Sacrifices (short story)

Things were always flying about Rickie’s head when she was a baby.

Her mother complained on the day of her birth that too many flies were present in that patch of the woods they’d chosen, where she squatted over the bed of banana leaves upon which Rickie was meant to make her earthside debut. The midwife had told her to focus on her breathing, for disrupting the energetic alignment they’d so carefully worked toward over the past nine months would do more harm than the flies could. Rickie’s mother insisted that Rickie’s aunt had not followed her instructions for how to age the leaves and sent her to the house to retrieve more. By the time she returned, Rickie was born.

The next day, a butterfly found its way from the garden, through the second floor window and onto Rickie’s forehead in her crib. Butterflies were long out of season by then, a fact all witnesses from that day agree on. What was harder to settle was Rickie’s mother’s memory that every window in the house was closed that day.

A few days after that Rickie was stung on the forehead by a bee, and it was at this point that her mother declared too many flying things drawn to a child in her first days as a bad omen.

So Rickie was used to feeling like a curse. In a way, she found satisfaction from the thing within her that unsettled people, whatever it was. From the day she was born she unsettled her mother; posing a threat just by existing, with her strange omens and a stubborn refusal to ever be afraid. As she grew older, Rickie became unsettling to other people for reasons often beyond their own understanding.

She just had something about her, that girl, with a sugarcane tongue and eyes full of stars. Her mother would say that her mind had a mind of its own.

And the flying things never went away. Even now, as Rickie sat on the cold bathroom floor with her legs folded underneath her, there was a moth circling her head like she’d swallowed a lightbulb. She was unbothered by the thing, as most things. But something about the items laid out before her on the bathroom floor was getting under her skin, making her itch with the tingle of incompleteness.

Something was missing.

“A stainless basin. Fresh cow’s milk. Aged rose petals,” Rickie softly narrated the list of items before her, which she’d memorized even before going to collect them all. “Cinnamon, clove oil, frankincense and myrrh, a silk ribbon, the peel of an orange…”

She had reached the end of the items in front of her, but the list wasn’t finished. “Frankincense and myrrh, a silk ribbon, the peel of an orange…” She repeated this a few times, waiting for a divine voice to complete the sentence and remind her what was missing. She’d been gathering materials for this for weeks and thinking about it for even longer, so the idea that any detail could have been overlooked or forgotten just didn’t make sense to her. Rickie repeated the list to herself over and over, scanned endlessly through the items, and still nothing. She didn’t know what upset her more: forgetting to get the thing, or forgetting whatever it was supposed to be.

Today, there was little room for her imperfections, especially carelessness—usually, she knew how to be gentle with herself when need be, but all she wanted in this moment that she’d spent weeks preparing for was to prove to herself that she could actualize her potential. That’s it. She just wanted to experience in real time the capabilities she knew she’d always had, ones she’d seen before.

And here she was, at eleven PM sitting on the bathroom floor with a moth and self-pity, failing herself.

Rickie shoved the basin away from her and it tumbled across the bathroom tile with a loud clanging sound. It startled even the moth, which landed on the wall behind her to regain composure. Rickie sat arms folded staring at her reflection in the mirror across from her, with eyes growing warm with rage like a pot of her mother’s healing stew. Her hair was pulled back into a low bun, showing off her moon-shaped face and now the classic pout that appeared whenever she couldn’t make her way happen with the ease that she could make a leaf turn purple or an animal levitate. Rickie wasn’t spoiled until it came to her gifts; they needed to work immediately, or else she was ruined. What was the point of knowing how to manipulate reality if it didn’t work when she wanted to fix her own?

The bathroom door swung open. Rickie didn’t bother to turn; she knew she’d left it locked, so there was only one person in the house with the gift to bypass that and the audacity to use it.

“You’re missing the stone.” Her mother stood in the bathroom doorway wearing a plush pink robe, her hair tied in a silk cloth she made herself—looking as ordinary as anyone’s mother, but towering over Rickie and her playthings with the tense scrutiny of a monarch.

“What?” Rickie kept her eyes in the basin, wiping it with a cloth to prepare the ritual.

“Cinnamon, clove oil, frankincense and myrrh, a silk ribbon, the peel of an orange, and a stone from the land of your mother’s birth.”

Rickie looked up now. Her mother unfolded her arms, turned halfway out the door, and said before leaving: “Clean this up and go to bed, Rickie.”

She walked away letting her words hang in the air, knowing Rickie would let them fall flat.

Rickie pushed out of the bathroom with enough force to knock a white burning candle off a table in the hallway; the candle froze just hairs’ length from the floor, the flame still dancing in the dark. She used a sharp gaze to glide it back onto the tabletop.

“You see why you don’t slam doors in this house?” Her mother asked, standing at the counter over small piles of dark herbs. She took an olive green bottle with a golden seal from the cabinet and poured its clear contents into a kettle over the stove.

“When are you going to start treating me like an adult?”

Rickie’s mother sighed over the boiling water. “What you’re doing has nothing to do with adulthood, Rickie. It has nothing to do with people or time or anything of this world. It’s childish of you, actually, to think this is about you being a child.”

“And yet I’m not a child. I’ve been doing this since I started walking. You and Grandma were the ones who taught me what I know, and after all these years you would think—”

“Rickie!”

Her mother’s voice cut through the night air like a diamond blade through stone. Silence entered as a welcomed presence, binding each of them to their respective ends of the room and glazing over their eyes with the gloss of bitter longing.

“Mom,” Rickie pushed the sound into the room like a call for someone she knew wasn’t there; a spirit who couldn’t answer. “I need the stone to complete the ritual.”

Her mother smiled. “I know that.”

“So you’ll give it to me?”

The water began bubbling in the kettle on the stove. Rickie’s mother paid it no mind, just held her daughter’s gaze with an expression that answered the question quicker than words could. Rickie’s eyes were sharp daggers on the kettle, and after a few seconds of her stare the bubbling calmed and the fire went down.

“Those are the kinds of spells you should be doing,” her mother said. “You don’t need the stone because you don’t need that ritual. It was created for people who really do.”

Rickie pushed out a sigh and her body turned toward the hallway. She almost wanted to give up and quit, which was how she felt during every conversation with her mother. It always felt like pleading with a brick wall; she never walked away feeling heard, just rejected and somehow outnumbered by one person.

She closed her eyes, trying to find calm in the darkness. “Who are you to tell me what I need and don’t? The ritual is for people searching for spiritual guidance, and if I want that I shouldn’t need permission.”

“I am your mother.” She spoke these words with so much heat that Rickie thought the stove might turn on again. Then, a bit softer now after noticing her daughter’s expression and glancing out the window to contemplate something before continuing: “I’m here to guide you, Rickie. I want you to lean on that. I want you to trust me enough to share your needs and let me help you figure out how to meet them. This ritual, honey, it isn’t the way. It’s a seeing spell that grants sight that defies time and space. It could be the past, present, or future; your life or anyone else’s; this dimension or others. You have no control over what you’ll see.”

“Mom, I have no control over what I can see now every day with my own two eyes. Does that mean I should keep them closed in fear?”

Rickie held eye contact with her mother—she wanted to watch the question sit on her chest, and it did. Her mother swallowed, turned around in silence, and began preparing a cup of tea. She scooped up a concoction of the herbs on the counter into the cup and poured the kettle’s contents out over it. She then left the cup on the counter and walked out of the kitchen, disappearing down the hallway.

Their conversations, especially those about the spiritual arts, were often tense and usually ended in someone walking away. But it was rarely this abrupt, so Rickie stood in the kitchen looking around for a moment in disbelief in how she’d been left hanging.

Then footsteps started coming down the hallway again. Rickie’s mother came out of the darkness with her hair untied and out of the silk scarf, which was in her left hand. Her right was closed, and when she got close enough to Rickie, she opened it to reveal a smooth black stone.

Rickie gasped. With bright eyes and an emerging grin that she didn’t bother to hold back, she opened her mouth to say something but her mother held a finger up to her own lips, demanding silence.

“You are my daughter, and I know because you have my stubbornness,” Her mother chuckled lightly, but maintained a sober countenance. “You came into this world gifted, Rickie, and you’ve been learning how to increase those gifts ever since. But I have lived longer than you. So when I tell you that this life can be dangerous, you have to listen to me. The things you see, whether with the pair of eyes on your face or inside your mind, can hurt you. The sights this life shows us can be like knives, sharp enough to cut you. They leave scars inside your mind, where no one else can see, where they will never heal. You are right that I can’t protect you from everything forever, and I want you to have experiences, but I have the wisdom to know which ones you don’t need. But you are in control, not me. So here is the stone if you would still so desperately like to see.”

She placed the stone in Rickie’s hand. It was just a rock now, ordinary despite being the key to unlock the most powerful ritual she had ever attempted, but it felt like it tingled inside her palm. Rickie ran her fingers over the stone wondering what it had seen, what kinds of elements had weathered it to the smoothness she saw now.

She wondered what her mother had weathered; she’d always seen her as a strong woman, immune to defeat. She and Rickie shared life together since she was born, but for the first time Rickie wondered about the life her mother lived before her. What had scarred her? The thought that anything could cut through her mother’s iron walls scared her, but this fear made her want to do the ritual even more. Whatever her mother had seen, even if dangerous, clearly wasn’t enough to knock her off her feet. The stories of scars couldn't discourage Rickie because they were stories she was still here to tell.

“Thank you, mama.” She gave the stone a squeeze in her hand.

“Take this, too,” Her mother took the cup of tea from the table and carefully put it in Rickie’s other hand. “It will make you forget. If the ritual works and you come back not liking what you saw, drink this and you won’t remember any of it.”

Rickie took the cup of tea. They shared a stare that held them together as one in a moment where they felt more separate than ever. Then Rickie scurried back into the bathroom without a word.

She set the tea down on the side of the sink, away from everything else. Drinking it would be like undoing everything she was about to prepare so carefully, so she knew she wouldn’t need it. She sat down on the bathroom floor and began, her hands moving with the ease of an alchemist.

Rickie had memorized the Seeing ritual since she first decided she wanted to do it. The ritual was a chance to learn more about herself; whether she ended up seeing her past lives, a glimpse of her future or a sign for what to do in her present, she knew whatever the spirits showed her would be what they felt she needed to see. She’d felt stuck under the weight of everything she didn’t know.

So, fearlessly, she glided through the steps:

Pour the cow’s milk into the basin; fill up to one inch from the brim.

Steep the orange peel in the milk; leave it untouched for three minutes before continuing.

Spell your first name in your mind while pouring in drops of clove oil and stop when you’re finished.

Add one stick of cinnamon for every full decade you’ve been alive.

Throw in the aged rose petals on top of everything else; as many as your heart is called to, but not so much to cover the contents of the basin.

Burn the frankincense and myrrh in your space.

Tie the silk ribbon around your left wrist.

When she was finished, the basin with her concoction looked full and alive. She looked down at the stone in her sweating palm; she wasn’t nervous, but there was a kaleidoscope of butterflies flying through her stomach and she couldn’t figure out why. As if it could sense this, the moth from before flew off the bathroom wall and onto Rickie’s shoulder. She smiled, accepting this as confirmation that she was ready for the last step, and closed her eyes.

With a stone from the land of your mother’s birth firmly planted in both hands, place your closed hands into the basin all the way to its bottom.

She opened her eyes and was in a living room.

Something about the room felt familiar, with its beige sofa unit, pale orange carpet, and gaudy chandelier hanging from the ceiling. The furniture was old-fashioned and too plentiful. A TV was playing a news channel, but the volume was low so Rickie couldn’t hear what they were saying. She was sitting on a chair in the corner of the room, across from the sofa.

She was about to stand up and leave—there was a beaded curtain in the doorway and she wanted to see what was beyond. Maybe something in the hallway or another room could help her make sense of where she was. But just as Rickie stood up, she heard someone coming and quickly fell back down into her seat.

The beads started jingling and Rickie felt her face break into a smile that stretched for miles. It was her grandmother who came through the doorway; since she got sick Rickie rarely got to see her, unless to visit her house every now and then to help care for the plants and cats and borrow herbs. Every time she went, her grandmother pulled her into the world’s warmest embrace, made her a meal the angels would envy, and gave her new spells to learn.

But this time, her grandma didn’t return the grin on her face. In fact, she didn’t react as if she’d seen Rickie smile at all. She just walked over to the sofa and eased slowly down into it with a heavy sigh.

“So what are you going to do?”

As soon as Rickie heard the question, she knew something was off. This voice wasn’t the one dripping with honey that her grandma always used with her. This woman sitting before her on the sofa looked different; younger than her grandma, but somehow more tired. This room looked like an imitation of her grandma’s living room that someone had created from poor memory. What was this place?

This is the question Rickie wanted to ask, but when she opened her mouth sounds emerged that she did not create and could not control.

“I don’t know. I mean, I do want to be a mother. Richard has always wanted children. But I don’t know how he’ll react if I tell him now.”

“Shay, it’s your decision.” Chills ran down Rickie’s spine when her grandmother used her mother’s name. The eye contact she made with her grandmother felt eerie now that she realized the moment she was in—one from so long ago that her father’s name was being used in the present tense. She felt wrong, somehow, eavesdropping on whatever this conversation between her grandmother and her mother was.

Her grandmother continued, “You don’t have to keep this baby. There are ways. Especially with how early things are. If you were further along it might take a more complicated spell, but I could give you something to drink right now that would take care of everything in ten minutes if that’s what you wanted.”

Rickie felt a tightness in her chest. She knew it was her they were talking about, and hearing her grandmother talk about getting rid of her so easily made her want to yell. But still, she couldn’t control her sounds. It was like her lines were already written.

“I want this baby. I do. But Richard is already sick. You know I’m trying to help him, but I’m scared of how a baby will complicate things. He won’t be able to help me as much.”

Her grandmother shook her head. “You won’t be able to help him, either.”

“I can care for my husband and my child. That’s the kind of multitasking we’re born to do, isn’t it?”

Again, Grandma shook her head. This time she inched closer and grabbed Rickie’s hand into a firm grasp, pressing her thumb into her skin. Rickie recognized this grasp as the prelude to all her grandmother’s most vital wisdom; she’d use it every time she was about to share something with you, and you’d better believe it was the truth. She held a higher knowing and ignoring it had consequences.

“You can’t, Shay. Not like this. I saw it myself. This one you’re carrying is coming in mighty, with force. She will bring to this earth an abundance to be reckoned with; she’s going to need a lot from you. So she’s going to take a lot from you, more than you can give if you’re giving to Richard too,” Grandma explained, keeping her hand locked. “She will make your power weak. Brittle. If you choose to keep her you’ll survive it, but you won’t be strong enough to use any magic while you’re pregnant. Especially not the kind needed to heal Richard’s ailments.”

Rickie was a witness to this moment, but she could feel her mother’s emotions. It was a losing situation with no escape.

“But I’ll get my power back once she’s born, right?” The voice coming out of Rickie asked.

Grandma sighed and softened her grip to a caress. “Yes. But you know Richard is not doing well. It’s…it’s not good. A pregnancy is long, too long for him to survive with no help. By the time she’s born…”

The butterflies in Rickie’s stomach had turned to stone and dropped. This was a moment in which she hadn’t existed, not really, but was a determining factor threatening to shift people’s lives. She never knew that her existence had been such a burdened, debated decision.

“There is no shame in taking care of it now, if that’s what you want. That’s your right as a woman. And no one would blame you for loving your husband,” Grandma told her.

Rickie exhaled her mother’s breath. “This…this girl that you’re seeing. You said she’s coming with force, with purpose. If I don’t keep her, where does her soul go?”

“Back where it came from,” Grandma replied.

“And if I get pregnant again later?”

Grandma tightened her lip and gave Shay the loving expression she’d give before delivering disappointment. “She’s coming now because she feels her time is now. If you send her back, there’s no way to guarantee that she’ll return.”

Rickie could feel her mother’s mind. She couldn’t hear any of the individual thoughts, but she could feel the tension, the pain, the guilt.

“And if I just let you take care of it now,” Shay said, “I’ll keep the strength I need to heal Richard.”

Grandma nodded slowly. “You decide, Shay.”

The sun must have started shining from the window behind Rickie, because a glow entered her grandmother’s eyes that lifted them to a warm hazel. As she stared into her grandma’s eyes wondering what she saw in the young face of her mother looking back at her, Rickie suddenly broke into a coughing fit. She coughed uncontrollably, grasping at her dry throat with her hands, until she fell over on the floor. Her eyes were closed while she heaved but she tapped around on the floor with her hands, searching for the air she couldn’t find. Then her hands landed in what she thought was a cup of water—salvation. Rickie quickly opened her eyes.

When she looked down, her hands were wet with milk.

She was back now: to herself, her life, her bathroom. The moth was perched on the shower curtain rod as if it had been awaiting her return. Her chest rose and fell with violent force.

Rickie stumbled up to her feet, picked up the basin and poured its contents out into the tub, her shaky hands spilling some of it on the floor. She went over to the sink to look at herself in the mirror and make sure she was really there.

She was. Disheveled, eyes widened like a deer, mouth dry from exasperation, but she was here. And at what cost?

She looked down at the cup of tea her mother had given her. Rickie did want to forget. It was ugly, what she had seen, and she wanted to scrub the conversation from her mind to feel clean again. Her life had taken her father’s away—from him, from her mother, and from her, since she never got to meet him. And that fated decision made before she even reached the earth took away any hope of her having a normal relationship with her mother.

Shay held a grudge against Rickie from the moment she was born despite how much she tried to deny or repress it, and Rickie had always had intuition beyond her years so she sensed, and thus projected, the resentment. Years of loving a mother who she felt couldn’t bring herself to truly like her, and now she understood why. It made Rickie sick to her stomach, thinking about how the disdain she felt from Shay had actually been a love more divine than she’d ever known. To love something that doesn’t even exist yet so much that you give it the life being drained from the person you loved first.

It was unfair to everyone involved. There was no one to blame and yet Rickie still felt it was her. She felt guilty, too, for pitying herself in this situation instead of the one who was burdened with the decision. She felt guilty for reacting to her mother’s ways in times when she just couldn’t see the burden she’d been carrying, the burden that Rickie still was. She felt remorse for the times she expressed anger to her father’s spirit for not being here, not even sticking around long enough for her to have at least met him once, when really his spirit deserved to be angry at her. She felt so many things that she wanted to feel nothing at all.

She looked down again at the tea.

The sacrifice was an aching sore that she wanted to assuage from her mind. But it had only been in her mind for the past couple of minutes—she imagined the ache of carrying that awareness for the next twenty-one years. It would be difficult, she thought, to find much joy.

Rickie took the tea, still warm in its glass cup, and placed it on the floor where she sat before. She took the basin from the tub and placed it next to it. Then she gathered the materials again and started following the steps the same way she did before. When she reached the end, the part where she was supposed to hold the stone in the basin, she instead poured the tea into the basin.

Rickie used the stone to stir the contents of the basin around and around. While stirring, she recited a prayer in a low whisper:

“Bring healing to her invisible scars

Make a soothing balm for the pain of her memories

Lock every battle she’s fought away in a hidden jar

Let the gift of oblivion be the white flag of her enemies.”

After the third time Rickie repeated the words, Shay opened the bathroom door again.

She looked at Rickie, the basin beside her, the wet stone in her hand, then back at Rickie.

“You finished the ritual?” She asked, unable to hide the concern in her trembling voice.

Rickie nodded.

“Are you okay?” Shay asked. “How did it go?”

Rickie shrugged her shoulders. She picked up the empty cup of tea and held it up for her mother to see. “I don’t know.”

Shay nodded and allowed her eyes to close for a moment, indulging in a brief sense of relief. There was nothing to say, or she couldn’t find the words, so she stood silently watching her daughter and the little mess she’d made.

Rickie looked at her mother and saw not a scrutinizing monarch, but the forbearing face of royalty. She stood from the floor and walked toward her mother, whose brows furrowed as she approached. Rickie paused, not out of hesitation but to say everything with her eyes that she couldn’t with her lips and hoped her mother would hear.

They held each other with their eyes, and then Shay pulled Rickie into an embrace that said all the rest.