I completed the glyph and the blue fire erupted in the floorboards for the second time tonight. I threw the ring into it.

  John seemed to realize what dire circumstances he was in. He blindly, desperately reached towards the fire. When he found it he hesitated before plunging his hand into the fire. I scrambled up and jumped on him, using both my hands to hold him there so he could not remove the ring. His screams lost any meaning. It was like music to my ears. He held the ring in the fire, but I held him.

  The confines of this body tied me to this meaningless existence. To John’s mistake. To 1950s housewife magazines. The restraints of the binding spell slipped away as the ring softened and the sigil lost shape in John’s broiling hand. He screamed and convulsed under me, but I was strong.

  My freedom washed over me, my power restored, and it was like taking a first breath. It was like feeling the wind on my skin after breaking the surface of the water. Laughter erupted from me as I rolled off of him. It is a wonder that the tiny spell had ever held me. John screamed and I laughed.

  He attempted to strike me with his unburnt but mangled hand. I brought the back of my hand across the face of the screaming, burning, bleeding man, and he crumpled face first into the ground. I sat up and dug my nails into his skin as I picked him up by the scruff of the neck like a bad pup. He tried to push against me, tried to pull away. I flipped him over, held him down against the ground, and straddled him. With one hand I restrained him by the neck as I dug my hand into his chest with the other. I pulled out his still beating heart and marveled at the feat of magic that is human life, and how it is wasted. What was left of John gurgled and sputtered before becoming limp under me.

  Climbing off of John, I tossed his wasted heart into the blue flame. It will blacken and harden to reflect his true nature. May it be more useful as ash than it was in flesh.

  I considered the grimoire on the floor. It existed for many a century, and would have gone on many a century more, had it not been tainted with his abuse, by his malicious blood. I rendered it to kindling, sad for its waste, and fed it to the fire.

  Lit by the flare of the blue flame catching on flesh and parchment, I stared in awe at my body as it slowly started to return to its natural form. I stretched and sighed. I was covered in my blood and his blood. My clothes shredded against the scales poking through my skin. I walked to the entry hallway, threw open the door, and looked back into the house, my shadow in the doorway dark against the stark moonlight. I would not miss this place. I felt no need to bid it goodbye. I turned and walked down the steps. Snow fell slowly and peacefully against my face. The moon shone down on me. Instinctively I turned towards the sea and walked leisurely into the dead of night.

  Let them wonder what happened to demure little Annabel. Let them share whispered worries. Let them follow my bloody footprints to the sea.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my husband, Matt, for always supporting my schemes and adventures. I likely wouldn’t have had the guts to start writing again if it wasn’t for Miko, the most inspiring best friend I could have ever dreamed of. Thank you to Sarah for giving me a shot. To the members of the Danger Eye Tea Society, thanks for contributing to my survival over the past few years. Last but not least, I give thanks to you, dear reader, for letting my story rent a little slice of your brain. I hope you enjoy your new tenant.

  About the Author

  A.Q. Hart, aka Annaka Hart (she/they), is a horror and romance author who also narrates and produces audiobooks. They are from Las Vegas, Nevada but have never gambled. Her goal as an artist is to create more magic in the world, but she does not believe in astrology. Their pastimes include: gardening, destroying the patriarchy, and roller skating. She does not like talking about herself in the third person, snow, or ketchup. They live in Michigan with their spouse and colony of freshwater aquarium shrimp.

  Learn more at www.AnnakaHart.com and follow everywhere @AnnakaHart.

  Tipping Points

  Layne Adamsson

  A cold-nosed starfish peeks from beneath a carpet of snow. Its rainbow arms sweep the world clean and for a giggled moment, the universe knows nothing but crystalline joy.

  Fern wipes the frozen memory away with the nighttime ice filigree decorating her tiny kitchen window. There’s no time to indulge in reminiscing. The fire’s gone cold. The musk oxen are stirring. Movement is both survival and solace.

  Tipping coffee dregs onto the frosted skeletons of her garden, she sighs at the thought of eight months without fresh fruit and vegetables. She’ll get by, she always does, but she’s already longing for the pungent scent of tomato vines; never a good way to start autumn. Shuffling a damp path through the drusy edged birch leaves, she makes her way out to the paddock where her shaggy little herd clusters, patiently observing as dawn spreads its marmalade glaze across the eastern horizon.

  “Morning Gladys,” she murmurs, offering her open palm to a steaming investigation from the matriarch’s muzzle. These quiet behemoths always make her smile. The big bull, Q, shedding immense quantities of qiviut each spring, always manages to vex and delight Fern. Gladys’ younger sisters Iris, Daisy, Violet, and Pansy are gentle, watchful, and protective of their surviving yearlings: Cedar, Maple and Willow. For now she’s still calling Gladys’ calf “baby.” A real name will come eventually. Family takes time.

  Feed and hay down, hens out, eggs collected, Fern takes in a breath of musty leaf litter freed by the warming sun. “First snow’ll be here soon, I s’pose,” she pronounces to the unblinking sky. A shiver of birch branches and a soft snort from the paddock are the only replies.

  Fern carefully washes the breakfast dishes to conserve each precious drop of tank water that must be hauled back out after use. She pauses to watch a chittering junco at the feeder outside her kitchen window. They were Rory’s favorite. She scrubs the pan harder, trying to cleanse the recollection from her mind, but as she moves to drying, she can’t help but finger the frayed edges of her lonely life. What would it be like to hold onto limitless love? How can people form bonds stronger than water? What allows some to expand and contract through the seasons, contorting into something elegant, buoyant, while others simply break and sink?

  When the loneliness threatens to fossilize her, she boils the kettle and rummages through the stack of newspapers delivered last week. Catching up on the news ought to be sufficient distraction for a few hours at least. The headlines are certainly unsettling if not diverting. Coastal communities in a flurry over the startling rates of erosion and thinning sea ice. Emaciated polar bears wandering progressively further south. Predictions of worsening forest fires. She sips her tea picking through threads of fear and rhetoric looking for data.

  Carding and spinning all the wool she’s collected from the musk oxen, the woods, and the neighboring herd over summer will take months; plenty of time to meditate on solitude in a rapidly changing world. Most people would approach these tasks systematically, clean it all, card it all, spin it all, but Fern knows monotony kills. Instead, she selects one bundle at a time, attending it from “mess to finesse”, treating herself to the delight of knitting it up into functional works of art before moving onto the next batch. She knows it’s not efficient, but who needs to worry about efficiency when there’s so little else to do through the long, dark winter?

  ****

  Eight times warmer than sheep wool, qiviut is the finest fiber in nature–softer than cashmere. The first time Fern cast on a row of this enchantment, she was hooked. Maybe its effects were heightened by the flood of oxytocin after she and Rory first met at the trading post. Maybe she would have fallen in love with anything he touched. Maybe the world would still be spinning on its axis if he hadn’t spun her off hers.

  He was trying to convince the owner to let him sell raw fibers on commission because he wasn’t interested in “all the fiddly work.” Fern was instantly captivated by his relaxed but confident cadence. She sidled up to the men under the pretense of interest in the product. When it was clear the owner wasn’t keen on stocking tangled heaps of raw, unwashed wool, she proposed to be the middle-woman. Rory considered her worn Carhartt overalls and muscled arms with a long slow gaze as a gap-toothed grin spread across his face. Extending a hand of partnership, he explained how to find his homestead the next day to “talk turkey.”

  Fern hadn’t a clue what she was doing as she bumped along the rutted, rocky excuse for a dirt road twisting between drunken black spruce off of the main road, frost-heaved into a lurching roller coaster. She’d never carded or spun wool, and she’d never fallen in love, yet here she was suddenly jumping head first into both. She hadn’t even considered what she was offering with her business proposition. Somehow, it made perfect sense in the moment. Her PhD research was stalled due to funding gaps, she hated waiting tables almost as much as the customers hated her, and that work would dry up when the first snows froze the tourist dollars anyway. She liked knitting and figured it couldn’t be that hard to spin. But all the logic came after the reason.

  He’d shown her the bags of qiviut he’d collected in the wild over the years during his summers documenting ecological markers; spoke rapturously on his solivagant expeditions. He introduced her to the small herd of musk oxen he’d coaxed into his river valley and expounded on his commercial ambitions. Explained their feeding, breeding and molting patterns with the patience and passion of the brilliant professor he could have become. Finally, he sent her off with a test batch. If she could successfully spin it into soft gold, he’d give her 10 kilos to transform over winter.

  It was an agonizing month of research and experimentation as Fern desperately tried to get the process right. Her eagerness to see Rory again pushed her and made every failure doubly frustrating. Eventually she had a skein worthy of the trading post’s investment.

  That was the first time she had to wait out his indefinite absence. The only means of contact was to leave a message at the trading post, where he would eventually leave one in reply. She only had so many excuses to stop in, but that was the trouble with casting your lot on a man at loose ends, you never knew when it would all unravel.

  ****

  At the carding table, Fern thinks about signs she’s seen, echoing the newspapers’ alarm bells: the growing asynchronicity between flora and fauna, infrastructure damage on the roads and in town, stressed trees, the crumbling river banks. She swiftly pushes the final chip from her mind; it’s too heavy to hold. She started the research 20 years earlier, before they’d known enough to be sure what was happening, what could happen, what would happen, but early enough to change course. Her mind wanders as her fingers pick bits from the tangled mess before her, like random data points trying to represent a vast complex web of interrelated variables.

  She wonders if she could have made a difference. Where would she be if she’d persisted instead of being pulled into Rory’s world. Woven into the fabric of this severe landscape, all her broken threads knitted then unraveled again by the life they pieced together. Could she have discovered some key evidence, something irrefutable to stop the climate denial before it started? Fern grits her teeth and focuses on combing. It’s madness to think like this. Obstacles were already being thrown in the face of truth before her time. Funding cuts, paper rejections, derision, harassment, threats–she experienced it all. Rory was a welcome escape, not a scapegoat.

  The rapid autumnal equinox slide always unbinds. Ghosts huddle in the lengthening shadows as the sun retreats to the southern rim of the sky. It’s the slippery light of loss, the world going dark. Sometimes she can’t breathe when the river’s rushing song tangles in the wind, plucks her own lost screams from bare birch branches. This play of light refracting strands of life slipping through her fingers.

  The rich velvet taste of salmon dinner for one transports her back to visiting Rory the second time. His palpable delight when she stepped out of her truck. The goosebumps he’d sent shivering up her spine. Her shriek of terror as Teekon, silent and lupine, materialised at his master’s knee. The electricity of proximity and her impatience to tell him of her trials. The internal fireworks ignited by his indirect question, “stay for dinner…”

  He’d served Copper River King with blueberry sauce, mashed Yukon Golds, fiddleheads and cherry tomatoes still warm from the sun. A royal feast. She’d asked where he found young fiddleheads so late in the season. His only answer was a wink and something about his “ways with ferns.”

  The memory still holds power over her after all these years. The tantalizing hope he would ask her to stay crushed in a winded blow when he’d ushered her out to her truck under the star-strewn sky. How her guts twisted on the dull blade of, “see you after breakup.” A whole winter away.

  He was as beguiling as the aurora. An elusive lone wolf. Thoughts of him danced through Fern’s head with the phantasmic pulse of the green banner of sky above her. Unobtainable.

  ****

  Fire, coffee, oxen, chickens, breakfast, spinning table. Fern’s fall days have a cozy predictability preparing for the transition heralded by the first snow to stick. She doesn’t bother with a calendar anymore, the angle of the sun is sufficient. She’s taken aback when the northern lights dance across the sky before the first flurry. Unsettled by the expectant stretches of tundra she passes to pick up her final rations and newspapers for the year. Images of houses falling into the sea, the latest volcanic unrest closing Anchorage airspace spin through her mind as she worsts a batch of yarn. The world is changing whether she pays attention or not.

  Control what you can; let go of what you can’t. No more driving things with will and effort, pushing the future with dedication and brilliance. That was her way before her first harvest withered on the vine; before Ashton and his little sister-to-be. People always say children change you, but no one can possibly explain just how much.

  ****

  That first winter without Rory was interminable. Fern set herself firm routines to complete sufficient skeins each month for rent and supplies. The radio, with its dependable schedule and commentary, kept her company as the dark months skittered around their sharp bend. It spurred meandering daydreams about Rory’s bandy-legged lope, what he might say about the weather or news, how he could move to the music. How he might move with her.

  Breakup couldn’t come soon enough. Not just for Fern, but the whole of central Alaska straining against winter’s icy grip on the Tanana. Grumbling patrons crowded the trading post speculating whether anyone would come close to winning this year’s pool. Mocked by the tripod standing proud on the frozen river weeks later than it had for a decade, most predictions had long since come and gone.

  The anxious anticipation of Rory’s homecoming became unbearable. She fretted something would prevent his return. By late-May, as gravel-crusted piles of packed snow loomed on corners and studded tires were swapped out for the summer, the river ice broke free, and her hope rushed away with it.

  Sloping into the post with her last bundle of worsted yarn, a twinkling of gray-blue eyes caught her completely off guard. Skeins scattered around her feet as she impulsively threw her arms around Rory’s neck. Sensing him stiffen, she awkwardly disentangled herself and gathered the strewn yarn and scraps of her dignity from the floor. “You’re back,” she said flatly, not daring to look up.

  “I am.” He sidestepped embarrassment by inviting her over to discuss business. “I have a proposal for you.”

  ***

  The treadle’s steady rhythm is a working meditation. Fern’s mind traverses time spirals as the wheel transforms silken qiviut into a lifeline. Heart-quickening moments of endless summer days, back-breaking labors of love, crushing losses, renewed hope, then back around to the joy that brought her here.

  Rory had much to show for his winter away. Electric with nervous anticipation, Fern discovered a mountain of lumber, stone, hay bales, and wire stacked before the one-room cabin. Fluorescent flagging and spray paint highlighted trees and ground. “Need a summer job?” he called out, sliding down from a Bobcat loaded with earth. All she could do was nod and beam back at him.

  Equally desperate not to wait tables and to spend every possible moment with this man, Fern didn’t hesitate to accept his invitation. To transfigure this tangled patch of wilderness into a working farm side-by-side with someone who smiled at her with his whole self, who made her feel seen and strong, was an offering of grace. She moved out of her place to camp on the property. Together, they squeezed every joule from the unflagging daylight to clear and level space for extending the cabin, raise a hayloft, build a chicken coop, dig a garden, and fence off spaces for corralling musk oxen when necessary.

  Manual labor was their courtship dance. Finding a groove, moving in harmony, anticipating the other’s needs, actions. Every post hole dug, each nail driven, all the meals devoured in exhausted communion bound them closer. Words flowed sparingly at first, but spilled into torrents as camaraderie bloomed and evenings gave way to deepening blues. It was easier for two solitary, introspective people to speak in the umbra.

  As they’d stood back to admire the finished cabin beneath the golden flutter of leaves, Rory asked Fern if she’d like to move in for the winter. Again, she threw her arms about him without thinking, but he reciprocated with equal fervor. “Take that as yes?” he laughed. She’d looked into his eyes and kissed him with the tidal force of a year’s pent-up desire.

  Living off-grid without running water was never easy, but Fern had never been happier. She experienced uninterrupted ease in Rory and Teekon’s quiet steady company whether striding through the woods, driving into town, or dip-netting. Every day brought new learning experiences; their mutual admiration mushroomed as she knitted while he read to her in the protracting evenings.