MARIE RUTKOSKI

THE HOLLOW HEART

Caroline Clutterbuck Kapulkin

His hand tightens. “Don't apologize to him for running away." Surprised, I turn to him. He adds, "Never apologize for who you are or what you needed to do to be yourself."

I toy with a bit of downy tissue paper. It is tishin paper, made from pounding the stems of mulberry trees and soaking the pulp in a vat of water and hibiscus sap. Incredibly thin and sheer, tishin is barely paper. It feels the way clouds look. Made a little thicker than what I hold between my fingers, it can be used for paper lanterns. A little thinner, and my mother can use it for her own purposes. Watch, she once told me, laying an airy sheet of tishin over a page flled with writing. The writing vanished, and appeared to be a blank page that could easily be stitched into the final pages of an innocent-seeming book shipped along with its secret message to the recipient, who would scrape away the tishin to reveal the words beneath. Even paper, my mother said, has its secrets.

My father's silence grows heavy, wary, and while I know from my aunt Sarsine that the king has a temper, he has never shown it to me, not directly. Instead, he gets like this: warlike, his gaze acute, his expression showing that he does not know his enemy's moves but he does not like what he suspects. Instead of looking angry he simply looks ready.

When I was little, he would sing a lullaby to me every night before bed. How did I get so far away from that moment, when I was cherished?

After she leaves, the wax drips, the flames sputter and lower. The oil in my table lamp burns out, leaving a heavy, slick scent in the air. There is no light but the candle flames and their reflections. One hisses, and then the other, and I am left alone in the dark.

I push open a window. The night is dense. Warm and sticky. Sweet, too, with the scent of white, night-blooming flowers that have opened their faces to the moon. The night holds summer's end: the honey left at the bottom of an almost-empty jar.

"Help me, damn the gods." My anger feels murderous, and I want to weep for how tired I am of always wrangling it under control. When my elders accuse me of being too merry, of shrugging away anything serious, I think: you would not like me better if I showed what I truly feel. You do not know how hard it is to pretend to be unbothered.

I loved this bit of detail about the abundant purple wildflowers and the different fabric of the caste clothes. A natural way to bring some worldbuilding into the setting.

... The familiar smell I associate with her: indi soap made from the perfume of tenacious purple flowers that grow in wild in the Ward.

The clothes in her wardrobe are nicer than anything I wore during my childhood, when I never thought it wrong that her dresses were made of cotton, not wincey, like mine. 

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