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Enna’s Daughter

by Margaret Dunn

The girls were taken when the weather turned—when the sea birds thinned, when tussock grasses hardened. Older girls, who had been through the allocation months before, began packing their things: wool sweaters, long underwear, books. The younger ones brought stuffies: knit foxes or cornhusk dolls, ones they hadn’t held in years but now were reaching for, at the prospect of three months away. They were fifteen, and they had known about allocation since they were old enough to walk. They’d seen their older sisters go, or, if they were a certain age, their own mothers leave for the winter months, and come back pregnant, sometimes already starting to show.

On the selected morning, the girls gathered in the Common. The sun bled through the lattice of poplar branches as the administrators went through headcount. After each name, Signe, the elderwoman, anointed the girl with oils before they boarded the bus. At some point, the administrators stopped, murmuring to one another, and called Signe over. Whispers rippled through the crowd.

Someone was missing.

***

Larkin was fifteen, with freckles and dark hair to her waist. Often, she could be found wading through the tidal flats, building little boats and setting them adrift, so that was one of the first places the administrators looked. She wasn’t there, nor was she in the cottage she shared with her mother. Enna spoke to the administrators in her kitchen, her hands shaking, while Signe put the kettle on.

“She wanted to stretch her legs before the bus—walk through town and back,” Enna said. “Some older girls had warned her about how long the ride to the outpost is. She said she’d be right back.”

The administrators took notes. One asked if her daughter had seemed anxious. “Girls can get that way sometimes,” he went on. “About the allocation months.”

“Nervous, sure.” Enna swallowed. “No more than expected.”

Signe cupped Enna’s chin in her hand, then turned to the administrators. “I’m confident Larkin will turn up,” she said. “All this fuss. Why don’t you bring the other girls to the outpost now and come again tomorrow? Larkin will be back. She’s probably having a laugh.”

“It’s not a laughing matter,” the administrator murmured. “The balance would be upset. People will hurt.”

“Of course,” Signe sighed. “But she hasn’t even been missing a day.”

***

That first week, the other women of the settlement were kind to Enna. They were concerned—searching the thickets and the brush, calling out for Larkin, checking their own closets, their floorboards, asking their children if they were hiding her somewhere. There was no evidence that the perimeter walls had been breached or scaled. Larkin had just vanished.

The turn came when the food began to spoil. The stores of meat and sweet potatoes blackened without cause. None of the firewood from the Common would hold flame. Fish and cheese rotted before they could be eaten, the supply of quilts dwindled. The air seemed colder than it had last year. Enna went herself to the thicket to collect branches. When she set the bundle down in the Common, no one would take the wood, let alone look at her.

A month of this. The schoolhouse felt warmer than Enna’s own cottage. Usually, she taught arithmetic and the alphabet there, but the children had stopped coming. Late one night, she walked the path to Signe’s house. It was modest and clapboard, painted white. Enna had spent many nights here years earlier, when her son, Thom, had left at twelve to live at the outpost, as all boys that age did. It was a difficult notion for Enna to grasp—never seeing her son again. She felt him like an absence. Like her liver had been removed, and the gap was still there.

Signe understood these things. She’d had eight children—most of them sons. That night, she did as she had years ago: guided Enna to the table and went to her pantry, then came back with a bottle of liquor, pouring them each a glass.

“Nicked this from the outpost the last time I led prayers,” Signe murmured.

Enna wiped her eyes. She had been sleepless, distraught, since the turn started. “Why is this happening? The cold being harsher, the food going sour.”

“You know why. Nature has been upset by Larkin not turning up, by her not going.”

“I don’t know where she is.”

“I know. I love you like you were my own child.” Signe took Enna’s hands. “But your complicity, or lack of it, doesn’t change the fact that the girls winter with the men, get pregnant, and return to us in the spring. That is the cycle in nature.”

Signe’s fingers warm and swan-crooked. Enna clutched them tighter.

“You know what winter is? It’s Demeter’s bereavement for her daughter.”

Enna sighed. “You know I don’t really believe in those old gods.”

“You must,” Signe said. “This spoil, this unnatural cold—it is what happens when the cycle is disrupted. Do you know what would happen if the girls weren’t returned to us?” Enna shook her head.

“The winter would stay.”

***

“Maybe I should just go.”

The weeks inside had turned Larkin pale. She was filthy, too, and restless. The makeshift room beneath the schoolhouse was only a few feet across. Enna had spent years digging it, but still.

“Mama, if people are hurting because of me-”

“Enough.”

The pair sat across from one another, outlined in candlelight. Enna had brought her daughter bread and some playing cards. Larkin rubbed an ace between her fingers.

“I don’t want-”

“You haven’t done it, Larkin. To go to that outpost, to live like that, with those men.”

“But wasn't that how you got me? Was I not worth it?”

Enna looked at her daughter. Her feet bare, legs bony beneath her nightgown. Enna could not remember which man had fathered her. There had been too many. A different one each night, sometimes several. The kind one with the limp. The ones who preferred force. Before Enna was born, society had done away with marriages, with claims of love and ownership. The sharing meant less violence, fewer grudges, more children. No one knew whose child was whose. No one belonged to anyone else—or, in that way, everyone belonged to everyone.

Upstairs, a noise. Enna snuffed the candle and climbed the ladder to the crawlspace behind the chalkboard. She lifted the chalkboard just enough to slip through, then shifted it back into place.

The voices were outside.

Enna wrapped herself in a shawl and stepped into the cold. Two men in administrator uniforms stood beside the schoolhouse wall, prying insulation free.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Maintenance, ma’am,” one answered. A pause, then. “Aren’t you supposed to be home? It’s past curfew.”

Enna looked at the handful of insulation he held—pink batting, feathers, scraps of newspaper.

“It’s so cold in my house,” she said. “Warmer here.”

“We’ll get you some firewood.”

“Nothing will light.”

“Another quilt, then.”

***

When she returned to the schoolhouse the next day, the walls looked untouched. The insulation was tightly packed. It smelled new. Beneath the boards of her own cottage’s walls, Enna found concrete. The insulation was accessible only on the outside. Each time she tried to lift the outer panels, administrators happened to be passing by.

On the third day of this, with the gray uniforms in sight, Enna stepped outside and collapsed.

***

The infirmary was walled off from the rest of the outpost. Enna was given a bed and an IV drip. She told the doctor was nauseous. Finally, after a week, she noticed a young man moving from bed to bed, neatening the empty sheets. She pushed herself upright and staggered toward him, bringing the IV with her.

“What are you doing?” He flinched. “You can’t—”

“Don’t you know me?”

His face had changed. The cleft of his chin had deepened, the acne scars like pinpricks.

“Please,” Thom whispered. “This isn’t allowed.”

“You heard about your sister?”

“They’ve looked everywhere—even sent men outside the walls. There’s no sign of her.”

Enna nodded.

He studied her, then jerked his arm away. “How did you know I was here?”

“I heard from other women that you were a trainee. That you tested their blood for pregnancy. That you were kind to them, very kind,” Enna said. “I need the truth. Is Larkin’s absence making this winter worse? Is it causing the suffering?”

Thom hesitated.

“In a way, yes.”

“Are they putting something on the wood—something to not let it light? Just tell me, tell me so I know I’m not going insane.”

He was quiet, studying the IV line in her arm. His fingers brushed the tubing.

“We calibrate the drip,” he said. “We can make it run fast or slow. Flood someone with medication or starve them of it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When women come back here to give birth, when the pain is too much, they ask for more morphine. Instead of saying no, we blame the IV wiring. We blame the other outposts that manufacture the equipment.”

She stared at him.

“Scarcity,” he said softly, “is a form of control. Scarcity of food, of warmth. The trick—the real trick—is making people believe the scarcity is caused by something else.

Someone else.”

“Like the gods,” she whispered.

He didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

***

Her cottage had been searched while she was at the infirmary. Enna stood in the doorway, noting the cabinet that had been left open, the drag marks on the floorboards. If they’d found Larkin, she would've known by now. They would have summoned her. They would have made a spectacle of it.

She waited until nightfall, then slipped outside, moving along the frost-slick path to Signe’s house. The downstairs was empty. An ember pulsed in the fireplace, barely alive. Enna moved loudly around the kitchen, and footsteps sounded overhead—Signe, descending in her nightdress. Her face wrinkled with sleep.

“Enna? What are you doing?”

“Needed a drink,” Enna gestured to the bottle of wine on the counter. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course.” Signe kissed her, then sat. Their thighs touched beneath the table. “Are you feeling better?”

Enna passed her the glass, and Signe took a sip.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Anything.”

“You said winter is a reflection of Demeter’s bereavement. The loss of her daughter.”

“Yes.”

“Then why would it fall on us? Wouldn’t it be taken out on the men? Wouldn’t we be safe? Wouldn’t winter only come because daughters are taken from mothers, not when mothers keep them?”

Signe blinked.

Enna leaned forward, her voice soft. “Your gods don’t make sense, Signe. Neither does that pantry you keep. All that contraband—radios, candy, liquor. Are those things your administrator sons bring you? Payment for keeping us in line?”

Enna reached into her shawl and drew out the syringe, then plunged it into the woman’s thigh. Signe jerked, knocking Enna’s hand away, and yanked the needle from her skin.

“What was that?”

“Morphine. Nicked it from the infirmary.”

Signe’s eyes flared. Then her breaths changed—hitching, shallow.

“Or, if we are being honest with one another, my son gave it to me.”

Signe went slack, striking the floor with a wet crack. Blood flecked the stone.

***

The chalkboard from the schoolhouse was found in the Common at dawn. Someone had propped it upright, and the message scrawled across it—in ink, not chalk—relayed what Enna had learned. The administrators shouted for the women to clear the Common, tried to drag the board away, but it was too late. The women had read it. By then, Enna and Larkin were already gone.

Hours earlier, they’d used Thom’s identification card to slip beyond the walls. They went north, through the frost fields, and stopped only when they couldn’t go further. Their feet bruised, the cold tearing at their lungs. They gathered the fallen limbs of a poplar and built a camp, nestling into one another. The fire caught quickly.

The wood held the flame.