i.
That year, December comes fast and hard and without warning. Noah's not cold in the ground by the time the mothballed hatbox under their bed runs barren of money and the woodpile in the shed begins to look minuscule in comparison to her needs. The wind breathes in through the cracks in her home and the snow collects, then melts into black mold in the spaces behind her wood stove and counters.
Santana Puckerman is a widow, and she is poor.
Things hadn't been bad, at first. Noah Puckerman was sweet, and he'd sought out her affections (and received them, in bulk) and when two months went by without her 'visitor' he'd married her. They hadn't been rich, for sure, but they certainly hadn't been left wanting for much. He was a farmer, he had crops, a little cottage with a single bedroom, and a shed for tools and dry wood. They didn't love, but they tolerated-fondly. Santana sewed, and she knitted, and she cleaned and sometimes she sat. Restlessness was, and had always been, simply the nature of her life.
The wheat went shortly after the third miscarriage. The priest told her that it was probably the loss of his livelihood that stole Noah's health, but Santana knew full-well that Noah's 'livelihood' lay with the woman of the neighboring town. She suspected that it had something to do with the tobacco he pouched in his lower lip like a squirrel. Her husband was not a man without vice, and she told the priest so-in so many words. So it goes, she was almost ejected from her own husband's funeral early.
That was spring. This is winter, and Santana is a widow, and Santana is poor. There's very little to be thankful for; she has no money, no way of procuring any, so it seems that it's her fate to rot away in that little cottage alone before the season is through. She sits, burning through one of the big maple logs in the woodstove, a gapped throw blanket spread over her lap, when the first few scrapes to the front door arrive.
At first, the dismisses them as a figment of her lonely mind. The second set is simply the wind. The third comes, accompanied by a shrill whooping, and Santana rises from her chair to move to the window. Outside everything is a black and white blur, but the lantern she'd hung on the front stoop's railing illuminates her nighttime visitor, sure as day. A crane.
Scrambling, Santana unlatches the deadbolt and throws the door open. There it is; panting, blood from one outstretched wing pooling in the frozen slush. Santana Puckerman's never been considered a good woman; she's got a mouth that could cut diamonds, a selfish streak from her cottage all the way to the neighboring town. Restlessness does incredible things to her. It brings her to her knees, it brings that crane inside and in front of the fire. It feeds and it nurtures. And in the morning, when she comes from her bedroom to find the storm over and the crane gone, her kitchen drapes swinging back and forth in the cool wind like a ghost, it opens up inside her like a flower.
ii
Brittany's been with her for nearly five weeks by the time the trees have changed. Santana never asks where she's come from, but she still receives an answer, as seems to be Brittany's custom. "I got lost when I saw your cottage. It seemed better than where I came from, so..."
"You got lost naked in the middle of January?"
The blond woman shrugs one shoulder and grins like she does when Santana's not going to get a real answer. Santana's come to accept this, to breathe along with the quirks, because Brittany opens the curtains in the kitchen when Santana forgets to, and she walks with her out in the woods on days when the weather permits it. There's nothing she can do about the graveyard of a wheat field that Noah left behind, but she's not a miracle worker. She's just a girl who happens to be a miracle.
Brittany couldn't walk when Santana found her, and her knees simply bowed together when she tried to stand. Another mystery met with a non-answer; "I had just been born when you found me." She couldn't read or write, either, and she never did learn how-but walking came easy to her. With walking came dancing, just as a pair to Brittany as inhaling and exhaling. Santana's lack of music didn't seem to be a mark on Brittany's map; she hummed and twisted to a melody that her housemate had never heard before in her wildest dreams.
"It's called Dance of the Swans. From Swan Lake."
"How on earth did you get seats to see Swan Lake?"
"I watched from the rafters." Brittany responds, and laughs. High and breathy, like wind rustling through leaves or hollow wind-chimes. The sound is foreign to the house and it's old wooden walls creak and settle with joy. Santana feels Brittany steal the Restlessness from her like heat steals summer rain from the concrete.
They're married in May.
Happiness never made anybody rich. When the bread and the meat run out, Brittany brings in a proposition. "I can weave." She murmurs one night as they're lying in bed. Santana is half listening, the other half of herself preoccupied with kissing and running her hands against the topography of Brittany's body. "I'm good."
"Oh?"
"I know you have a loom out in that old shed. I can weave silk."
"Silk will go for a lot in town." Santana hums. "I was just going to sell it, but If you can get that old loom to listen to you, you can work it as much as you want."
By the end of the week, the loom and Brittany are communicating like old friends. They have money enough to fill the cracks in the cottage with caulk, to buy new blankets. Brittany keeps a padlock on the shed when she works, claiming that making good fabric takes concentration. "Please don't fight me on this." She says, her usually sunny face crumpling with seriousness. The darker skinned woman kisses Brittany's forehead and lets her rest against her lap, stroking a hand through yellow hair. "I won't."
Santana comes in from the garden, sweating from the hot August day, to find Brittany sitting beside a box full of baby booties. They're blue and pink and full of holes-Santana had never been great at knitting-but Brittany cradles them in her rough hands like gold. "Do you have a child?" she asks, glancing up. Her wife feels the cool pang of Restlessness hit in the pit of her stomach. She knows that a set of bloodied sheets and a ruined dress sit in the bottom of the box.
"I did." She responds simply. "Put those away. I should have used them as fodder for the fire when we were poor."
Brittany's brows furrow. "These aren't yours to burn." She returns softly, with no hint of meanness weighing down her words. "They belong to your children. You made them for your children."
Whatever words Santana had planned to say become weighted down in the middle of her throat. They're kissing before either of them can think to help it, tumbling to the floor, and Santana is crying like she hasn't since the first time she tried to scrub a river of her own blood from the insides of her thighs and the tile of her bathroom. It isn't empty and Restless this time, but she can only control it as much as a mountain can control it's ice-melt stream. They stop kissing and Santana just cries and in the morning, Brittany mends the holes in the booties until they look perfect; like something a child could actually wear.
iii.
This is the tragedy of selfishness. They add on to their cottage, rooms for children and guests that only exist as clumsy school girl fantasies. To meet Santana's lofty demands, Brittany weaves more silk-two days a week in the shed become three, then four, and her sunny disposition begins to wear thin. Her arms and naked back become pockmarked with a rash of unknown origin, though Brittany simply says that it's "a family sickness". She won't stay to be touched, not reverently in bed, not fondly as she cooks at the kitchen stove.
The last time Santana sees Brittany is in mid-July. After breakfast she gently rubs lotion on the angry red rash that engulfs the better part of her wife's milky skin. They speak amicably, most notably about the child of one of Santana's relatives who'd recently been orphaned by consumption. A baby girl with rotten luck, not seven months old. "She could stay with us." Santana reasons softly. "We could love her."
"We could." And for the first time in weeks, Brittany smiles, her mouth stretching from one pole to another. She leaves shortly for the shed, and Santana takes to her thoughts. She retrieves the mended booties from her dresser drawer and fingers them absently, feeling the loose knit rub against the skin of her palm. They're tucked away in an envelope with a letter to her aunt, who is caring for the little girl while they search for a home, saying that she and her wife would be overjoyed to take her.
The walk to and from the post clears her head, and Santana spends the rest of the time until lunch making mussed bedsheets, tending to the garden, and finally preparing Brittany some soup. When time passes and the blond girl still hasn't emerged for her meal, she sets it on a tray and carries it the short distance to the shed. A new kind of restlessness has emerged within her; she can't wait to tell her wife that in a month's time they'll be parents, or discuss that they need to find a new way to keep aphids out of the garden.
There's no padlock on the door this time, which is unsurprising. Along with the mystery illness, her wife has become increasingly forgetful. Santana hums as the pushes the door open with a bare foot, Brittany's name ringing out into the rafters.
The crane rushes past her before she even has time to see it.
Santana drops the soup, barely registering the sting as it burns her legs and hands. She's blinded by a flurry of feathers and a pained whooping, and by the time she turns around the shed is empty and the crane has sailed away into the distance. Santana can't feel Brittany's name leave her mouth, can't hear it, she only watches it echo off the trees and the windmill and the blood-smattered loom, half hung with plucked feathers, half with the finest silk she'd ever seen in all her life.
epilogue
Santana dresses her daughter in mended booties and teaches her to dance to the tune of Swan Lake, and she loves her fiercely, and she takes her little girl out in the winter to see the cranes travel away south. It's the most beautiful, the most tragic thing, and it weighs in Santana until she can no longer feel anything but joy.
a/n: I just wanted to make a few general notes about what's going on here. Chronologically/geographically, this story is kind of hanging in space. The original fable is Japanese but this story, obviously, does not nescisarrily take place in Japan. There are also some anachronisms: i.e, gay marriage, the production of the ballet Swan Lake. Basically it can take place in any headspace you want it to. It's a fairy tale. Use your imagination. Thank you for reading :)