Tristessa's Story, Part 3

Be sure to check out Parts 1 and 2... Tristessa's story begins there. -m


In the days after I threw the egg at the boy, Ravigie refused to speak to me. She was so angry with me for throwing our last egg that she didn't even make me toast for breakfast. She set a cup in front of me, which I had to fill with milk myself. The well was dry; we were lucky that the goat was still alive.

The yard in front of the coop smelled strange, close to something like rotten eggs. Every time I walked past it I held my breath, and soon it became a sort of game to me. In a week I became very good at holding my breath for no reason in particular.

It was at the end of that week that the package arrived. The courier was dirty, sweaty, and smelled worse than I did. But his clothes had once been very fine, and even though he looked ready to collapse, he held his head as high as a prized stallion did during a parade. Ravigie met him at the corner of the property, a little ways away from where the garden of eggs had popped up. I stayed out of sight, watching and listening.

"I have a package for Ravigie," he said. "There's no last name."

"I don't have a last name," Ravigie said, holding her hand out for the brown paper-wrapped thing.

The man held on to it just a second longer. "You are Ravigie?" Disbelief was bright in his voice. He obviously had been led to believe that Ravigie would be housekeeper to some grand woman.

"The only one," she said. "Give it to me, boy." She glared at him so strongly that immediately he handed it over. Ravigie took it and tucked in under her arm, clamped beneath her armpit. "Well?"

The man looked like he was about to say something about being called "boy", but he wisely thought better of it and took a couple of steps backwards instead.

I don't know why, but I chose that moment to come out of hiding. The man jumped when he saw me. I started to smile, to try to clear his mind of worry, but it was too late. His mouth gaped and he staggered backwards, fingers splayed open as though searching for a handhold.

"You..." But he wasn't looking at me anymore, he was looking somewhere behind me. I turned around, curious. Just on my peripheral vision, I saw the flicker of something dark. Trying to follow it, the shadow stayed on the edge of everything, but it took on the form of what could have been a man, or the reflection of a man.

"Me?" I asked once I had faced him again.

He shook his head, turned on his heel, and ran away.

Ravigie came to stand near me, putting her hand on my shoulder and shifting the package under her arm. "Come inside, Tessa."

"Why?" I was looking after the running package-carrier, watching his heels kick up dry dirt clods as he ran back to town.

"Just come," she said, pulling me towards the door. She, too, was looking at something behind me. Looking again, the shadow became only more distorted, seeming to be obscured by smoke. It was certainly the form of a man, but I couldn't see his face.

I shook my head, trying to clear my eyes for another look. "There's someone there, Ravigie," I said, pointing. She didn't respond, but she did pull me swiftly into the house.

The old woman put the package on the table in the kitchen, then sat down on a chair and put her face in her hands. I waited silently for a minute before she lifted her head again.

"I don't want you to go outside for the rest of the week, Tristessa." When I didn't respond, she went on: "And don't touch this package."

I opened my mouth to protest, but Ravigie pushed herself up and walked through the back door to the garden, leaving me in the kitchen. I stared at the crinkled brown paper wrapped around the courier's delivery. It was the first time I had a chance to really inspect it.

The wrapping job was haphazard and sloppily tied with several loops of dirt-caked brown twine. All in all, I believe it was about the size and shape of a dinner plate, and floppy, not like a wrapped box. And I wasn't allowed to open it. After sighing once, I poked it. The paper crinkled and stayed pressed in where my finger had been, a clean smudge on the brown surface. I looked at my finger; it was covered with dust. Wiping in on my skirt, I sat in the chair and stared at the package, thinking about the garden of eggs and the shadows that were flickering at the edge of my vision.

Tristessa's Story, Part 1

My name is Tristessa Rincressa Potenta Dellatiere. There is a father somewhere in my past, but he was not there long enough to assist in naming me. My mother's name is Umi and when she disappeared I was sent to a farm. Whenever I tell my story, some kind-meaning stranger asks me where the farm was. I can never answer them. Perhaps it was in Italia, where I am told I was born. Or Espagna. I only know that one moment I was living between the still stone bodies of houses bordered by cobblestone streets, and the next I was at the farm, pulling myself up out of the mud.

Mud can be soothing if you approach it in the right way, but this mud had children all around it, and they were taunting me. "She has evil in her eyes!" they were yelling. One of them threw a stone and it hit me just above my eyebrow. I looked up, blinking blood out of my eyelashes. "They are even blacker than a pit!" I tried to speak, but something caught the words in my throat and strangled them into silence. "Dirty eyes!"

Just then a plump woman with a soiled apron attached to her dress came bustling out of a house behind me. She was not the farmwife, but a servant or housekeeper of sorts. "Stop! Stop this now! Shoo! Away!" She fluttered her apron at the children and they ran away, squealing like pigs. "Tessa?" she whispered then. It was the first time anyone had called me that, and I did not know at first that she was talking to me.


"Tessa? You are bleeding!" she said. I looked up at her with my one blood-free eye. Vomit rose in my throat and somehow I kept it back.


"I don't know you," I said. "Who are you?"


The woman looked very sad all at once, but soon her face was wiped clean and replaced with a solid half-smile. "I am Ravigie. I care for you."


My head rolled backwards and the bile rose again. "I'm going to throw up on you, Ravigie," I said, choking. She grabbed my arms carefully and pulled me up so I was kneeling.


"I'll hold your hair," Ravigie said. My hair was already caked with mud and she really didn't have to hold it back. My stomach heaved and my entire body shuddered as my stomach emptied itself of the little amount of food that I had actually eaten an hour before. Ravigie rubbed my back with her fingertips and whispered soft shushing noises while I heaved and hurled and expelled.


Ten minutes later I was laying on my back in the dirt, wiping my mouth with a wet bit of rag that Ravigie had brought out from the kitchen. She grabbed a shovel from the side of the house and turned over the mud and dirt so that my pile of waste was covered out of sight.


It was only then that I cried a little, and it was the last time I would ever let myself cry for real.