Flesh and Feathers

In the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains stands an estate built on gold. A creek trickles slowly across the back of the property and, in the evenings, you can hear the croaking of frogs from the last bedroom on the third floor. If you wake up early enough in the mornings when there’s still dew dotting the grass, you might be lucky enough to see mule deer grazing in the field around little purple Nose skullcaps and bridal Water minerslettuce. The wind whistles across the old brown shutters in the winter. When it gets damp outside, right at the tail end of winter, the wooden floors smell like centuries of fireplace smoke and pine needles. In the living room, there are little notches carved into the corner of one of the walls. Claire thinks it’s from a family marking the heights of their growing children. Every time I walk by that wall, I run my fingers along the jagged scars. Sometimes I get a splinter.

We have always lived on the Santa Estate. Claire and I were born here, in Santa Maria House, which was risky for our mother considering the closest midwife was nearly an hour’s drive away; the closest anyone is nearly an hour’s drive away. Worse than having no doctors near, we had no television, no take-out food, and no boys to gawk at in geometry. All there was to fill our minds with were sounds of braying deer and the crackling of a freshly lit fire and the first breath you take after stepping outside in January, the way it burns your lungs and freezes your nose hairs. All of it training for today, when we Change.

Read the rest here. Explore the Secret Santa Murders collection here.