Cerise Mooreland felt the earth shake. Birds took off panicked into the sky. When she looked up at them, her legs wobbled. “No, no, no,” she muttered. “This isn’t happening.”
But it was. Somewhere in the distance, a deafening thud rang out as a tree hit the ground.
She sat bolt upright in bed.
“Mother!” Cerise complained to the old woman who had been shaking her. “I was in the middle of a very interesting dream.”
“We have company,” Opaline replied flatly. Her eyes seeming to darken with both anger and resignation. “It’s time to come downstairs, Cerise. It’s time to re-enter the land of the living.”
Not used to her mother having such a tone, Cerise didn’t answer. She pulled back the covers and swung her legs around to show her intent, then waited until Opaline left the room before moving again.
It had been a year - one full year- since her return to the Mooreland farm and her childhood bedroom. Nothing about the room had changed since she was a little girl. It had been so easy to settle back in and pretend her life from age nineteen onward hadn’t happened. She had never met a shade named Jack Laindier. She had never had a daughter. Her daughter had never betrayed the entirety of the Harvest witch tradition. In her mind, she could still be the same sweet, popular, slightly odd girl with her whole life ahead of her.
But all of those things had happened.
She stood on weak, tottering legs that had spent the majority of the last year in a bed too small for them and made her way to the closet. The clothes she brought were still mostly in their boxes and part of her figured they wouldn’t fit anyway. She had lost far too much weight in the past year. An old brown shift dress of her mother’s hung lonely on a hook and she took it, running her fingers over the seams in the fabric before putting it on. Here was something else she could pretend: that she had the inner strength of her mother.
Ever since she had been a little girl, Cerise envied her mother’s fortitude. Setbacks that brought tears to her eyes, barely seemed to give her mother pause. The night her father had disappeared. The night Cerise thought the prophecy had been about her after all. Opaline Mooreland had nodded and said, “What will be will be. We just got to keep moving forward.”
Last Halloween when Cerise came home with news of her daughter, she had said the same. It was infuriating.
She took a steely breath. “Give me the strength of Opaline Mooreland,” she whispered, enunciating each word clearly as though they were part of a spell. Her mother was right. It truly was time to re-enter the land of the living.