Cauldron Anthology Issue 3: Year 1 Collection Cauldron Anthology Year One Issue FINAL 1.17.18 | Page 37

there.
“You think that I am sad?” I somehow manage to keep rocking. Back and forth. Creaking wood
and my pounding heart. Back and forth.
“You have never known love.”
I shake my head. “This is not true. I have known great joy.”
“I said nothing about joy. I said you have not known love.”
“You cannot feel joy without love.”
He shrugs. “A little bit, perhaps. Love of the most basic sort. But love and joy are not the
same.”
“I think you are wrong.” I am sure of it. “You cannot have joy without love and so it follows
that you must also have joy in order to love.”
His frown is worse than his smile, no light at all, only dark ooze. “Ask any grieving parent. They
still love the child who has gone from this world, but I doubt you could say that they feel joy.”
“Yes, they would. Joy that the child had lived, however briefly.”
“And what do you think these parents would ask you?”
We both know the answer to his question. They would ask: “Why did this happen?” And I
would say: “Because it is the way of nature that everything lives and so everything must die.” But
is that the truth? Who can say why anything happens? Pain and pleasure, good and evil, birth and
death. Is it not all just a jumbled mess that women and men have to fight their way through? Is this
what the gods meant to create?
I don’t answer him.
His voice mocks me. “I knew you were a liar. I had hoped to be wrong, though. I thought the
Kalip Women were supposed to tell the truth.”
There. There is my fire come back to me, deep in my belly. The muscles of my back move and
bunch, sharp points against my red cape, as I settle myself deeper into my chair. Breathing and
rocking. Back and forth. In and out.
“You know nothing of the Kalip Women. Do not test me.”
His smile flares back up, the heat of a sun about to explode. “I know more than you can pos-
sible know.” And with that, he backs away and vanishes.
I do not take my place in the rocking chair at the top of the stone steps again for a week. Eight
moons bleeding away little by little. Seven new suns burning through the mist, calling to me. I
huddle next to the door of the big stone house by the river, hearing people approach the stone
steps. Questions with no answer to be had, not from me. I can hear the intrusion, the re-sentment,
in their voices because I am not where they expect me to be. I have alwa ys been there.
I am not there.
I have no more answers.
I do not know where I am. Where I belong.
Everything I have ever known, or thought I knew, disappeared when the man with the dead
smile arrived.
My belly fire no longer burns, but I am not cold. I cannot say I am empty, for doesn’t emp-
ti-ness have its own pull, its own magic? I have none of that.
What am I going to do tomorrow? I cannot hide forever. And what am I hiding from any-way?