Brave in the Woods

VELVET BONESJuniper felt it when her brother disappeared.She was certain of this.Oddly, her lungs didn’t go all wonky the way they sometimes did when bad things happened. Like a hive of bees was inside her chest, using up every bit of her breath with their buzzing and swarming.That feeling would come later.Instead, when she startled awake at 2:37 in the morning on July 6—eleven and a half hours behind Afghanistan time and the explosion that started everything—she had the astonishing feeling of antlers growing in. So much so that she jumped out of bed and switched on the twinkle lights above her mirror to make sure she wasn’t turning into a woodland creature out of a fairy tale.And there, clear as her startled expression, she saw them. The fierce velvet antlers of a blacktail deer.Then they were gone, leaving Juni to hope she’d been dreaming, or she’d lost her marbles, or both. Either would have been better than the third possibility.Juni climbed back into bed—alongside Penelope the foster cat—and told herself it was her imagination. Because of course it was. Her grandmother Anya had been reading to Juni, Connor and their father before them the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm for as long as she could remember. Anya wanted them to understand the truth in the fairy tales, as gruesome as they were, so they might be prepared for life’s twists and turns. Honest stories, Anya had reasoned, helped people make sense of the world as it really was instead of the way everyone wished it would be.But Juni believed Anya’s motivation went deeper than that, even if she would never admit it properly. Because if their family legend was to be believed, they were cursed.Dad didn’t believe in the Grimm family legend, that the descendants of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were cursed to endure the worst of the treacherous fairy tales, penance for crossing a witch once upon a time. He liked to point out how no one in their family had ever fallen asleep for a thousand years or married a king or eaten a poisoned apple or been turned into a frog. And while that was all technically accurate, Juni had often wondered if it was the spirit of the fairy tales that haunted them more than the literal tales themselves. Their family was, after all, prone to extreme luck, both good and bad.No one knew this better than Juni, who was certain she had used up whatever good luck she’d been allotted simply by being born. Three miracles was what it had taken to save her. She’d cheated Death, and everyone knew Death was a sore loser.Juni looked up at the mural on her wall. Specifically, the watercolor Connor had painted of a ten-point buck just before he left for basic training all those months ago. It was meant to be a reminder that she had survived. The buck had been a witness.This calmed her. Between the buck being the last thing she saw before going to sleep each night, and a lifetime of stories about a family curse, it was no wonder Juni had dreamed a fairy-tale sort of dream. So, with nothing to be done in the middle of the night, she forced the whole shebang straight out of her mind and let Penelope’s soft purr lull her back to sleep. Morning was the only antidote to crazy midnight imaginings. All she had to do was get there.But the antler dream haunted her. And when they found out Connor had gone missing in action later that very day, Juni couldn’t stop thinking about the curse, how the two might be connected. There was no antidote for that. Except one only Anya could provide.Juni tried to be logical. She didn’t want to burden Anya with her crazy antler problem when they were all going through so much. But finally, three agonizing days later, with the feeling she was about to come apart at the joints and fall into a pile of bones, Juni couldn’t help herself.They sat in matching Adirondack chairs on the deck, quietly watching a summer storm build over the water. Before the valley was flooded to become Lake Almanor, the Great Western Power Company had moved a Maidu reservation and cemetery, and Anya had always said that when thunder rolled in the sky, and whitecaps rose on the water, it was the justifiable rage of the Maidu.There were still forests of pine trees on the bottom, and four-foot-long catfish swimming among the branches. The lake was a melancholy place that Juni felt matched the deepest part of herself.“Deer are often the symbol of an impending journey,” Anya said. “Sometimes your sleeping mind knows what your wakeful mind does not.”“I don’t think I was sleeping when I saw the antlers.”“Does it matter?”“Sure. Dreaming is normal. Seeing things is crazy.”“Normal? Crazy? We see what we see.”Thunder rumbled. The sky turned dark and threatening. Penelope jumped into Juni’s lap and tucked her paws under her own soft body. Gray like a shadow, Penelope matched the storm clouds and Juni’s mood.Juni whispered, “But what if he’s gone missing because of the curse? What if the dream is trying to tell me something?”“Oh, Juni girl, look at me.” Anya took Juni’s chin in her palm. There were smudges under Anya’s eyes. None of them had slept. “I had no business putting those ideas in your head. They were the silly ramblings of your superstitious old grandmother trying to make sense of her own life. Can you understand that?”But Anya looked scared, which scared Juni.The curse had always been feathery to Juni, like a cirrus cloud, because Anya had never really explained its origin. Nor did she talk much about her own childhood story. Instead, Juni and Connor had followed Anya around in the garden and the woods, along the creeks and rivers and on the lake, as she wove stories of distant family with the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm until all that darkness and wonder had blended into an irresistible stew. It coursed through Juni’s veins and wrapped around her heart and had her believing that her own miraculous survival, and her life yet to be lived, was part of some vast fairy tale she didn’t yet understand.“But look what happened to you, to Grandpa Charlie and now to Connor. The stories you’ve told about the rest of the family . . .”“Enough, Juni! We are in charge of our own stories, not the other way around.” Anya’s hand fluttered to her mouth. “No more talk of curses. Promise me.”“Okay, Anya. I promise.”Juni was left even more shaken. She’d never seen Anya in such a state.Over the days that followed, Juni desperately tried to talk herself out of believing the curse was real, that there was any meaning in her vision of antlers. It was as Anya had said—her sleeping brain had given her a symbol. That was all. She tried to believe she was no more cursed to grow deer antlers than she was to find herself trapped inside the body of a fox.But she couldn’t. No matter how hard Juni tried, she just couldn’t shake the feeling of those new velvet bones taking hold. That alongside losing something precious, she had gained something impossible.