//------------------------------//
// Delilah's Birthday 
// Story: Tales From the Well - Pirene Shorts 
// by Ether Echoes 
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In the weeks since her daughters went missing, Delilah never hesitated to glance at her phone when it buzzed for her attention. Scrambling for her purse, she lifted it with shaking fingers and turned it on only to find a notification from a colleague wishing her a happy birthday.
She started to type a long rant about his insensitivity and his ignorance of her plight that listed in scathing detail everything that was wrong with him emotionally and professionally, including the long-standing sexual harassment controversy that should have ended his career years ago, but Aaron’s hand covered hers. Gazing up into his patient eyes, she sighed and left off. Taking his hand, she settled back in the uncomfortable chair to watch the drama before her rather than creating more at work. Part of her whispered that his crimes would come due, soon, but she ignored such fancies.
“I don’t see why you’re still bothering to hide him,” Victor growled. A big man, his hands roughened with farm work, he could growl quite convincingly. “You’re just making yourselves accomplices. I get it, if Marcus had been my kid, I’d have backed him up at first, too, but the evidence just keeps piling up. When are you going to admit that your son murdered our little girls?”
“Go to hell, Victor.” Mahalia Flores bristled from her place by her own husband. Though a slight Filipino woman, she could have been carved from ore with how little ground she gave to the bigger man. “Marcus is a good boy. He loved those girls. He’d as soon die in their place. I pray to God he’s all right, and that he doesn’t come home with this lynch mob waiting for him.”
“He’s a dropout and a jilted lover. It was a crime of passion!” Victor shook off his wife Mary’s attempts to calm him. “My baby girl is out there, dead and maybe worse, and I know you know something!”
“Naomi’s not dead,” Delilah said aloud before she could stop herself.
The argument broke off as the other parents stared at her and she wished profoundly that she could have reached back in time and shoved her fist down her throat. Jose, Marcus’ father, gave her a sympathetic look, while Victor and Mary looked livid. “Excuse me? Have you heard something?”
“I agree with Mahalia and Jose,” she said to cover up. “Marcus never would have hurt Naomi. If Daphne and Amelia were in danger, he’d go to help them. That’s why he stole all those guns.”
Mary rolled her eyes. “Oh, now this is just fucking theater, isn’t it? How do you know that, Delilah? We already know Marcus is a criminal—”
“He is not a criminal!” Jose shouted. “Cannabis should be legal.”
“Shit, I want that, too, but wanting something not to be a crime doesn’t make it any less of a crime!” Victor shouted back. “Even if he didn’t, he stole guns from his uncle! Unless your brother gave up those firearms willingly, Jose?”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have illegally converted AR-15s stacked up in the attic, then,” Delilah said, dry. Ideas and thoughts pressed at her so hard it ached, of monsters and a centaur and the world cracking, and she forced herself to breathe and think of equations, to twist a magnetic field in her mind and model the containment of particles hotter than the sun.
Victor sputtered, staring at her while she planted her head in her free hand to massage the headache. “How do you—? No, I’m not getting into this. For fuck’s sake, Aaron, if your wife is losing it, take her home and let her get some rest.”
Aaron gave him the steady, cool look that had served him well reporting in Sri Lanka and Lebanon. “I don’t make my wife do anything she doesn’t want to do, Victor.”
Before the argument could break out again, a deputy leaned through the door and glared at them. “Knock it off! I can and will put you in cells to cool off.”
“Has there been any word?” Aaron asked, and Delilah was grateful for his calm, especially when her head was fit to burst. “What did the sheriff have to share with us?”
The sheriff himself stepped inside. He looked around at the group, meeting each of their eyes. “Mr. and Mrs. Ocean, we found a pair of bodies in the river. Two girls, about the right age and size for yours. We hoped you might identify them for us.”
Delilah groaned softly, shaking her head. “It’s not them,” she said, gasping. The pain made it impossible to focus, impossible to contain the torn open scar that poured thoughts and ideas into her head. “Katie and Jessica Holmes. Providence. A man took them out in his van, he, he…”
For a moment, her awareness slipped out of her body. She saw Aaron catch her as she crumpled over, saw the looks of pity on the Flores and the Quinns. Something grabbed her attention, flickering green, and she looked beyond the walls, beyond the curve of the sky, to see a green aurora, the color of her eyes, grace the boughs of a tree of stars.
Returning to her body came with just as much nauseating speed, and once again she found herself grateful to her husband as she emptied her breakfast into a wastebin he’d had the presence of mind to fetch. He held her hair and rubbed her back, while Victor and Mary went to try and identify the bodies in their places.
Her body quaked and tried to heave even when she had nothing to give. The tension in her arms left them numb and tingling, and even after the storm passed she felt like the aftermath of a hurricane.
Looking up, Aaron found Jose holding out a water bottle. “Thanks,” he said, twisting the cap and offering it to Delilah. She nodded her thanks as well and swished it around, spitting out the first couple gulps before drinking it down. Sweat beaded on her brow.
“Would you like to join us in prayer?” Mahalia offered, her voice gentle.
“Unlikely,” a new voice said from the door. “She used to scream whenever the Catholic school nuns tried to make her pray. If those fucking penguins couldn’t make her bow to something she couldn’t see with vinegar, I doubt you’ll manage with honey.”
“Mother?” Looking up in shock, Delilah met eyes just as green as hers. Rail-thin, with her short blond hair just starting to go gray and clad in clothing that could be described as almost masculine, Henrietta cut a strange figure in the doorway. She seemed to defy age, her features weathered but not wrinkled, and she leaned against the frame and played with an unlit cigarette between her fingers. “When did… what took you so long? I haven’t been able to reach you for weeks and your grandchildren might be back there, dead!”
If they were dead, if she found out that day of all days, it might shatter what’s left of her soul. They weren’t, though. She couldn’t say that they weren’t and sound convincing doing it. Mahalia gave the woman a distasteful look, but reserved harsh words, letting mother and daughter have their moment. Aaron’s hand tightened on hers.
“I haven’t checked my messages in weeks. I came to see you and found out on the way in.” She glanced back down the hall. “They’re not, by the way. I already looked; just another pair of blond girls who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Jose’s look matched his wife’s. “You don’t sound all that sorry for them.”
“Of course I’m sorry for them. The world deals us shitty hands and their parents are going to find they got the shittiest hand of all. If I took a moment to cry for everyone and everything I felt bad for, I’d be a wreck.”
“You never cried for Jason,” Delilah snapped. “Forgive me if I don’t believe you. Why are you really here?”
Her mother fixed her with a steady gaze. Even decades out of her roof, Delilah had trouble holding that stare, but fear for her children kept her steady. For once, her mother broke contact first, turning to put the cigarette in her mouth and then down again. “I mourned in my own way. I’m still mourning.” She didn’t look up when Delilah started to deliver an acidic retort, snapping, “Don’t. For fuck’s sake, Delilah, I’m here because we’re family, because it’s your and Jason’s birthday and because I didn’t want to be alone this time. I had a feeling things would be worse than ever and look how fucking right that intuition was.” She let out her tension in a slow breath. I’m sorry I didn’t check. You know how I get when it’s close.”
Delilah lowered her eyes and hot tears burned. The Flores couple excused themselves politely, while Aaron sighed. “Why don’t we all head home? There’s nothing for us here.”
“Yeah,” Delilah sniffed. She got to her feet and made her way to the door, trying to contain her sobs. Her mother’s bony hand on her arm surprised her, and she met her eyes. “Mom?”
Sighing, Henrietta pulled her in, eliciting a fresh wave of weeping. Her mother was stiff and hard, a terrible hugger, but Delilah overflowed, pouring out an ocean of pain and loss, and she needed her contact more than anything in that moment. Anything except her girls, at least. “Let it out,” she murmured, her own voice dry and cracked. “They’re alive. I know it right down to the bone.”
Sniffling, Delilah accepted a tissue from Aaron and rubbed her face. She didn’t let go of her mother’s hand. “You really think so?”
“Don’t you?”
“I don’t know what to believe.” She sighed. “Yeah, come on. Let’s go.”





The house felt empty. It felt like a shell. While she fetched drinks from the fridge, Delilah replayed the moment over and over again when she’d come home from the theater and found Naomi and Daphne there, the two heading off for a sleepover with Amelia. She remembered wanting to see her daughter, recalled an insistent premonition that she should check on them before they left, but she’d ignored it just as she’d ignored the warning during the play, to leave and drive off into the woods as fast as she could.
She hated herself for ignoring those warnings.
“Should we make up the guest room for two?” Aaron asked as she stepped into the family room. “If Greta will be joining us.”
“We’re on the rocks again. My fault, I was being a bitch,” Henrietta said, accepting a Diet Coke and popping it with a hiss. “I sent her a message about the girls and she responded with her sympathies, but she’s in New York and won’t be here for a couple days.”
“Well, you’re welcome to stay.” Aaron looked down at the coffee table and frowned.
Following his attention, she found to her surprise that she’d automatically set for six, not three. In addition to her own Diet Coke, she’d given Aaron a Dr. Pepper, then a sugar cane apple soda and one orange, the kind favored by Daphne and Amelia respectively, plus an extra apple soda between them. A little shaken, she sat down next to Aaron. “Mom? I think I’m going crazy again.”
“You’re not crazy,” Aaron insisted. “It’s perfectly natural.”
“You married a good man, Lilah. I’d listen to him.” Henrietta still hadn’t lit her cigarette, even if she played with it. “It’s not like it was back then. You couldn’t distinguish what was real from what wasn’t. Have you tried to find a door to the underworld lately?”
Delilah blushed and ducked her head. “No. I want to, though. Not the underworld – I’m convinced if I walked out that door, I could wander into the forest and find my way to some other world, though. If that isn’t crazy, I don’t know what is.”
Aaron squeezed her hand more firmly still.
“It’s genetic. Daphne had it for a bit. I had it. My mother and grandmother, all of my siblings, we all had it once in a while. Okay, sure, my brother disappeared during the war and no one ever saw him again, but it was fucking Vietnam and he was drafted and no one thought he’d stick around for that bullshit hell hole. So what if he was ranting about dragons and shit?” Henrietta gestured off into the distance. “In ‘79, when I was with IBM setting up mainframes at the University of Athens in Greece, and one of our local contacts freaked out when he saw me. He said I was the striking image of a fifth century saint venerated on his home island, who was revered for predicting deadly storms, and I did that test and found our genetics go right back there before meandering through Europe. It goes way back.”
“Having a genetic predisposition towards schizophrenia doesn’t make it better when it manifests, Mom.” She sighed, leaning into Aaron. “I’m not sure how much sense it makes for our genes to survive intact like that over sixteen hundred years, anyway.”
“Point is, you keep your feet firmly on the ground, let the storm pass, and go back on with your life. It’s our curse, the price we pay for being brilliant. I sincerely believe that all the work I did with the others at IBM and the work you’ve done in physics would be impossible if not for that. Daphne and Amelia are just as bright. Mark me, they’ll change the world.”
“If we’re so crazy, then why are you so certain that they’re alive?” Daphne bit back. “What, have you started to believe in the things we feel in your old age?”
Henrietta shrugged. “I’m certain, and you’re certain, too.”
“Crazy is a demeaning word,” Aaron said, “and I hate that you put yourself down like that. Yes, you have fits, and yes there seems to be a genetic component to it, but you’re not crazy. It’s a temporary illness that we’ve been managing ever since we married.”
“Fine, fine. I can’t argue with you, too, love.” Delilah grabbed tissue and rubbed her eyes. She stared down at it. “I should go get some stuff for dinner. Just because I hate my birthday doesn’t mean I can’t make a good meal for my family.”
“You sit still,” Henrietta waved her down and rose. “I’ll be the one cooking around here. You spoiled runts didn’t have to work restaurants like I did. Jason, would you—” A stricken look crossed her face, and she dropped the cigarette. She bent a shaking hand down to take it. “Fuck me.”
“Maybe you both should rest,” Aaron offered gently.
“Shit, Aaron, if I had to take a nap every time I saw my dead child, I’d be in a fucking coma.” Henrietta waved him off and went to grab her coat. “I’ll be back. I need some air after that, anyway.” She gave her daughter’s hand a squeeze, then made her way outside. They heard the click of a lighter as she went.
Delilah sniffed. “You know, Aaron? Strangely, that made me feel better. I don’t remember much of anything after it happened, just the waking dreams, and when I snapped out of it, Mother wouldn’t talk to me or anything. I accused her of being an unfeeling bitch.”
“Honey, we’ve talked about your mother, and I think we all know that she’s a flawed human being, as emphasized by today.” Aaron gave her a hug and pulled her in close. “I want to believe, too. I know my Amelia is resourceful, and that Daphne never gives herself credit for how smart she is, but…” He sighed into her hair. “The Everfree State Forest isn’t all that big. It’s bounded on all sides by little towns and roads. They can’t possibly be lost in there still, not after all this time. At the same time I know the counterarguments. No bodies? Marcus’ bike abandoned? Daphne’s clothes and phone left on a riverbank? Nothing from the dogs sent to sniff them out? If there were signs of disposed bodies, they’d have been found by now. It’s fishy, it triggers all of my reporting instincts ten times over, and I want to go out there with you and find them, but…”
“Yeah.” Delilah closed her eyes.
Once again, she found herself dissociating, parting from her flesh and blood in the warm circle of Aaron’s arms. She drifted up through the wood and wiring above their heads, through Daphne’s room, left untouched after two weeks, and through the attic, until she stood soaring over the house and the little town, her gaze piercing the woods behind the house. They seemed to wind away with impossible angles, as though a branch of some ineffable tree pierced space and time and thrust through their ordinary dimension to form pathways that wound into infinity. There, among the trees near the house, three girls walked, two blondes and one with hair the color of ink. They climbed up the hill to the fence, and started across the backyard.
Delilah gasped like a woman drowning, terrifying Aaron as she scrambled from the chair and out of his arms. She stumbled, hitting her ankle on the coffee table, but didn’t let it stop her as she limped to the back door.
“Delilah?” He got up, trying to catch for her. “Delilah!”
Finding her feet, she charged to the screen door out back and threw it open, while red and gold leaves swirled in a fresh wind. She expected to find nothing. She knew, intellectually, that she’d find nothing, no teens and child making their way from the white fence.
Except she did.
Except they were there.
Daphne and Amelia and someone she couldn’t see for her tunnel vision stood there on the back porch, staring at her in shock as her head screamed and her heart pounded. She felt sick, weak, nauseated and unsteady. She took them in, studying their features, noting with agony the healing scars and the skin burned golden by the sun.
It was just a delusion. It had to be.
“Oh my God,” Aaron called. “Daphne? Amelia?”
It wasn’t.
Aaron caught her as she fell, blacking out, but she didn’t stop plummeting. She fell through a world of particles, of the substrate of the universe, and into a place of shifting possibility and uncertainty. It was beautiful and strange, and in those undulating depths, chains grew taut, and whispers filtered in through the dark. A green light shone above, and she looked up to see Daphne illuminated by it, holding her hand out, looking more sad and beautiful than she’d ever imagined she could be.
“This isn’t a place for us, Mom,” she whispered. “Come on… let’s all go home.”
Grasping her daughter’s hand, she let her drag her back towards the light.





The water ran cold from the tap, but Delilah needed precisely that. She splashed her face with the freezing water and shuddered, fumbling for a towel and wiping her face. When she opened them, eyes so brightly green they seemed to shine in the dim light of the powder room stared back at her.
It was turning out to be one hell of a birthday.
Ironic, really, considering how long ago she had stopped celebrating Halloween, let alone the birthday that fell on it. Her heart pounded, and she gripped the sink, afraid she might throw up again, but nothing came, just dry heaves that never went anywhere.
“Mom?” Daphne’s knock came through the door. “Are you all right?”
Delilah winced as though the knocks had been at her head. Everything seemed too bright, too close, too real. She drew another breath and sighed. “I’m fine, sweetheart. I’ll be right out.” After taking a moment to straighten her hair and wipe her face, she turned and walked out. There, on the couch, sat her daughters, alive and... alive. They were alive.
Not that she’d ever doubted for a moment that they were alive. She knew, somehow, without knowing how she could know, struggling to make herself stop believing that she knew while deep down she just did. She wished that she could say it was mother’s intuition, but, frankly, she knew better.
It was hard to say which of her girls was the most changed. The two of them burned in a way that was almost unreal. Weeks ago, when they’d left, they’d been a self-absorbed teenage girl and a troubled, wide-eyed girl - now, though she saw a mature, battered young woman in Daphne’s eyes.
In Amelia’s, she found someone far, far older than herself looking back at her.
Aaron took Delilah’s hand as she stood there, unspeaking, and guided her to a seat at one of the chairs. She hardly noticed the dark-haired girl sitting between them on the couch, awkward and quiet after sharing her part of the tale, where she’d spilled in intimate detail the heartfelt talk she’d had with her youngest to save the entire world from her actions, to empathize with her loneliness, hurt, and guilt. She sipped an apple soda and stared at the floor.
Delilah threatened to seize up again, squeezing her husband’s hand hard enough that he winced. He bore it in silence, his own eyes as lost as hers.
He, though, hadn’t seen it. He hadn’t witnessed it in dreams. He didn’t bear the responsibility that she bore.
No matter how she tried to avoid it, Jason’s eyes swum back at her, mirrors to her own. When she turned her head, two children galloped through the house on all fours, laughing and snorting and nickering and all-around horse playing. They ran into a brightly lit living room not unlike the one she sat in with her family, and tussled until a sharp whistle brought them to a stop.
Their mother stood there, her blond hair curled tightly, as regal and poised as ever as she looked down at them with the same bright green eyes they all possessed. “Delilah, Jason, what the hell are you two doing?”
The kids disentangled themselves from one another and scrambled up to sit, beaming, the sun in their hair. At that age, there had been no distinguishing one from the other. Jason would grow his hair as long as he could before Henrietta had it chopped off, and Delilah got hers cut as well in solidarity with her twin. “We’re horses, Mom!” she chirped.
“Ponies,” Jason corrected, giggling.
“Well, stop it at once. You need to be people. I played games like that at your age, but my parents set me straight. The world’s not going to let you be horses.”
“Aww, but Mom!” Delilah went up to her and smiled, twisting in her little dress. “We were just playing. I promise we’ll grow up, but can’t we be kids now? It’s our birthday! Halloween, even! We even got costumes.”
Henrietta sighed and reached down to run fingers through her messy hair. “All right, but only for now. You especially need to be studying, Delilah – the world doesn’t take well to women who think for themselves, not yet. You won’t get allowances on your birthday in the real world, either.”
“That’s silly,” Jason said. “If anything, girls make the most sense.”
Henrietta laughed, but Delilah never forgot those words, even if they faded somewhat. The Thorsens never really forget anything, as others quickly found out. Even decades later, pain blossomed sharply, and but ten years later she returned from the car, her coat forgotten, to find Jason in her clothes, sitting on her bed and getting ready to go out with a wig and everything. He’d wept, breaking down, and she’d held her twin through his storm. They spent that Halloween together, indistinguishable again for the first time since puberty.
They’d gone home together, walking beneath the streetlamps, skirts swishing about their ankles. Delilah had looked at the person she thought of as her brother, taking in his smooth cheeks, the forms under his dress, even the way he shifted his hips as he walked. “So…”
“Yeah. It’s been going on for a while.” He rubbed at his throat, as if he could massage out the deepness in his voice.
“Why, though? I mean... I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know.” He looked at her, eyes unchanged, undimmed. “It’s how I see myself. I never stopped having the dreams, of the two of us together as mares, Delilah... I just can’t stop thinking about it, stop feeling like something went wrong.”
“You gotta stop thinking that way. I still get the dreams, but I’m focusing on the real world, Jason.” She took his – her? – hand and squeezed. “What about... I don’t know, I hear there’s treatments for that? Mom, she’s gay, she’ll be okay with it.”
“I haven’t decided. Sometimes... forget it.” Jason sighed, averting her eyes.
They didn’t speak of it again. Whenever she brought it up, Jason would turn away and talk about something else. Day by day, month by month, he grew more and more agitated, more distant.
It was Halloween of next year. She remembered walking home with her then-boyfriend Jack, only to stop on the side of the sidewalk. She clutched her heart, her eyes squeezing shut, and wondered if she was having an attack, if she’d gasp out her last breath there as the autumn leaves swirled about her feet. Every breath seemed to tear it in half, bit by bit, until half of her heart seemed to come loose. With green eyes wide and bright, she raced home, dropping her bag.
There was nothing they could do by the time she got home, and that was the last birthday she ever celebrated.
When she came back, her eyes blinking away tears and blurring the vision, she found Daphne looking at her knowingly, her heart going out to her mother. She got up, crossing the seemingly vast gulf between child and parent, and settled next to her and embraced her, burying her face in her mother’s shoulder.
The shock of contact sent more memories tumbling, of watching Daphne, who looked so like Amelia at that age, angrily assert that she had a best friend, a sister of the heart, only for Delilah to burst out with a welter of confused, angry emotions shouting her down. Guilt ate through her heart like acid, and she lowered her face into Daphne’s hair, tears pouring hot and fast.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I was wrong. I was so wrong.”
She couldn’t take it back, though. She could have fixed everything if she’d just believed her, if she hadn’t torn her down like her mother had torn her down and her mother before that, if she’d refused to give up on her like she gave up on Jason, maybe things would could have been different.
“I know, Mama.” She sighed. “Don’t destroy yourself over it, please.”
Delilah tightened her grip about her daughter. “Too late for that. I love you, Daphne. I wouldn’t ever let you go again, if I could... if I could stop you.”
They stood like that for a long time, only to part with reluctance. Daphne lowered her eyes and sighed. “I wish I could stay.”
“Why can’t you? Even if you’re this… this goddess of the new world, why can’t you stay? Why can’t either of you stay. Amelia…”
In answer, Amelia swelled in size without any apparent effort, becoming a fully-grown woman wearing a foreign gown, displaying every bit of the promise of beauty and strength she’d shown as a girl. Her apparent age grew to her mid-twenties and stayed there. They’d stay there for ages to come. “I think it’s probably time I left the nest.” Even so, pain settled across her features as she stared out the window at a pair of blue jays perched on the sycamore. The ones from her journey, Delilah knew. “I’m not your little girl anymore.”
“Bullshit you’re not,” Aaron said, shattering his silence. He rose and came to crouch by her side. “Amelia, I don’t care what you’ve been through or how many centuries you have behind you, my little girl is exactly what you are.”
Amelia tried to answer, something tart and bitter, but she crumbled before him and started to cry, pulling into his embrace.
Leit Motif shuffled into a tighter ball, peering at the humans around her, and Delilah felt a profound sympathy for the way she held her hands, wondering what it would be like to have hooves of her own, just like she’d dreamed as a girl.
Daphne brushed a hand through her hair as she sat down. “I wish we could stay, but the world really does need us. This planet is changing, it’s going to become more and more magical as my Age waxes, and there’s going to be monsters and war and death. I have to stop that.”
“For a little bit, at least?” Delilah asked, taking her hands. “Daphne, honey… you were taken from me, please don’t just disappear.”
“I won’t,” she murmurs. “We’ll still be in touch. Oh, Mom… I’m so sorry.”
The front door opened, and Henrietta’s boots clopped on the front wood. They all favored boots that made that noise, Delilah realized, and no longer had to guess why. She emerged from the front, putting groceries down, and stared around at the scene, fixing on Amelia for a moment before meeting Delilah’s eyes. “Well? See? What did I tell you.” She popped a new cigarette from her pack, clicked her lighter, and took a long drag before letting it out slowly. “Happy birthday, Delilah. It’s your best one yet.”