for their mother as they pranced out the door, finished with foraging through the now empty kitchen. The mother bear turned immediately to follow slowly, easily releasing its focus away from Sorin’s mom, now that her cubs were sated. It made its way out the door. 

Serie dropped the shield and collapsed to her knees at the sight. Her son rushed to her side, taking off his shirt to wrap it around the bleeding on her arm. Together, they watched as the mother and her children wandered off into the night, happy to survive another day. 

Edited by Alexandro Lopez Guzman