Page 1 of The Maiden and Her Monster

The forest ate the girls who wandered out after dark.

Once the sun sank below the horizon, the villagers closed their doors and shuttered their windows.

The dim, tinted orange glow of tallow candles became the only wash of light spilling onto the streets.

Inside the houses lining the dirt roads, families gathered.

They told stories in hushed tones, animated by hands making shadow figures in the candlelight.

Braided bread cooked slowly in ovens and stoves boiled stock and vegetables for supper.

In one such house, a woman sat on her knees, elbows leaning on the window’s edge as she gazed out to the barren street.

Over the line of sturdy stone houses, the shektal bell rang.

Her skin prickled hard with goose bumps.

The bell sounded every night save the Sabbath, and every night its warning melody, signaling curfew, crawled inside her skin.

She focused instead on the cool touch of the window. When she breathed, fog weaved like a spider’s web on the glass, crawling up and wide. She drew her finger up the pane, then looped it around and around to paint a flower on the window.

“Malka.”

The voice was as warm as the candles puddling light into the room.

“Baby, please get away from the window. I don’t like when you linger near it.”

“Yes, Imma,” Malka said, pushing from the ledge. She fell into her mother’s waiting arms and rested her head between the bones of her chest. Malka’s hands tightened around Imma’s waist, too aware of her mother’s sharp ribs and protruding collarbones.

Imma grasped Malka’s cheeks between her cold, brittle hands. “It’s time to light the yahrzeit candle.”

“Without Abba?”

“Your father is on another Rayga hunt. You know how that goes. He’ll either join us halfway through supper or stumble in at sunrise stinking of wine.”

Imma gently rubbed her calloused thumb along the gash decorating Malka’s cheek, half scabbed over but still bruised.

The flickering candles made Imma’s eyes, normally the bright green of spring leaves, a hollow forest dark.

Imma’s gaze softened, for she knew what had made the gash in her skin.

Who had made it. Shame clawed up Malka’s throat, but she swallowed it down.

Malka gritted her teeth. “The men should not have a Rayga hunt while the mourner’s prayer is being sung in every household in Eskravé.”

Imma tucked a curl behind Malka’s ear. “To them, vengeance is a mourner’s prayer. However unholy you may think it is.”

In the kitchen, Malka’s two sisters stood against the small, rectangular wooden table decorated with an embroidered cloth and the intricate copper plate meant to catch the dripping candle wax.

Hadar, the youngest of the siblings at only eight years old, grinned at Malka as she and Imma entered the room.

Her smile was all crooked teeth, brown eyes doe-like in a way Malka hoped she would never outgrow.

When a piece of Hadar’s raven black hair fell into her face, she puffed her cheeks to blow it aside.

Malka chuckled, having done the same many times with her unruly curls.

Her other sister Danya, five years younger than Malka at eighteen, held the match in her hand. Where Malka and Hadar’s hair was unruly and black like Abba’s, Danya had gotten Imma’s curly golden locks which fell gracefully around her face.

Danya stretched out her lanky arms. “Would you like to light it?”

Malka gripped the match and stepped close to the candle. As she struck the match against the tinder, she held her breath. This part was always sacred to her—the creation of light as divine, the transition from everyday life to the holy.

She began to sing.

The prayer was soft, familiar. It rolled off her tongue like honey, words shaped by memory and heartbreak. Malka could hardly believe there was a time when she lit the mourner’s candle less often. A time before the woods began its haunting, and the monster, its hunger.

A monster which had become so feared, her village had affixed it a name: the Rayga.

With each word sung, Malka remembered the faces of the girls claimed by the woods, and the monster within:

A young girl of five, too caught up in her game of chase with her twin brother to notice the sun’s last rays falling through the burly copse of trees.

A woman of twenty, who stole away to the woods with her lover to escape the watchful eye of her parents, and in her lust, did not see the day slip to night.

A grandmother of seventy, who fell asleep by her husband’s grave, situated within the forest’s grasp.

And Chaia. Taken a year ago. The anniversary of her loss prompting the burning of the mourner’s candle tonight.

The prayer turned to ash in her mouth.

Later that night, Malka sat on the floor of the bedroom she shared with her sisters as they made paper cuttings to decorate their house for Bayit Ohr, the upcoming winter festival of lights.

It was a quiet night, as they all had become once the curfew bell rang.

Only the faint rustle of trees in the wind and the crackling of dim fires broke through the weighty silence.

It was on these still, quiet nights Malka remembered Chaia most. The silk brown of her hair, always brushed into smooth waves, falling to her shoulders.

The mischievous glint in her eye as they would escape into the night to tell haunting stories.

During the day, they each had their duties; but once the sun set, they were free to talk about anything and everything under the dark cover of the sky and its glimmering stars.

“I know you miss her,” Hadar said, bringing Malka out of her reverie. The graphite she had traced onto her paper bled through the page, ruining it.

Malka set her ruined paper cutting aside and swallowed any grief with it. “Everyone misses her, Achoti. It’s a time of mourning for the village.”

“But you miss her most,” Hadar responded.

She smoothed her thumb on the edge of a cut she had made, perfecting the shape.

Her creation was already beautiful, with patterns of stars, moons, and intricately cut block letters lining the paper.

Vines of ivy wove around the letters like pillars, shaded by half-sketched lemon trees.

Malka imagined what it would look like once it glistened with color, vibrant as the stained-glass windows on Eskravé’s shul when the sun peered in through the glass.

Even Danya’s paper cutting was beginning to take shape—the sketch of an oak tree with its impressive root system shaped into the letters of the ancient Yahadi holy language.

The beauty made Malka long for the Eskravé of her childhood. Like the Rayga, the villagers also gave the woods a new name when it soured: Mavetéh. Into death.

But that was not always what Malka knew it as. Before it was Mavetéh, it was called Kratzka ?ujana in her language, named for the forest’s elder trees and their thick, gnarled branches.

“It was not always like this, you know,” Malka said, remembering Kratzka ?ujana. “The curfew and the mourning.”

Hadar licked the graphite smeared on her hand. “What was it like?”

Malka patted her leg, beckoning Hadar. Her sister smiled big and settled into Malka’s lap. Malka wrapped her hand around Hadar’s curls like the vines of ivy on her paper cutting.

Eyes closed, Malka pulled forth the shaded memories of a vibrant Eskravé, known to her only five years before, where birds sang their melodies, and the breeze carried the hum of violins from the shul during evening services.

When Imma would take Malka and Danya to a meadow in Kratzka ?ujana and teach them about the flowers sprouting there.

Danya, only thirteen, would hold the basket in her arms as Malka plucked the flowers.

They would pick marigold and foxglove for Imma’s medicinal uses, and woad and madder for Chaia’s parents to use as fabric dye.

Eskraven villagers took pride in the goods they made—from clothing and furniture to food prepared according to Yahadi law. Families in Eskravé went back generations, and trade specialties carried down through bloodlines.

Chaia had hated the unchanging nature of her village, the clear path it paved for their lives, but it was something Malka cherished.

“I wish I could pick flowers, like you both did.”

Malka brushed a kiss on Hadar’s forehead. “Hopefully you will soon.”

“Do you think Abba will ever find the Rayga?”

“The men have certainly invested enough alcohol into their Rayga hunts. Better be worth something,” Danya responded, eyes still fixed on her own craft.

Malka glared at her. “There’s no use speaking like that in front of our little sister.”

Danya rolled her eyes, still focused on her meticulous brushstrokes. “Malka, you have to be kidding me. Hadar isn’t sheltered from the fact that every man comes back drunk from their heroic Rayga hunt. Especially not when one of the men is Abba.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

The loud bang of the front door slamming shut rattled the wooden beams in their room. A deep, raspy laugh filled the air, which left the argument dead on both sisters’ lips.

“Stay here, I’ll go see if there’s news,” Malka said.

She lifted Hadar from her lap, closing the door behind her as she left the room.

In the kitchen, Abba sat defeatedly on a creaky wooden chair. Imma bent over him, wiping at the dirt clinging to his cheeks and around his nose.

In the back corner of the room, their hearth blazed, flames licking a suspended iron pot. The boiling water growled and spilled over the lip, sizzling when it slapped the hot coal beneath.

Malka ran to it, adjusting the trammel hook so the pot hung higher off the heat.

“How was the Rayga hunt, Abba?” Malka asked over her shoulder.

“Nothing,” Abba spat, running his hand through his hair. “Not as if we ever get to stay and search long, a bunch of women these men are. One sound and they go running.”

“Did you collect any of the herbs I asked for?” Imma asked, squeezing out the dirty rag into the bucket by her side.