Page 10 of To Clutch a Razor
“Pull yourself together,” Marzena says, and she tosses the cigarette out the window. Elza watches in the side mirror as it bounces across the road, still lit, and disappears from view.
“How?” Elza asks, and the rage is giving way, now, to something slower and heavier. Filip. Her mentor. Everyone’s favorite uncle. He taught her curse words when she was too young for them. He taught her to make pierniki one Christmas, star-shaped and glazed with sugar. He swam with them—Elza and Dymitr and their older brother, Kazik—in the lake at the edge of town, unfazed by the tadpoles. He was deft with a knife.
“Strzyga” is the reply, and at this, Marzena’s hands tighten around the steering wheel. Her jaw flexes. All her grief, turned to anger. “I hunted it and killed it already. Your father is cleaning up the aftermath. Filip’s body is on its way home.”
Tears prick at Elza’s eyes, but she can’t cry. The last time she cried in front of her mother, Marzena boxed her ear and told her to grow up. That was years ago. Elza breathes deep, until the sharp edges of grief have dulled.
“Good,” she says, then. “I hope it died slowly.”
“Hear, hear,” Marzena says, and she turns on the radio.
Elza drops her bag on the floor of her bedroom and opens the closet door. She didn’t bring anything pretty with herto America, just practical clothing that would help her disappear. So she presses her face to a tulle skirt, a silk slip dress, a brocade jacket. They smell like floral perfume, and the textures against her cheek are comforting. She strips off her boots, her jacket, her canvas pants. She puts on pink satin shorts and sits on the edge of her bed.
The door is closed and everyone else is in the kitchen, making plans for the body’s arrival. Her cousins just got back from the cemetery, where they picked out a plot to salt it in advance of the burial. Red cabbage is already simmering on the stove, and her aunt is mixing cake batter for yogurt plum cake. Babcia, someone told Marzena, is at the butcher. Elza’s job is to get the songbooks out of storage for pustô noc—the empty night.
The empty night is an old ritual, and it only belongs to some members of her family, really. It’s Kashubian, and it’s her father’s side that’s Kashubian—Filip’s side. Rituals tend to bleed over, regardless, especially when their purpose is to ward off evil spirits. The Holy Order is always interested in warding off evil spirits, so they borrow from every culture, every faith, if it means keeping themselves safe from pollution.
Once the body arrives, they’ll put it in the living room on a board, wash it, and wrap its hands in rosary beads. Then the family will gather and pray and sing until daybreak to keep the body safe from dark creatures that want to possess it or transform it. They’ll eat and drink and try not to fall asleep. Then they’ll carry the body on its plankto the burial plot, and someone will keep watch after it’s buried, just to make sure it doesn’t rise again.
There’s something comforting about knowing what to expect from the next few days, even if Elza doesn’t want to see Filip’s body, cold and dead, lying on a plank between the chess set and the old record player.
The last time she spoke to Dymitr, he was rude and dismissive, exhorting her to leave him alone as he pursued Baba Jaga. He was with two monsters, a zmora and a strzygon—a male, which was peculiar—and he kept her from killing one of them. She assumes he needed it to find Baba Jaga, but she doesn’t understand why he was pretending to be its ally instead of just taking it hostage. Maybe he was right, though—maybe she shouldn’t have gotten involved when she didn’t know his plan.
He could have been nicer about it, though. It wasn’t like Dymitr to be cruel. But then, he hadn’t been acting like himself for months before going to Chicago. Mournful and exhausted. Refusing to draw his sword. Their grandmother kept ordering him to pay penance for his doubt. Hail Marys and kneeling on uncooked peas and God knows what else, in the hope that pain would purge him of whatever ailed him. Apparently it worked, because he came into the kitchen clear-eyed one morning, having proposed an important mission in America that their grandmother had approved.
Elza unlocks her phone and dials his number. She might be angry with him right now, but he loved Filip asmuch as she did, and he deserves to hear the news. She’s not surprised when she gets his voicemail.
“Hello,” she says. “I know you’re still on your mission, but… Filip is dead.” Her eyes burn again. This time, with no one to see her, she lets the tears fall. She wipes her nose with the back of her hand so her sniffle won’t be audible in the message. “The ritual starts tomorrow night. I don’t know how long you’re expecting to be gone, but…” She chokes a little. “I’d like it if—if you came. Mom is… Mom. Everyone’s here, and they’re—”
She stops. Clears her throat.
“I’d like it if you came,” she says again. “But I understand if you can’t.”
She hangs up before she can say anything even more embarrassing. Then she gets up to pick out a black dress for the funeral.
5A PUZZLE SOLVED
There are two of them.
There are always two of them. Knights travel in pairs. Sometimes, when she was still getting visions of them, Ala tried to guess what they were to each other. Siblings. Spouses. Parent and child.
These two are husband and wife. It’s obvious in the way they move together, the way they look at each other.
The woman has gray eyes, narrowed in focus, and Ala can tell this event is long past because of the woman’s hair, curled and pinned like Marilyn Monroe’s even though she’s pulling a damn bone sword out of her spine. She yanks it free with a grunt, her hands sticky red, the gray in her eyes now Knight bright. At the corner of her mouth is a cut, like she’s been struck.
“Hold her down,” the woman says, her voice rough, and she marches toward the man, who has his knee on a zmora’s back.
Ala can tell she’s a zmora by the way the illusions flicker over her. She gives herself the appearance of a bear, a snake,a fox. The work of a frantic mind and wild illusion powers run amok. In the spaces between them, though, she looks young, her dirty-blond hair tangled over her face, which is pressed to the dirt by the man’s palm. He handles her like an animal and maybe that’s why she makes herself look like one.
The man’s palms are stained red, not with fresh blood, but with the peculiar transformation of a Knight with his bone sword drawn. It’s clutched in his left hand, which bears his wedding ring.
“She hit me,” the woman says.
“I saw,” the man replies.
“I think she should lose the hand she used before she dies,” the woman says, and the zmora on the ground screams—in rage or in fear, it’s hard for Ala to say.
It’s just a dream,Ala says to herself, but it’s not just a dream, is it? It’s also a memory.
