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Esther was raised in a household terrified of rage.
“It is easier,” her father said, when she was so young that she shouldn’t have understood, “easier to feel nothing. It will not keep you happy, my love, but it will keep you safe.”
There was a look on his face that she didn’t recognize, that, as an adult, she would learn to name sorrow. He wasn’t there when she woke in the morning and her mother told her not to cry.
“Love is dangerous,” her mother said, when she was a little older but still too young. “Especially for women like us.”
“Did you love Dad?” Her voice had been so small.
“I wanted to,” she said, looking as if she was considering elaboration, but seeming pleased when the ring of the phone interrupted. She moved towards it quickly, voice quiet. “Bruce, it’s late. Uh-huh. Okay, I can be there— give me an hour. I’ll drop my daughter off at—”
Esther slipped back, shy at any mention of herself.
“Well, not all of us can play happy families quite so well, Bruce. Give me an hour.”
Esther was gone, slipping down the hall before her mother could turn around. She knew, even at this age, to push down the wave inside her, to hold it tight until it crumbled and blew away like dandelion seeds on the wind.
“Esther!” Her mother called, louder than her speaking voice but nothing but perfect calm in her tone. “I need to bring you to Dad’s. Can you go grab your toothbrush and some pajamas?”
There were a lot of days like that that year, so many that her father’s apartment slowly became home, the place where her toothbrush and her dolls and her extremely factual, emotionless diary lived. He was the one who taught her to always be satisfied, to never get too attached. He was the one who took her for the first time to meet her grandmother in Tompkins Square Park.
“She is haunted by despair, your mother by rage, and you by sorrow,” he said. “Your grandmother, she allowed herself to feel only joy and happiness, but even joy invites despair. All emotions tie together.”
Esther looked up at her grandmother, letting it all float away. “It’s easier to feel nothing,” she said.
It seemed simple, but so many things are when you’re a child. Sorrow is easy to brush away when it is as small as you are.
“You rat bastard!” Her mother shouted, the first night in a dozen that Esther had come home to her. She had the phone to her ear and an expression on her face that Esther had never seen. “You’ll pay for this.” She slammed the phone down, catching a glimpse of Esther in the hall. That look on her face faded for just a moment and she said “Call your father. I have to run.”
“I love you,” Esther said.
“Oh, honey,” her mother said, “try not to.”
When her father came to get her, he brought a duffel bag, quietly packing up the last of her things.
“Who’s Bruce?” She asked, his hand holding hers as the subway doors closed.
“Someone who your mother gave too big a piece of herself to. She thought she was safe, because it wasn’t an important piece, just money, partnership, business, but it was a piece nonetheless. Never let anyone have that big a piece of anything, Esther.”
She looked up at her father, and realized that she already had. She let go of his hand and, as best she could, of him. She was too young for a heart of stone, but that had never stopped her before.
Rage was safer, she learned, an imperfect loophole for a girl who had never let herself feel it. If she was angry at her father, the sorrow would fade, so she let herself be angry. One woman’s curse was another woman’s salvation.
She moved out at eighteen, into a shitty studio apartment with barely functioning heat. She let herself be content there, not happy, never happy, but free from the rage she had taken on. She paid her own way through college, made many acquaintances but no friends, and decided that she could make it through life like this.
At twenty-one, six months after graduating and two after moving into a slightly less shitty one-bedroom, she buried her father at a tiny cemetery upstate, where his parents were buried. Her cousins, people she had met but never spoken to for a longer than a moment, told her it was okay to cry. She resisted a laugh at that.
The whole drive back to the city, sitting shotgun next to a friend of her father’s who wanted so badly to reminisce with her, she sat silently, able to think only one thing.
She was fucked.
There was a time bomb in her chest, ticking every moment she sat alone. She threw herself into work, into other people, into filling every second of her time that she possibly could. It took her months, nearly a year, to hone that anxiety, to move herself back towards research, towards solutions. Her mother had never found something to break their curse, but she spent her whole life running. Esther didn’t want to run.
She spent all her time at the library, deep in occult texts, though the public library didn’t have as wide a selection of those as she would’ve liked. It was no matter, she thought, just a place to start, to find citations which would lead her to more niche texts and someday to her salvation.
In the end, it only took a few weeks of digging until one of the librarians asked what she was looking for.
She didn’t know what to say to that. “Answers.”
An old man sat beside her the next day, a thick tome in his hand. She looked up at him, ready to walk away, but he merely raised a brow at her. “What sort of answers are you hoping to find?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
He slid his book in front of her. “Try me.”
“What’s in here?”
He gave her a sly grin. “Answers.”
She quit her job two days later, moving into the Clinton Hill Chantry six months after that. It was a perfect sort of devotion, living with her job in a building endlessly full of distractions. There were more books here than she could ever read and most days, other members of the Occult Society joined her, wizards willing to teach her magic that came from knowledge, not sorrow. Alejandro taught her the most, spells and laws and history all mixed together over a cup of coffee. Years passed like that, the two of them sitting side by side in Gramercy, in the Chantry, in coffee shops and subway cars and parks. She outpaced all the rest of her teachers, but never him, with a golden glint in his eye and a sly smile.
“I won’t be like them,” she said, alone with him in the endless stacks of Gramercy. “I would rather— I won’t lose myself to the curse. It’s already taken too much from me.”
“Exactly,” he said. “It has taken too much. Don’t stop fighting, mija, but do not let it take anymore from you.”
She thought of her mother and the park she hadn’t visited in nearly twenty years and her father, and the gravestone she’d never let herself weep at and all those childhood diaries which were little more than cold recitations of the facts of her life. It was a hard way to live.
“Will you go somewhere with me?” She asked.
He took her hand.
“My dad used to say it was easier to feel nothing than to have to sort my emotions, to avoid just sorrow.”
He raised a brow. “I have never known you to take the easy way.”
Smoke. Fear. In the distance, she heard the fire engine, but it wouldn’t be fast enough to save all those precious books. She urged her people out and set to work, frost spells little help against the flame, but perhaps enough to serve as a bandage until help could come.
“Hello?” A voice called through the smoke. It had been several long minutes, but fewer than she expected. “Ma’am, we have to get you out of here.”
She stared at the firefighter in front of her. “Where are the rest of you? Shouldn’t you have a hose or something?”
“Yeah, we will,” he said. “But your friend told me you were still in here. I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
“I can’t allow anything in here to be damaged,” she said. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Probably not,” he said. “How can I help?”
Glass shattered and Esther turned in horror, certain the building was about to collapse, only to see the Questing Blade, an ancient sword of immeasurable power, fly from its case into the fireman’s hand. By the time he closed his fingers around it, it was a gleaming silver axe.
“Holy shit,” she said.
“Hm,” he said. “That doesn’t seem safe.”
She heard other firefighters storm inside.
“Let me get you out of here,” he said.
She barely managed a nod.
Later, in the ashy but stable library of the Chantry, she sat with him, trying not to stare. She had always had a thing for clever men, men with soft hands, quick tongues, full of fight so she could resist any delusion of permanence. Ricky was none of those things, strong, slow, quiet, and oh so hot.
“You’re taking this all really well,” she said. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Sure,” he said.
“That magic is real? That you’ve been chosen by an artifact of great power? That the world isn’t what you thought it was?”
He shrugged. “Sounds good.”
She blinked at that. “Why are you not more surprised by this?” Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She stood, turned, pressed it to her ear. “Alejandro, the Chantry is fine, we need to talk.”
“I’m not worried about the Chantry,” he said. “How are you?”
“Alejandro,” she said. “It’s the Questing Blade. It’s chosen a new champion.” She turned back to look at Ricky, only to find him holding the axe to his ear like a phone. “I might need some help with this one.”
He smiled at her and waved even though he was sitting three feet away.
She was fucked.
Ricky didn’t ask any questions because of course he didn’t, because he was perfect and kind and even if she weren’t cursed, deserved so much better than an emotional mess like Esther.
But he wouldn’t stop sending her selfies. That haunted her a little, even as everything seemed to go wrong. She was sure that it had to mean something, but even more sure that she merely wanted it to mean something. Ricky was just a texter, a fan of selfies. He probably sent them to everyone he knew, probably talked to a dozen women the way that he talked to her— not that he was flirting with her, but— why was this what she was thinking about? As much as her fear tended to melt into self-loathing, she knew Ricky wasn’t talking to many women. He just wasn’t the type. Her own mother had given her proof— not that she needed any— that he didn’t have an ounce of darkness in his heart. He had no secrets.
Alone in the Chantry, she muttered to herself, “Merry Christmas to you too, Mom.”
Ricky’s phone wouldn’t stop buzzing in her hand as they flew down the streets. She couldn’t resist the look, searching for the proof that Ricky was just the kind, perfect person she knew him to be, that she wasn’t special.
She didn’t find it.
One moment she was holding the crown in her hands, the next she was racing down the streets of New York in a borrowed Maserati, desperately trying to reign in the sorrow for just a little while longer. She could barely look at the rat— okay, dog— riding shotgun and she wanted to tell him to shut up, to say anything else, but rage had abandoned her, despair and fear and anxiety and contentment had gone. All that was left was sorrow. Sorrow at the time she’d lost and the parts of herself she’d cut away and the fact that she was this close and still might not make it. She couldn’t even be angry at Kugrash, couldn’t do anything but drive and weep.
In her mother’s arms again, it was all worth it.
She grabbed him tight, kissed him like she would never let him go. Like she could feel something for the first time in so many years, it was hard to remember. She could let her heart of stone melt.
When Alejandro fell into the storm, Esther clenched her fists, heart full of dandelion seeds and sorrow. She could save this sorrow, could mourn once the deed was done and the world was saved. She could hold him in her heart, let herself love him and miss him in the way she’d never let herself miss anyone.
But then Ricky fell, wings like an angel’s appearing on his back as his lifeless body flew towards the storm. She screamed, ran, threw out every bit of her magic. There was a chance, a chance, a chance— she couldn’t bear this sorrow.
She woke up in an empty bed to the sound of push-ups, sitting up to see Ricky on the floor of the hotel room, softly counting to himself.
“Hey,” she said.
“Oh,” he looked up without stopping. “Hey.”
She burst into tears and because Ricky was perfect, he didn’t seem weirded out, just stopped what he was doing to sit beside her, hand held out like an offer.
She took his hand. “Sorry I’m a mess.”
“Do you want to keep crying?” He asked, a surprisingly insightful question.
She considered it for a moment and then let herself sob in his arms, a lifetime of sorrow finally unleashed.
It was two days later that Ricky slipped a key into her hand, far too casually, with a silly smile. “This is for you,” he said. “Just, you know, to have.”
It was funny how easy it was to be happy when you didn’t get in your own way.
Years later, curled up on the couch as Ricky talked about baby-proofing the house with a glee she wasn’t sure she’d ever heard from him, new sorrows and new joys settling in her heart, no longer there to be blown away like the wind, she looked up, stared at him for as long as she could.
“Will you go somewhere with me?” She asked.
He moved to get her shoes.
“Not this second,” she laughed. “I— upstate. There’s someone I need to visit.”
Alejandra ran and laughed, Ricky chasing after her with a wide grin. Esther sat on a blanket, grinning in the summer sun, a book untouched in her lap.
“Oh!” Ricky said, “Al, watch out for the rock. Be careful!”
She chucked at that.
“Mama!” Al said, running back, something clenched in her little fists. “I brought you a flower.”
Smooshed a little in toddler fists lay a dandelion, no longer fleeting white seeds but yellow and alive and beautiful. Esther took it with a smile and tucked it behind her ear with a surge of sudden emotion.
“Mama?” Al asked, too young to understand and thank god for it, “Why are you crying?”
Ricky came to a stop beside them, scooping his daughter into his lap as he sat beside Esther.
“Oh sweetheart,” she said, “because I can.”