Voices clamored in the background as the small dark woman Anita associated as the mother of the dancing girl hurried from the house. The dancing fey child was being roughly handled, coerced into the covered cart and money was scattered on the ground. The woman sobbed and protested. Anita didn’t know what was wrong, but she knew that the woman didn’t want the beautiful girl to go with the men. Without thinking she jumped down from the tree branch, landing nimbly on hands and feet in the cart-path. Silently, she walked to where the mother stood begging for her child while the willful girl pouted from the cart. Looking up at the dark bear-like man, Anita knew she looked at death. He wore it like a scent upon his skin as if death was a lover he bathed in nightly.

Picking up the spilled coins in the road, she handed them to the mother and gripped the wrists of the dancing girl. It wasn’t until later that she remembered being of a height with the girl, or that her own hair swirling past her ears and eyes was of the same midnight hue. The last she remembered was the resounding silence as she looked up at the death man and offered up her hand, to take the dancing girl’s place. Then she woke trembling in her bed.

Feeling sick to her stomach, Anita lurched groggily into the small dim bathroom just off the stairs. It wasn’t until after she washed her face and patted it dry that it hit her; not only didn’t she feel like herself, she literally wasn’t herself. During the night her long dark brown hair had turned sooty black.

At breakfast her father stared, but her grandfather’s reaction was the worst. He ranted and screamed about the vanity of woman never being pleased with the gifts given her by the gods. Anita tried to show them that she didn’t do anything to her hair. She took them all the garbage bags and cans.

"See? No boxes of hair color," she said. Her father shrugged and seemed not to care but her grandfather continued to yell, snapping his cane against the top of the breakfast table.

"This is the fault of the old woman. She filled your head with stories of her youth!" He stood, staggering about the small kitchenette slashing the air with his gnarled hand. "How she and her stupid sisters connived to free some stupid brat and set loose some stupid family curse and salvation. Bah! I wish she would have left that nonsense back home in Russia!"