Silver Pen Winner: Untitled by Michelle Bulsiewicz

Michelle reached 15,000 a while back! Sorry about our belated congrats but WAY TO GO! We’re so proud of you and all our Silver Pens.

You can find Michelle on instagram at @novelste (and other places) and on twitter at @mgarrett589 (and other places)!

Untitled

A Hannah/Samuel story but with witches. To get pregnant, a mother offers her daughter’s future to a witch nunnery. The child can see beyond the veil, and will use this power to heal the tear her mother made in it.

Olwina’s grief was a storm. It battered her from within, trapped, rattling beneath her rib cage so her lungs burned, tattered and frayed, with every breath. With every exhale, she didn’t know if she would ever manage to breathe again. She didn’t know if she would make it to the next breath. Or the next.
Part of her didn’t want to.
Inside her house, her mother and sister were busy scrubbing away the evidence of Olwina’s near death experience. It was as if a ravenous beast had come through and left only carnage in its wake. But that beast was her own body, rejecting the life she’d grown within her, trying to take her down with it.
Her mother had told her ten times in the last hour that she had never seen a woman survive after losing that much blood. The sheets were soaked with it.
But here Olwina stood. Not only alive but standing. Not only standing but whole, hale and hardy as she should never have been after such an ordeal. But she wasn’t grateful. She longed for her body to reflect the pain it had brought upon her. She longed to ache in her physical form as she did in her soul.
It didn’t make sense, her healing.
Her child’s body in the grave made a gross kind of logical sense—the tiny creature was months early, her translucent skin and wide eyes hadn’t the smallest chance of survival in the open air, her little lungs as fragile as butterfly wings

Congrats again, Michelle! Sounds fascinating! And sad 🙁 Poor Olwina