* Author : Christine Lucas

* Narrator : Kat Kourbeti

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes

*

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Previously published by Abyss & Apex







Content warnings for ableist slurs and attitudes, violence, and misogyny





Rated PG-13

Moths in a Fluttering Heart

by Christine Lucas

 

When Maria returned to her village, she found it burned to the ground. Nothing was left of her kinspeople but blackened corpses littered across the village square. She searched around, with the moths in her gut a panicked swarm, stinging to be let out. Everyone else had been shot on the narrow cobblestone streets. On weak knees, with eyes burning from the lingering smoke, she turned towards the woods, her moths breathless with guilt and relief in equal parts. If Evdokia, the midwife, hadn’t sent her to the herbalist two towns over, she’d be dead too. At the edge of the village, Maria stumbled on Papa-Kostas, shot by the Virgin’s shrine, in a pool of blood.

Maria sniffled and he raised his head, his eyes unfocused.

“Maria? Is that you, girl?” Barely a whisper.

Maria gawked, then nodded. He’d called her just Maria. Not Zavo-Maria. The slur that the villagers had attached to her name had stuck enough that its omission made Maria uncomfortable — as though it made her less and more at the same time.

“Nazis,” Papa-Kostas managed. “Looking for resistance fighters. We didn’t tell.” A fit of cough. “Evdokia . . . dead too. See to Charon’s supper, girl. Don’t leave us here, stranded.” He raised his right hand, the tips of his first three fingers brought together, and air-crossed her, before his arm fell limp. “May gods old and new bless you, child. Forgive me.” And he spoke no more.

The Ferryman’s supper. Maria’s moths fluttered all at once. She picked up her skirts and ran into the woods. Dawn hadn’t broken yet. Would she make it on time?

She ran up the nearby hill and then downwards into the small ravine, to the banks of the creek. Not far from there, the ravine opened up to a deep canyon, its slopes a forest of pines and ancient oaks: the sisters of the Dodona Grove. The creek swelled and joined with more creeks to become Acheron, before the dark depths of the world siphoned its waters beneath the surface. Maria headed away from the Acheron, towards the little hut and the nearby cavern, where the villagers brought their herds every November to outwait the winter’s cold.

It was safe inside the hut — few people could find it, most of them dead now. Dishes were stacked on a narrow table by the cold hearth, and sacks of grain and buckets for milking the goats at the other side. Maria sat on an old, creaking stool to catch her breath. Her panicked moths had fled her gut and plodded through her blood now, making her dizzy. She took deep breaths to rid her nostrils from the stench of burned flesh, inhaling the scents of curdled goat milk and pinewood. Then of other, unsettling scents, of murky waters and dead tadpoles, and just a whiff of honeysuckle . . .

The Ferryman’s scent, and the scent of the death that followed his heels.

Maria sprang to her feet. The supper! She really was zavo, sitting idle while Charon waited. If she angered him, would he forsake the souls of her kin? Would he release the dead upon these lands as punishment? She shook her head until the moths with wings of guilt scattered from her thoughts. No.