Village shuttered against night, clay stove fired up, the kettle steaming
in the damp. Her position set, the old Dutch-German requires it, a cook
to bank the fires to prepare the meals. His bed? She has her own, a right
to refuse the man; she made him sign his mark upon the deed she’s folded up,
squared in her belongings, a quilt she patched with her mother, a bronze knife,
a single coin to pay her funeral. The bride could be called young in polite nations,
here she is the cook, a lover if she permits it. There is no church, no dowry,
not even a dress beyond what she made on her last name day, stitched like her
comfort depended on it, the dress, a sturdy enough coat against cold, rain,
the haymaking weather she will cook in, every day, for the rest of her days,
with a man who agreed to pay her, shelter her, and fuck her with child, in her
own time, or his own time, should he drink or take to anger, as men do.
She is given flowers to cover her from evil, a bit of dirt from her father’s house,
a bit of ash from her mother’s hearth. She doesn’t believe evil is darkness,
she understands darkness divides evil into shadow, nothing can be trusted
with the eye. When the old man picks her up he whispers, I’ll keep demon’s fingers
from your ankles, and carries her into the house, and puts her down
like a basket of beets. He salts the stoop, strikes candles against the known.
They eat a stew with bread. He drinks to shatter her place. She hears the crack
of the whisky cask and tumbles into a well of worry. He visits her in those first hours
of darkness, the journey hardly off her, to keep you safe from it, from the evil
that would take you right outside the door. She knows she has no choice
in the matter, she’s heard her mother’s bed clatter; the demon is in the gaps
between spirit and man, how often he lifts it to his lip, how often he puts it away.
Cassandra Whitaker (she/they) is trans writer living in rural Virginia. Whit’s work has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Conjunctions, The Mississippi Review, Lamba Literary Review and other places. They are a member of the National Book Critics Circle and an educator. Wolf Devouring A Wolf Devouring A Wolf is forthcoming from Jackleg Press in 2025. wolfs-den.page