Free The Story Sisters by Alice Hoffman Page A

underneath. She looked like a creature who belonged in the garden, who slept beneath leaves and spoke to earthworms and threaded white moths through her long black hair. She didn’t seem quite human. Claire got a funny feeling then, the way Elv must have felt when she saw the bag with the other cat floating away. The one she hadn’t been able to rescue.
    In the summer of the gypsy moths when everything changed, when Elv was eleven and Claire was eight and Meg had stayed home sick, they had walked home from the stop sign in the dark.Elv had been gone for ten hours. She was still wearing her bathing suit, but no shoes. They were gone. They held hands and went along the empty lane. Their mother scolded them when they got home. She told them to go upstairs and they would talk about their disappearance in the morning. Elv said it was her fault, and that Claire couldn’t find her way home without her. Elv was going to be punished for coming home so late, but she didn’t care. When she and Claire went upstairs, she got into bed, her knees drawn up. Meg was sprawled out on her own bed, reading
Great Expectations
.
    “Have you ever read this?” she called to Elv.
    Elv turned to the wall. Arnelle was like a black seed in the center of her chest.
    Claire got into bed beside her. Elv smelled like ashes and garden soil. There were leaves in her beautiful long hair.
    “It’s about a boy who thinks he has no future, but then it turns out he does,” Meg said. “It’s a complicated mystery about fate and love.”
    Elv felt cold. Claire wrapped her arms around her. There was no way for her to ever thank her sister, no words that would ever do. Something bad had happened to Elv instead of to her. Elv’s bathing suit was still damp but she hadn’t bothered to take it off.
    That was when Claire knew they would never tell.
    I N THE GARDEN , on this night when the robin had died in their hands, June bugs flitted overhead. Elv shooed them away. The sisters were sitting beside the row of cabbages. No one knew where they were. They might have been a hundred miles away; they might have slipped down the steps that led underground. Itwould be August before they knew it. Elv bent forward to whisper. Her face was hot and tearstained. In the human world you had to choose your loyalties carefully. You had to see through to someone’s heart. Elv’s long hair grazed Claire’s face. “You’re nothing like her, you know.” The garden was so dark they could only see each other’s faces. That and nothing more. “You’re much more like me.”

Swan
    My sister stayed in her room, hiding. She gazed at the sky and cried. You’d think shed be happy to be human, but she kept talking about needing her freedom. I had lost sister after sister; was I supposed to lose her, too? She stood on the ledge outside the window. She had only one arm; if she started to fall she would dash to pieces on the rocks below
.
    I went out at midnight to gather the reeds, though there were wild dogs and men who thought of murder. I carried sharp needles and sticks. At night I wove the reeds together while my sister cried. When I was done, I threw the cape over her. She changed into a bird and flew away
.
    I watched until she looked like a cloud. Now she was free. Well, so was I. I walked to the city and got a job. I had a talent after all. When people asked if I had a family I didn’t mention that once I’d had twelve
sisters. I said I took care of myself. I said I liked it that way, and after a while I meant it
.

    A T THIS TIME OF YEAR THE S TORY SISTERS HAD TOMATOES at every meal. Fried tomatoes battered with bread crumbs, rich tomato soup with celery and basil and cream, salads of yellow tomatoes drizzled with balsamic vinegar. Once a pot of simmering preserves were left on the stove and forgotten; the girls dubbed the remaining mixture Black Death Tomatoes, delicious when spooned onto toast. They told tomato jokes: Why did the tomato turn red? Because he saw the