“The Sisters” won me over in its very first sentence. Language, imagery, rhythm, all of these are tools for spell casting, just as much as the everyday household magic which these characters seem to have access to. Though the arc of the story is never particularly surprising, it is nevertheless extremely satisfying—and the pace at which we learn more about each of the sisters, the ways in which the story reveals them to us, is delicious. — Guest Judge Kelly Link
In the morning, the sisters learn that their father is coming to visit. Harriet sets the letter in the middle of the table, where peeled apples are browning, and where a china vase holds pussy willows and thick-stalked cattails, molting clumps onto the linen cloth. A slow wasp wanders across the words a room in which to lay my... The weather is cooling, so he’s half-dead. His queen is nested in her paper home in the warmest wall next to the stove, fat and quivering as she falls asleep for the winter. All three sisters continue peeling apples with sharp little knives and the peels fall to the floor at their bare feet.
* * *
Agnes writes a shopping list on the back of their father’s letter. Silver thread, brandy, Darjeeling, piglet from Irving. She wears a fitted velvet jacket over loose breasts. It’s moss green and her skirt is black. She smokes cigarettes of rolled tobacco she grows herself in what had been called, when they were young, the west field. The rabbits have dug labyrinths beneath the west field and sometimes feast on the plants so that at night they emerge with wild eyes and drooling mouths. They tear over the field, kicking up dirt, and their squeals can be heard all across the mountain so people nod and say, the rabbits have gone mad again. In the morning, a few will be dead from exhaustion and the others will sleep fitfully under the earth. Agnes will gather the still-warm bodies and skin them next to the shed and the sisters will make a stew, as they do any day following the madness of rabbits.
* * *
The sisters rise early to walk the fields with shovels, and the old feeble pig follows. They are looking for silver stitch helichrysum—pale tufts that poke from the ground like the unruly heads of old men, buried upright. The birds leave their nests to circle the air as the sisters transplant the small bushes to a patch near the house. Later, they’ll toss in half-rotted crabapples and crusts of old bread and the birds will dive into the silvery foliage, shrieking and fighting over the scraps. During this feast, the sisters will harvest turnips and late potatoes. They will sweep the porch, polish the mantle, wash the windows.
* * *
The next morning is gray when the sisters push open the door to the upstairs room. They strip the bed and replace the straw in the mattress, finding spiders, mouse droppings, a nest of dead baby squirrels. Jane sets the eyeless babies near the window where their mother might come to collect them. She’ll gather them up, roll them like beetles in the brown grass, tend to their little corpses in her new nest where the babies will, in time, be absorbed into the walls, become a part of its structure. Jane cracks open the window with gloved fingers— she keeps herself well-covered. Her tunic is shapeless, her knitted stockings are long, and her hair is hidden beneath a linen kerchief. She watches the blackbirds swoop and dive, nearly hitting the ground before rising up on the air like ashes from a fire.
* * *
When they make the trek to town, people say to each other, the sisters are coming. Irving, who is gray now, waits for them. He gives them a piglet which Harriet places in her basket, and they give him a hat of rabbit fur. He inspects it shyly, nodding his thanks before placing it on his head. Last visit, they brought him lace knitted with fine linen thread for his daughter, newly married. Before that, two bottles of gooseberry juice sealed with wax and a garland of rabbit feet, and before that, a needlework of fruitflies hovering over a bowl of darkly bruised plums. He is always surprised and then pleased with what the sisters bring him.
They sell to the shopkeeper a bolt of linen and four honeycombs in jars, oozing amber liquid, and they purchase silver thread, Darjeeling, and brandy.
* * *
At dusk, they drop boiled turnips in a lumpy trail down to the pond. They do not put away the old feeble pig but instead wait on the porch with flickering lamps and watch him wander. When he nears the soft earth by the water, they nod and go to their beds and sleep well—Agnes on her cot in the kitchen, Harriet in her bed in the back room, and Jane in the wingback chair near the window where the blackbirds watch her by the dim glow of her lamp.
* * *
In the morning, they walk through the brittle grass and the fog, to the edge of the field where the pig is neck-deep in the marsh, and dead. His milky eye stares towards the house where the sisters had dreamed all night of pork cracklings and sausages. They haul him out of the muck and bring him to the shed. When they scrape his skin, bristles stick to the sisters’ arms and their aprons. His body jiggles when they hang him upside down, and his livers and coils slap the ground and steam. It’s night when they’re done butchering, salting, and boiling down the fat, and they are stained the color of bruises. They bathe in tin tubs under the moon’s light, rise with water falling from their shoulders and hips. They empty their tubs over the pig’s butchering place, washing it clean.
* * *
The sky is cold and bone-white when their father arrives. They watch him from the kitchen window, at first a speck of a man floating along the thinnest ribbon of gray road, then taking shape and growing until before long he fills their doorway. He removes his hat. His hair is full as a lion’s mane and silver, and where a pale blue eyeball once sat, is a sliver of pink socket beneath a flickering lid.
My sweets, he says. All grown up now.
His eye darts about the kitchen—the hen on the table, the young pig at the door, bone broth boiling over on the stove. From the rafters hang strings of dried mushrooms, herbs, glossy black feathers. He bats the feathers with a finger and one flitters to the floor by his feet. Cheerfully decorated, he says, and his smile shows wet brown teeth.
The sisters have not stepped forward to greet him, so he beckons to Jane, whom he always favored because of her twisty orange hair and, when she was small, the flash in her green eyes, the rose-petal pink of her delicate mouth. Now at her age, her lips are bloodless and her eyes washed out to a moonish green. She’d plucked out all her eyebrows and lashes years ago, but the rest of her hair is still flaming hot. Their father slips a finger beneath her kerchief to coil a strand around his pointer, and Harriet lunges forward with a stomp of her foot. He removes his hand.
Wasn’t I sorry to hear about your mother, he says.
* * *
Over a dinner of bread, turnips, and pork sausages scented with thyme, their father talks on. He’s traveled the world, he says. He’s met scholars, grown in wisdom and knowledge. Ask me anything! And when they continue to eat in silence, his broad smile falls. Yes, well. I’m not surprised. You’re like your mother and she was a dim light. No curiosity. He taps his forehead. No brains.
The sisters shake their heads and butter their bread. Their mother wove fine linen from her own flax, and from the seeds she rendered linseed oil. She bottled valerian tonic and comfrey balm, and people travelled from all over the mountain to purchase from her or make a trade. When she spoke, words formed around her tongue instead of on it. Words caught on the back of her teeth like clicking coins or deep in her throat in a raw hiss. People knew this, so they came silently, as if speaking would show disrespect. They pointed and mimed, the front porch becoming a theatre’s stage when folks had sore throats or gout or disagreeable partners.
Their mother was respected, managed her land, raised three daughters, kicked out a husband, and grew to an old age. At the end, and after much thought, she chose to walk into a midnight blizzard that had whipped snow into great drifts like waves in the darkness. The sisters found her days later off the mountain path, frozen, which their mother had read was an unusually warm and deliriously peaceful way to leave this world. And so she did leave this world warm and peaceful. Their father could never understand such a person.
* * *
That night while Jane sleeps near the window, she feels in her dream that a great wolf looms and she opens her eyes. Their father is on the stairs. His face is hidden in shadow, but she knows he watches her. A bird’s wing flutters against the windowpane, and their father turns away.
* * *
In the morning, their father walks the whole of their mother’s property, pacing, counting, testing the soil in the palm of his hand. The sisters watch from the window while they knead bread, and the blackbirds watch from their colorful nests in the oaks near the pond. Their nests are made of found things, and all of these things together tell a story—grasses from different seasons, the bones of their dead, pale strands from the silver stitch helichrysum, the feeble pig’s bristles, Jane’s fine eyelashes…
When their father returns, they feed him pie and Darjeeling spiked with brandy. I’d like to see the deed to this land, he says, and two lazy wasps circle his silver mane of hair. Give it a little go-over, he says. He bats at one wasp, then the other, and the wasps are disturbed. Their buzzing grows louder as they bounce off his head and stick to his lapels. He jumps up, knocking back the chair, then slaps his hand to his neck and a tiny yellow body falls to the floor, leaving a red welt on his skin.
Harriet! he bellows, but she’s already outside, walking away from the house, skirts billowing.
Harriet, always his least favorite because she’s heavy-boned and her hair is dull. She wears a skirt knitted from the unraveled yarn of three sweaters they’d long outgrown. The wool had been dyed by their mother, one with red cabbage, one with nettles, and one with the skins of onions, so the skirt is now striped in muddy shades of purple, green, gold. On her feet, Harriet wears black gumboots, and at her neck, strong as a man’s, she wears a high collar of netting embroidered with wasps. It rises to her chin so she looks like a queen.
Their father watches her out the window as he speaks. Fetch me the deed to this property, will you, chickadees?
And the sisters watch the other wasp crawl up the back of his collar with slow and spindly legs.
* * *
On Wednesday afternoons, their friends come to tea. Mrs. Beddoe, whose dark eyes are nearsighted and unfocused but whose observations are sharp as a snake’s tooth. Polite Mr. Haas in his best lavender coat. Irving, who wears the garland of rabbit feet around his neck.
Their father hovers, trying to impress with his worldly philosophies. I’ve traveled the country and beyond. Ask me anything, he implores.
Well, then. Mrs. Beddoe taps her cane on the floor. What is the Welsh word for a sensual dream on a starless winter’s night?
Ha. Not at all what I meant.
Which varietal of rutabaga, says Mr. Haas, twisting his moustache, grows best in the West Indies after a year of drought?
And when the sisters’ father sighs and opens the front door to leave, Irving says—What brings you here, anyhow, Mr. Monroe? Hm?
They all watch him out the window, a cloud of blackbirds swirling above his head as if he exhales them into the air.
* * *
You’re all getting old, says their father from his seat at the table where they’ve served him soup and warm bread. He waves his hand lazily at his face, neck, chest. But little Jane still has this hair, he says. As he reaches out his hand, a blackbird smashes into the window before flying off to the oaks in a crooked path. Their father watches with his one good eye, his finger gently prodding the spot where his other should be.
Jane was only a child when his eyeball was torn away into the heavens. Alone with their father in the wind-whipped west field, her hair shot back from her head and his hair shot forward. Grasses beat their legs and beyond his always-reaching hand, trees bent and bowed and swung their limbs. Without looking up, Jane knew a blackbird hovered just over their heads, fighting the wind with strong wings. And when their father’s hand took hold of her hair, that blackbird dropped down, plucking his eye from its socket like a ripe berry and carrying it off towards the oaks. He fell to the ground with a cry, and Jane walked back to the house, holding her hair tight in one trembling little hand and her sweater closed tight with the other.
* * *
That night, the rabbits are mad again.
The sisters read comfortably in their beds but their father paces the floor, scraping his knuckles on the top of his head. How can you sleep! he bellows from the top of the stairs. Agnes! How can you stand it!
They pay no mind and soon dream peacefully to the rabbits’ revelries. But when the squeals turn to shrieks, they are woken. A hint of smoke tinges the air. People across the mountain lift their heads from their pillows or set down their books. They rise to their feet and listen on their porches. In the dark, the sisters rush down to the west field, their nightgowns swishing, their bare feet crushing dead grass. A great bonfire shoots orange ashes up into the sky, and the dark figure of their father swings a club to the ground like a madman. Together, they wrest it from his hands and Hariett hurries to the pond where the moon spills milky light on the black surface. She throws the club in the water and the light shatters, then she returns to her sisters who are holding each other. Their father is back in the house and the rabbits that escaped him are hiding in their burrows.
* * *
By morning, Agnes is still down at the west field, where the pile of blackened rabbit bones smolders. A sooty fog rises up around her skirts as she walks the edge, checks her plants, speaks soft and low to the rabbits who huddle beneath her feet. She takes a deep drag of her cigarette and blows smoke at the cold sky, then turns to the house and watches for the shape of her father at the window.
* * *
They feed the birds in the patch of silver stitch helichrysum, then they have tea without their father. Above them, something bangs, then drags and bangs once more. They know he has emptied their drawers and chests onto the floor—their childhood clothes, their mother’s family letters, old encyclopedias and garden manuals, pictures of relatives, moth-eaten quilts, fallen feathered hats. Agnes smokes her lumpy cigarette, Harriet stitches in silver thread, and Jane weaves reeds together with gloved fingers.
* * *
A man comes to the house in a motorized car. He is damp and flushed with excitement, words tumble from his smiling mouth as his eyes dart about the place. The sisters’ father introduces him as his good friend, Sky MacIntosh.
The cleverest man I know!
Oh! says Mr. MacIntosh. So says the cleverest man I know!
Agnes stubs out her cigarette on the wall beside her but the other two don’t look away from their father’s shiny friend.
Come! says their father. Show good Mr. MacIntosh your gardens and trees.
The sisters trail behind the two men, listening to their father’s murmurs. Well, they let it all go to waste, but you can see, can’t you? This is good land—
As he stretches out his arm to take in the vastness of their mother’s good land, a bird tumbles through the sky. It falls so fast they can hear the rush of air along feathers, and the sickening thump when it collapses into their father’s head. He cries out, running three crouching steps away, shielding his head with his arms. Blood runs down his face in thick black threads.
Jane! he yells, but the sisters are watching the bird fly off toward the pond, crooked and clumsy with injury. Jane stoops to gather the fallen feathers. Later, she will wash them, then hang them from the rafters until she has enough to make a shimmering black collar for Harriet. She places the feathers in her apron pocket and the sisters head back to the house. At their backs, Mr. MacIntosh dabs at a dark spot in their father’s great mane of silver hair with his handkerchief. Oh shame. Oh dear.
* * *
That night the sisters put extra brandy in their father’s tea, and three drops of their mother’s soothing tincture.
* * *
Their father snores deeply in his bed. The sisters wipe the soup from his lapel and straighten his buttons. They comb his silver hair, that glitters in the fire’s light. A blackbird sits at the window, looking in with shiny bead eyes. Jane, in turn, looks out, her hands pressed against the glass. The dark sky is filled with flapping birds. One hits the window and she jumps back, turning to her sisters. Another smashes the glass behind her, and then another.
Agnes dips her chin and Harriet says, Open the window, Jane.
* * *
Downstairs, the sisters make tea to the crashing and thrashing above them. By candlelight, Harriet picks up her needlework, Agnes rolls another cigarette, and Jane finishes weaving the reed frame with gloved fingers. There’s a sort of music made by the tapping of Harriet’s thimbled finger to needle, the grating sound of silver thread pulled through the folded deed on the back of the linen. When they are done, Agnes hammers a nail into the wall and Jane hangs the picture. The embroidered blackbird stares back at them, curious and ragged. Feathers are strewn about its scaly talons and its beak is full of silver strands.
Upstairs, the door is locked and the key hangs above the stove. It will remain there for so long the sisters will need canes to climb the steps when they finally revisit the room. They won’t be surprised to see that the most useful parts of their father had been taken, and the rest of him had sunken into the mattress, become absorbed in the fetid straw so that it would seem, to an outsider who is prone to see shapes in clouds, that the bed had a face, or the straw had the vague shape of a man.
But for now, the morning light is soft and purple, and their fingers and necks are stiff. They wrap shawls over their nightgowns and take a walk on their mother’s good land, the fields, the pond, the grove of oaks where the nests now glitter like frost. The blackbirds are quiet, the rabbits sleep peacefully under the ground, and the wasps prepare to die, while their queen is nested in the wall near the stove. And Irving’s young pig follows, growing fat on acorns and gnarled roots.
Angie Ellis lives on foggy Vancouver Island, where she is currently working on a collection of linked stories. Her first novel, A Snake and a Feathered Bird, comes out in the fall of 2025.