Blasphemy at the Door
Mika Verina, Birthday Girl
The dress was not made for cooking. That was the thought that hung over me. Not about it being my birthday or the lottery tomorrow — just that the thin white cotton picked up every stain possible.
I’d worn it for an hour and already hated it.
The Church prescribed white for women of age: cotton only, off the shoulder, falling to the knee. A beacon of piety. Almost every woman in Redwater wore one. I’d spent eighteen years watching them move through the market in their white dresses, had watched my mother iron hers each morning with the same reverence she gave to scripture. I’d thought when my day came, putting it on would feel like something. An elevation, maybe.
What it actually felt like was a target.
The fabric was so thin you could see my shape right through it. Wide hips, full thighs, the dark shadow of everything the gods deemed blessed. Breasts too heavy for the loose neckline to properly contain, hips too broad for the skirt to lie flat. I had my mother’s build — voluptuous in ways Redwater men called generous.
I called it inconvenient.
Even the tips of my pointed ears felt exposed this morning, poking through the curtain of my long brown hair. I had spent eighteen years hiding behind sackcloth and hand-me-downs that swallowed me whole. Now the whole world could see exactly what I was made of.
The compote hissed at me, and I snapped back to the task at hand, grabbing the spoon and dragging it through the thickening berry mixture. Steam curled up into my face. The fruit was good this morning — dark plums and plump blackberries from the market yesterday. The fruit was coaxed into sweetness with honey and a blade of dried ginger. Dalen liked his compote smooth. Not too thick, not too sweet. I’d been making it his way for five years, since I was thirteen and too young for anything more than kitchen labor. I could cook Dalen’s breakfast in my sleep, and many mornings it had felt that way.
The fried cakes were already golden, the edges beginning to crisp in the cast iron. I nudged the pan on the rack, buying them another minute.
Then the knock came.
Not a polite knock — a frantic one, knuckles striking wood in rapid succession. I froze for a beat. The household was still asleep. Or should have been. I crossed the kitchen and pulled the door open before whoever it was could knock a second time.
The cold hit me first. Morning air, sharp and damp, carrying the smell of mud and animal dung from the lane outside. Then I took in the woman on the step.
She was close to my age, a year or two older. White cotton dress, same as mine, though hers was gray at the hem and patched. She had the look of Redwater on her — that particular exhaustion that settled into women’s faces early here. A permanent tension that settled around the eyes. Her pointed ears were reddened from the cold. She held an infant bundled in a shawl, and even as I watched, she shifted the child tighter against her chest.
“Is Dalen home?” Her voice was barely above a whisper. Her eyes darted past me into the kitchen.
I already knew what this was. I’d opened this door before.
“He’s sleeping,” I said.
“We just need a little something. Food, anything.” Her chin dipped toward the bundle in her arms. “The boy — he’s Dalen’s. I swear it.”
She turned the infant to face me, and I looked into my brother’s eyes. Sharp and pale as winter sky, already too knowing for a face that small.
My stomach turned over slow and ugly. That baby was my nephew. And this woman at my door was a vision. A crystal ball showing me my own future. White dress. Empty hands. Begging at a man’s door.
The Church said she’d brought this on herself. Lie on your back to make them; therefore, lie on your back to support them. That’s what the Carox said about this exact situation. She’d lain with a man, and now she must provide for the result. The Church had a verse for everything.
I turned back to the kitchen without a word.
The fried cakes were done, the edges perfect. I slid one from the pan onto a cloth, folded the fabric over it, and carried it back to the door. Still hot. I pressed it into the woman's free hand.
“Don’t come back,” I said, low enough that my voice wouldn’t carry up the stairs. “Not to this door. You’ll find no more charity here. I’m sorry.”
Her face went through several things at once. Gratitude and humiliation in equal measure. She nodded once. Then she was gone, slipping back through the garden gate with the baby pressed to her chest, the cloth-wrapped cake tucked against her side.
I shut the door. Turned back to the kitchen.
The compote was burning.
"Damn it—" I crossed the room in three strides and yanked the pot from the fire, the handle searing through the cloth I‘d forgotten to double-wrap. I hissed through my teeth and set it down hard on the hearthstone. Grabbed the spoon. The bottom was scorched, a dark crust already forming, the whole mixture carrying the bitter undertone of failure.
I was standing over it, making increasingly desperate stirring motions, when I heard footsteps on the stairs.
“Mika?” My mother’s voice preceded her into the kitchen, low and immediate. Elda Verina had the particular talent of sounding worried and judgmental simultaneously. She appeared in the doorway with her dark hair already pinned beneath a headscarf, the lines of her face deeper in the morning light.
She was a woman carved by hard decades — forty-something years and all of them felt. Her pointed ears were her most elegant feature, delicately curved above the severity of her expression. She’d been beautiful once. You could still see it, like a coin worn smooth by too many hands. “What is going on in here?”
“The compote,” I said uselessly.
Her eyes swept the kitchen, landed on the ruined pot, then cut to the door, then back to me. She glanced over her shoulder toward the stairwell. Then she was across the room, pulling the pot fully from the heat and pushing past me to crack the window open.
“Take this outside,” she said, thrusting the pot toward me. “Empty it. Quickly. Before the smell gets upstairs.”
I did as I was told, pushing out into the small herb garden in the cold morning air, gooseflesh raising along every inch of exposed skin. I scraped the burned mess into the compost heap, rinsed the pot with water from the barrel, and rushed back inside.
My mother had already set a new batch of fruit over the low flame. She stirred it without being asked, her back to the door, her motions brisk and deliberate.
I stared at her for a moment, gratitude tightening my throat in a way I didn’t have words for. Then I recovered the skillet and set it back on the rack to reheat.
“Who knocked?” she asked, not turning around.
My hands slowed on the batter bowl. “A beggar,” I said.
“A woman.” It wasn’t a question. She could read the omission in my pause.
“Yes.” I spooned batter into the hot pan and listened to it sizzle. “With a baby. She claimed the child was Dalen’s.”
The spoon handle clinked hard against the pot’s rim. “Blasphemy,” Elda said, her voice dropping into the register she saved for heresy. “Bringing disgrace to his doorstep. On today of all days.” She shook her head, the set of her jaw fierce and tight. “Did you send her away?”
“Yes, mother.” If I told her about the smuggled fried cake, she would make me do penance until my knees bled.
“Good.” She stirred once, twice. Her voice shifted slightly — lower, trembling at the edge. “And the day before the lottery, too. I don’t want anyone else’s sins touching you right now. Did she look lottery age?”
“Yes.”
“Well.” A pause. The berries popped gently in the pot. “The gods have their own accounting. I’ll put an extra offering on the altar this morning. Just to be certain.”
I watched the bubbles form and burst on top of the cakes, waited until the edges went dry, then flipped the pan in one practiced motion. The cakes landed golden-side up, perfect. I could feel the warmth of the fire against my bare shoulders and thought, not for the first time, that the dress was already doing exactly what it was designed to do. Announcing me to the gods. Inviting scrutiny.
Elda set two plates on the worktable, still not meeting my eye. Side by side, we finished the breakfast in silence — she stirred her careful fruit while I stacked my golden cakes. Complicit in the small deception. Dalen’s boots struck the upstairs floor above us, and we both went still for half a second, like mice that had heard the cat.
Then we moved faster.
