When I was ten my father sent me out to the well in the backwoods of our home to fetch water. It was winter, and the snow burned my bare feet. The neighbors kept hounds in their back stables for hunting in the spring and summer, but every year they seemed to forget about them, and in moments of desperation the poor things would break from their lockups and roam our forest for the last skinny scraps of meat that weren’t able to hide away for the winter. One set its sights upon me and gouged the flesh from my neck and that’s how I ended up here.

I watched from that ethereal place above where everything you touch just barely escapes your grasp, like dandelion seeds in the breeze. I watched as the sun fell behind the white mountains and rose again in the east and still my carcass lay in the snow, the wetness keeping the blood fresh and the frost glistening on my skin like marble. I imagined my family’s search party must have taken all night. Indeed, when my father finally came it was with our own hunting dog, and when he saw the patch of red in the snow he shrieked and fell backwards. Then he came for me with frantic, open arms. I stood and opened mine back but he passed right through me and took my body in his arms and carried me home.

My mother and sister shed their tears silently as they washed me and covered me in a shroud of our warmest blankets. My father had dug a small grave at the base of the evergreen in our backyard, and slowly, like he was carrying a sheet of the most precious silk, he picked me up and laid me in it and buried me in the snow.

It was at this point that passersby had begun to crowd around our home, inquiring about the whole ordeal. I fluttered among them like the shadow of a butterfly, going here and there and hearing this and that. The heavenly veil that separated us warped their sound, and I strained to hear. When someone asked who had died, one old man shook his head.

“Wicked thing,” he said, and spat on the ground. He gestured to the grand old house at the end of the road. It stood tall and black against the snowfall.

“The Baron?” someone said.

He nodded. “Set his hounds on his own slave girl, the one whose parents died last winter. I tell you, must’ve been hard for the poor thing. No family and all.”