Editor’s Choice Award

The Lilac Years

by Aradia Burkhalter

Years ago, when the forest in the east was dark and unnatural, when a full moon brought the baying of hounds and fairy rings of mushrooms in the garden, when doorways were guarded with iron and hazel, when the Little Dead Folk stole shingles from the roof and left their chipped arrowheads under our pillows, and the lilac fields shivered and hissed without a breeze, my father died and disappeared and it wasn’t a sad thing. I didn’t see the dying and I didn’t see the disappearing. Mama just told me one day, put her hands on my shoulders, looked me in my eyes, and said, “He’s gone, darling.” It was to be understood that he was not coming back.

Later, I asked where Papa’s grave was. Mama just put a hand on my face and said, “Don’t go looking for it, Fiona. Don’t go looking for your Papa’s grave.” Then she kissed my forehead and went back to peeling lilac petals from the stems in a bowl by the kitchen sink.

We never talked about it again.

And I never went looking for Papa’s grave.

The man arrived on the first day of fall. He didn’t come up the long dirt driveway, like salesmen or harvest workers. He came in from the lilac fields, marching a careful path between the rows. I saw him from the back porch, his black hair a moving dot in the wind-roiled sea of purple.

I called for Mama. She came out to the back porch, just as the man reached the near field.

He hopped deftly over the low wooden fence that kept the lilac where it was supposed to be.

“Who is he, Mama?” I asked. I was braiding stalks of lilac together, my hands sticky and sweet-smelling with pollen.

Without looking away, Mama took the braided flowers from my hands. She reached up and hung them on the string tied to the roof of the porch; they’d hang there to dry for a week, then be used as protective charms on the windowsills to ward away the Spirits of the Night.

Mama said, “Fiona, that’s your father.”

I watched the strange man come closer. He was almost to the end of the lilac field—soon he’d be in our backyard. “You said Papa was dead.”

“He is.” Mama took one of my pollen-coated hands in hers and held her chin up high. I did, too, because I knew Mama liked it when I was strong like her.

When the man—Papa—reached the backyard, the dogs ran barking to him. They were four giant white creatures, long-haired and terrifying. They yipped and rolled at his feet like housepets, so unlike the fierce protectors we used them as.

“Elizabeth,” Papa said, not coming closer from the back fence. His eyes were smiling, but his mouth was not.

“I told you not to do this,” Mama said, stern. “Fiona doesn’t need the Little Dead Folk.”

“I’m not here for them.” Papa lifted a hand and I realized he was holding a sparrow in his palm. Its eyes and claws were made of brass, and in its beak was an old, dry stalk of braided lilac. Like the fresh ones hanging from the porch, swaying in the hot summer breeze. “I’m here to come home,” Papa said.

The sparrow took flight. It landed on the porch railing, right in front of me, twittering in a muffled sort of way around the lilac. I reached out to it, and the bird hopped into my hand, brass claws cold and sharp on my skin. It dropped the lilac.

“They’re letting you come back?” Mama said.

“Yes.” Papa started to walk up to the porch.

“Why?”

There was no answer. The sparrow in my hand chirped once, twice, took the lilac back in its mouth. It turned its head to flash a brass eye at me, and then ate the lilac like a starving dog would eat a piece of meat. When the lilac had been devoured, the sparrow said, “The time has come and gone and so has he! The time has gone and returned and so has he!”

The bird flew away. I watched it, a dark spot racing through the sky, until it disappeared against the backdrop of the distant forest.

Mama stepped down from the porch. She and Papa stood together in the backyard, and I watched them, and the dogs watched them, and Mama said, “Welcome home, then.”

That first spring with Papa back, the rains came down hard from the mountains, and all we could do was watch them flood the fields and carry the unbloomed flowers away, down to the valley and the riverbed, swollen with water. Mama didn’t let Papa ask the Little Dead Folk for help.

I knew going to them was never the right answer. They were tricky creatures, the Little Dead Folk, and if you asked them for so much as a glass of milk they’d come knocking on your door one winter night collecting the debt in the form of your house and hearth. I’d heard the stories. I knew the risks.

The Little Dead Folk were never to be asked for help.

We waited for the flash floods to stop scooping away land and lilacs. We had food and money from the previous harvest, but nothing made it easier to watch all that green and pale purple disappear from the fields just as fast as thunderheads kept rolling in. By the time the rains stopped and the fields drained, it was the last spiney days of planting season, and we had to move quick.

Mama had to pay the farmhands double to get them to come back and help. All of us were out in the fields, digging and planting and digging and planting. The four dogs helped, carrying tools and digging holes for fence posts that needed to be fixed while we worked. My hands blistered and cracked and bled over and over again beneath the leather gloves. Farmhands quit work when we were halfway done and inching too close to summer, too much unplanted and too much unsprouted.

In autumn, only half the crop grew back. Mama carted what we had off to the city to be sold, leaving me with Papa. It wasn’t long before he was leaving me with the dogs so he could go and fix our problem.

No one ever told me so, but that hot September afternoon, when I watched Papa march past the fields and to the woods in the east, I knew he was going to make a deal with the Little Dead Folk.

At the end of the week, miracles spilled over our house and Mama sold our half-crop of lilac for twice what we made in a good year. We had the coziest winter I’d ever experienced. In November, I woke up one morning to feed the chickens and one of the big white dogs was under the porch, choked to death on waterlogged lilac.

I turned 12 in the middle of harvest season, so for my birthday Mama made me pancakes with lilac honey before the sun came up, and the farmhands all gave me hugs and sang while we worked. My birthdays were always like this, and it wasn’t anything I held resentment over. Other kids in the city would have hated to have their birthdays overshadowed by farm work, but Papa braided me a crown of lilacs during lunch and the three dogs never left my side.

It was special enough for me.

After dinner, I went up to my room and there was a brass statue sitting on my windowsill. The pane was open, curtains swaying in the hot breeze, and when I looked out over the back garden I saw a girl crouched at the fence.

Little brass statue in hand, I bolted back down the stairs, past my parents in the kitchen, and outside to where the strange girl watched me.

The dogs were nowhere to be seen. Tomato and pumpkin and dahlias and snap peas and sunflowers murmured and tilted in the night, drowsy and small next to acres and acres of lilac.

I was holding a small brass sparrow, I realized. A meticulous likeness; every feather was carved out, every ridge on its beak and legs, even the fine bones of its chest and wings could be felt if I moved my thumb just right.

“Do you like it?” came a small voice from near the fence.

I jumped. “Who’s there?”

A head came up from the foliage. She had dark grey skin, the color of trees in winter. Her deep red hair was a mane of curls, and tangled in them were brambles and lilac stalks. She had big, golden eyes and fingers tipped with brass.

“Do you like the gift?” she said.

I looked again to the brass sparrow. “This is from you?”

“Yes. I made it.” She tilted her head. “For your birthday.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Brigid.” She tilted her head back the other way. “You’re Fiona of the Lilac and you’re our absolute favorite.”

My brain stopped and started like our truck in freezing temperatures. “Why did you give me this?” I knew I shouldn’t take it. I knew it was bad to accept gifts from the Little Dead Folk, that I would then owe them something. Even then I did not want to owe anyone anything.

“Because you’re our favorite,” Brigid explained. She curled her long fingers over the fence and leaned into it. “Don’t you like it?” I swallowed. “Yes, I like it.”

“Then keep it.” Brigid’s smile looked like honey tasted.

“I don’t think—”

From the fields, one of the dogs barked. Brigid jumped, turning to the sound, and then she said, “Fiona, Fiona, Fiona—”

And was gone before I could blink.

Shaking, I called the dogs in. I didn’t show Mama or Papa the brass sparrow, but I did keep it on my windowsill, so Brigid would know that I kept it. That I really did like it.

When I was 14, one of the Little Dead Folk died in our garden.

Mama and Papa were away in the city. They didn’t tell me why, just told me they were taking a cab and wouldn’t be back for a couple days. I woke up the second morning they were gone and brass bells were ringing outside, filling the air with their summery sound, a musical noise that hit my ribs and the back of my throat.

When I looked out the window, at the lilac fields sprawled out in purple sheets across our land, one of the big brass fish that lumbered in the sky drifted past my face. There was a whole cloud of them up there; golden and wet, shining with dew, drifting over and around each other, swooping low on the lilac so pollen dusted their fins and bellies.

All the while, that bell sound played, kicking up with every dive and twist and turn.

Something bad had happened, I knew. The Little Dead Folk only sent out the fish when they were mourning, when they’d lost something, when a promise had been broken or a life had been ended. I’d seen the fish in the distance before, just shining brass figures over the trees, but they were never this close.

In the garden, there was a body. For a moment, my heart stopped and my lungs seized up, because the dark gray skin and the red hair and the green clothes looked an awful lot like Brigid, and if she’d died I would have done something reckless.

But it wasn’t her. It was a woman, but it wasn’t Brigid.

The dogs sat balefully by her body. Overhead, the fish swooped and chimed with aching sadness. I found myself already beginning to cry.

“Come on, boys,” I said to the dogs. “We have to bury her.”

She didn’t weigh very much at all. I wrapped her in a wool blanket and carried her to the truck. The dogs followed, subdued in their own grief, and climbed into the bed with the Little Dead Folk.

I’d only driven the truck once; tractors were similar enough, though, and even if I screwed up the clutch a few times it wasn’t hard to get out of the driveway and down the dirt road. I drove to the forest.

I wondered what had killed her. Why she was in our garden. Only Brigid had ever come so close and been noticed; usually Little Dead Folk only came near to steal small things, never to die.

In the sky, the brass fish floated after us. The sound of the bells could barely be heard over the roar of the engine and the crunch of the dirt-and-gravel road.

The road ended right at the edge of the forest. I shut the truck off and got out, gently took the body from the back, and carried it into the trees. The dogs led the way, tails low and steps deliberate. We were a funeral procession. The fish were the mourners. The bells were the dirge.

We stopped at a dark thicket of brambles. Little brass berries hung in clusters on the branches. A family of sparrows twittered from within.

I set the Little Dead Folk under the thorns and tucked the blanket around her. The horde of brass fish gently bumped me out of the clearing, haunting and benign in their sadness, and as they descended on the corpse, I left.

My last winter with Mama and Papa was a winter that intended to kill. We spent the short days and the long nights locked inside, trying to stave off the biting cold, trying not to think about what lay to the east and just beyond our lilac fields.

Mama wouldn’t talk to Papa. She blamed him for the swaths of missing lilac at harvesttime, those broken stalks and that blood-like pollen paste choking everything from the farthest fence to our back porch. She blamed him for the deaths of two more dogs; one strangled in barbed wire on the autumn equinox and the other strung up like a ghost at the edge of the forest on Halloween. She blamed Papa for farmhands that quit and buyers that didn’t pay, for the missing fence posts and the tires stolen from our tractors.

I never said it like Mama did, but I blamed Papa, too.

There was no hiding the deals he made with them. It started with the replenished crops after the floods when I was eight. Kept going to easy harvest that same year. A fixed tractor that autumn. Dry firewood in the winter. So many deals, so many promises, so many big things that dwindled into little things. By the time one of our farmhands lost an entire arm the summer before that awful winter, Papa was making quiet deals with the Little Dead Folk as small as refilling the jar of milk right when it was emptied.

It added up fast. In the dead of January, when all we had to eat was bread and cheese, and when our last remaining dog ate and threw up old leather shoes, Papa left to make one last deal. Mama screamed at him. Shrieked and cursed until her throat gave out, and when her voice failed she grabbed the iron hearth poker and used that. She knocked out three of his teeth and sliced open a gash in his cheek.

He still left.

The dog, starving, licked up his blood from the floor.

Papa came back a week later with all of his teeth, firewood, and enough food for two winters. He also came back with no eyes, no tongue, and his neck branded with sparrow-shaped burns. If it weren’t for the food, Mama would have shot him dead with the rifle in the coat closet.

No other payments were demanded for the remaining winter months. We survived, though the house was tainted with a dark hatred and bitterness. We survived, but my Papa was a husk that sat in the living room day and night. We survived, but my Mama stopped speaking and only ate bread with lilac honey. We survived, but our only remaining dog went mad and, after chewing off his own tail, ran bleeding and howling through the lilac fields, vanishing before I could tell if he was dead.

We survived, but I started wishing we hadn’t.

I knew the Little Dead Folk would never stop collecting Papa’s debt.

Knowing this did not make me prepared to pay it.

The last birthday I spent with my parents, when I turned 17 and harvested lilac alone in the dwindling fields, Brigid arrived to take me.

The sun had scorched most of our land dry. Dust kicked up everywhere in the slightest of breezes. Sweat evaporated right off my skin. My lips had long ago cracked, skin long turned red and then brown. I hadn’t spoken in months, so when I greeted Brigid my voice was hoarse.

“You know why I’m here,” she said.

Brigid was beautiful, I knew. Beautiful like the full moon on spring nights. Like the first blooms of lilac. Like dew on the grass. Beautiful like the brass fish swimming in the sky, grieving and singing, beautiful like the four big white dogs who used to sleep in my bed, beautiful like my Mama had been before Papa came back and the world stopped being good.

Brigid was beautiful, I knew.

I also knew why she was here.

“How much time do I have?” I asked. I put down my shears. Pulled off my gloves. The leather pulled off scabs, and I winced at the rip of healing skin, the spill of new blood.

“Tomorrow night.” Brigid took my hands in her soft ones, cradled the wounds. “You can say goodbye.”

I was shaking, felt cold even in the oppressive summer afternoon heat. Say goodbye? To who?

“I just need to grab something,” I told her, “and then I’ll go with you. Tonight.”

Brigid smiled. “Alright.”

I gathered up the shears and the gloves and the basket with the lilac I had harvested that day. Together, we trekked back to the house. Chickens clucked in the garden; crows cawed from our discontinued power lines. Brigid waited by the fence while I went inside.

Mama sat at the kitchen table, braiding lilac.

“Mama,” I said. I was crying.

She looked up only as far as the basket of fresh lilac. “Bring that here,” she whispered.

“Mama,” I said again, tears choking the word. “Mama, please.”

“Fiona,” she said, softer. “Bring that here.”

I set the basket on the table. My hands kept bleeding.

Still crying, I ignored Papa’s useless form in the living room and went upstairs. All I needed—all I wanted was the little brass statue of the sparrow. I cradled it and carried it back downstairs. Mama didn’t say a word when the back door banged shut behind me.

Brigid smiled again when she saw the brass sparrow. “You kept it.”

“Of course.” I wiped my tears. Realized too late there was now blood on my face. “Ready to go?” “Yes.” Brigid took my hand. There was blood on her now, too.

Together, we left the house, and the garden, and the dying lilac fields and my broken parents and the hot, dusty stench of summer. Together, we walked into the forest where the Little Dead Folk lived. I was dying and disappearing and it wasn’t a sad thing.

In the distance, I heard the big white dogs and brass bells in the sky.