The Starving Season
By E. (Emmanuelle) M. Nikolaev
Posted on
We carry the bride’s coffin on our backs, hastily constructed by our frail hands from what was once her litter. The starving season is a killer, even for brides brought from afar to marry kings and princes, dowries of gold and spices carried with them through the streets of hollow wasting faces. The bride’s hand maidens walk ahead of us, adorned in white, the color of weddings in their country, but to us, it has always been the color of mourning, the color of death, the color of the snow that comes to take our children. We step in tandem, careful not to drop the corpse, even as the air itself turns bitter and blue in the cold, and still yet we walk northward, to where tears freeze as you weep, and your heart stutters, for the air is fractal.…
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