After weeks of struggling to stave off sleep at every waking hour, which had only grown fewer with each passing day, suddenly Marilyn couldn’t force herself to sleep. She lay awake all night, alternately staring at the ceiling, watching the still pond outside, and studying the animals Penn had carved on her antler.

Gretchen told her that this was expected. It meant the end was near.

For the first time in her life, Marilyn didn’t bother putting on a show of gratitude, courage, or good will. She simply stopped speaking. The healers of Pine Valley didn’t care— they tended to her without judgement. The fact that they would have saved her life if she had ended up at this clinic rather than the half dozen others who simply tossed her aside made it difficult to breathe. She couldn’t think about it.

A new member of her care team joined late that afternoon. A middle-aged woman with a crooked smile, abrupt mannerisms, and large antlers, though not of the size Marilyn had once been. She set a collection of pamphlets down on Marilyn’s bedside table.

“I heard you liked my work. Vivianne Morris. Call me Vinnie.”

Marilyn did a double take, but she couldn’t find her words yet. Vinnie didn’t mind.

“You’ve been through a nightmare. Don’t know if it means anything to you, but I’ve spent my whole life trying to fix how people think about antlers. It’s obvious they don’t work anything like we’re told. I’m also the one who’s going to fight to bring those people calling themselves ‘healers’ to justice. I wanted you to meet the person who’ll be avenging you before you bite it.”

A faint smile briefly played across Marilyn’s face. She couldn’t sustain it. Vinnie went about her tasks, leaving Marilyn fresh clothes, updating her chart, refreshing the quieting spell on her room. Before heading out, she said:

“One more thing, hun. I can’t go back in time and make those people listen to you, but I can listen now, for whatever that’s worth. I’ll be here all night. Press that button if you need me.”

An hour later, she returned. “I brought an extra blanket. It’ll be in the closet if you want it.” Marilyn nodded in thanks.

Again, on the hour, Vinnie reappeared. “Here’s some extra water, hun. Fresh and cold.” Marilyn watched her intently as she set a ceramic pitcher on the bedside table, which was growing crowded.

On the third hour, Marilyn spoke first. “You said you’d listen?”

“I’m listening.” Vinnie snapped out of her latest pretense for coming in— hanging an air freshening charm— and took a seat by Marilyn’s bed.

Closing her eyes, Marilyn asked, “What is there even left to say?”

“Whatever you want, now. I wonder if anyone’s told you that.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s hard to understand for most patients, but you don’t have to worry about what we think. We’re here for you. I know how the other healers are,” she said with distaste. “We won’t kick you out for being upset that you’re dying, you know?”

“It’s so much more than that.” The flute Penn had made for her lay at her side; Marilyn picked it up and held it to her chest. She started and abandoned a half dozen sentences as her thoughts boiled. Finally, she simply said, “I wish people had been kind to me.”

“You seem like a kind person yourself.”

“They were cruel.” It might not have been the first time she’d realized, but it was the first time sinking in. “Every day, every hour, they acted like their cruelty was a favor I should have been grateful for.”

“I know.”

“And I can finally say it, but I can’t feel it. I want to. I know I’m angry and hurt and scared somewhere deep down I can’t get to. I want to- I deserve to grieve the life I’m not going to get.”

“You spent your entire life burying, correcting, and fighting your own emotions. You were forced to. It’s no wonder you can’t access them.”

“I’m going to run out of time before I figure out how.”

“I’ll make you a deal, then. You feel anything you can, or nothing at all, however it shakes out. Don’t judge yourself. It’s not your fault. Focus on that, and I’ll be angry on your behalf. Can’t do much about the other things you want to feel, but angry, I can do. I’ve got plenty of practice.”

“Could she have saved me? The last healer, I mean.”

Vinnie shifted her weight as she considered the question. “You were far along. But then, you did have both antlers when you first went in. No one can know for sure, but I won’t lie to you, it was still possible.”

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“Can you…” Marilyn blushed and looked away.

“What?”

“It’s silly.”

“If there was ever a time to embarrass yourself, this is it, hun. The dead don’t come back to answer for their stupidity.”

Her laugh reflected a tentative acceptance of that fact. “Can you say something negative about all the healers who lied to me?”

Vinnie’s crooked smile bloomed in full. “How delicate would you prefer me to be?”

“Not at all?”

“They’re fucking assholes.”

With a gasp that turned into a grin, Marilyn whispered, “What!”

“You heard me. I hope everyone heard me. I hope the goddess herself heard me. I’ll say it again; I’ll put it on your tombstone if you want.”

In between nervous laughs, Marilyn shushed her. “I don’t want a tombstone, anyway. Just throw my body in the woods.”

“Got that written down anywhere?”

“No. Somehow I didn’t think I’d be dead at twenty-six.” Being able to talk about her imminent death with humor brought her an unexpected sense of power. “Wait, that reminds me— your pamphlets. Thank you. Being able to laugh about all of this kept me sane. I don’t know how you got away with it, but I think they saved my life.”

“Clearly not.” Vinnie tested this quip with raised eyebrows, only smiling when Marilyn guffawed. “I’m glad they helped you. I was about your age when I started. You can’t say much out loud before your work gets confiscated, but once I’d written enough earnest pamphlets, no one who cared was reading them anymore. I was really hoping it would help. I’m going to do more to fight, I promise.”

“That’s good to hear.”

Once her mirth faded, Marilyn thought it might break the dam holding in the rest of her emotions. Nothing came. She sank into her bed.

“You look like you could use some alone time.”

“Maybe so. Thank you, Vinnie.”

“Take care, hun.”

***

No one could get hold of Penn or Marilyn’s mothers. As the day wore on, she spent more and more time watching the door, sitting up with hopeful excitement every time someone came in. By evening, she lacked the strength to sit up.

Sleep pulled at her mind at last. Late into the night, a certainty settled over her, and she considered telling the healer checking on her. Would they be upset if they weren’t with her to help ease her passing? But if her family really wasn’t going to make it back in time, Marilyn wanted to be alone. The healer left.

Marilyn cradled her antler flute and closed her eyes. A light appeared above her, but her eyelids wouldn’t move. Warmth spread from her antlers through her entire body. The heat began to rise, and she rose alongside it. Marilyn didn’t open her eyes so much as leave them behind. She drifted toward the light with perfect awareness of everything around her: cool air coming in from the window, the dull blinking alarm of a monitoring charm on her wall, her still and sunken body beneath her.

A voice spoke from within the light.

“Look what they have done to one of my beloved children.”

In the same way Marilyn had felt Penn’s emotions, she sensed love and fury in equal measure. “Are you… my goddess?”

“Yes. I knew you would recognize me. You’ve suffered so much. Come to me now, Marilyn, and take rest.”

But she didn’t want rest. The Stagmother knew this, and she allowed Marilyn to feel that her goddess was well pleased with her. “Take restoration, then. Your antlers were my gift to you. They connect you to each other and to the divine; you are connected still.”

The light brightened, and her flute glowed with the same intensity on her bed. “I don’t understand. My whole life, I’ve been told they were bad.”

“Genuine connection— caring for others, understanding their struggles, sharing your own, allowing yourself to be vulnerable to them— is difficult to balance. You may begin to lose yourself or to overtake others. Over the last one thousand years, my people gradually forgot their blessing and only remembered their burden. My gift atrophied, our bond broke. I haven’t been able to reach you in hundreds of years. You were left alone to starve one another of meaningful attachments.”

Healers rushed into the room, more than Marilyn recognized. They halted at the sight of her detached antler radiating pale light.

“Your world stole your birthright from you,” the goddess told her. “Take back what is yours.”

Marilyn turned her attention fully on the flute. It had taken on a new fluidity, malleable in the palm of her will. She could move it, shape it, even grow it as she pleased. First, she wrapped her corpse in a protective cocoon.

“I’m sorry,” Marilyn spoke to her former body. “I wish I could have saved you.”

The cocoon rose from its bed as Marilyn shaped a new body around it. She slid the burgeoning form out the window, onto the cool grassy hill where she had plenty of room to work. Her antler branched ever wider, ever taller, stretching ten and then twenty feet into the air. She opened a vast network of holes throughout herself. Six legs emerged, four in the back and two in front, followed by a long, slender thorax. Her corpse rested deep within her new abdomen.

Satisfied, Marilyn joined with her antler to inhabit the body of her choosing: a praying mantis.

A sparrow alighted on her right foreleg. In the voice of the goddess, she said, “You are magnificent.”

Though she had regained a physical form, Marilyn’s senses remained as a matter of innate knowledge. She couldn’t smell the wild lavender crushed beneath her hind leg, but she knew its scent was in the air. Likewise, she had no vocal chords or lungs with which to speak, but she could make her words known.

“Have you chosen a new form, too?” Marilyn asked her goddess.

“No. This is how I have always looked in the material world. I was never a stag- I am the mother of stags. But my people have forgotten me completely. We were both forsaken, Marilyn. What will we do now?”

“I’m going to carry my body home to my mothers. My goddess, you’ve already done so much for me, but will you help me again?”

“What do you need,” she answered.

“Wind.”

Intrigued, the Stagmother flapped her small wings and called a fierce wind across the field. As the air passed through Marilyn’s twisted antlers, the holes and chambers she had formed vibrated with a thousand horrific shrieks. The wrath, terror, and heartache she had been unable to process in her final days were each expressed in perfect dissonance.

“Our pain is the same,” the goddess cried in righteous anger. “We will give each other a voice.” She directed a continuous stream of wind to tear through the towering mantis form.

Taking her great, stuttering strides, Marilyn began her long procession home.