All Our Yesterdays by Joel H. Morris

Author:Joel H. Morris [Morris, Joel H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2024-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

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That night I was seized by a blinding pain. My insides were twisting, my heartbeat was in my ears. Maidservants put me immediately to bed.

I woke to feel my insides on fire, then fell back into fevered dreams where the old woman and the burning child visited me again and again.

The bed was wet and red.

“A bit young to bleed,” the nursemaid said. “Not yet twelve.” She shook her head distastefully, as if I had chosen my age. “You’ve become a woman. Let’s see if your father approves of you running out and about in those woods now.”

But I had already resolved never to return to the clearing. And the forest, its labyrinth of birch and pine—I would not go there at all, nor to any other woods but for the brief roads through them. Even then I saw them as the breach where darkness and men met.

I spoke to no one about her, about what I had seen. The woman in the woods was a shadow, a figment, a nightmare hag I had conjured somehow in my dark and desperate imaginings.

Confined in the safety of my home I touched walls for comfort, and I knew that if those stone walls crumbled, I should go mad forever. I will never have a son, I told myself. I will never marry, never have any child at all. Of course, the choice would never be mine.

I remained in my chamber the rest of Duncan’s visit. My father sent word that he would wait until my bleeding had passed. My step-aunt—the one person in my life who might be closest to a mother—left me to the servants’ care. Macduff never knocked.

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