You look like a plum, Elesa. Are you unwell?

Sit back down, my dear. I would not advise that you go on deck right now. During the first few days of a ship’s voyage, you will find yourself slipping on vomit there. Do not make the novice traveler’s mistake. “To take the air” on deck is another way of saying “to empty your dinner” on deck. In a while, you may ring for the steward, Elesa. A pot of tea and a plate of shortbread will settle both of our stomachs, but for now we will continue.

The roses first came to me when I was seventeen, I told Old Iota. From the beginning, they were accompanied by a moth trapped inside my skirt, its wings fluttering. When I asked Old Iota if it was the same for her, she hid her face with her hands. I had no mother, so I thought that I was dying. When I continued to live and to bloom, my father’s disinterest in me turned into disgust or shame, for what I did not know. Soon that change would darken my life, a cloth over a birdcage.

My father began by forbidding my brothers from gathering their school friends at the house, not even to complete their lessons in the late afternoon shade of the courtyard. He paused, and he drew an even wider border. “Nor do I want them near the entrances of the Villa Cassimati,” he declared. A “villa” was what my father insisted on calling the house, and to distinguish it from the neighbors’, which were actual villas, he gave it his family name, as though it were another of his sons. My brothers nodded their heads in unison. They did not object because they now had a reason to be elsewhere. Their school friends had been some of the few visitors to the house. I would miss their faces more than I would miss my brothers’.

Next, my father denied me the half-light of the moon and the stars. The shutters to my bedroom windows were to be kept shut, day and night. “Especially at night,” he restated. My brothers elbowed each other’s ribs. That rough touch was a dagger in mine. It told me that they were privy, yet again, to something that I was not. It told me how alone I was in that house.

My father then forbade me from ever leaving the Villa Cassimati, not even to accompany Kanella, the cook, on her morning walks down to the marketplace in the center of Kapsali town. “But how will Kanella know what to buy?” I pleaded.

“There is nothing new there,” my father said. By “there” my father meant the marketplace, but he could have been speaking about all of Kapsali town or the whole of Cerigo Island. “Kanella will buy what she has always bought. She will cook what she has always cooked. We will eat as we have always eaten,” he said, his eyes not once leaving the pages of his book, which even I could tell was always the same one. When my father was not an echo, he spoke in circles, a snake swallowing its tail.