I Raf You Big Sister Is A Witch

They found me on a Tuesday that tasted faintly of lemon and ash.

I remember the shape of the doorway first: crooked, the frame carved with letters that weren't Swedish or Arabic or any script I could name, only a suggestion of meaning as if someone had written a promise and then erased most of it. The house smoked a little from its chimney, though it was late summer and no one in our town burned anything. A single lamp glowed through one curtained window, like an eye that hadn't fallen asleep.

Years passed. Please accept my assumption here: enough time for foxes to change their trails, for paint on porches to peel, for children who were toddlers then to learn to write their names properly. I am decisive where memory wavers; the world requires it.

"Why do you keep doing it?" I asked her later, when the lamps were lit and the jars hummed with low contentment. i raf you big sister is a witch

Not real wolves—though there were wolves that winter—but wolves in the form of men in wool coats and shoes with names printed inside. They called themselves a consortium at first. They wanted an audience with my sister. They asked for a demonstration. They brought flowers and legal pads and a man who smelled faintly of old books and the sea.

She stood on the threshold with her arms folded as if she had been expecting me. Her hair—black as the underside of ravens' wings—tumbled past her shoulders and caught the lamp light. Up close, I could tell everything about her was slightly off: the angle of her jaw, the slow, patient way she blinked, like someone deciding each flash of sight mattered. She smelled of basil and iron and rain on pavement. That smell would come to mean many kinds of truth.

They insisted they only wished to negotiate "the ethics of intervention." But their ethics were made of ledger lines and little boxes. They wanted rules so that favors could be cataloged, taxed, and turned into a commodity. They proposed a register of beneficiaries. They brought a contract with margins narrow as knives. They found me on a Tuesday that tasted

"You shouldn't be here," a voice said from inside the doorway. It wasn't my voice. It wasn't even human. It was my sister's.

I told my sister. She listened, throat bobbing like a caged bird.

Rob gave his coin—the memory of his father's first laugh. He left light-footed, the color of someone who had been forgiven. A single lamp glowed through one curtained window,

Chapter Three: The Deal that Wasn't

"You hoard what belongs to the parish," he said.

"Elsewhere." She paused, and for a beat the lamp's flame tipped toward her palm like a moth. "Or simply away from being your sister."

Chapter Five: Contracts with Wolves

The request should have been a simple one: find the lost music, return it. But my sister counted the cost on the backs of her fingers like a debt collector.