The kitchen was a tomb of flickering shadows, lit by a single, sputtering tallow candle that smelled of rendered fat and failed dreams. The air was thick, stagnant with the scent of watery cabbage soup that sat in the center of the scarred wooden table. It was a meal of poverty, served in bowls with hairline fractures that looked like jagged veins. Outside, the wind howled through the eaves, but inside, the silence was far more predatory.
Their mother, Marisa, sat at the head of the table. Her face was a map of resentment, the skin pulled tight over her cheekbones like yellowed parchment. She stirred her soup with a rhythmic, metallic clink-clink-clink against the ceramic—a sound that always made Elena's nerves fray. Marisa's eyes, once bright like Elira's, had dimmed into a dull, transactional gray.
"Sit," Marisa commanded, her voice like the grinding of stones.
Elena sat. She kept her back straight, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed on the steam rising from her bowl. Across from her, Elira was already eating, her movements loud and entitled, her eyes still shimmering with the residual adrenaline of having crushed Joel's heart an hour earlier.
"Three days, Elena," Marisa began, her voice dropping into that low, lecturing drone she used when she wanted to exert her fading authority. "Three days until you leave this house. And God knows, you aren't prepared. You've spent your life with your nose in books and your head in the clouds, but a farmer doesn't want a scholar. He wants a wife. Do you understand?"
Elena nodded slowly. Her throat felt tight, as if the silence lived there like a physical obstruction. She wanted to point out that she didn't even know this man's name. Was he kind? Was he cruel? Was he even a human being with a soul, or just a machine of flesh and bone looking for a servant?
"You have to make him adore you," Marisa continued, leaning forward until the candlelight cast skeletal shadows across her features. "A man like that—a man who works the earth—he has a temper. He has needs. You cannot speak to soothe him, so you must be twice as useful with your hands. You will wake before him. You will have his coffee hot and his bread baked. You will keep his house so clean he fears to walk on the floors. That is how you survive a man, Elena. You make yourself so vital to his comfort that he forgets you are a burden."
The word burden landed like a lead weight in the soup. Elena felt a cold shiver of revulsion. Survive a man? Her mother spoke of marriage as if it were a siege. She searched Marisa's face for any sign of maternal concern—any hint of "I hope he treats you well"—but there was only the cold, hard calculation of a woman who had successfully traded a liability for a cleared ledger.
"And don't you dare go there with that sullen look on your face," Marisa snapped, slamming her spoon down with a sharp crack. "You will smile. You will be pleasant. You will learn to anticipate what he wants before he even knows he wants it. If he comes home angry, you be the peace. If he is tired, you be the strength. You have no voice, so your body must be your language. Do you hear me? You make him adore you, or he will send you back, and I swear to the Heavens, Elena, if you are returned to this house as 'defective,' there will be no place for you."
Elira let out a sharp, jagged laugh, breaking her bread with unnecessary force, crumbs scattering across the table like debris.
"Adore her?" Elira mocked, glancing at Elena's pale, trembling form. "Mother, look at her. She looks like a wilted weed in a rainstorm. How is she going to make a man adore her when she can't even tell him she likes the weather? He'll probably get bored of her in a week and realize he bought a mute statue instead of a woman."
Elira leaned across the table, her eyes narrowing as she shifted the "advice" into something far more poisonous.
"And what about your precious college, Elena?" Elira sneered, her voice dripping with a faux-helpfulness that was more painful than a slap. "You were so busy making signs about 'learning' and 'books.' Well, here's a tip from your big sister: if you're so desperate to go, why don't you ask your farmer? Maybe while you're scrubbing his boots or hauling water for his livestock, you can bat your eyelashes and ask him to pay your tuition. I'm sure a man who spends his life in the mud has plenty of gold lying around for a girl who wants to read poetry."
Elena flinched as if burned. The mention of college was a jagged blade twisted in an open wound. She looked at her sister, her eyes pleading for a shred of mercy, but Elira only smirked, enjoying the sight of Elena's spirit breaking.
"Oh, wait," Elira continued, her voice rising in mock realization. "I forgot. You can't ask him. Because you have no voice. And let's be real—he's a farmer, Elena. He doesn't want a wife who can solve equations or analyze literature. He wants a wife who can breed sons and hoe the potatoes until her hands bleed. You should probably burn those books of yours tonight. They're just useless weight now. You aren't a student anymore. You're a commodity. A trade-in."
"Elira is right about one thing," Marisa added, her voice cold as a winter morning. "That dream of yours? It's dead. It died the moment that envelope arrived. You are an outcast in the world of the educated, Elena. No university wants a girl they have to guess the thoughts of. Your place is in the dirt now. Be grateful the dirt is willing to have you."
The air in the room seemed to vanish, sucked out by the vacuum of their cruelty. Elena looked down at her soup. A single drop of oil floated on the surface, shimmering in the candlelight like a lonely eye. She felt the weight of their words pressing down on her shoulders, a crushing mountain of "advice" meant to strip away the last remnants of who she was. They weren't trying to help her; they were trying to bury her while she was still breathing.
She was a ghost at her own dinner table. She was the "broken" one, the "silent" one, the one whose dreams were a source of family ridicule. She thought of the stranger at the market—the way he had looked at her with respect—and the memory felt like a lie, a cruel hallucination in the face of this reality.
Her appetite vanished, replaced by a cold, leaden ball of nausea. The smell of the cabbage soup, once merely unpleasant, now made her stomach turn. She felt like an alien in her own skin, a stranger in the house she had spent seventeen years serving.
Elena pushed her chair back. The wooden legs groaned against the floorboards, a lonely, weeping sound.
"Where are you going?" Marisa demanded. "I haven't finished telling you how to manage the household accounts for a man of his standing."
Elena didn't look up. She couldn't. She simply touched her stomach and shook her head, a silent gesture of sickness. She pointed toward the hallway, her hand trembling so much that her fingertips brushed the edge of the table.
"Fine," Marisa huffed, turning back to her soup. "Go. Sulk in the dark. It won't change the fact that the farmer comes in three days. You can cry all you want, but you'll do it in his house, not mine. I'm done with your moods."
"Goodnight, little bride," Elira called out, her voice sing-song and cruel. "Dream of tractors and manure. It's all you have left. Maybe the cows will understand your sign language!"
Elena fled. She stumbled down the dark corridor, the walls feeling like they were leaning in to crush her. She reached her room, shut the door, and didn't turn on the lamp. She crawled onto her narrow bed, pulling the thin, scratchy blanket over her head, trying to drown out the sound of her mother and sister laughing in the other room.
In the darkness, she reached into her pocket. Her fingers brushed the bruised skin of the golden plum and the soft, crushed petals of Joel's cornflower. She held them to her chest, the only two things in the world that didn't demand she be something she wasn't.