Bread
The family was very kind to him. The old man had a son, Felix, and the child was his sister, Agatha. The young dark woman was Safia, Felix’s betrothed.
Elias didn’t see Felix often, but he heard his warm, booming laugh all the way down the hall. He was told, by Agatha, that Felix had a job as a clinic doctor in town. Safia was left to do most housework, cleaning, mending, and cooking.
Her pretty voice rang out as she worked in the mornings and chased Agatha around the house.
They left Elias’s care to De Lacey, who rubbed his cuts with ointment and cleaned them. Elias could not yet put on his shirt without worrying his healing chest so he had to go shirtless. This also meant he could not walk around the space as he would like. He had to keep his back covered.
So he lay there as though he could not move, citing the injuries on the bottom of his feet and the slow-healing burns between his legs.
Elias looked out the window and wished to feel the wind on his face and smell the earth. He stretched in place after everyone had gone to bed, fearing that the creak of the wood floors would alert someone to his fitness.
Besides that, Elias felt very good. He felt better than he had in years. His injuries were healing faster than everyone expected. Burns fading to pink and white irritated patches, the stitches and cuts angry and red but no longer weeping fluid or bleeding.
Best of all was Safia’s cooking. Safia liked to cook with cinnamon, and though it was costly, Felix indulged her. Elias had never had so much of it in his life and keenly felt its luxury.
He could hear the family eating dinner in the front room. Hear their laughter and the rhythm of their conversation. It made him miss his own kin with a bitterness too sharp to discuss.
When Safia asked after him in that way, he turned his face to hide his tears and she didn’t ask again.
She rubbed a hand over his head every so often and it made his heart make birdsong.
What he would do for Magda’s roughness, the sweetness of her pinches, and the flutter of her eyelashes.
What he would give to smell the scent on the top of Gida’s head, to braid her hair and tuck flowers into the pocket of her apron.
What would it cost to dance with Alina, hear her heels pound the floor and the twinkle of her laugh?
What horrors would he endure to push his face into his mother’s neck and have her hold him?
To taste the first bloody cut of his father’s hunting, fresh and salty on the tongue.
If he thought of them for too long, the image of their faces warped in terror and disgust surfaced. Victor’s crimes had poisoned even memories of them.
With the strange strength of his limbs, Elias wanted to mourn properly. To shout and cry and kick and break things, to bury his face in skirts that smelled of love like he was a babe, not full grown.
But instead, he lay there on his back and wished that he were dead.