Her hair hung in dreadlocked clumps from a monstrous face. Fangs like tusks jutting up from her lower lip, a beard that hung down to cover her neck, with eyes pink like the sun. Yak hides hung from her in a patchwork fashion, the torches in her hands waving back and forth. She lumbered past as the snow fell thick enough to blot her out after just a few steps. The only trace that she had passed were the hoof tracks, and even those were filling with snow.
“It’s disgraceful.” The words were muffled by Pru’s hat, by the snow, by the deep black of night, by the parade lost to itself in the snow.
“What?”
“I said it’s disgraceful.”
Pru glanced at Errol, who was frowning deeply beneath her hood and hat. “No, yeah—what’s disgraceful?”
Another man costumed as one of the beasts lumbered past and roared ferociously to whooping and cheering. The horns of his mask long and twisted, like a corkscrew. The red light of the Eno Festival bonfire shone like a pyramidal blur through the snowfall.
“We commit genocide and then celebrate in this…this…” Errol was trying to form words Pru already knew, waving her hands in disgust at the parade, “this—we were meant to be better than this, you know?” Words she’d heard last year, during Errol’s first Eno Festival. By then the indigenous people of Vinter—the tayvl—were becoming little more than an old nightmare in the lone colony. Even on the outskirts of the settlement, sightings were becoming a rarity, even an oddity. A long terror finally vanishing.
Pru didn’t bother responding to Errol. It would only lead to a fight, and she was so tired of fighting. So tired of remembering her childhood terrors.
Another costumed as a tayvl trudged by while a dozen children poked him with sticks, laughing. The tayvl roared and chased after the youths who fled in a mix of terror and delight.
“We make them the monsters,” Errol said, “but we wiped them out in less than a generation! Doesn’t it make you sick?”
We make them monsters to remind us that we’re not. The thoughts Pru didn’t share. Instead, she said, “I can just meet you back at home.”
Errol crossed her arms and frowned deeper but didn’t turn to leave. That would be too easy. “We were supposed to be better than this.”
Pru wasn’t sure that was true. Wasn’t sure humans were meant to be anything at all. What she did know was that she enjoyed the Eno Festival. Enjoyed seeing so many people smiling, dancing, hearing them laughing and singing. It filled her with pride for her people. That they could survive and thrive on a planet so unwelcoming. She turned to Errol and put a hand on her hip, then leaned in to kiss her. Errol softened and returned the kiss. Pru took her hand and led her through the snow, past the parade, towards the blurs of lights.
Errol sipped at her akvavit while Pru drank mulled tayvlberry wine. Behind Errol was the skeleton of a tayvl that everyone called Ari. It stood eight feet tall, its horns spiraling towards the ceiling from the skull, its gaping mouth full of sharp teeth, and its arms spread wide as if about to grasp any who came close, take them into the night to rip the flesh from their bones.
Hirsch’s Café was dim, even during the Eno Festival. Klezmer musicians tuned their instruments in the back corner and chatted animatedly about the festivities. Hirsch set down a carafe of tea and said, “No, no, not like that. The music must be felt! This is Eno, not a bat mitzvah!”
“Eno’s a disgrace.” Errol snorted and drained her akvavit.
Pru put her face in her hands. A tension headache already forming as Hirsch’s Café stilled, quieted.
“Excuse me?” Pru heard Hirsch walking towards them. “Stop tuning that, Liev! No, not a word. Miss,” Hirsch was working to constrain his fury, “would you mind explaining yourself?”
Pru put a hand on Errol’s. She gave her a look that said, please just shut up. But Errol pulled her hand away. Stood up to face Hirsch. Errol was a bit taller but Hirsch had thirty pounds on her. “We desecrate ourselves when we eradicate a sentient species and then wear their skins and hang their skeletons as trophies.”
Hirsch took a step back as if struck. He turned to Ari, then back to Errol. “You don’t like Ari?”
The klezmer musicians erupted in laughter.
“It’s disgusting.”
Hirsch cocked his head. “You come to my home to drink and insult me? Why? Why not stay home and get drunk by yourself?”
“I wish I had.”
“So do we!” One of the musicians yelled from the corner.
Hirsch turned to them, and the musicians laughed harder at the expression Pru couldn’t see.
“You’re proud of this…this…this travesty! We land here as desperate strangers and the first thing we do is start killing the only people—”
“Careful there, my friend Ari might take exception to being called people.” Hirsch’s voice took a tone of concern, which had the musicians laughing still harder.
Errol’s ears reddened. “They had a language and culture. They lived here forever in peace, and we murdered every one we came into contact with and then desecrated their bodies!” Only Pru heard the last half of her statement through the laughter and jeers. Errol’s fists clenched at her sides and she shouted over the laughter. “Is this where our pride stands now? On the desecrated bones of a conquered people! Is this what it means to be human?!”
Hirsch was no longer even looking at her. He held Ari’s hands and was swaying to the music coming from the corner. They began singing a love ballad when Pru left the café, left Errol before she attacked Hirsch and ruined another Eno Festival.
Pru heard Errol’s shuffling steps as she came upstairs. She pretended she was asleep when Errol entered the room but her whole body was tense, dreading the fight she knew they needed to have.
“I’m not sorry.” Errol’s speech was slurred. “I don’t get how you all can live like this. The tayvl were people and we murdered them.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Pru vibrated with tension. “You weren’t here. And the tayvl aren’t extinct.”
“Then where are they? If we didn’t commit genocide, why can no one find them?”
Pru sat up and pushed herself against the headboard. Errol was just a shadow in the darkness of the room. Pru tapped the light and gasped at the bruise already swelling over Errol’s left eye, her split and bleeding lip. “Your face!”
Errol took a step back and looked down. “One of those musicians got me. I…I broke the skeleton.”
“Desecration.”
Errol scowled and winced. “That’s not funny, Pru.”
She stared at Errol. There were so many words she wanted to say but the ones that came out were gentle, conciliatory. “Come to bed.”
Errol sighed through her nose. “You know it was wrong.”
“Have you ever asked someone what it was like to grow up here?” She could still smell the blood and vomit, feel the fear buzzing in her chest, writhing beneath her skin.
“Vinter’s not so different than any other colony.”
“Just deadlier.”
Errol shrugged as if the risks were the same anywhere. But nowhere else had tayvl or winters that never seemed to end. “Why are we even here?” An exasperated plea. Then she took a breath. “What brought your family here?”
Pru laughed. “You’ve known them for years—have you ever asked them?”
Errol shrugged again, laughed softly. “Your dad’s always talking about how the stars don’t shine here. He just wants to know what the constellations are like on Virgo, and your mother’s never been impressed by me.”
“What was it like on Virgo?”
Errol climbed into bed, still fully clothed, and pulled herself close to Pru. “Depends on where you lived. Virgo’s one of the oldest colonies so there are settlements all over. My grandma says it’s a lot like earth. Or at least Galandria was—that’s where I lived. It was on the southern continent. Even so, winter’s there were nothing like here.”
“And you lived in harmony with the indigenous people?”
Errol sighed. “See, that’s what bothers me. My grandma used to study ancient humans. Way back before we were even human. There were, like, a dozen different humanlike species, but we pushed them all into extinction. It’s such a loss. She felt it immensely—my grandma. She said that it was the first Shoah and we never asked for forgiveness.” Errol took a breath. The words spilled from her rapidly. “Like, I don’t know. I just can’t believe we’re doing it again, the first chance we got. When I left Virgo, this was a new colony. The promise of meeting this new sentient species—what could we learn from them! It felt like—I don’t know. Like a chance to make things right. As a species, I mean. A chance to forge a bond and not just destroy. And then by the time I got here they were all gone.” Her voice trailed off, dissolving like the Eno lights in the blizzard outside.
“The tayvl are still thriving. Just not here. Comparing this to the Shoah is the real disgrace, Errol.”
“But—”
“No. No, Errol. No. For once, just say nothing. You don’t know what it was like because you don’t want to know. You can’t know because you weren’t here. Never had to—” Pru shuddered to remember. Running from a tayvl. Hearing the screams of those eaten. Finding the butchered bodies of friends, family. “Eno is not a celebration of the death of the tayvl. It’s a celebration of the light, after years of fear and darkness and deathly cold. A light that bloomed over this new world, that bloomed for we who live here. A light of life that we fought for. It’s the commemoration of the new covenant, the new temple we’ve made here.”
“I’ve heard this before, Pru.”
“You never listen.”
“I don’t want to fight, Pru. Not with you. You’re shaking.”
“Please, don’t touch me right now.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not okay! You always do this. You bully your way in without bothering to understand. Never asking a question, just pushing forward with whatever notion gets stuck in your head.”
“I’m sorry, Pru.”
“You’re just cold.”
“It’s winter.”
“That’s Vinter.”
“I listen to you.”
“Only at night, in bed. And even then—”
“I hear you. Hear your heart. Feel it. Feel the beat of your heart pulse through the dark on these long, cold nights. Turn off the light. I just want to hear you. To feel you.”
“Don’t touch me.”
“You’re cold. You’re shivering.”
“Shaking with rage!”
“I’m sorry, Pru.”
“I just wish you’d learn to relax. To live more peacefully inside yourself.”
“You all have winter in your blood here. My blood’s full of summer!”
“So clever.”
“Have you ever seen stars?”
“What?”
“On Virgo—hell, on a hundred different planets—you can see the stars. Trillions and trillions of tiny dots of light in the sky. When you look up you see maybe hundreds or thousands, but the longer you look the more the sky seems to open. You see deeper, further, and find only more stars. Stars clustered together and within those clusters you see even more of them. Here you can barely see the sun. Some day we should travel to a new world. You’ll not only see stars, but you’ll feel like there’s nothing but stars.”
“The journey’s too long.”
“It only took me a year to get here.”
“But thirty years passed. You left Virgo before I was born.”
“I spent my whole life looking for you. I knew from the first time I saw your face, when I first heard your heart pressed to my ear. I recognized you. I had a dream when I was little. I had it almost every night for years.”
“Tell me.”
“Don’t interrupt. It was just a silhouette. A woman. She was in the distance but there was a light behind her. Like she was in a doorway that was all lit, but everything else was dark. In my dream she would walk towards me, or maybe I walked towards her. In all the years I had that dream, I never reached her. That was the whole dream. Just me approaching someone I couldn’t see, and yet it meant so much to me. It seemed to hold significance that rippled through my every day. And then I saw you. Do you remember?”
“I remember.”
“You were so beautiful with your head shaved.”
“I was anxious about it.”
“You’re too beautiful to be so sad. You didn’t deserve to be lonely.”
“Hold me.”
“You were cold.”
“Just hold me. Do you remember when you fell in love with me?”
“I remember.”
“Do you know when I first came to love you?”
“Tell me.”
“You were sleeping beside me.”
“That it?”
“It was the first time I had seen you be quiet for longer than a minute.”
Errol laughed and held Pru tighter. The night thickened around them, the snow falling heavy and silent. After a time, Errol breathed the words I love you into Pru’s ear.
Pru nuzzled into her warmth. She loved Errol, but had never said so, and maybe never would. There was so much distance between them. Chasms of history, of memory separating them. But for the night, this was enough. The warmth and the snow, and the many things left unsaid.