by Elliot Berkley
Elsie found the girl who was once her sister in the Chapel of the Sleeping Angels. She had known Annabel would be there. Annabel was living with her mother now, who was devoutly involved with the Chapel. And Annabel was more often alone. One had to turn to something. And if it was praying, so be it.
Annabel stood before a statue of a sleeping angel. She looked like a mirror image. Pale hands intertwined. Clothed in dove-gray. Eyes closed. Hair falling down her back. Only the wings were missing, the gaping arches of marble feathers, too heavy to ever take to the air. She was just as lovely as she looked the day she and her father left Elsie’s house, if only her cheeks had grown thinner, and lost a fleck of the child Elsie had once known.
Outside, barren tree branches clicked and clacked against the glass in the heaving wind. Somehow, Annabel opened her eyes.
Her gaze met Elsie’s. How many months had it been? It was the beginning of summer when Elsie had watched her pack her things. Outside, a blanket of snow covered the village.
An intake of breath from Annabel, as if she had seen a ghost. It occurred to Elsie that was what she must look like: A ghost from a past life back suddenly to haunt her. She had wondered what shape Annabel’s face would take when she caught sight of Elsie; whether her mouth would curl in anger or disgust, if her eyes would water. Instead, she smiled.
Elsie waited for her in the snow outside. Annabel ran to hug Elsie. She hadn’t expected that. In fact, she’d been afraid Annabel’s anger would have taken Elsie as its prey. But her once-sister took Elsie’s hand.
Perhaps all of Annabel’s praying had taken her anger away. But things didn’t often disappear forever. No. It had to be somewhere.
“Annabel,” Elsie said.
“Elsie! It’s been so long—”
She spoke quickly. “I need your help,” Elsie said. “There is a curse on my mother.”
* * *
Elsie’s best memories of Colin and his daughter, Annabel, were buried knee-deep in snow. Her younger brother Iain was much more receptive to the two of them. Elsie, on the other hand, had been icy to them for a year, building a brittle shell against their intrusions upon her life. It made her angry; a man that her mother had met in town, and his daughter, suddenly moving their things into the attic above Elsie’s room. It was only four years after her father’s death, and half a year had passed since her mother had fallen in love with Colin.
Elsie’s icy heart began to defrost only as the winds turned cold. Perhaps it was being stuck inside so often. The cottage decked out in lanterns. The five of them, celebrating the winter holidays together. The days when Annabel would sneak down from her attic and whisper with Elsie over candlelight. Colin built fires and helped her mother cook, the simmering sounds of their chatter reaching her bedroom. He had a voice that could do that, wide and hearty that echoed up to the attic when he laughed. It wasn’t until a year later that her shoulders would tense every time she heard it, even if it was only a joke he was telling.
Colin would make dinner, flaky potatoes and onions baked in goat cheese. He’d learned that potatoes were Elsie’s favorite food. He’d watched her across the table, between the candles, careful to savor her reaction. He was a good cook.
Colin told them stories about the Wisps around the fire. They grant wishes, for a price. A deal must always be made.
He had seen them, he told her. Elsie didn’t know how true his story was. We were walking in the woods, just a mile north from our farm. He wove the picture of the woods through their minds. My brother and I were youngsters then, wandering the night woods behind our house. We stumbled into one of their circles. They chased us through the woods, with their sharp teeth and spindly fingers.
That’s not true! Annabel would protest. Uncle never told me that part.
He told them many stories about his brother. But he never told them his brother’s name. Elsie didn’t know anything about him, really.
There was a time when she overheard him, telling her mother that half of those stories weren’t true, but that he’d never tell them which ones. That was only for Elsie to decipher.
* * *
Deep in the forest, past the rock wall, was where Elsie had gone. She had braved the woods for her mother, Colin’s words of circles and prices ringing in her ear.
Elsie spun as the snow fell around her, searching. The earth billowed around her in drifts of snow. The trees were stark shadows. The forest had breathed with her. It was deep, mossy, and tangled. Dripping with the melting, early snow. It seemed to be trying to tell her something.
I, too, am not entirely what I seem.
As the darkness enveloped her, the toe of her boot crossed a line of white mushrooms.
The wind stopped.
The forest was not green anymore. It was cold, and still. Only the mushrooms on the rotten earth stood out. White as bones.
Just as Colin had said, they appeared. Flickers of shadow. Flutters of wings like a bat’s.
Elsie turned, jerked around. But they darted away from the corners of her vision, always. And then their voices filled the silence, bubbling up like a sudden, throbbing symphony of wild shrieks.
What do you want? What do you want?
To lift the curse on my mother, Elsie had replied.
We will tell you. We will tell you. For a price. For a price.
Anything, she had said.
She did not like the things that she had given them. But her mother was growing paler by the day. The ivy had begun to choke her bluebells and the tulips that were growing in their garden.
Only the-girl-who-was-once-your-sister. Only the-girl-who-was-once-your-sister.
Can help you lift. Can help you lift.
The curse. The curse.
* * *
As they neared the cottage, Elsie watched Annabel’s face change. The ivy had eaten away, by now, at the tiles on the roof, weighing the sagging ceiling down. It coated the windows, the fence posts. The garden was long-dead, but there it was, the ivy, soaking what little life was left out of the stones.
The windows were dark. The door creaked open. The hallway was silhouetted by dust.
The two of them tiptoed up the stairs. Elsie knew Annabel did not particularly want to run into Elsie’s mother. She wondered what it was like, seeing the house again. There were still shadows on the wall where paintings had hung for three years, still an indent in the rug where an armchair once stood. It was dim and half-empty, eaten away by gray. The house was missing things. Missing teeth.
“How am I meant to help?”
“I don’t know,” Elsie replied. “I just know that I can only lift it with your help.”
They were sitting in what had once been Annabel’s room. The attic was a jumble of sharp angles and shadows now. Barren furniture. All the tiny glass charms and baubles, Annabel’s music box—they were all gone. There were cobwebs in the corners of the rafters. The ivy had not yet clouded the grimy windows.
“And I know something else.” Elsie reached around the back of her neck and unclasped a silver chain, letting it dangle in the air, the carving of a black cat glinting on the locket. “The curse is on this.”
“How do you know?” Annabel murmured.
It had been a gamble that Annabel would help Elsie out in the first place. Annabel had not been the fondest of Elsie’s mother in the final year that they had all lived together under the same roof. Elsie had been riding on the hope that distance had made things clearer, that Annabel didn’t loathe Elsie’s mother enough to refuse to help. That what remained of their bond, three years whispering over the dinner table and giggling in candlelight, would outweigh Annabel’s grudge.
It seemed she had been right.
“There was a morning I picked it up to put it around my neck. It had grown heavier.” Elsie said. “The same morning, the first of the ivy appeared in the garden. I didn’t put it together until later.” Curses always need something to ground them.
Annabel’s eyes darted around the room. To the grate. To the chimneystack. She stood, abruptly, and began prying a brick from the chimney.
“What are you doing?”
“I hid these here when my father took all the lanterns up here away as a punishment. I’d forgotten about them until now.” The brick came loose with a crumbling of mortar and grime. She slid it out of place. Sitting behind it was a box of matches.
She took one in her hand and struck it, then leaned over the woodstove and let it spread over what remained of the charred embers. Soon, a tiny golden blaze was going. Elsie took a final look at the black cat’s carving. It landed on the fire with a thud.
They waited for a while. Nothing happened. Between the licks of flame, the locket was untouched.
“No burning it, then,” Annabel murmured. Elsie reached for the silver chain, yelping as the flames bit her finger. She slid it out of the embers, coated in ashes but otherwise untouched.
The door creaked open. “Annabel?”
* * *
With the turning of the year, the house began to feel tense. Elsie’s black cat, Marley, ran away one day, which had set her crying for a week. Colin wandered the house, fidgeting with loose boards, with rusty nails, fixing. But with every passing day, his anger grew. He would curse and kick the hammer when he bruised his hand. Elsie’s mother kept the wine away from him. Once the last keg of beer was gone, she did not buy another.
He was not entirely what he seemed. Twinkles in his eyes when he smiled. His voice, Elsie quickly learned, could grow loud. Very loud. It would raise, would roar like thunder, when Annabel dared to dawdle, still braiding her hair when they were meant to be leaving for the market.
The anger would burst from him as if it hadn’t fully been prepared for, as if it was an untameable storm, and it would all land upon Annabel. He never dared raise his voice at Elsie or Iain. Despite everything, Annabel did not hate either of them for that.
Perhaps he yelled at their mother, but she would never know.
Elsie would stare at her hands, her brother silent beside her, waiting for it to be over. Footsteps thundering through her room, to the attic where Annabel’s room was. He shook the house with his anger, sometimes. It seeped through her walls, dripped through the rafters. She would never look at her mother’s face. Annabel would shout back, for it was all she could do.
He would chop firewood in the back, yelling with each swing of the ax.
And then he would return once more. He would make them stew, and walk Elsie and Annabel home after school. He would run with the dogs in the snowy drifts, who loved him. He would carry Iain on his back, who loved him. He would cook for her mother. Who loved him.
The food he made them did not taste like anger. It tasted like his laughter. Elsie wondered where he kept his rage, what he did with all of it. She did not know if she loved him. Perhaps she wanted to.
One night, they had fought. Elsie had not been home to see it, to hear it. Her mother never told her what it was about. Elsie had gotten home from school, and when she stepped inside, the anger was waiting for her, flickering with the candlelight, with the thud of pacing footsteps upstairs. Her mother, stone-faced at the table.
It was quiet rage. Perhaps this should have been better. But it seemed only to be more dangerous.
Elsie went upstairs and curled beneath her quilt. She was woken by the sound of the front door slamming, shaking the frost from her windowsill. It was Colin, trailing into the swirling night.
They did not see him for a day. Her mother was in tears.
Where is he? Iain had asked.
I do not know, her mother replied.
That evening, she’d taken her wooly cloak and forged out into the wintry drift. When she returned, her eyes and nose were red, her knuckles chapped. But she was alone.
It was Annabel who told Elsie where her mother had found him. The pub in town, she whispered. He hadn’t come back. Elsie longed to storm down there and knock the glass out of his hand, spill the golden liquid across the floor.
A day passed. Elsie returned from school. The front door creaked open beneath her touch, unlocked. Her heart fluttered in her throat. She did not know if he had returned. The house, upon entering, was silent. Empty.
In the kitchen, the wooden chairs were overturned. Thrown to the floor. Everything that had lay upon the table was scattered across the carpet. Pieces of an old chessboard. A vase of flowers, the white petals strewn like roses across a grave.
While she uprighted each chair, her mind danced with images of what terrifying scene could have happened, whose rage this was a carcass of. It might’ve only been the dogs, overexcited.
But perhaps it was not. Perhaps it was a warning.
Perhaps she was not the one meant to find this.
Once she was done, everything returned to its place, the anger concealed, as if it had never been there at all. But it had been. She could not wipe it from the air, could not sweep it from the seams in the floorboards.
A day later, he was back, waiting silently at their door. He talked to her mother for a quarter of an hour. And then everything was in its place, returned to standing position like the chairs in the kitchen. As if nothing had ever happened at all. He smiled tentatively at her, when she crept down to see what was for dinner. He did not say anything at all.
* * *
It was Iain, eyes wide in the doorway. Annabel stood. He gaped. “What are you doing here? Did you bring her, Elsie? What’s going on?”
He had turned 12 the week after she’d left.
Iain ran to hug Annabel. She pressed her cheek to the top of his head. “You’re getting tall.”
“Don’t tell mother,” Elsie hissed. “She doesn’t know. Annabel is helping me.”
“With what?” Iain’s voice squeaked. “Can I help? What are you doing?” His eyes shone with confusion.
“The ivy,” Elsie whispered. “Where is she?”
“We went to the market. She’s coming down the front path. I went ahead.”
“Iain, can you keep her away from the back door? Please?”
Elsie and Annabel ran down to Elsie’s room, pressed their ears to the door as they listened to Iain’s pattering footsteps, down the stairs, into the hallway. Annabel was twisting a ring on her finger. Elsie hadn’t noticed it before. It was an angel ring, a pair of silver-feathered wings spread across her knuckle.
“Where were you?” her mother asked. Annabel let out a tiny gasp. Elsie’s mother’s voice was feeble, a rasp.
“Mother, come see. I think the ivy’s gotten into my window,” Iain said.
“Fine. Show me.”
Long, labored footsteps up the stairs. Through the crack in the hinges of the door, shadows flickered. Her mother’s footsteps paused. She began to cough. Beside Elsie, Annabel stopped breathing.
Elsie’s mother kept coughing. Ivy leaves fluttered to the ground.
Iain had paused at the doorway to his room. “Mum,” he said, his voice very, very small. “Are you okay?”
“Fine.” Her mother coughed once more. She kept walking.
Out in the garden, they dug a hole in the dark earth. Dirt clotted underneath Elsie’s fingernails. The locket went in, the soil back over, coating the palms of their hands. Annabel packed the soil tighter and tighter, grinding it down with her heel.
Elsie stood, looking up at the eaves of the house.
Before her eyes, a new leaf of ivy unfurled, stretching toward the paper-white sky.
* * *
A year ago, her mother wanted them to travel to the seaside. Perhaps she knew, already, that it was their last winter together. The town was strung with lanterns and baubles. By then Elsie and Annabel were close as ever, as if they were sisters themselves. If anyone saw them, arm in arm together down the road, they would think the same blood ran through their veins.
The town was only an hour’s ride from the coast, and filled with brightly-painted houses and tangled trees. There was a sailboat that made trips between the port and the far islands, and it took passengers, for a small fee. They ate hot gingerbread and roasted chestnuts while waiting to board the boat. Elsie watched the gray ocean, crashing towards them in foamy waves. Reaching up to soak the toes of their boots. It stretched on and on, waves of tossing water, until it reached the feet of the jagged islands in the distance.
The sun broke the clouds as they took off across the water. Annabel’s hair streamed in the wind, curling around her shoulders like midnight against the afternoon sun. They laughed together, tossing chestnut shells to the seabirds, whose shrill songs filled the air above them. At the boat’s railing, Colin bent over Iain, an arm around his shoulder, pointing to some far-off boat. Her mother watched, a distant smile on her face.
“Those rocks look like us,” Annabel told her. Five crags stuck up from the seafoam, splashed with salt.
Elsie loved being a sister more than anything that day.
At the end of the trip, Colin put a hand on her shoulder. She jumped a bit at the sound of his gruff voice. “Spotted this in the market,” he said. “Reminded me of Marley.”
In her palm he pressed something cold and hard. She unfurled her fingers. It was a shiny locket, engraved with a picture of a black cat.
* * *
It took Elsie and Annabel half an hour to walk to the nearest seaside. The wind fought against them the entire time. Each step down the road felt like slogging through mud. Halfway through, Elsie had slipped her arm through Annabel’s, just as she often did when they were still sisters, and they huddled together against the freezing wind. By the time they reached the rock-bitten shore, the wind had nearly frozen their hands off.
Annabel had been silent since they’d watched Elsie’s mother coughing. She had been coughing much more in the past week. It had been getting harder for her to breathe every day. Elsie wondered if Annabel was thinking about her angels. Perhaps she was praying to them, to take away her mother’s curse.
Annabel barely waited to reel her arm back and chuck the locket in an arc across the sky and into the waiting mouth of the ocean. The gray clouds thundered above, the wind whipped around them.
The locket floated on the surface of the water. It did not sink, like it was meant to. The amber eyes of the cat gazed up at Elsie. She thought of Marley. Of all she had lost. She thought, for the first time in months, of Colin’s face. Clear as day. His beard, feebly-shaven, the circles under his eyes, the glimmer in his dark pupils.
The world had grown very loud. She gazed down at her feet. The ground was littered with broken seashells, in a half-circle around the girls. The clouds opened up. The raindrops turned the rocks slick and black. The wind sent torrents of water and air across Elsie’s face.
“I don’t understand,” Elsie called. She couldn’t see Annabel’s face. It was turned toward the open sea, toward the islands, far away, and the jagged rocks that stuck up from the broiling white foam of the sea. “It should be sinking. That means the curse is broken. Why isn’t it working?”
Her sister murmured something, but Elsie couldn’t hear her. “What?” she shouted.
Annabel turned. Her face was twisted with rage. “I give up!” she shouted over the roaring wind. “I can’t do it! It won’t work and I can’t help you! And I won’t help her anymore!” The image of an angel was shattered on her face.
“Annabel, please!” Elsie’s throat tightened with tears, with strain. “She’s going to die! She’s my mother!”
“And she was never mine!” Annabel shouted. Tears streamed down her face with the rain. Elsie could tell because her cheeks always got very pink when she was crying. “She ruined my father! She’s the reason he won’t see me anymore! She’s the reason he’s been away from the town for half a year! I hate her!” She looked the angriest Elsie had ever seen a person.
“Annabel,” Elsie sobbed. Her voice hurt. The wind tore her hair to pieces. “Annabel, half a year?”
“We used to be best friends, the two of us.”
“But my mother was cursed two months ago, Annabel.” Breathing hurt her lungs.
“I just want him to be the way he was again. I want him to come home.” The anger had not left her, then. It had been buried all that time.
Elsie stepped towards her sister, her boots slipping on the slick rocks. “You cursed her,” she whispered.
The world grew very quiet.
Annabel’s eyes were very wide and broken. Her shoulders shook. She wiped the snot away from her face with a sleeve, and in that moment she looked very young, like the day that Elsie first met her, sniffling in the garden because she was too nervous to go inside and meet Elsie and Iain. The world seemed to float around them. Nothing made a sound.
“Annabel,” Elsie said. “You hate her that much?”
“No,” Annabel sobbed. She shook her head. “I hate my father. I hate him now.”
Elsie reached out and brushed Annabel’s shoulder with her fingertips. She stepped back. “I just wanted a sister,” Annabel said. “And a family. We were one, for a while. Weren’t we?”
“We were,” Elsie said. “She tried, Annabel.”
“I know.”
“She still feels guilty that you had to leave. I can tell when she talks about you.” Elsie paused. “She remembers your birthday.”
Annabel looked away. Her eyes were glassy. She shook her head again.
“Your father. . .” Elsie began.
“I know he hurt her,” Annabel said. “I know. That’s who he is. I know. I’ve known him all my life.” Annabel sat down on the wet rocks. The rain had stopped. The sea was calm once more, white foam lapping at the rocks beneath them.
Elsie sat next to her.
Annabel was three years younger. But it had never seemed that way. There were days when her eyes carried something far older, some sadness that Elsie had not grown enough to understand.
“He wasn’t always this way. There were times when he was amazing,” Annabel said.
“I know. He was kind to me.”
“When he wasn’t angry. When he wasn’t drinking. Or even sometimes when he was,” Annabel murmured. “He was good.”
“I know,” Elsie said. “He loves you, Annabel.”
Author Bio
Across the milky harbor, speckles of sunlight lit up an island. Annabel leaned her head on Elsie’s shoulder. Beneath their dangling feet, the locket sank slowly beneath the waves.
Elliot Berkley is a junior at Emerson pursuing a BA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. She grew up in Tacoma, Washington. Her short story “Beetles” was published in Concrete’s Spring 2025 issue, and her novella Sungleam was published by Wilde Press in Fall 2024. In her free time, she loves being among the trees and close to the ocean, spending time with her loved ones—including 2 dogs and 5 cats—playing Minecraft, and going to museums. Follow her on Instagram and check out her writing portfolio here: @notsmelliot and https://elliotmberkley.wixsite.com/my-site-1
