place, she moved inside to prepare herself for the gathering.
The invitation was for midnight. It was written on a leaf as big as Ella’s palm in delicate looping cursive. She kept it in the drawer of her vanity and had looked at it every day since it arrived. She wanted to make sure she got the instructions right as she didn’t suspect she would ever get another invitation like this in her lifetime. She reviewed it one more time before beginning her final preparations.
Ella ran a hot bath and threw in handfuls of rose petals and birchbark. She lay there for an hour, soaking until the whole of her felt saturated. She dried in front of the open window as small bits of snow danced around her shivering body. Then she took the wildflowers, which had arrived with the invitation, and arranged them in her hair. Bluebells, foxglove and cowslip swept across her brow. She stood nude in front of her vanity mirror, inspecting her body. She imagined the word “March” written across her stomach and smiled. It was time.
The grandfather clock struck midnight and the chime sounded different without its wooden enclosure. Clutching her invitation, Ella made her way slowly through the house. The streetlights peered through the windows as if to see her off and she shone in the glow they cast. She stepped outside, bare feet on frosted ground, and made her way to the circle of wooden items in the backyard. The sky had cleared and the stars glittered in the firmament accompanied by a bright full moon.
Ella approached the old, arthritic desk and opened the drawer once more, producing a book of matches and a small container of kerosene. Frozen but determined, she drizzled the clear liquid onto the log and the branches and watched it seep into the scraps of paper making them translucent in the moonlight. The first match she lit was swept away in a gust of snowy wind, but the second was successful and she was pleased by the warmth of the growing fire on her bare skin.
Piece by piece she fed her wooden things to the fire and it blazed like the rising sun. She threw the pencil in last, using it to write two words on the back of her invitation as prescribed.
I ACCEPT.
The yard was empty but for the fire and the gleaming young woman who stood with a leaf as big as her palm pressed against her silver breast. In the quiet of the night her voice rose in quivering song as she accepted the invitation she had been offered.