The Sin Eaters by Andrew Beahrs

I find that I am touching my face with my palm. For years I have adorned my cheeks and chin with a small constellation of stars cut from black felt. In my youth the fashion began among wealthy folk, who sought to cover scars and craters left by pox. My own stars and moon remain, though my skin has aged beneath them. My hair, once the color of oak bark, now hangs in loose gray strings.

My owl, Henry my husband would say, when, during love, my eyes went wide as hope. I laughed at the name, and took it silently to heart. For his owl is what I felt myself to be. His bird, who could at any time fly if she chose. Thus every day with him was a new dedication.

Sky, I think. Skin. Hair. Age. There are times that these things feel a mask. There are times I rejoice to think that none here can see the woman it covers.

Were I to learn stories of the men here, very likely I would find some to mirror mine, like different clothes draping on a single drying-frame. In recent years some tales have been common throughout the English midlands. Our village had lands, a fellow might say. Common lands. All our folk used them and worked on their upkeep. There were shared pastures where a man might graze his cows, shared wastelands where he might gather wood at the edge of the royal forests. But our landlord decided he could get more profit selling wool than collecting rent. He hired fellows to build fences around the pastures, and to guard the fences. Then he ordered them to raise sheep inside the fences—sheep for his profit alone, on pastures we villagers had all shared. Some of my people stayed. I left.

So it was in my old home. Most of my congregation fled before the changes, leaving for America, leaving me alone among the thieves who legally stole our lands.

The canoe bumps gently against the dock. Men gather there, carrying ropes and landing-hooks to help raise the sturgeon. So many men, so far from their first homes. How truly could any of them tell their own stories? Once I thought I had a strong hold on the tale of my own life. But the more I clutched it to me the more it changed, shifting as surely as the face aging beneath my stars.

It took unmooring from my old home to make me question the truth of the story I told myself for so long. It took abandoning my home, my solid place, and a long flight across a country I have now left and lost. I have fled through forest, and down river, and over lake. A monastery has sheltered me, and a barn’s sweet straw. I have lived in hope of purity and in fear of murder. I have met good men and bad men, and I have met evil. And I have returned to the best and worst place of my life, learning that what I thought were nightmares were only veiled memories.

My mind falls back and back: across a windswept ocean, to lands beloved and despised. It rests, at last, upon the English morning that saw the end of my old home and the beginning of my wanderings. Almost I can taste iron, feel the singe of fire, smell the choking smoke.

Many, hearing my tale, would think it was the cruelty of others that drove me from my village. And surely the cruelty of Monkshead’s new masters was a part of it.

But I know that what truly made me leave, on that April morning, was memory. Memory, conjured by a word.