Epilogue.

First, allow me to apologize for the long wait on the epilogue for this story. Second, allow me to thank all of you lovely people that have stuck with me and this story from the very beginning. It's funny how stories like this one start to feel like more than just a fabrication of letter and words. Somewhere about half way though, it starts to feel like a journey in the exploration of self, and you all have played an integral role in it. I will be sad to let this one go. So thank you, from the bottom of my heart, and Merry Christmas guys!

…

A small girl jumps into her eldest sister's bed, giggling and with limbs folding ungracefully. She is shrieking about snow falling and presents under trees. Her sister's dark eyes open and warmth shoots through everything under her gaze, much like the way blood in veins carries warmth to cold fingers. She is smiling, softly, in a way that echoes, and she draws her littlest sister against her despite her protests to "Get up! It's Christmas." It doesn't take long before the younger girl settles, enveloped by the warmth radiating from her sister and lulled into repose. Another girl, this one older, more coordinated, peeks around the door jamb before floating forward and joining her sisters. She lingers briefly in a warm shaft of morning light that broke from the clouded sky. She lingers in light and dances the thin line between the real and the make-believe, teetering dangerously, beautifully. There is a good deal of noise between her ears. She leaps onto the bed and presses her face into her eldest sister's neck. They lie in the quiet like they are waiting for something. They don't hear their other sister wake, the one with ice chip eyes and good intentions, but arms wrap around her instantly when they feel the bed bend to accommodate her weight. The snowflakes falling outside in the grey light make shadows dance in a dizzying waltz on the wall. They are waiting for everything and nothing at all, watching the accumulation of all they are and have been unfold into another pale grey morning. They are clinging to each other at the edge of dawn, as perplexed by the human condition as all those in life seem to be. Proud, struggling with themselves, but kind, charming, generous. They seem to be holding their breaths as honey sunlight spills over the horizon, as the day comes, and their journey to the discovery of self and place continues under new and different skies. Sisters, friends, daughters. My daughters. My darling girls.

Down the dusty wooden steps there is a warmly lit Christmas tree, and small gifts in glittering reds and golds surround it. A clock ticks, the old furnace hisses. In the room across the hall his face is peaceful, etched with laughter lines that we had creased together and new cracks and crevasses of age that mark the years I wasn't there. Sometimes in his deepest of sleeps, I can feel two hands reaching out for me to which I respond only in whispers, "not yet my darling, not yet."

Across the estate, a young boy with a soft dusting of freckles on his nose and pale green eyes knots a scarf around his throat and steps out into the snow. The boy looks up to the sky and flakes of intricacies and wet catch in his eyelashes. There is a red string tied around his heart. There is a red string tied around his heart, and my daughter's heart is like the kite at the end of it, tugging at it, pulling towards freedom. In time though, she will come to understand that this string is looped around her heart too, and that this isn't, in fact, the end of the world, the end of the string. And that really it is the beginning.

A clock ticks, the old furnace hisses. Light creeps across the cool floorboards and catches the dust in the air, making it shimmer. My Jane would call it magic, my Skye, the refraction of light. Either way it was the becoming of future into present. The manifestation of yesterday's tomorrow. The noise up the stairs was Christmas morning coming, like the pitter patter of feet and stifled giggles from four young girls. And with these four sisters, light follows. I can see it trailing at their heels and twisting around their wrists, casting the cabin in a warm glow. They wake their daddy and their sweet mother with laughter and cries to "wake up, it's Christmas!" Following them is the boy in football themed pajama pants that gives Rosalind a wry kiss on the cheek, and knocking on the door is a freckled boy that gives Skye a goofy grin and his whole goofy heart.

And so time keeps ticking, and breakfast is made while carols are stuck up a little of key (Batty winces). Coffee percolates and everything smells of firewood and winter clothes. There is a rhythm in the rush, keeping in time to beating hearts and blood that runs a little faster under skin when fingers brush. It sounds like a minor chord, an unpracticed orchestra dripping chaotic sweetness, a street performer with fingers too cold to hit all the notes but that people stop for anyways. The lights aren't fading yet, the curtains not closing. They are together in the yawning world, doing whatever it takes just to stay alive.

I smile and watch it fall like gossamer around my daughters' shoulders. Rosalind was sitting amongst the chaos when she stopped suddenly, tugging Batty into her lap and turning her face upward. "I can feel her," she whispers to her sisters. Skye shivers and Jane loops an arm around her that Skye for once does not shrug off. They tug the feeling around their shoulders, and sit together in silence, waiting, waiting. "Me too," Skye says finally. And they laugh, though they don't really know why. It feels like a relief, like letting out a breath that had been held for too long.

For now, they cling to each other, waiting for everything and nothing at all. Time unravels and the edges fray, but the morning is unfurling with all of its youthful glory. Do not worry too much, my darling daughters. Do not close your eyes. Love one another fiercely and know that you are loved. Oh, my girls, however long you may live, I never can wish you a greater happiness than this!

…

This was Elizabeth Penderwick's point of view, if anybody missed it. The last line is not mine, but the last line of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, which I found appropriate. Inspired by "Stay Alive" by José González.