It's been five days since I found my father's head. I learn that grief is not a wave that crashes over you, but a new atmosphere you are forced to breathe. Our house becomes a vacuum, the silence so dense it feels like a physical weight on my chest. It muffles sound, steals warmth, and makes every tick of the clock an accusation.
My mother has not spoken since the funeral. She has become a living effigy, a monument to loss. For hours, she sits by the cold hearth, cradling the small clay pot my father brought her from his last trip to the city. Her thumb traces its unglazed rim in a slow, ceaseless orbit, as if the curve of the clay holds the blueprint to a world that still makes sense. Her skin, once the colour of warm bread, has taken on the grey, translucent quality of old snow. She is eroding before my eyes. My sister, a silent mimic, moves through the house like a shadow, her own grief a smaller, sharper echo of my mother's.
Behind them, the idols loom in the gloom—the unseeing head, the swollen belly, the tongue without ears. Once they were gods. Now they are just furniture. Their silence mocks ours.
Water now tastes of rust. A phantom flavour, I know, a trick of a mind steeped in the memory of blood. The thought of my father is not a clean wound, but a poorly set bone, an ache that twists with every shift in the cold air. I find myself staring at the wall, only to be ambushed by a memory—the rough rasp of his palm against my cheek, the scent of pine and city spice that clung to his coat, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he called my calculations clever. The memories are useless. They are currency for a kingdom that has already burned to the ground.
And then, a sound.
A sound so alien in our suffocating quiet that it feels like a physical blow. A scream, high and ragged, torn from a woman's throat. It is not a sound of fear, but of agony. It rips through the fog-choked afternoon and shatters the stillness of our home.
My mother's head snaps up, her eyes wide with a terror that is, for the first time in days, alive. We move to the window, a single organism pulled by the sound.
Outside, the village square has become a stage. The houses seem to have exhaled their occupants, who now press together in a tight, shivering circle. At its centre is a performance of ordinary, brutal theatre. The shopkeeper, his face a blotchy canvas of rage, is swinging the iron-tipped end of his belt. The neighbour aunt—the adulteress—is on her knees in the snow. Each lash is punctuated by a wet, slapping sound that carries clearly in the cold air.
The crowd is not a monolith. It is a collection of appetites. Some watch with grim satisfaction, their whispered judgments—"Whore," "Curse," "Monster-breeder"—feeding the shopkeeper's fury. Others, mostly women, clutch their shawls, their faces pale with a fear that looks dangerously close to complicity. They are watching a mirror, terrified of the day it might turn on them.
The shopkeeper, for his part, plays his role with feverish commitment, his bellows about seduction and dead sons a sermon for the baying congregation. He is not a man grieving a dead wife or a dead child; he is an animal asserting his place in the pack.
Then the theatre turns darker. A man emerges from the crowd holding an axe, its blade a sliver of dull light against the grey sky. A collective intake of breath, a tightening of the circle. The air grows thick with a terrible, rapturous attention. The aunt stumbles backward, her pleas dissolving into choked, animal whimpers. The snow clings to her ankles like shackles.
The axe falls. It does not make the clean sound I would have expected. It makes a wet, heavy chunk, and it lodges in her skull, the handle quivering like a grim flag planted in conquered territory.
For a moment, there is absolute silence. Then the colour comes. A flood of impossible red, steaming as it melts its way into the white snow. The village has made its sacrifice. Horror has become entertainment.
I think of the idols in our home, staring, swollen, deaf. They would have watched this too. But gods never scream. Only people do.
And then I see her.
In the shadow of a doorway, half-hidden, sits the shopkeeper's daughter. Her knees are pulled to her chest, her body coiled so tightly she seems to be trying to collapse into herself. Her long, light-brown hair has fallen forward, a silken curtain hiding her from a world that has just shown its teeth. She trembles, not from the cold, but with the deep, internal quaking of a structure about to fail.
I know her. The blue ribbon in her hair, a startling slash of colour against her pale skin, is the same one she wore the day I saw her weeping behind the temple, the day her mother's screams were swallowed by the night. Now, her father stands over a corpse, his hands clean, while she sits in the corner, orphaned by a violence he has orchestrated.
Her eyes, light as a winter sky, are fixed on the red stain in the snow. They are not filled with tears. They are empty. It is the same hollow emptiness I see in my mother's gaze.
The village has devoured one of its own to soothe its fear. But I see the truth. The real cost is not the body lying in the snow. It is the silence of the survivors. It is the daughter who will never scream, and the mother who will never speak again. We are a village of silent screams, and in that moment, I feel like the only one who can hear them all.
At last, my mother speaks. "If only your father were here," she whispers. Her voice is raw, like something dragged across stones. My sister takes her hand, and the dam breaks—they both weep, their grief pooling into the room like floodwater.
One ear catches their sobs; the other still holds the fading roar of the square. I stand between them, neither inside nor outside, like a coin still spinning. My mother sits where she always sits—by the hearth, the clay pot in her lap. Her thumb drags over the rim, round and round, as though if she stops, even for a second, the world will collapse.
I sit across from her. My sister kneels close, her hair falling over her face as she wipes her cheeks.
"Mother," I say quietly, "what will we do now?"
The question tastes like ash in my mouth.
She doesn't answer at first. Her eyes stay on the clay, unfocused, as if she sees a whole different life inside it. Then her voice comes out, low, brittle: "Your father is gone. Someone must take his place."
"Who?" my sister whispers.
"You will learn to work," Mother says, still staring at the pot. "You are good with your hands. A household will take you… maybe this year, maybe the next. You will bring back food. At least enough."
My sister bites her lip but doesn't argue. Her silence is her answer.
"And you, son…" Mother finally looks at me. Her eyes are cracked glass, reflecting light but holding none of it. "You will study as long as you can. Then you will work. The temple men… or the fields… it doesn't matter. We will not beg. Not yet."
Her words fall like stones into the room. I feel them pressing on my chest.
"So this is it?" I ask. "This is our life now?"
She almost smiles, but it is not a smile. "This is what is left. Grief does not feed us."
I don't reply. I cannot.
We sit in that fragile quiet, all three of us staring at a future that already feels worn thin, like a thread about to snap. I want to support them, to hold them, but I don't even know what feeling is inside me. The morning is drowned in fog. It seeps through the little cracks and slits of the house, crawling into every breath. Watching my family weep fills me with both anxiety and disgust.
Knock. Knock.
"Check, son… who is there?" my mother says, her voice cracked, low, and melancholic. I rush to the door and open it. A face forms in the fog, though the mist blinds me. An hour ago, the air was not this thick.
"Hello, son." It is Big Mouth's mother — and with her, Big Mouth himself.
"Sorry to interrupt you."
"No, no, good ma'am. I'm glad you came." Of course, I don't want these two fools in my home, but I can do nothing. They step inside, though my eyes linger outside.
The crowd has thinned. The shopkeeper is gone, along with his daughter. But the aunt's body is still there, lying crooked in the square. The temple men have come at last to claim it.
"Oh, dear… you are here finally,"
my mother exclaims, wiping her tears. My sister clears the wooden chair for Big Mouth. "I'm sorry… what happened to your husband," my mother whispers. "All you have now is Little Big Eyes. Big Sister." Big Mouth's mother suddenly breaks. Her sobs fall heavy, and of course Big Mouth begins crying too, watching her — watching his mother.
"I never imagined this could happen," she chokes.
"I told him I had bad feelings. I begged him not to go. But he was so determined. He said if he didn't go, we would starve. We would all starve."
"Oh, dear, don't cry," my mother murmurs, clutching her. "You do have this angel. Trust our goddesses — they are makers of the universe. They will handle it."
She hugs her tightly, tears soaking into cloth. Big Mouth's mother wipes her face with her sleeve, though the tears come faster than her hand can chase them. Her voice scrapes like gravel on stone: "Tell me… what happened outside? I heard the screaming. The snow was red when I came. Was it her?"
My mother does not answer at once. Her thumb keeps circling the rim of the clay pot, round and round, as though if she stops, the roof will cave in. Finally she exhales, brittle as snapped twigs. "Yes. It was her. The adulteress."
Big Mouth's mother bites her lip until it bleeds. Her head shakes slowly, as if weighted with stones. "Poor woman. Foolish woman. I never liked her laugh… too loud, too sure of itself. But still—did she deserve that? For men to split her skull like firewood, in front of children?"
My mother keeps her eyes on the clay, voice flat and cold: "The crowd was hungry. They wanted blood. It makes them feel safe. As if killing her could cure their fear."
Big Mouth's mother's voice fractures, words stumbling out uneven. "Safe? A dead husband, a dead son… was that not enough for one woman? Must her body feed the square too? And the girl—God help her—the girl. I saw her hiding. Eyes wide as glass. Who will she run to now?"
At this, my mother finally lifts her gaze. Her words come sharp, bitter as frostbite: "No one. The men don't care. The shopkeeper wanted to roar, so he roared. Easier to beat her than beat himself."
Big Mouth's mother nods, each motion heavy, dragged from her bones. "They say she seduced him. As if men are children, dragged by the hand to sin. He went to her bed with his eyes open. He killed her the same way."
The clay pot turns once more in my mother's hand. She whispers into the fog crawling through the cracks: "Perhaps it was her fault. Perhaps it was his. Perhaps it was both. Perhaps this was fate."
The silence after is thick, rancid, crawling into every breath. Outside, the fog claws at the door. Big Mouth whimpers like a sick dog in the corner.His stench clings to the room. Big Mouth is dressed the same as always: the old sweater, the cold, smelly jacket, and that woollen hat with the red tip that makes him look like a clown. His mother is even shorter than my sister, her hair tangled, her clothes worn thin. They are poorer than us, and now with the man gone, I wonder how long it will take before they starve and die. "Have you eaten anything? Please, eat with us. And Big Eyes, you can come whenever you like," my mother says. I don't like the free pass she gives Big Mouth.
"Yes, Aunty," he answers, a sudden smile breaking his face. "I would love to come and play with brother." The word brother makes my blood boil. My mother asks me to pass the bread, and my sister brings the food. I thought there would be nothing left to eat, but somehow, she has managed. Big Mouth slides the bread toward me before I can even move. I never asked him. His ugly grin stretches, his crooked teeth showing like a cracked fence. Never mind. I should not ruin my appetite. And then my idiotic sister opens her mouth. She asks if the priest was right. Big Mouth nods quickly, puffed with certainty. He claims the priest is always right. Such an idiotic question changed the whole atmosphere of our dine.
During the funeral, the priest and the entire temple community gathered. In our tradition, the body is thrown into the valley, left for nature to consume. When they cast the head into the mist below, the priest raised his voice and claimed it as the act of a monster—that the monster had begun his work. I remember his exact words: "My dear villagers, we are servants of the goddesses. I am sorry that I could do nothing, for the act of monstrosity has begun. Protect the village. Protect its honor. For our martrys who died, we will carve noble names into the rocks of the temple, so that the generations to come will look upon them and learn the sacrifices we made." He stopped then, and tears came to his eyes—miraculously, as though on command. He bent to pat the head of a little girl who stood there blank and silent, too young to even understand the scene. And then his words turned darker. "If only we knew how to find the monster who deceives with a good face. He kills, he destroys our happy families. He has destroyed my family. I will never forgive him." The priest straightened. His voice sharpened, cutting through the fog. "Let us prepare. Let us promise: we will catch this monster, and we will purify this holy land again." His eyes seemed to shift with the weather—reflecting empathy and kindness one moment, then blazing with fire the next. The fire of vengeance.