Autumn Flitter🌗︎
When Mooncalf learned what her name actually meant, she stomped after her father to ask why he would name her such a thing.He patted her head without looking up, and said “Ohh — y’know — it was just wishful thinking.”
Mooncalf stood trembling.
He finally glanced at her, turned back to what he was doing.He said “Sometimes you pray for a stillborn, and sometimes still the parasite is born anyway.”
She decided on the spot that her name was just Moon (Tiur) now.She was a bit young for a Renaming ceremony and didn’t know every step, but she did not ask for permission before tracing the Etruscan letters into the hearth ashes.She stole her father’s wallet.She packed some clean socks and as much pantry foodstuffs as she could fit into a bag, and marched down the dirt trail to the smoother road to the main road into town.
She was six years and six weeks old.
It took Moon’s father two days to notice she’d gone.When he finally did notice, he paced the house and the yard and the dirt trail and the smoother road and stood on the edge of the main road, watching, listening.And then his joy rose as a song on his lips as he bounced back to the empty house.
🜨
Night Soil did not need to ask her father.He reminded the girl every morning and every evening what a shitty time her zeroth birthday and every day since had been for him, his wife, and his sister, but especially for him.He would say “I’d wanted to stir you into the garden mulch.”
Night Soil’s escape needed more deliberate stealth.Her father actually checked in on her regularly, locked the doors and windows every night.Searched her room for contraband.Diligently spanked her after every perceived infraction.
She had learned to pick the lock on her bedroom door, she kept spare clothes ready in a bag in case her father’s ‘moods’ ever became too unbearable, and she always took note of the house inventory for travel-friendly foods or potential makeshift camping tools.But on the night she clicked open her lock for the last time, she didn’t linger long enough to loot the pantry, grabbing only a crust of bread off the table before slipping out the front door.
She was eight years and eight weeks old.
When she left home she had no Rename in mind.For a while, she would meet new people in passing and try to improvise when asked.“Nightso — or, no, it’s — my name is just Soil.”Or Night, or Garden, or Mulch.
A man named Plow Under stopped what he was doing to interrupt her idle conversation with someone else, to tell her how much he liked ‘Mulch’.He said “Your father must have expected you to be fertile” and winked and held her hand for a little too long.Something about the way he said ‘your father’ made Soil wonder if this friendly interloper was a member of The Church, and she shivered under a cold sweat until she hit the main road again that night.
In the next town, an old woman named Granite just quietly nodded her approval when Soil offered the name Dirt.Granite said “Yes, good, good.A beguilingly humble-sounding name.But where would we be if not for the earth beneath our feet?”
Beside that evening’s fire, as the light faded, Soil conducted her own private Renaming, and as she was finishing the spell, indulged the smallest vanity:She called herself Earth (Tular).
#fiction #magicalRealism #microfiction #namingCharacters #whatsInAName
Claudia Hall Christian