Edgar Allan Poe's Sacrifice: A Narrative Fiction

She sits on the floor by the window, gazing out at the softly falling snow. She rocks back and forth gently, cocooned in a potato sack blanket. Not a sound has escaped her since I found her out in the cold, earlier today, as I was surveying the forest.

She was cold—too cold—with shallow breath and faint pulse, cut and bruised and smudged with dirt and blood. I carried her back to my cabin where the crackling fire returned colour to her lips and cheeks and a pail of warm water flushed grime from her shiny raven’s wing hair.

The cabin is very still save for her rocking and the flickering red flame in the fireplace. I pluck a leather-bound book from the wooden shelf and sit at my desk. The white square of window fades to black. She stays there nonetheless—rocking, rocking, eyes fixed on something somewhere in the impenetrable darkness. I light my oil lamp, layering shadows across the walls. I pull out a well of ink and my quill pen.

My pen scritch-scratches on the paper and she suddenly turns her head at the sound.

Her eyes are dark and obsidian. I meet her gaze. We stay like this for a while, until she slowly rises from her spot by the window, potato sack wrapped tightly around her thin shoulders like a cape. She walks—no, floats over, her gentle footsteps making nary sound nor vibration. Her gaze is fixed on the desk—no, the book—no, the pen.

She approaches, until her thighs hit right against the slanted wooden edge of my desk. I look up at her, she looks down at me. Her expression is not imposing, just tired, and quite

sad.
“Do you want the pen?” I ask. No matter what I ask, her response is the same: silence. She doesn’t speak this language.
I give the pen to her. She remains firmly rooted to her spot on the planked wooden floor in front of my desk, eyes fixed on the blank pages of the book now.
I give up my seat and stand by the desk. She sits swiftly, firelight reflected in her eyes.
She begins to draw. Her hand traces thin black lines across the page, neat and sure. Images spring up—the forest, the ocean, tents, figures, animals—all with an air of quickness and familiarity.
And then ships leak out of the pen. Colonist ships. Three-masted and foreboding. Shakily rendered. Closing in on the shore.
Violently, she slashes the quill across her map of the familiar, tearing the page; arrows from the ship moving in, an arrow from the camp moving out. She draws the lone figure of a young woman at the head of it. Points at the figure, points at herself, puts her hand over her heart. She closes her eyes, extinguishing the twin flames.
Her people . . . gone. Her home . . . attacked, destroyed, obliterated. There is no one left who knows her story. There is no one left who speaks their language. What was once the voice of many now rested solely in her silent throat; the knowledge and responsibility of an entire people lived in her dainty hand.