Sleeping Helena by Erzebet YellowBoy Read Free Book Online

argue and since the child’s physical health was excellent, he kept his concerns for those late nights when only the stars heard him utter complaints.
    Tutors fled from bites to the hand or kicks to the shin; one had a book flung at his head because he wouldn’t read a story quickly enough for her. Helena wooed them all with her grace and charm, but there was only so much they could take. The sisters simply shook their heads and increased their pay, or sent them out with an extra bribe in exchange for their silence. Helena sat in the center as always, while around her the household slowly fell into disarray.
    Her episodes were not the result of moods or growing pains, nor were they simple tantrums. As a result of her gifts, Helena was aware of herself. This little girl knew precisely what she was made of — eight parts in equal measure and not one thing more.
    All eight were painful masters, for all had a ravenous need. Music demanded music; she would play until her fingers bled if the other parts would let her, but song demanded song. By the end of each day her voice was hoarse, yet dance demanded dance and so it went. At least Helena could feed these, for she knew what they required. Not so her eighth part. That she could not name. She knew she was made of song and dance, of beauty and wit, of grace and finally, of death. How she’d been made she did not understand, but that did not concern her. The need to know and sate her eighth part ruled Helena’s world.

    It was a day like any other in late summer. The air was crisp, the birds were singing and the flowers were in bloom, but for the roses. Helena was in the kitchen garden under the watchful eyes of Hope, who was never to let the child out of her sight when they were outdoors. Hope’s apron waved in a breeze as she bent over a bed of mint while Helena, left to her own devices, skipped down a path and stopped at the hedge at its end. Once, she imagined, the path went on to wind through the roses. Now the hedge blocked the way. She parted its branches and ducked underneath where the bloomless roses grew in a dank mass of blackened stems.
    The briars held a secret tight by their thorns and Helena wanted to know it. She closed her hand upon a stem, opened it and gazed at the blood on her palm where one of the thorns had pricked her. She was studying the smear when she heard something fall onto the path behind her. She crawled back below the hedge and saw, amidst the leaves and twigs on the stone, the body of a tiny bird. It fluttered a wing and opened its beak; it was still alive.
    “Hope! Come look!” she shouted.
    “What’s this? Where have you been?” Hope reached Helena’s side, saw the bird and frowned. “The poor thing. I’m sorry, Helena, but there is nothing we can do.”
    Helena looked up at Hope, who shuddered at what she saw in the child’s eyes.
    A gift roared. Helena stood and before Hope could stop her, she brought her foot down on the little bird.
    “It’s dead,” Helena sang in her childish voice. “I did it.”
    Hope stood as still as stone until Helena touched her, and then she shuddered again. “Come, Helena,” she said, as if to a wild beast. “We must go in now.”
    Helena shrugged. She did not expect Hope to understand.
    She allowed Hope to wash her hands in the sink and then went in search of Thekla, who was found napping beside a small, bright fire in the library. Even in the heat of summer, Thekla’s legs were always cold. Her feet were shod in thick, black shoes and crossed each other neatly, but the stockings gathered around her ankles dispersed the illusion of dignity she tried to maintain. Helena’s vision was always full of shoes. She knew every pair her grandaunts owned and could count the numbers of eyelets in each by memory.
    She put a hand on Thekla’s knee. “Aunt,” she said, and watched Thekla spring up, grasping for composure.
    “You gave me quite a fright, young lady.” Thekla leaned forward and brushed a