The Mare in Me

by Liv Strom

I snuck up to the frost-covered window to see what my older sister was staring at so intently. Morning was approaching, but the sun had yet to rise, and I saw only night.

The cold crept into my nightdress as I pulled on Vera’s sleeve, trying to get her attention.

“Why’re you up?” I whispered, though there was no one to disturb.

“To see the fairies,” Vera answered in her matter-of-fact voice, as if at the age of sixteen she knew the world like a twelve-year-old never could.

I pressed my nose against the freezing pane. In the Danish January darkness, not even stars were visible. The wind howled, and I leaned into my sister, seeking warmth and reassurance. Her bare arms were even colder than mine.

“There isn’t anything like fairies,” I said, suspecting she was pulling my leg.

“There.” Vera put an arm around me and pointed outside. “That moving light. You must be quick to see it. They don’t have wings—don’t believe those pictures—no, they run over the moss and grass, hide under roots. There they go.”

And as she talked, perhaps I saw them.

Two lights, tiny creatures scurrying across the garden toward the copse of trees in the far back. That’s where we played tea before Vera grew up and away. But like this, in the dark of night, she was almost herself. Only the play had changed.

I nodded. “Was that what woke you?”

She shrugged and looked away. We shared a room. It wasn’t like she could hide that she never slept anymore. When I threatened to tell Mother, Vera said a Mare was stalking her, sitting on her chest and bringing bad dreams, but she was handling it. Sometimes, I saw that as well, a shadow, pushing and pushing my sister down.

The cold floors numbed my feet, and I longed to return to bed. We had another weekend before school in Copenhagen. I wished the quiet mornings at Engdal and days walking the fields could stretch forever. Only the nights were too quiet. Vera too distant. Perhaps when we both returned to school, normalcy would as well.

“I’m going to bed,” I declared, daring her to mock me.

Vera only nodded, consumed with what she saw through the window, or perhaps her own thoughts, while rolling an acorn between her fine fingers.

Wrapped in the now cold sheets, I closed my eyes and dreamt of fairies and tea parties and never growing up.

The next morning, I woke to find Vera still by the window. She didn’t speak while I dressed but joined me for breakfast with our parents.

Mother spoke of dinners and shopping, father not much at all, and no one expected me or Vera to add anything. Finally, Greta, our maid, cleared the table and Mother asked us if we wanted to join her in town today to get dresses for the new year.

I quickly nodded as Vera shook her head.

“I’m walking today,” she said, and I knew she was pulling away. Perhaps she could no longer bear being seen with her mother and little sister.

When our parents left, she leaned closer to me. “I’m bringing the fairies rowan berries so they’ll care for the house. Perhaps they’ll dance and give me acorns in exchange. But get me some of those caramels I like—I’m sure they would please the fairies too.”

She winked, and my insides brightened. So what if she did not want to join? We were still sisters. Soon, I would be a woman as well and she would invite me on her walks.

The sun broke the cloud cover during the precious few daylight hours as Mother and I purchased dresses, ribbons, and sweets. I asked how Vera would get a dress—for I had grown four centimeters and my sister’s were clearly short in the cuffs. Mother only mumbled it would be solved before changing the topic, spending more on me than usual. I returned with a cloche hat—the latest fashion, though mother had not allowed me to cut my hair like the lady in the store—and a string of beads long enough to reach my belly button. Perhaps being the only one still a child wasn’t so bad after all.

Back home as the afternoon sun set and wind howled, I ran to our room to show Vera my purchases. She wasn’t there. Three acorns lay on her perfectly made bed. The daytime heat evaporated as I searched room after room, finally ending in my father’s study, a place neither of us were allowed.

He sat behind the desk, working despite this being his one week off from the family shipping company.

I hesitated in the doorway until he finally looked up from his letters. The windows reflected his frown, for outside full dark had settled.

“Yes?” Father said, his tone implying he was much too busy for my questions. But I had searched everywhere…

“Vera is missing,” I said, stepping onto the thick imported carpet. “I’ve not seen her since breakfast. Did she show for dinner?”

The frown lines deepened. “Greta said she’d packed her food. That girl keeps losing track of time. Always in her own world.”

His tone was angry, but I saw the worry. It wasn’t the first meal Vera had missed over the holiday. Father marched through the house, calling loudly like I had not dared to. Greta came, then Mother and Mats—my father’s all-around man. None had seen my sister. The clock struck nine.

Father and Mats left to search the recently converted stable, now a garage to housing my father’s pride and joy, a Ford Model T Vera also admired. I heard their shouts as I pressed up against the same window as last night. Lights moved outside, and I tried to imagine them fairies, like Vera had. Had I truly seen something? Were the acorns proof?

I ran to Mother, told her of the copse and Vera seeing something and how she’d told me that’s where she was going.

“She’s seeing someone, alright,” Mother said as she sent me to our room and hurried outside to tell Father.

Alone, I snatched up the acorns, imagining the Mare shadows Vera said came to her at night. What if she wasn’t making it up? What if… I knew every hiding place in this room.

Before the clock struck ten, I had her diary in my hands and settled by the window to read and break every trust. What did it matter if she was gone?

It started with school and the girls I’d thought were her friends wanting to hurt her, their eyes always following, and Vera listing hideaways and herbs. Then drawings of nature, of small magicks and creatures with dark eyes. She had longed to return home, struggled to put on a smile for her teachers.

It became harder to follow, tight notes filling the margins, whispers of the Mare at night saying she could become one of them.

A shout sounded from downstairs, and I snapped out of my sister’s rambling thoughts when Father carried her dripping wet inside. Her blue lips and shivers didn’t scare me as much as her wide, wide eyes. Hot tea and bottles were brought, clothes stripped, and blankets wrapped.

When she only turned away, Mother shook her shaking shoulders, demanding explanations.

“Found her standing in the river,” Father said, staring at his daughter. “Said Nekken played so sweetly she could not stay away, that I should run.”

He shook his head, and for the first time my precise and competent father seemed without answers.

“She’s not five,” Mother snapped. “She’s lying. There must be a boy. This is not…”

She trailed off as if unable to finish the sentence. Normal? Like Vera? How a proper girl behaved?

I should not have done it, would remember this moment later and all the other possible choices, but as my parents’ desperate eyes met, they seemed to shrink, and I offered the diary, saying, “It’s the magick.”

Vera’s head snapped up. “That’s private. You won’t understand. Give it here!”

She fought Mother’s embrace, but the winter had taken her strength. Though Mother often complained about her extra weight since birthing us, now she made use of it, pressing my sister down.

I sat, frozen and lost, as if my family was a play I didn’t recognize, each one of them taking on an unfamiliar role while ignoring me. Whatever Father said couldn’t be heard over Vera’s screams and I almost saw it, the shadow on her chest, the Mare and magick she wrote of.

It finally quieted, though I don’t know how. As if they exited the stage, leaving a tale they did not care to be part of, Mother and Father disappeared, Vera crawled under her blanket and the silence pressed down. The clock struck twelve, the sound echoing through the house.

“What happened?” I asked. She was silent so long that I feared my betrayal had turned me into another enemy.

“I can’t sleep, Nora,” she finally said without turning my way. “They come at night and whisper—then the most wonderful music. He said if I went into the river all would be well.”

“Who?” Mother had asked the same. I don’t know why I thought the answer would change.

“Nøkken who plays—he’s like a man but not. Green scaled and dark.” She turned to me, fever lighting her blue eyes. “They’re almost lost, dismissed as part of the past, like the horse and carriage, but we can still keep them alive. You believe me, right?”

Though I spent most of church thinking about the coming week, instinctively my fingers made the sign of the cross. If I’d ever heard anyone talk of the Devil, this was surely it.

“Why don’t you sleep? Tomorrow will be better.”

“For you,” she laughed until it turned into a cough. I fell asleep watching her watch the window.

The next day, her fever ran high, and the doctor came. The adults talked seriously behind closed doors. Vera rambled of magick and ice. Mother insisted I returned to school, and no matter how I argued, Mats drove me off, leaving the caramels by Vera’s side and three acorns secreted into my pocket.

In Nygaard’s School for Girls, I waited for Vera to join me. It was two weeks before Mother’s letter arrived. Vera had been sent elsewhere to calm her nerves. At first, I wrote her daily, sending the letters home for I had no other address. When no answer came, I read instead of magick and witches, Margygr, and Mare—of the dangerous female creatures of the past. My friends dreamt of flapper dresses and practiced the Charlston, cutting hemlines and hair dangerously short. I imagined the shadows around my sister and stared into the dark, hoping and fearing to see what she had. The acorns lay on my windowsill—a reminder of our broken trust. Sometimes, at night, from the corner of my eye, they seemed to shake, like something wanted to erupt. To be seen.

It was summer when Mother and Father allowed me home and, after weeks of questions and arguments, to visit Vera.

We drove up winding country roads, arriving at a manor three times the size of ours, surrounded by towering iron gates and poplars. While it was well maintained, I felt more shadows than ever in the precisely inch-high grass. No fairies could hide here, but there was something in the air.

The house itself had bars across the windows and heavy doors watched by firm men.

Father and Mother spoke to the Administrator while I waited on a bench outside. There were no short dresses or music here, everything white and bare. Women in nurse’s uniforms walked next to those with vacant eyes. Somewhere, someone screamed. The hair on my arms stood. I didn’t understand this place, only that they had lied to me. This was no place of healing. If the Mare lived anywhere, it was here.

The Administrator, a gaunt older woman, walked us to the second floor and unlocked a door. Inside, on an unmade bed with loose hair and gnawed-down nails, sat a girl who used to be my sister.

“Vera?” I asked as she turned unnaturally slowly. “How are you?”

Her face was too slack, her bones too visible.

“It’s the treatment,” Mother said, though I heard the question in her voice. “To help her sleep.”

Vera said nothing.

I was a spectator again, sitting in the single chair in the corner, while Mother and Father talked to Vera’s placid face. When they ran out of words, they asked me if I wanted to join them for coffee before leaving. I shook my head. I was here for Vera.

Alone together, I crept up on the bed next to her.

“I’ve missed you,” I said. “I’m so sorry I gave them your diary. This is all my fault.”

The tears I’d buried overflowed. I’d imagined her in a good place, not this. She blinked, as if waking up—perhaps everything was a dream now.

Her hand found mine, grip still strong.

“Don’t worry. I’ll get away from here. They’ll take me.”

“Who?” I searched the stark room. There were no other exits than the one we had entered through.

“The forgotten ones—you see, soon I’ll be one as well.”

I squeezed her harder. “I’ll never forget you.”

She nodded, not to accept my words, but in acknowledgment. “They shake the world in their desire to be seen. Scream and scream. Living in the past is painful. You go to the future. Don’t let anyone see your rage.” Her eyes narrowed on me. “I know they say I’m crazy. But I see them. Some always call women insane when we talk of things others can’t see—at least I won’t be burned on a pyre or drowned to test my wickedness.”

“What?” I stammered, but I had read enough to understand she talked of witches. This time when my fingers twitched, I did not cross them. This was Vera, and I was thirteen now. I could be strong for my sister.

Footsteps approached outside. Suddenly frantic, she dug under her mattress, tore a corner, and pulled out a handful of acorns.

“You see them? Free them!”

The door was wrenched open as I stuffed them into my pocket, nodding.

“They’re coming!” A nurse pushed Vera down, separating us. “They never left! There!” And as the nurse pierced my sister’s arm with a needle, I saw the shadows move. “One day I’ll make you all see!”

Vera slumped, the energy dissipating as quickly as it had come.

We were ushered out, increased treatments talked of in quiet voices. New methods of exercising my sister’s unsightly insanity, surgical methods of removing the magick she raged of.

With my pocket full of acorns, I rode home in silence, sure I didn’t see one oak inside the asylum, nor a patient who walked alone.

The next day, I was returned to school.

Over summer break, no one spoke of Vera. Her bed had been removed from our room, her clothes and brushes and books packaged away. As she had said, the household was trying their hardest to forget her.

I planted the acorns before the fairy copse, asking them to free Vera despite feeling terribly silly for talking to a tree. Without her there, I saw nothing besides leaves and bushes and bugs. There was no magick anymore.

As I returned for Christmas, a year after the river and diary, there was something fragile in my mother’s voice as she exclaimed we could finally bring Vera home. The doctors had cured my sister. She did not even comment on my chopped off hair—which I had thought might earn me a beating despite my age.

On Christmas day, we drove to the asylum. If shadows congregated there in summer, winter brought true dark.

The Administrator brought us yet again to Vera’s room, this time pausing with the key in the door.

“She’s all packed. Don’t let the side-effects surprise you. The white cut is remarkable. There will be nothing abnormal anymore,” she said to Mother, who nodded while clutching her purse.

The door swung open.

Where I had a chic bob, Vera’s hair had been chopped off near the scalp. The white gown hung on her skeletal frame. I dropped the caramels I’d brought for her, the dozens of colorful balls scattering in this monochrome place, as I rushed inside and clutched her cold, cold hand.

“What have they done to you?”

But staring into her vacant eyes, I knew. Not only had Mother and Father forgotten her, they had made her forget herself, for no one stared back.

There were no shadows. No Mare or fairies or acorns.

No magick music.

All lost when my sister’s mind was erased.

Digging my fingers into her hands, I voiced all my fear and loneliness and rage as I shouted her name, uncaring who heard. Cried that I’d never forget. That they might as well have drowned and burned her.

And, as if those forgotten heard—knew someone saw—the world shook until acorns, Vera and I fell from the bed. The shadows rose and as the world rumbled with me, the cracks in my heart were mirrored across the walls.

The adults crossed their chests and looked away from what they couldn’t understand, perhaps knowing denial was the most powerful force of all. As the world stilled, I swore I’d bring Vera to her infant fairy grove, and even if I had to become a Mare myself—one who brought nightmares to others—I’d never let them forget what they’d done for how was this the better choice than accepting the possibility of magick in the world?