Stefania anticipated a tough time of it. She had come to escape the din of the linen factory, the tightness of her family’s apartment, the harassment of the neighborhood bullies, the suffocating press of Hartford’s tenements, but she had also come expecting to work, and to work hard. This was the only expectation that the American Thread Company actually fulfilled, despite their advertisement’s promises that A glorious new life awaits the young woman upon the scenic banks of the Willimantic.
The mill proved louder than the workshop where Stefania had sewn uncounted miles of linen using the very thread she now drew from the enormous spinning frames. Long after her shifts ended, she felt the thunder of the machine thrumming though her ears and chest. A constant mist of lint hazed the bustling work floor. Even though she kept her long braid coiled in a bun and then tucked under a net for safety’s sake, the downy white particles infested her black hair. Between all the pale streaks in her tresses and the arthritic cramping in her hands, she would have felt like a princess prematurely aged by a crone’s curse in her nonna’s fairy tales, save that her parents had made sure she’d known from the time she could walk that Stefania was no precious child to be pampered . . . and that even in her stories, Nonna was more likely to cast Margheriti women as Roma witches than royals, the beatific ancient kissing her crescent-moon necklace and waggling her fingers in a faux hex whenever Papa complained about her feeding Stefania such stories. For a girl raised on a filling yet bland diet of prayer and work, the old stories were rich and rare as gelato—both her mother and the mother church insisted that suffering in this world was necessary for glory in the next, but her grandmother’s fables provided the sweetness of immediate satisfaction. While Stefania appreciated from a very young age that even virtuous women couldn’t expect to find much justice until the hereafter, it was fun to listen to the fairy stories and imagine the wicked facing abrupt consequences for their ill manners. What a world it would be, where drudgery could be escaped forever through quick wits and a pure heart . . .
The long days in the Connecticut mill were the best part of Stefania’s new life, as they kept her mind from dwelling on just what a terrible mistake it had been to come here to Thread City. This wasn’t just homesickness—she’d felt that when her family had taken her away from Volterra, an ache she still carried with her when she thought of her distant grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles, when she remembered the thick sunlight dripping down the familiar hills to pool in the Etruscan necropolis that honeycombed the base of the cliff. That pain had inspired her to seek out better wages, however farther afield, so that instead of guiltily turning over every penny to her parents, she could save enough to return to the Old Country . . . assuming there was any home to go back to, if the Americans didn’t work up the moxie to join the Italians, English, and everyone else fighting the good fight against the Hun.
Homesickness, though, that came easy. She missed her family, she missed real food, she missed a good night’s sleep in her old bed, she missed the comforting drone of Italian around the dinner table, however much the Yankees tried to make her feel ashamed of who she was . . . she missed all of that, but she was almost sixteen years old, and she could bear it. The thornier burden was that the girls here made the bullies back in Hartford seem as hissing cats to biting dogs, her roommate at the boarding house the worst of all.
The older girl had acted polite, if a little aloof, when “Grandma” Snow introduced them. But as soon as the landlady left them alone, Frieda made it clear that she wasn’t about to share the cramped room’s sole bed with a greasy dago . . . and if Stefania tried to make a stink about it, she would pay a stern price. Either of Stefania’s older sisters would have put up a fight, she knew, but try as she did to grow the courage to push back, it always withered before it could bloom, even after weeks of sleeping on the floor and enduring countless abuses anytime they were alone together. As a result, she spent as little time in their shared room as possible, silently praying the girl would soften with time and patience, but even after Stefania cut her palm on the edge of a cracked spindle, Frieda had only laughed at her clumsiness and loudly told her friends that the thread would need an extra turn in the dyehouse, since guinea blood left a powerful stain.
Yet for as polluted as she seemed to find Stefania, Frieda certainly had no compunctions about borrowing her roommate’s clean socks right off the line, or helping herself to the pizelles Stefania’s mother had sent her. Stefania wasn’t surprised the girl was a thief as well as a bully, the two going hand in glove, but the lack of consistency made the trespasses all the more galling. Especially since she would have gladly given Frieda all she had to offer, if only the girl would politely ask. She never did.
“Hey!” Stefania winced at the feminine call as she left the gate of Saint Joseph’s one evening after the days had grown long enough for her to retreat there after supper. The church was one of the few true sanctuaries she had found in the smoky, crowded burg, even if she always felt like the Irish congregation was giving her dirty looks, but now it seemed like this safe haven had also been discovered by her tormentors. She put her shawl-covered head down and quickened her step back toward the relative safety of the boarding house’s parlor, but the girl caught up alongside her. “Hey, you’re Stephanie, right?”
Stefania curtly nodded, too angry to reply to the girl’s cheery tone. This game they played of acting nice only to then mock the stupid wop for being taken in was the nastiest in a rotten repertoire, and she wouldn’t be duped again. She kept her brisk pace.
“I’m Helen, I work the next floor over from you.” The twang in the girl’s voice marked her as a local, and since most of Frieda’s gang were fellow transplants at the boarding house, Stefania dared a glance at her shadow. Helen was a big girl with a big smile, braids shining like spun gold as the setting sun caught on a shop window and flashed over her face. “Say, mind if we take it a little easier? I just put in an extra four, so unless you’re in some kind of a hurry . . .”
“Sorry,” said Stefania, slowing down but not really sure what else to say. Apologizing had always come naturally, but even though she had taken to English better than anyone in her family, she had never figured out how to talk to American girls. It was as if there were some hidden layer to the language that she couldn’t quite make out, leaving her forever below, squinting up into the glare.
“So hey, I’ve got a favor to ask,” said Helen, which put Stefania a little more at ease—she was used to people asking for things. “I live clear out of town, and since it got so late, I thought I might try a night at the Elm instead of walking all the way home in the dark. You reckon I could sleep on your floor? I don’t snore or nothing, and could make it up to you.”
“Sorry,” said Stefania again, imagining Frieda’s reaction if she tried to sneak another girl into their room.
“Hey, no trouble,” said Helen, affable as ever. “I’m sure they’ve got someplace for stray mill girls to bunk down around there. Maybe you could just vouch for me with whoever runs it?”
Stefania readily agreed, and not wanting Helen to get the wrong idea, added, “I would let you stay with me, but my roommate has me sleep on the floor.”
Helen’s sunny features clouded over. “Well, that is some trash right there. I was your roommate, I’d let you share the bed.”
For the first time in a very long time, Stefania’s throat tightened from something other than fear and sorrow.
The Snows were very accommodating of Helen, letting her bunk in the extra room they kept open in case a girl fell ill and needed to be isolated. Frieda was less understanding of the circumstances, hissing in the dark of their room that she would slit Stefania’s throat if she ever brought a dirty melonhead into the boarding house again. Just for a moment, lying there on the worn floorboards, Stefania imagined herself doing something terrible to Frieda. Worse than the visceral image was the smile she couldn’t quite shake off as she drifted to sleep.
“Are you sure?” Helen dubiously accepted Stefania’s sandwich the Friday after Pentecost. They had repaired to their usual spot a short walk down the muddy river, the two girls always lunching together now. Helen didn’t seem to have any friends, either, despite being every bit as outgoing as Stefania was shy. “My daddy always says say thank you the first time but ask why the second.”
“It’s Embertide,” said Stefania. “I have to fast tomorrow, too, but after Sunday I’ll be done with them for a while.”
“Oh, well, if it’s just one of your pagan rituals, I’m all for it,” said Helen with a wink, biting into the stale bread. Stefania knew her mother would have turned white as the lint on their dresses at the way the girl teased her about their faith, but she felt a secret thrill at how Helen always found a way to make something as mundane as church sound mysterious. It reminded Stefania of her nonna’s folktales, the ones where witches were far more common than saints, though they might still turn you a good trick instead of a bad one, so long as you demonstrated kindness and sound judgment. Her parents worried the fables would frighten her, or worse, turn her into a superstitious fool, but Stefania was clever enough to recognize them for the parables they were . . . and as Nonna always said, the only difference between a martyr’s miracle and a sorceress’s spell was how the story ended for the vessel of the divine.
Through a mouthful of her second sandwich, Helen asked, “What it’s for, all the fasting?”
“To show our thanks to God for the bounty of nature by exercising moderation in how we make use of these gifts,” Stefania recited, and then caught sight of the fleeting edge of last night’s dream winging past her mind’s eye. She hadn’t remembered anything upon waking, but there it went, a vision of flight over dark forests, and as it did she remembered something else her nonna had told her, the sort of story the old woman always concluded with a kiss on the black medallion that hung around her wattled neck: “In ancient times the good witches would fast through the Ember Days, and their hunger gave them the strength to change shape when they slept at night.”
That got Helen so excited crumbs rained out of her mouth as she said, “Really?”
“It’s just some old story my grandmother used to say,” said Stefania, immediately regretting giving her friend further cause to dismiss the church as silly and superstitious. “Nobody really believes in witches anymore.”
“Oh, but you should,” said Helen, scooting so close Stefania could smell the onions on her breath. “Witches are all around these parts, and have been for a long, long time.”
There was none of Helen’s usual playfulness in her tone or expression, and Stefania was about to change the subject when something shied through the grass of the riverbank not two feet from where they sat. The girls both startled to their feet as it splashed into the water, and only when the second rock narrowly missed Stefania’s head did they turn to see Frieda and three of her cohort farther up the shore. Frieda wore Stefania’s best shawl, and the sight of it on her square head made Stefania shake with anger as well as fear. Fortunately some men appeared along the path behind them, and the bullies turned back to the mill complex rather than carry on in front of witnesses.
“I guess you are right about witches,” said Stefania as Helen angrily bit into the squashed remains of the sandwich she’d crushed in her hand. “I live with one, I should know.”
“What she is well rhymes with ‘witch,’ but it’s not the same, not by a yard,” said Helen through her mouthful of bread, but at least returning to that subject brightened her mood. “A real witch, well . . . that’s why you always be nice to a stranger, because you never know, do you?”
“I guess not,” said Stefania as they waited for the men to overtake them on the riverwalk so they would have a buffer on their return to work. “You would like my nonna, and she would like you.”
“I bet we’d get along swell,” said Helen in that wistful voice she got whenever Stefania told her about her childhood home. The farm-girl-turned-mill-worker was the first American Stefania had ever met who actually wanted to hear about Italy, and she eagerly shared her daydreams of returning to the winding stone streets of Volterra, to once again explore the creeks that coursed through the valley, and the caves carved in the base of the cliffs . . .
“Witch caves?” asked Helen as the first millhouse came into sight. The girl was obsessed.
“I doubt,” said Stefania, though her nonna had tried to scare her away from playing in them by claiming they were actually ancient tombs haunted by restless spirits. “I do not think witches have caves.”
“Of course they do,” said Helen, as if this were knowledge so common even her foreign friend should know it. “There’s one up on a hill between here and my place. Back when all this was just colonies they had a bunch of trials, I guess, and tried to burn the witches out. But they didn’t catch them all, and them that got away learned to keep their practice away from prying eyes—in the darkest glens, in the deepest caves. Like the one up behind my farm.”
“There is not,” said Stefania, not so much because she didn’t believe Helen as because she didn’t want to believe her. The whistle blew.
“I’m only telling you this on account of you being my best friend,” said Helen, stopping by the gate even though they were already late. “But it’s true. The witches had their church in that cave, and it’s still a magic place. Anyone who’s brave enough to spend the night there will get their wish granted.”
“How would you even know such a thing?” asked Stefania, feeling a chill despite the muggy heat of the day.
“Because I slept there one night last summer,” said Helen, clutching Stefania’s cold hand in her sweaty one, “and I had all these dreams, and then my wish come true. It was scary, I won’t say it wasn’t, but it was real.”
Stefania didn’t know what she could possibly say, and Helen dropped her hand. “You don’t believe me, do you?”
“I . . . I want to?” Which was the truth, because Stefania would rather Helen be an aspiring witch than either a crazy person or someone who would lie to her only friend.
“Then come up there with me, and I’ll show you! Tomorrow night, you tell Grandma Snow you’re going to stay out at my farm, I’ll tell Daddy I’m staying at the Elm with you, and right after work we’ll light out for the cave together. Say you will!”
“Come on, ladies, no shirking!” a mustachioed carder shouted as he passed through the gate, never minding that he was as late as they were. Looking at the cavernous windows of the stinking millhouse that stood ready to swallow her whole for another shift, Stefania felt too tired to resist her friend. She was too tired to even feel scared.
“All right, but only since I sleep on a floor anyway.”
Helen’s smile was bright as the bank of candles at Saint Joseph’s, as if Stefania had agreed to share a secret family recipe instead of engaging in a witchy pact. Well, even sorcerous old crones were young and happy girls once upon a time, weren’t they? Helen was the first person Stefania had ever met who genuinely seemed to believe in the stuff her nonna always prattled on about, and instead of chilling Stefania’s heart, this warmed it. Meeting Helen was definitely the closest she would ever come to knowing what her grandmother might have been like as a bright-eyed young woman with her whole life at her toes instead of her heels.
Coming back so late meant the only open spindle was right next to Frieda. The German had warned Stefania against working beside her, but the great whirring machine muffled the girl’s insults into canine grumbling. Before she met Helen, the bitter inflection alone would have ruined Stefania’s shift, a harbinger of the true unpleasantness to follow when they were alone in their room, but knowing she would soon escape Frieda’s wrath for at least a night, she found herself almost enjoying the girl’s muted abuses. Maybe it was the conversation she’d just had with Helen, or maybe it was the floaty, disconnected sensation that came from fasting, but Frieda’s droning reminded Stefania of her nonna’s incomprehensible murmurings when she was blessing her favorite grandchild.
“What kind of blessing?” Stefania had asked after obediently kissing her grandmother’s skin-warmed necklace, her voice just as low so her parents wouldn’t hear what they were up to in the old woman’s cramped kitchen.
“Bad practice to ask,” Nonna had said, tapping the little scar on Stefania’s forehead that she always told her would let her wits slip out, if she wasn’t careful. “You’ll learn, in time, if it comes to pass. You’ll have to be good, though, good and clever both.”
“I’ll try,” Stefania had said, knowing it was neither good nor clever to automatically pledge to be both.
“Of course you will!” Her grandmother had turned back to the ribollita she was ostensibly teaching Stefania how to make. “You’re a Margheriti woman, after all, and the deserving find helpers everywhere. You’ll do as fine on the wrong side of the sea as you do on the right.”
“I don’t want to go.” Stefania had repeated the same invocation she had unsuccessfully tried on her parents. “I want to stay. I could take care of you. Somebody has to.”
“And somebody does,” her nonna had said, but her eyes were shimmering like the oil she skated around the saucepan. “Just as I’ll be watching over you, until you learn to watch over yourself. Things won’t be so bad on the other side, you’ll see. They never are.”
“I’ll come back,” Stefania had promised herself and her nonna. “As soon as I can, I’ll come back.”
“I’m sure you will, if the moon is right—now chop that onion!” Nonna’s way of signaling the conversation needed to turn to supper. That had been the last time they’d ever spoken alone, and Stefania had been too nervous to ask if the moon was ever wrong.
The sun had nearly set by the time they reached the cave. Stefania’s heart pounded, and not from their hike—after all of Helen’s talk of their destination being atop a great big hill, Stefania had expected an arduous climb through the forest, but compared to the steep slopes back home, this gentle hummock beneath the maples and birch felt anticlimactic. Until Helen triumphantly pointed at the black opening that yawned in the modest rise. There had been no trail to follow, but ever since they had left the road out of town, the local girl had led them unerringly to this place.
The cave looked smaller than Stefania had expected, a bolthole in the humble hillside barely big enough to accommodate the bundle of blankets her stocky friend had stashed along the roadside that morning on her way to work. Then Helen dropped down and wiggled inside after the bedding without even checking for snakes. For a moment it looked like she was actually stuck in the tight opening, the hem of her long calico dress kicking up around her calves as she squirmed in place, but then she was through, leaving Stefania alone in the darkening forest.
It felt like waking from a dream, the abrupt clarity of where she was, what she was doing. She should be at Mass, preparing for Trinity Sunday, but instead she stood shivering at the mouth of a witch’s church. The second day of fasting in a row always made her a little delirious, and between the arduous work in the spinning room and then the march out of town and through the woods, she felt on the verge of collapse.
“Come on!” It sounded like the hillside spoke to her, and Stefania obediently went to her knees, then her stomach, her hands shaking as she crawled into the cave. It was everything she feared, and halfway through she realized it was too tight, that she couldn’t move forward, but when she tried to back up, she couldn’t find any purchase either, back and bosom wedged into opposing shelves. The closeness of the passage seized up her chest, making it impossible to breathe. Jagged rock scored her back like a penitent’s lash, dead leaves whispered their prayers against her kicking shoes, a light flashed in the blackness ahead, and then something clawed at her grasping hand, seized her wrist.
“Easy, easy!” cooed Helen, and as Stefania let out a ragged moan she found she had wormed herself out of the tight spot. Crawling the rest of the way into the larger opening, she lay shivering in the leaf-strewn dirt as Helen struck another lucifer. This time she found what she was looking for, lighting a dirty stump of a candle sprouting from one rough wall. In the flickering glow Helen’s healthy skin had taken on a sickly pallor, her golden hair as pale as unbleached cotton, and the hungry way she leered in the gloom gave Stefania a fresh coat of gooseflesh . . . but then her eyes adjusted, and she sat up, letting out a little laugh at being so ridiculous. Helen was just Helen, and she always looked hungry.
“What do you say we break that fast of yours?” said the girl, licking her lips as she took out the baked potatoes she had secreted away from her father’s kitchen the night before. There was some old story or other about the feast that awaited those good witches who stayed true to their fast, a grand banquet held in the wilderness and attended by the beasts of the forest and the birds of the air, but Stefania was too exhausted to remember the details. Too hungry not to eat what was offered.
As she bit into the leathery skin of the potato, she saw curling black symbols on the walls of the narrow chamber, a small aperture framed by stacked stones at the top of the rear wall. A comforting smell filled the air, like freshly turned earth warming in the sunlight, and she relaxed into the wall of the cave, felt it soften against her freshly mortified back.
“When you came before . . .” Stefania swallowed a hard mouthful of potato. “What did you wish for?”
“You have to keep that secret if you want it to last,” said Helen, the jovial girl sounding about as forlorn as Stefania had ever heard her. There was a darkness there, so black and lonely it took Stefania aback. Helen really believed this stuff, and that made Stefania wonder if she should, too. The girl handed over the canteen. “But we both know, don’t we? Just like we both know what we’re wishing for tonight.”
Stefania wasn’t so sure, but she didn’t want to disappoint her friend, so she just nodded and sipped the warm water. They ate the rest of their potatoes in silence, and then Helen uncorked a bottle of the cordial her family made for special occasions. It was so much sweeter than wine, but Stefania found she came by her taste for it naturally. She had assumed that when the time came her fear would find her, deep in the woods where any mountain lion or bear might discover them, but now that she was in the moment, Stefania wasn’t scared at all. As the candle nub gutted in the sweet-smelling fume that wafted through the window in the back of the cave, she felt ecstatic.
Stefania was with her nonna, but she also was her nonna, picking her way alone through the tall trees along the steep ridge, searching for some hidden door to the world below. High overhead the walls of Volterra gleamed in the moonlight, but her kind belonged down here, in the necropolis that was ancient before the first stone was laid in the castle above. She passed by many grand choices, ignoring arched portals guarded by winged demons with serpentine limbs, and then ducked into a crescent-shaped crevasse so tight her skull could barely scrape through. It didn’t hurt, but she could feel the scar open on her forehead—the raised half-moon she would always ask her nonna about, and each time the old woman would touch it and tell a different tale—and then she was through, into the blackness beyond.
She scrabbled in the darkness, like an animal, turning the hard earth beneath her harder claws. When the hole was deep enough, she took off the medallion she always wore, a black moon on a long black chain, and she planted her legacy in the fertile soil of the grave. As she piled the gift with prayers and dirt, an arrow of moonlight pierced the window above her, shining on the entwined girls, but neither awoke until after she had slunk past them, outside into the Connecticut woods, looking back at the mouth of the witch’s cave, where—
Stefania opened her eyes but it made no difference, the moon set or never risen on the far side of that small window. Her skin crawled at the unknown, unnamable sensation, but she couldn’t move. Something was just outside the cave, something watching them, something that had been inside but moments ago. She could hear it breathing in the blackness, the rustle of leaves as it lay down at the mouth of the entrance.
Then Helen stirred softly against her, skin and blankets sweaty in the early hours of the late spring morning, and Stefania started the rest of the way awake. Helen’s breath, warm against her neck. She sighed and almost let herself relax back into Helen, when the detail of the dream prodded her to action. The cave was small enough she could reach around without leaving the protection of the blankets, the hard-packed earth cold against her questing fingers . . . until she brushed the mound of loose dirt, warm and soft to her touch.
The depression wasn’t very deep, and as soon as the chain brushed her fingers, she felt a charge more powerful than anything at work in the mill course through her body, electrifying her in ways that not even Helen had. She felt the familiar crescent of the medallion, just as she had on her nonna’s lap a decade ago, an ocean apart . . . and badly as she wanted to put it on right then, she leaned over and hid it in her shoe instead. Not because she didn’t want Helen to take part in the miracle, but because she didn’t want to hurt her friend by proving that they hadn’t actually wished for the same thing.
Never before had Stefania had so much to confess on a Trinity Sunday. And never before had she skipped it altogether, eschewing the flesh and blood of the church for something more substantial at Helen’s farm. The girl’s father was a kindly man, but ever since Helen’s mother had passed the previous summer, he seemed perpetually distracted, oblivious to even the girls’ holding hands underneath the supper table. He was just so very glad Helen had finally made a friend at the mill, after how badly she had wanted to work there despite his wife’s insistence that she should stay and help on the farm instead. Would that Agnes were still with them, she would see their daughter had been right all along.
The whistle. Stefania was on her feet before its trill had faded, staggering around her room and throwing on her least dirty dress, wadding up her hair under a net. She couldn’t believe she’d overslept, but it was no surprise that Frieda had slipped away to work without waking her, no doubt hoping Stefania would accrue another demerit for tardiness. As she gave herself a perfunctory glance in the vanity mirror, she gasped, her hands flying to her sunburned neck—the necklace she had finally allowed herself to clasp into place before falling asleep the night before was gone. She scoured her tangled blankets on the floor, searched everywhere even though she felt the weight of futility bear down on her. It was gone.
A dream. Of course. Whether from cordial or witchcraft or plain old exhaustion, the entire delirious weekend had been one fever dream. She gave up the search for the necklace that never was, hurrying out the door, but as she passed Grandma Snow in the parlor, the landlady called, “Stephanie, dear, may I have a word?”
“I’m late,” protested Stefania, almost barreling past the old woman, but then remembering herself. “I mean, sorry, of course. How can I help?”
“I won’t keep you,” said the kindly matron. “I just wanted to say that while it’s nice that you and Frieda are such close friends, I don’t want to see you put yourself out, is all. I know this is your first time living on your own, and while that is exciting, it comes with its own responsibilities.”
Stefania had no idea what Grandma Snow was talking about, and although a week ago she might have just smiled and thanked her for her time, now she said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“The necklace, dear.” Crevasses deepened around the old woman’s mouth as she frowned. “Spending hard-earned money on such frivolities for yourself would be bad enough, but when I complimented Frieda on it this morning, she told me you’d spent a week’s wages to buy it for her . . . is that true?”
“No,” said Stefania, her every hair standing on end, touched by that same deep current that had flowed through her back in the cave. Frieda must have noticed Stefania’s new necklace as she dressed in the morning and stolen it off her very throat as she slept. That bitch. “I have to go, Nonna Snow.”
“Oh,” said Grandma Snow, and she was saying more as Stefania flew out of the boarding house, something about how she didn’t think necklaces were allowed anyway, but Stefania was already gone, dashing to the mill as hard and as fast as her legs would carry her. Helen was waiting for her by the gate, apparently more than willing to earn another tardy demerit herself if it meant exchanging a brief hug and a few words with Stefania before they started their shift. The girl’s handsome smile turned to alarm as she took proper notice of Stefania’s frantic pace, her furious expression. Helen moved to intercept her but Stefania dodged around her, her rage a hawk that had spent its whole life in a cage and only now knew what it meant to fly.
Crossing the yard and barging into the millhouse, bumping past workers, the tumult of the monstrous machines was as the gentle lapping of the Willimantic beside the roaring inside Stefania’s skull. She charged into the spinning room. Frieda was lined up with the other girls working the massive spinning frame, turning and stretching the cotton roving into thread, and Stefania was almost upon her when it happened.
What it was, she couldn’t say exactly. Nobody could, not at first. And even after, the explanation didn’t help. It was just one of those horrible things that happen sometimes.
Frieda leaned forward to draw out a length of yarn from the wall of machinery, and then was yanked face first into the spinning frame. Afterward, nobody could figure out exactly what part of the mechanism had even caught her necklace, because it somehow came loose again after a few turns . . . but a few turns were enough. Frieda flopped around as she came free, pawing at the thickening red line where the black chain had disappeared into her milky neck. Her wide eyes met Stefania’s, and then her head fell back, her split throat stretched open like a cave, and there was so much blood on the cotton there was no hope of salvaging it in the dye room.
So many questions lingered. How a chain that thin could do that kind of damage without just snapping from the pressure was as much a mystery as why a mill girl with Frieda’s experience would wear a long necklace into the spinning room. She just seemed so taken with it, Grandma Snow sniffed, and though she didn’t say anything directly, Stefania could tell the old woman was judging her for having reclaimed it from the foreman after they cleaned Frieda up for the funeral.
Well, the busybody was entitled to make any judgments she wished, especially since Stefania would no longer be lodging at the Elm. All the other mill girls looked out their windows, but nobody came out to say goodbye as Helen helped Stefania up onto the riding board of her daddy’s wagon, onto the rose-embroidered cushion where her mother used to sit when they road to church. As the two girls crossed the dye-darkened waters of the Willimantic and headed back to her new home on Helen’s farm, Stefania supposed they might have both wished for the same thing after all. 
Jesse Bullington has published three novels, edited two anthologies, and released stories, reviews, and articles into such colorful landscapes as The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 13, The LA Review of Books, and VICE. Under the pen name Alex Marshall, he’s written the Crimson Empire series. His work has been shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the David Gemmell Morningstar Award, and the Kitschies.
Illustration: Nicole Rifkin
