Tide King by Jen Michalski

witch?”
    â€œNo…no,” she said. He cocked the trigger. “Yes. Yes! Take me, leave the child. Please!”
    â€œYou’re a liar, and if you’re a witch, so be this child.”
    The house exploded with the smoke and sound of the musket, sucking time and air inward, never to be released. The shot hit Ela in the chest and she lay with her lalka in the dirt, hard and milky like a broken vase. She heard her mother scream and struggle against the soldier as he dragged her from the bone house. Soon she was outside her body, following. Outside, she hovered over them, over the shadow of Bolek, his heavy breaths filling him up and then shrinking him as her mother struggled to get at him.
    â€œBolek, she’s dead! Ela is dead!” She clawed the air between them until it was thin and ragged, but he stood unflinching, breathing heavily. “You have taken everything from me! And why—because you are a coward?”
    He bobbed his head, laughing like a loon, but his body slumped. She could not believe he was going to get away with it. The lead musketeer emerged from the bone house and threw her mother’s remaining tinctures on the ground. He started a small fire and rolled the glass and alcohol and herbs into it.
    â€œYoung peasant.” he said to Bolek. “You will be well rewarded by the Prussians for your bravery in bringing this Satanic menace to our attention.”
    Bolek lifted his head, and Ela could see his smile, self-satisfied, through her tears. But it was only for a second before the soldier pulled his sword from his side and, in one stroke, lopped Bolek’s head off.
    â€œStupid peasant.” He kicked Bolek’s head, no longer smiling, across the field. “Enjoy your reward.”
    The soldiers laughed. The fire burned blue and green and then orange as everything spat and cracked and turned to black.
    â€œWe’ll take this one back.” The copper-haired soldier nodded at Barbara. “If she is a witch, surely it can be proven. And until then, let her bewitch us with her fruits.”
    And with that, he dropped his pants and moved toward her mother.

1945
    He woke up in blackness. It choked him like a coffin. The trees of the Hürtgen forest and the large bowl of gray sky above them were gone. He tried to sit up, but darkness pressed on him like heavy taffy, ensnarling his limbs. No birds sang in the black trees he could not see. He vaguely remembered winter, the Germans, the cold.
    His hip ached. He dug his hands through the black weight to his thigh. He felt a stump where his left leg had once met his hip, the skin smooth and round like a baby’s head, a mossy substance covering the tip like afterbirth. A memory of men, of Stanley Polensky and others, swam before him. But they were not here, nor were the others in his unit. In his mind, he could see them around him in the forest still, lumps in faded fatigues, helmets upturned like opened walnuts.
    He thought of his parents in Ohio. He imagined them sitting in the living room, listening to The Abbott and Costello Show on the radio, interrupted by a knock at the door. It would be the only knock, as their nearest neighbors were a half-mile north, they were expecting, the knock they’d hoped never to get. His mother’s hands would clench her knitting, her fingers moving over the seams, counting them absently as the officer at the door took off his hat and his father turned toward her, his face like a quarry. He thought of his room, the clothes he would never wear again, the line of sun crawling over his bedroom wall and dresser in the red dawn that he would never see. He imagined the wife he would never touch, whose shoulder he would squeeze in the car on the way to somewhere, anywhere, as long as she was beside him. Would he ever kiss anyone again? Would anyone ever love him, beside his parents?

    He thought of the field behind his parents’ house and the beet and carrot seeds he