Grandma taught the three sisters about the ancient magic in the green-seeded things that sprout in every woman’s soul. At night, she showed her girls how women weave green magic through their fingertips, how they ooze it from paintbrushes, and how they learn to serve it up with soup ladles and still-warm bread.

“When we kiss our granddaughters,” Grandma tickle-whispers in her cool breath, “green tendrils graft our magic to theirs: Remember, Little Branches, green grounds instinct. It ignites dreams and flames joy.”

Grandma would peel back her exoskeleton at this part to reveal the throbbing green orb of her chest.

Giggling, the sisters would sink their clunky limbs in. Their fingers tickled the warm knotted seed, and they’d feel green wiggle into their hearts, where it sigh-settled.

Grandma talked then of the bellyful bear and how it grew claws and stomped at broken things with its powerful
haunches.

Mother is a broken thing. A cracked teapot ripe for splitting.

“The bear shattered your mother long ago,” Grandma reminds them, stretching herself wide enough for them to full-crawl in. “It’s not her fault, Little Branches. She was raised to serve and serve until, too chipped, she gave way. I’m sorry, my Little Leaves,”

When the sun rises, the three sisters are sent to refill glass jugs in the numb, cold water of a nearby spring, where daddy-long-leggers vie for their attention, where the lone spider creeps from a corner and threads into their hair, and where sometimes the bear squats low in wait.

In spring’s stone walls, the sisters shout their wishes to no one, and no one echoes back. They play at candybar wishes fit for their pulled-tight braids and test out bigger ones more suitable in the land of men. They don’t dare wish the real one. The one Grandma’s trained. That one that requires blood.

Ages pass since they first touched the water’s numb. They’ve long traded giggles for too-long glances. Their bodies since rubbed raw by the bear, attacked by the wolf, passed over by the rabbit. If not now, they knew, never.

Grandma calls out from the spider’s mouth: “Speak it real.”

So the sisters wish it true.

The lungs are the first to go. Even before the skin molts to raised bark, their capillaries burst open green fingerlings. Their ruptured hearts leak limb-filling blood. Muscle groans. Twisted tendrils split time-worn leather between what were once walking toes. It is painful — an agony the birds witness, their faces forever intertwined, gawping up at the cloudless sky.