Excerpt: Searching for the Threshold

Searching for the Threshold

She was seven years old for seven days when Aunt Katja woke her at the darkest part of the night. Since she slept between Magda and Elka, Aunt Katja had to be very quiet, but not too quiet because all her short life she had never slept very deeply. Magda and Elka snored softly and didn’t hear a hint of sound, let along sense a presence close by. Janka always wondered why that was but supposed it was just one more difference between her and her sisters, besides the red hair and green eyes that set her apart from their dark beauty.

Aunt Katja whispered, “Janka, awaken” soft as a lazy fly in the corner of an attic window on a hot July afternoon. (If you’ve never heard a fly buzz that softly, you haven’t been in an attic on a hot July afternoon. Nothing can stir for very long or very loudly on days such as that.)

Janka hadn’t been much sleep lately. The stars seemed to have done all they could to keep her awake with their music for the past seven days; something she found curiously entrancing yet frustrating. Even at seven she understood that without enough sleep things could happen to ruin the harmony of a day. She had meant to ask her mother about the star music but the day’s chores and teachings and meal tables surrounded by other family members kept her quiet. She felt the music should be kept to her self until she got an answer or two.

Now in the faint light of a sliver moon was her Auntie Kat. Though Janka loved her mother deeply she trusted Auntie Kat to have answers to the really hard questions. Questions like what made apples smell one way in bud, another way green, a third way red and firm and a fourth way wrinkled in the barrel at the end of winter. (She understood why apples smelled different in pies and sauces and jellies. She wasn’t completely stupid or unobservant.) And Auntie Kat was never too busy to answer a question, though she did sometimes work her answer into what she was doing, like adding new colored threads to her weaving; threads that seemed out of place until the complete pattern was laid out. Her answers, just like her weaving, often made Janka think more than she expected to when asking the questions. Sometimes that was fun. Sometimes it was annoying, until she figured it out, like the key to a puzzle.

Janka quietly crawled out from under Magda’s left leg and Elka’s right arm and made her way to the foot of the bed, where her clothing was folded over the footboard for the next day. Without asking Auntie Kat what to do, she dressed quietly and, boots in hand, tiptoed to the open window, allowing Aunt Katja to lift her over the sill and set her quietly between the house and the flowering lilac bushes. She moved to the side a bit to make room for her Aunt to come through the window. Together they edged along the side of the house to the nearest corner, finding a break in the heavily scented bushes and passing through, getting a light dusting of pollen and smattering of early dew in the process.