1. Favorite

Basically moving through the relations of Haven and her adoption family, starting the a crisis of the story.

 

Sophie propped her elbows up on the table, waiting for Edmund to return from his search for wood. I scowled at her, but she merely turned her cheek towards me, peering at the door. My eyes obediently followed hers, tracing over small ripples in the light paint of the walls, as they brought themselves to the wooden frame, a half-cut door standing almost too large inside it, the bottom half ajar.

            “Sophie,” I spoke her name kindly, though I had gotten into the habit of speaking through my teeth. She turned her head slightly, so that I could see her eyes on me, and I continued. “Could you shut the door? We don’t want Edmunds supper to be too chilly, when he returns.”

            Shaking her head, Sophie pushed her chair across the floor, leaving light scratches over the old ones in the wood. “Edmund should have gone for firewood when the sun was still out, if he wanted his supper to be warm, should he not have?”

            Sophie had been adopted by Edmund and his wife nine years before me, when she was barely a year old. When I arrived, she had just had her tenth birthday, and had become quite a handful already. I was only seven then, but I had put it to my mind to become someone that Edmund and his wife could be proud of, by being exactly the opposite of Sophie.

            Even then, it had been evident to me that she had barely, if any, manners. And the few she had were used only when absolutely needed; if she was caught in a brawl, or sneaking something from the market, some kind of trouble that would have Edmund send her back to her first foster home.

            With a sigh, I climbed out of my seat, just as she sat back down in hers. Again, I scowled at her, and she muttered something incoherent in my direction, flinging her head towards the door.

            I ignored her, sure that she would behave herself as soon as Edmund returned.

            When I got to the door, I found that the air was unsurprisingly icy, with a slight breeze breaking through it. Sophie began humming behind me, a low, sad-sounding tune that she often sang.

            Forgetting for a moment why I had came to the door, my body responded by pulling it open and taking a step into the chilly air. Immediately, it curled itself around me. Shivering already, I cupped my hands around my mouth, and called, “Edmund? Edmund!” Making use of my coming outside.

            Since I got no answering call, and I was already outside, I pulled my long skirt around my legs, huddled in my shirt, and pushed my way into the thick woods. The ground was soft, almost pulling my shoes from my feet with ever step I took. In the forest, the air was colder.

            Edmund is going to freeze to death! I realized, looking around with both wary and frightened eyes.

            “Edmund?!” I called again. This time, to my surprise, it was echoed by a call of my own name.

            “Haven?” It sounded close, but I couldn’t be sure, with the wind blowing in my ears. As I turned away from the path, a pair of firm hands gripped my shoulders. My mouth opened in a shriek, but it was muffled by another hand.

            “Shush! Do you want the entire village to awaken? Haven!”

            The hand removed itself from my mouth, and a painful sting came to my cheek. Instead of howling again, I shuffled away from the dark and abusive hands.

            “Haven, what are you doing out here? I told you I was going for wood, you’re going to come to your death bed in this cold! Look, you’re shaking and chattering, how long have you been outside?”

            I knew the shaking part was true, but was a chattering? I couldn’t feel it, if so. “Ed-Edmund?” Stunned, I stumbled forward again. It was true, I was chattering; his name was made by a series of little clicks through my teeth. The hands grabbed my shoulders again, Edmund shaking his head in the darkness.

            They lead me back through the woods, after I had taken a log to make it easier on him; he had only gotten two, but they were large enough to last it through the night.

            During the few short minutes I was gone, Sophie had thrown on her cooking apron and brought up some potatoes and a hunk of roasted cow meat from the cellar. She was standing in front of the fire now, with the cauldron sitting on the sheet of iron we had made a burner out of.

            A cigarette was clenched between her teeth, little huffs of smoke escaping from a crack between her bottom and top lip. It was an act that both of us had seen before; she would dump out the food I had made for Edmund, and cook something up herself.

            When she heard us come in, she beamed and announced that supper was almost reading, throwing in a bit of a smirk in my direction.

            Oh, just go along with it, Haven, I ordered myself. Edmund knew that I had made supper just as much as I did, and he would surely say something.

            “Why, thank you, Sophia.” He matched her smile with one of his own, striding over to peer into the cauldron. “But, as I recall, Haven was cooking supper when I left, at dawn.”

            Sophie turned to glare at me, before rushing into a story that a bird had flown in and tipped over what was left in the cauldron. Her small, sweet voice had never sounded appropriate for a girl like her, and I often amused myself by listening to her talk with imaginary ears, pretending that she had a deep, crackly witch’s voice.

            This would be considered childish and be frowned upon at any other household, but the three of us had all been raised different from others in the village, which were constantly shivering from the fear of being abducted by a devils aid.

            “Dear sister-” I laughed as she took the act further then usual, stretching her manners to what was surely the limit of what she knew. “Haven,” she now said between her teeth, half out of anger and half mocking me. “What did the bird look like, again?”

            “Oh, it was very large, yes, and black. A crow, no doubt, or an ashen hawk. It had toes so sharp, it could have brought us down, if it would have liked!”

            Edmund gasped at my unusually non-vivid description of the imaginary bird. “That terrifying? Thank God you girls ducked!”

            Edmund chuckled quietly, while Sophie smiled and poured some pork-potato-and-vegetable stew into a mug for him. Sophie handed him the mug, and we were sent off to our room so he could eat his supper in peace.

                       *          *          *

            Sophie had not yet begun her usual snoring, but instead I could hear her fiddling with something that sounded like a latch. “You’re just wasting valuable food, you know?” I whispered, locking my hands over my chest and looking at the cracked ceiling. The room was dark, for Sophie had nailed a board across the only window, but a bit of light shone from a crack in the wood.

            “He likes me more,” Sophie answered, throwing the object to the floor with a thump. “I can hardly believe it, but I know that is it so.”

            An odd answer, a one-person debate over which family member Edmund likes more.

            “He doesn’t have a favorite child,” I informed her, a sleepy edge to my voice. “And you should not do anything to make him choose.” Warnings were something that Sophie didn’t take seriously, so I added, “Or back to the Seeters’ it is.”
            “Not like that…” She muttered, and plucked a cigarette into her mouth.

After a few minutes of pondering what she had meant, I realized that the smoke from the cigarette was getting thicker. “Sophie, put out that cigarette.” I whispered.

No answer.

“Sophie? Put it out, now!”

When again I received no answer, I rolled onto my side, and gasped at what I saw. Sophie had fallen asleep, cigarette still lit, and it had rolled out of her mouth and stopped on her long hair, which had spread the small flame out onto her pillow and the fuzz of her bed.

“EDMUND!” I shrieked, watching helplessly as the flames devoured some more of her hair, turning the room a crisp red-and-brown color. “EDMUND!"

Author's Note

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Reviews

[O. Ragnarok]

That was unexpected. A nice ending, seeing Sophie get her due, to an extent.
But what happened to Edmund's wife...? You made a passing mention of her, but that was it. Is she dead?
Lastly, I need to question the setting here: It has a modern feel due to the (repeated) use of the term "foster parents" and such, yet at the same time, I had a fairy-tale vibe the whole time I was reading it.