Revenir | Her Name is Beloved

A mother's love transcends death itself

Hello and welcome to the Fiction Section of The Untangling. Just like in my main publication, these stories centre on themes of identity and what it means to be human. Main genres are literary and slipstream fiction and fantasy written with a lyrical and poetic writing style.

You are reading a standalone story from Revenir, an anthology I co-wrote with my son, who died in 2021. The stories explore the human experience and delve deep into themes of love, loss, and the search for meaning. Written in a haunting, lyrical style and set in a single fantasy world, this collection is for readers looking for character-driven stories with strong emotional resonance.

Tonight was not as others before it.

The streets of the town hummed with the activity of many. Faces blurred like the lake that lay at the border, melding together, blurring at the edges. And mine? Just another, lost in the swarm. The rich bustled past in garbs of silk and velvet, leather boots, toting quality purses—emblems of high status in a city of many. Yet on the same street, an amputee beggar jingled a small bowl of coins in one hand, pulling himself along with the other on a makeshift cart, little more than a wooden slab.

And there she was, yet not as I had seen her last. Changed.

When she was born, the earth loved her. Like the grass that swayed and danced in the wind, so she drew her first breath amidst stalks of green, and no flaw could I discern in her. I held her against my skin and traced the pattern of her veins with my fingertips. Yet others did not see what I saw, and for them she held no glow as I had felt when she grew within me.

I would have suffered no darkness to touch her, but still darkness came and stole her in the night as I slept, and my family said death had claimed her as she deserved.

“Other children you shall have—children that are whole and without defect,” they said to me, as though one life was akin to a pair of worn shoes.

I learned how anguish claws at the heart and casts a grey shroud over all the world. She was perfect; how could they not see?

But by the time I knew myself to be deceived, she was gone from my reach. For as the fog of grief parted for moments of briefest clarity, whispers came to my ears through doors not-quite-closed.

I stumbled from my bed, clutching at the neckline of my nightgown with spasmed hands, and my uneven steps on the creaking wood floor turned their faces to me. “You stole her from me.” My voice rent the air and silenced their hisses. “You took my perfect babe and threw her into the street like rubbish.”

“You will have others,” my mother stretched her arms out to me in supplication. “She was not—normal.”

I tore myself away before she could burn me with her touch. “And you are no mother,” I hissed.

The earth shifted and the sky tore itself apart, and no whisper would tell me where she had gone. I lurched from street corner to street corner. In my haste to leave that house, I wore thin slippers of little protection against rough cobbled stones. Through force my limbs carried me, my voice thinning with each inquiry after a baby with star-shaped lips and three beautiful fingers on one tiny hand.

Please tell me you’ve seen her. Please.

But those wrapped in fur cloaks spared me no glance. If not that they drew their clothes and bags closer to themselves, I might have thought some magic had stolen my voice. Others pleading those same fur cloaks for a few coins were too preoccupied with trying to survive the night to think of one lost child in a sea of lost people.

The night hours ticked by and the city grew quiet. My body had split open to birth a universe that was mine for so small a time. A universe now lost to me.

In the hush, my breath grew ragged until it was the only sound filling my ears. An unseen heaviness pushed me to the ground and my limbs collapsed as of their own accord.

I will never have the chance to behold her again.

I passed then over deep waters and ended my song, but still she tethered my spirit to the earth, and I searched for her in every beggar child that roamed the streets, every maiden whose lips were cut in the shape of a star.

When she grew, fire loved her. In my joy at her finding, she seemed to me the sun itself; a radiance flowed from her head and pooled into a light wherever she set her feet. She was no longer a child by then, but in the liminal space between childhood and womanhood.

My eyes caught sight of her, a girl with matted brown hair sitting hunched outside a bakery famous for cranberry buns, and a young man with chestnut curls sneaking her a blackened one on his way to make deliveries. She reached her hand out—a hand with only three fingers, and I knew.

My universe. My daughter.

But a fury knitted itself about her brow, and her rage to the world was like spitting embers, for it had rejected her. When asked her name, she gave the one of the city; with no one to claim her, she answered to no other title. With such a name, she heard once, and again, then again, “You are abandoned. You are nothing. You belong to no one.”

The ominous voice sounded through her head, draining into her veins, bleeding into her soul—this voice was her childhood companion, and I wept then for the cruelty of the world that was unable to see the beauty beyond the limits of a body that betrayed her.

She could not hear my voice through the veil, no matter how I shouted.

I could only watch—

When she shivered, the wind loved her. As she made her bed in the streets, the rain pelting her neck, her back. She’d built a makeshift shelter in a corner from discarded wooden scraps which protected little against a harsh winter. Other huddled shapes scattered along the stone alley. Only those with nowhere else to go would be out here.

My incorporeal arms could not keep her warm.

Her head lifted and I followed her gaze. Around the corner, a figure hurried past, as most others did in that alleyway. The wind lifted tufts of ash-blond hair from the hood he wore.

When he drew near to us, her gaze did not drop and his eyes met hers.

The boy started. Their eyes burned into each other’s with puzzlement and still she stared at him with a blaze that would not soften.

“You’re that beggar from outside the bakery.”

Her eyes only narrowed.

His hand convulsed before he pulled his cloak over his head and shoved it into her arms before walking away without looking back.

Days passed before she encountered him again. “Aster,” he said his name was, though she hadn’t asked.

“Why?” she asked.

His answer didn’t come at once. “I know something about being left behind.” He fingered the edge of the cloak he’d given her that night. “And someone I loved used to give you bread.”

“Oh.” Now the sun shone above them, she couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes.

Winter weeks passed, and the boy called Aster sat with my daughter day after day. He didn’t laugh at the way she spoke, when her s-es ran together like running water, and she began to speak more in his presence, until the sound of her voice seemed natural and lovely, and I thought I would weep at the musical cadence of it.

The first time he came upon her digging through rubbish heaps with filth up to her elbows, he did not flee. Only I witnessed the flicker of hesitation before he pulled her up and gave her pieces of salted fish and berries just picked. He took her to the lake outside the town and washed her hair.

In her world where she had learned that people will always abandon her, someone stayed, and stayed, and stayed. And slowly, slowly, she shed the armor she had built around herself, piece by piece by piece. And I gave her hand to another, though she did not feel it, and for once in many years, my heart eased.

Tonight was not as others before it. Tonight, she knew what it was to be loved by a friend.

When she smiled, the stars loved her. And now when she tells her name, it is no longer the name she had received as an orphan, lost and forgotten. She gives herself a new name. The name she gives herself speaks of grace. The name she gives herself speaks of belonging. It echoes a new voice: one that tells her she is worthy.

When she spoke her name, I loved her. And at last I knew she saw in herself what I had seen from the moment of her waking, that she is Beloved.

Thus I smiled and whispered my enduring love for her once more as my spirit drifted to the stars.