Roses and Rot by Kat Howard Page B

very wrong. Your father would acquire a new wife, who would arrive with daughters of her own, and she would scheme to send you into a life of drudgery, or cast you out into the forest alone. Or, worse still, there would be no new mother, and your father would fall in love with you, forcing you to leave home and run far, far away to escape.
    I couldn’t imagine it, growing up. How a stepmother could be worse than my real mother, than this woman who was supposed to love me, and who so clearly did not. I envied the girls in the fairy tales, sent by stepmothers to sleep in the ashes, or in the barn with the beasts. The girls who ran.
    Smart girls, brave girls. Girls who escaped. Girls who saw what they wanted their fate to be, and clawed for it. I couldn’t imagine being that brave, not with a mother in the house. I made myself small and quiet, not even a whisper in a corner, and still she saw me. I kept all the secrets that she wielded like threats, that she stopped my mouth with, and still, I was not small and quiet enough. I think the only way I could have been small and quiet enough would have been to disappear completely.
    At night, I would close my eyes and clench my fists, and wish that my mother would die. I couldn’t see how I would survive growing up if she didn’t.
    She didn’t die, and I did survive my childhood, but I think back on that wish, on those moments when I was curled in my bed, my faced buried in my pillow so Marin couldn’t hear me crying, and remember how hard I wished. So hard I shook with the strength of it.
    Even though I knew it was wrong, even though I knew it was terrible, that if I was in a story I was the monster for thinking such a thing, I never wished for anything else so hard in my life.

9
    The wind blew strong enough to rattle the shutters on their hinges, and it howled like a chorus of lost souls. Rain spattered like stones against the windows. Trees snapped and cracked as the storm stole their branches.
    “Are you working, or can I come in?” Marin stood in the doorway, sleep-tousled and wrapped in a robe I hadn’t seen before.
    I cocked my head, taking it in. “Does your robe seriously have—”
    “Hippopotamuses wearing tutus? I just got it—isn’t it great?” She twirled so I could appreciate its full glory.
    “It is great. And I was working, but I can use the break, so make yourself at home.”
    She walked to the window, arms wrapped around herself.
    “Trouble sleeping?” I asked.
    “I was fine until the storm woke me up.” A branch slammed into the window, shaking the glass in its frame. Marin flinched. “You don’t happen to have any Star Princess stories lying around in your brain, do you?”
    I took a breath. We had built enough of a bridge, I thought, that I could tell her now. Tell her I had written them out, made them for a Christmas that we’d never celebrated, that they were put away now. Maybe I could even ask her why it was she’d gone silent when I went away to school, what it was that I had done to make her not want to talk to me for years. Maybe we could finally say all those unsaid words.
    “Though on second thought, you know what? I’d love to hear something new, something you’ve been working on here, if you don’t mind sharing.”
    The moment slid through my fingers.
    “Sure. Okay. Let me find something that’s in non-embarrassing shape. One of the ones I sent to Beth.”
    While I sorted through papers, she dropped onto the bed, the side farthest from the windows, and tucked her robe around her, carefully covering her feet. “Okay, go.”
    “ ‘Once upon a time,’ ” I began.

    Once upon a time, there were two sisters, and there was a forest. The forest was, in the way of these things, full of secrets.
    Not just the secrets of leaves and trees, of fur and feathers, of the shadowed spaces. Certainly it had all of those, but it had other secrets as well.
    A tower, and at its height a woman singing a song that called the ocean in and