The stone floor is cold against her legs. Her thin dress, worn the entire summer, can’t keep the damp out. It sponges moisture out of the stones. For the first month, this bothered her, now she only notices at night when she stares at the small patch of moonlight on the floor, trying to sleep. No one visits. Her cell door is opened at mealtimes, a metal plate shoved in, the stone floor scratching against the bottom. She’s long stopped listening to the prison’s noises: doors slamming, boots stomping, rats scurrying in the walls. They’ve faded into the background.

She is alone in the stone room; everyone was too afraid to share a cell with her. The guards finally found a cell in the old, unused part of the prison. There were no beds to be had, no extra mattress, so she has a pallet on the floor that smells of mildew. She tries not to think of what might be living and dying in the pallet. She’s taken out once a week for a shower in the prison’s tiled bathroom. The water, barely lukewarm, feels luxurious and she always hopes that the guards will lose track of time, but they never do. They stare at her nervously as she strips and scrubs every part of her body, going double over her scalp where the oils build up and coat her thick hair. When she’s done, a guard tosses her a towel, afraid to get too close.

One day blends into another day…into another…into another. She doesn’t taste the runny soup in the metal tray, or the dry bread that comes with it. Every noise sounds the same; her skin grows thicker against the damp. Only the warm water from the showers and the feeble steam snatch her out of dullness.

But today is different. It starts just after dawn. A new sound, different from the heavy footfalls of boots, the distant slamming doors, and the sliding of her metal food tray across the stone floor. Two sets of footsteps, lighter and hesitating, stop outside her door. The heavy door opens, and two women enter. They cross themselves, and one kisses a crucifix that hangs at her neck, as soon as their eyes adjust to the light and they see Elena sitting on her pallet. One holds a hairbrush and a glass bottle of something, the other a toothbrush and a clean dress that has stripes running across. They approach Elena, their lips moving as they utter prayers. One brushes Elena’s hair while the other douses her in perfume. Elena insists on brushing her own teeth, her gums sore afterwards since it’s been weeks since she’s seen a toothbrush. She slips into the new dress, uncertain what all this largesse means. No one from her family has visited during her time here. Some, like her brother Andrei, were too ashamed when she was arrested. “How dare you dishonor our family like this!” He’d shouted. Dorine, the only one who would’ve understood, was far away, safe near the sea with her own family.

Elena recalls the past with bitterness, remembering all the charms for healing, good fortune, simples for sick children and womanly troubles, and readings she provided free of charge to her family and neighbors. Who did you come to when your husband was cheating on you, Nicoleta? Who gathered the herbs for little Serghei that winter when his cough wouldn’t go away? If I hadn’t warned him, Uncle David would have lost all his savings in that bad deal. She indulges herself with thoughts of revenge. A drink to cause sickness, or a charm to force them to tell their darkest secrets, knowing she’d never attempt such things. There were prices to pay for such selfish acts.

A new set of footsteps sound outside her door after the women leave. One of them, heavy guard boots, the other, leather soled. The high click-clack of the leather-soled shoes stops outsider her cell, and once again the heavy metal door swings open. One man enters, the guard stays outside. The man places a chair, only one, as far away from Elena as the cell affords. He fingers something in his suit pants’ pocket, prayer beads, Elena thinks.

She recognizes him from the pictures in the newspaper. She’d long suspected the picture were doctored or taken years ago when his face was unlined and the flesh still firm. Now she sees she was right. The man that sits in front of her is small, almost the same height as her, and wasted, though not from age. His skin has a yellowish tinge and his cheeks are pock-marked and flabby. Elena is reminded of the clay-pits outside her hometown where she and her siblings would play after it rained. Wet globs of clay slowly traveling down their arms and faces, replaced by new globs they threw at each other. She almost reaches for the globs on the man’s face.

The man’s eyes, small and deep set in his skull, blink. His tongue travels quickly over his dry lips, and the scent of plums drifts across the cell. Elena knows the smell well. A bottle with its pale amber liquid was a cornerstone in her mother’s kitchen, taken every evening from its shelf by her father when he came home.

“Elena,” the man says. “You and my wife have the same name.”

Elena sits staring. Of course she knows this already, everyone does. The old man continues to make small talk. The weather, his children (Does she have any? No. Pity), the upcoming holiday. Elena knows what the man is doing, she’s observed the same behavior in the people that come to consult her. They beat around the bush, until they exhaust all other topics and the actual reason for their visit comes tumbling out of their mouths. She lets the old man go on, not so much listening to the words as to their stilted rhythm, like a novice pianist attempting a complicated jazz piece.

When he finally slows down, he asks Elena “How long have you been here?”

“What’s the date?”

“September seventeenth.”

“Then it’s been almost three months.”

The man nods and scratches his chin stubble. “I can get you out of here early, maybe even today if…”

Elena watches him, wondering if a bribe or a threat is implied. She wants to be back in her home, especially before winter sets in. She shivers and her breath catches as she imagines what this cell will be like in the winter with no heat source. She runs away from these thoughts to the little house she hasn’t seen since she was dragged from her porch after dark. The morning sunlight dancing off the little bottles and jars that line her kitchen walls. Tinctures and draughts made from the herbs in her garden and ones she collects in the hills. Flowers hanging from the ceiling, drying for later use. Her garden will be overrun with weeds by now, and some mixtures will need to be thrown out, mold growing around the corks. She imagines it this way, though she knows her house has been razed since her arrest.

The man removes something for inside his jacket. Elena has to be blink several times before she sees the object in the weak morning light.

“It was my mother’s,” the man says, inching his chair closer. “I know this much at least. The more personal the object, the better the results.”

In his hands he holds a silver bowl. Intricate filigree, vines, and leaves weave around the bowl’s sides, up toward the lip. He holds the bowl out to Elena and she takes it, tracing the pattern with her fingers before setting in on the stone floor. The man takes Elena’s cup of water and pours it out into the bowl.

Elena stares dumbly across the room at the man, his mouth cruelly turned up at the sides. “How is your sister, Dorine? And her three children? And their pretty little house outside Medgidia?”

Elena has lived all her adult life under his regime, too long to be surprised that he’d gone straight to threats, bypassing bribes altogether. Of course, he knew all about her family, knew to threaten the only sibling she really cared about, her little sister Dorine, the peaceful one of the family. Everyone had been surprised when Elena, who her mother called Elena Furtunoasa, or Elena the Tempestous, and Dorine had become inseparable. As soon as Dorine learned to walk, neither were ever seen without the other. Elena would take her to the hills to pick flowers, practice for her future occupation, or to the nuns who taught sewing in the village. Though Dorine never showed the same interest as Elena in the practice, she’d never held her back. And when their brother Andrei teased Elena about her unruly hair, or her flat chest, saying how with even the strongest philter, she’d never find a husband, only Dorine could calm the rage that threatened to explode out of her.

The man is smiling at Elena, projecting an attitude of self-satisfaction obtained from years of being denied nothing.

Elena leans over the bowl, tucking her feet underneath her legs. The water reflects the grayness of the room and Elena’s curly brown hair as she stares down. She bites her bottom lip nervously. She’s only tried scrying a few times. The first time nothing happened. She stared into the hand mirror for an hour while her favorite candle, scented with lavender, flickered next to her. The second time, a rainy day in winter, the images were faint, almost undiscernible. Figures humanlike, their faces obscured, faded in and out of the mirror. The third and last time was different, frightening. A large crowd of people, some with cuts on their faces and blood staining their clothes marched across the mirror. From somewhere in the crowd she heard a scream, then gunshots. A child near the front of the crowd dropped a loaf of cozonac, the cellophane wrapper soon muddied with gutter water. Elena had dropped her mirror then. Shen left the broken pieces on the floor until morning, too afraid that she would see further images.

“Look!” The man demands, shaking Elena out of this reverie.

Elena leans back over the bowl, silently pleading to see something, anything. If the surface of the bowl remains blank, she’ll have to make up something and she’s never been good at lying. Dorine claimed this was a virtue, but Elena knew that wasn’t always true. When her father demanded money from their mother to buy more ţuică, her mother would lie, say the price of food had gone up, and that there wasn’t any left over to buy his drink. After her mother’s eye stayed swollen shut for three days, Elena knew being a bad liar had its consequences.

The man taps his foot impatiently. Elena wants to tell him visions don’t come on demand, that she is a conduit, a receiver only, but something flickers across the surface of the bowl. At first Elena is sure she’s imagined it, but then the ripples multiply. The hard, cold stone floor fades, as does the scratchy material of the dress she wears. Elena doesn’t hear the man when he asks, “What do you see?” and drags his chair closer to her and the bowl.

It’s the crowd again, the same one as the last time. The child, hand clutched around the cozonac, waves her other hand in the air. The crowd parts to allow tanks and army green trucks to pass. The crowd cheers them on, waving their blue, yellow, and red flags. Buildings in the distance spew smoke, and flames leap from one roof to another. Young men in the crowd, coats zipped up against the winter wind, leap onto a moving truck and the people that crowd its bed pull the boys on board, smiles on their faces. The national anthem is blaring from a speaker nearby and the people begin to sing along, swaying to the music while their city burns around them.

The scene changes. The man and his wife, the one that shares Elena’s name, sit behind small desks surrounded by soldiers. The man in charge, wearing full fatigues with the famous Kalashnikov hanging at his side, reads a list of charges. The man on trial shakes his head and yells that the trial in unconstitutional, while the woman, bundled in a fur lined coat, tells the men that they are all bastards. One of the soldiers tells the woman to shut-up and shoves his automatic in her stomach. The woman stops yelling, but her face, the muscles sharp with practice, work themselves into a look of pure hatred. When the verdict (death by firing squad) is read, the man on trial lunges at the soldiers. They manage to restrain him and one of them punches his face which quickly bruises, the thin skin threatening to break open in several places. The woman curses the men, their families, and the day they were born. Like a cornered dog, she fights erratically, catching one solider in the groin before they tie her hands together and gag her.

The scene changes again. The man and wife stand against a stone wall, hands behind their backs. Their last words reflect their characters so poignantly, one of the soldiers hesitates, not from fear, but from bemusement, when the signal is given. The man is belting the national anthem, while the woman screams obscenities, her gray hair falling lose around her face, when the bullets hit their bodies, jerking them back against the wall. The smoke clears and the pair lay in a heap on the ground, blood seeping through their winter clothing and pulling around their heads. The man is smiling, looking more peaceful than he has in years. But even death can’t wipe the smug expression from the woman’s face.

The water in the bowl dims, before going blank. Elena sees herself gazing into the water and quickly works her face into a neutral expression, hoping the man in the room with her didn’t see her disgust and fright.

“Well? What did you see, girl?”

Elena smiles at the word girl. She’s thirty-four and the years of worry and months of isolation haven’t been kind to her face. She knows this from looking into the bowl. Lines that used to fade with a good night’s sleep are permanently etched between and under her eyes. She dumps the water near the door and hands the bowl back to the man. She smells tobacco, the good kind, when she is near him. For all his bravado, she sees terror behind his eyes, the kind that never goes away, the kind the wearer earns. But she’s lived under his regime too long, heard rumors about all the people that have died by his order, to feel sympathy. But there’s Dorine, her little house, and her own life. With the truth she’s unlikely to get any of those things back.

“I saw a big parade, and a rally. Both bigger than any I’ve ever imagined,” she starts, drawing on years of such events, all broadcast across the country. “There were foreign leaders present, their flags lined up in front of the grandstands. I saw gifts, and wreaths of flowers. Treaties were signed, everyone wanted an alliance. An artist from Paris painted your portrait. It was magnificent,” Elena concludes. She allows her eyes to go misty and smiles at the man who sits frowning in his chair.

He is trying to decide if he believes Elena, she knows he is. She can see the struggle playing out inside his head. Something prompted him to come see her. He himself outlawed her practice and that of hundreds more. He’s worried about something. Elena hasn’t seen a newspaper in months or talked to anyone with opinions. But even before she was arrested, he was starting to fall from favor. The country, weary from decades of this regime, was starting to fight back. It started with the university students. There were protests and demonstrations. Then everyone, even her grocer, was talking about it. People thought he’d escape to another country, but who would want this weasel and his wife?

The man grinds his teeth and gives Elena a cold look. For a moment she thought he’d buy it. She’d counted on his ego and the decades of reinforcement it had received. When he gets up to leave, she knows she was wrong.

“Funny,” the man snarls, “I’ve always wanted to visit Medgidia.”

He walks toward the door, stepping in the puddle of water. Elena’s lips moved rapidly while he stands in the water waiting for the guards to open the door. She feels a rush of heat move from her chest toward her hands before dissipating entirely. If it’s a selfish act, Elena is willing to pay the price.

– Jordan Dilley