Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
After a long day of renovating the house (so foolish to do this in winter, with the snow and the cold), you sit down on your floor (the table’s laden with tools) and eat a bowl of the stew Cyrus made for you.
Bite by bite. Sometimes you need to eat as fast as you can, get it all down before you lose your nerve.
Other nights, like tonight, you need to eat slowly.
Talk yourself out of the nausea that roils up the back of your throat.
Convince yourself to go through with it.
Let yourself feel that there is no witch, there is no cage, there is no cauldron.
The oven in this house doesn’t even work.
Can’t cook me if there’s nothing to cook me in, you tell that childhood fear, and the childhood fear snaps, Could roast you on a spit.
You can only talk yourself out of so much.
That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.
* * *
The next morning, you walk the quarter mile to Cyrus’s cottage to return his dishes. “You know, when I became human again,” he says, taking the dishes and balancing them with arm and wing, “I had to relearn how to chew food. Forgot I couldn’t just swallow.”
There’s a joke you could make here. You don’t. “Must have taken time,” you say.
“Sometimes I still go to swallow things whole,” he laughs. “Only remember at the last second that I can’t.” He gives you one of his meaningful looks. “Everything takes more time than it damn well should.”