Every Child Lighter

V.

Lina Voss, the youngest, was born without a shadow.

Nobody in the family remarked on this. Babies are not generally noted for their shadows, and by the time Lina was old enough to stand in sunlight and cast nothing, the Voss family had been living with impossibility for so long that a missing shadow was, if anything, a relief. Shadows are decorative. Shadows are not load-bearing. Her aunt Petra, whose tears crystallized into salt formations that crumbled to powder if you held them too long, had spent three decades managing a condition that ruined pillowcases and left drifts of white residue in the corners of her eyes like tiny geological deposits. Her uncle Erwin could hear things that had not happened yet — not in any useful prophetic way, but as a constant low-frequency hum beneath his ordinary hearing, like tinnitus tuned to next week. He wore earplugs made of beeswax and still flinched at sounds only he could perceive.

Lina’s missing shadow was nothing. The family noted it the way they noted the house’s other eccentricities — the windows in the east bedroom that were not made of glass but of something translucent and faintly salty, the scratches on the ceiling of the upstairs hallway that no one had made, the way the linden tree in the yard dropped its leaves in patterns that, if you photographed them from above, resembled a sentence in a language that used no vowels.

She was seven and lived with her mother, Karin, in the rooms above the old kitchen. The house had been in the family since before the family was a family and was instead just one woman standing at the edge of the forest with soil under her fingernails and a decision she had not yet made. Lina did not know this story. Nobody in the family told it anymore. The house told it, in its way, but houses speak in structural settling and the slow language of cracks, and Lina was too young to read foundations.

She knew only this: on certain afternoons, when the light fell through the east windows, the room filled with a color that was not quite amber and not quite rose, and in that light she could see, very faintly, where her shadow should have been — a paleness on the floor, an outline, like the ghost of something that had decided not to exist. She would stand in that light and trace the outline with her bare foot, and the floor beneath was always colder than the surrounding boards, as though the absence had a temperature.

Her mother told her the light came from Aunt Petra’s tears. The windows were Petra’s tears, or had been, decades ago — a whole winter’s worth of crying, collected and compressed by processes no one in the family understood but everyone accepted. The tears had hardened into panes. They filtered sunlight into frequencies that did not appear on any chart.

Lina thought about this sometimes, at seven, lying on the cold outline of her missing shadow. She had asked her mother once whether the shadow would come back, and Karin had looked at her with an expression closer to recognition than to worry and said, “I don’t know, Lina. Ask the house.” So Lina pressed her ear to the floor and listened, and the floor hummed at a frequency she felt in her teeth, and she did not understand a word of it.

IV.

Petra Voss had been crying since she was nine days old.

Not continuously. Not even unusually often. But when she did cry — from pain, from frustration, from the flat animal sadness that arrives without reason on winter mornings — the tears that fell from her left eye, always and only the left, did not behave as tears should. They slowed as they descended her cheek, thickened, and by the time they reached her jaw they had hardened into granules that looked like coarse sea salt but were not salt. They were something else. Under a magnifying glass they showed the branching structure of frost on a windowpane, hexagonal and repeating, and they tasted — Petra had tasted them, everyone had tasted them, the family’s relationship to the condition was empirical and oral — of iron and chamomile and, faintly, of lake water in October.

The crystallization happened from the outside in. The surface of the tear would stiffen first, forming a membrane like the skin on cooling milk, and then the interior would contract and organize, and the whole process took approximately three seconds and produced a tiny sound: a click, like a seed pod opening in dry heat. Petra felt it as a pressure behind her left eye, a tightening, as though the tear duct itself were a kiln and her grief was being fired into ceramic before it could fall. After forty years of this, her left eye sat slightly lower in its socket than her right — not enough for a stranger to notice, but enough that photographs of her face always looked faintly asymmetric, as though taken during a mild tremor. She kept her hair parted to cover that side. She carried tissues in every pocket and a small brass tin, formerly her grandmother’s, for collecting the crystals when they fell in public.

She was forty-one. She taught mathematics at the regional school and told no one about the crying. The crystals accumulated in her pillowcase creases and she swept them into a jar each morning with the same resigned efficiency with which other people emptied a lint trap. Her mother, Ilse, had collected them in lachrymatory bottles — small glass vessels with narrow necks, bought at estate sales, Victorian mourning objects designed to hold tears that were merely liquid. Ilse had filled eleven bottles over the course of Petra’s childhood, and then the crystals had done what crystals do given time and pressure and proximity: they fused. The way ice lenses form in frost-susceptible soil — moisture migrating toward cold, accumulating, each particle negligible, the aggregate tectonic — the crystals pressed against the glass from inside until the bottles cracked and what remained were sheets of fused mineral the size of dinner plates, translucent, warm to the touch even in December. Ilse had fitted them into the window frames of the east bedroom because they were beautiful, and because waste in the Voss household was a variety of sin.

The windows cast that strange light. Petra had not known they would do this. She had not known her tears were load-bearing.

Her brother Erwin’s condition was louder. Erwin heard tomorrow layered beneath today: a Tuesday conversation carrying, underneath its ordinary words, the phantom audio of Wednesday — a door slamming, rain on the roof, a television program that hadn’t aired yet. He described it once as living in a badly mixed recording where the engineer had accidentally left a second track running at half volume. He hummed constantly to drown it out. He ran the faucet when the bleed-through surged. He had tried to profit from the condition exactly once, betting on a horse race he believed he could hear finishing — the crowd’s roar, the announcer’s call — but the sound turned out to be from the race after the one he’d bet on, and he lost forty euros and never mentioned it again.

The gifts were not useful. Petra could cry minerals. Erwin could hear next Wednesday. Their mother Ilse could see in perfect darkness, her pupils expanding until her eyes were solid black, depthless, and she moved through unlit rooms with a confidence that frightened her children because it looked, from outside, like sleepwalking. Before Ilse there had been Ilse’s mother, Brigitte, who had weighed nothing on Tuesdays.

The gifts were the weather. You planned around them. You did not ask where they came from, or why the linden tree grew faster than any linden should, or why the forest was three meters closer to the house than it had been when Petra was a child, or why the walls hummed at night in a register that made Erwin press his hands over his ears and whisper that the house was dreaming out loud.

III.

On Tuesdays, Brigitte Voss floated.

Not gracefully. Not like a balloon or a saint in a devotional painting. Brigitte floated the way a dropped leaf floats: chaotically, subject to air currents she could not predict, bumping into ceilings and doorframes and, on one occasion she described only to her daughter Ilse, the underside of the linden tree’s canopy, where she spent four hours tangled in branches while a pair of goldfinches built a nest in her cardigan.

The weightlessness arrived at midnight and departed at midnight. Between those hours her relationship to gravity was negotiable. Her mother, Anneliese, had sewn lead fishing weights into the hems of her dresses — eight ounces per hem, enough to keep Brigitte’s feet near the floor but not enough to prevent the slow upward drift that gathered force through the afternoon. By evening she was ceiling-height. By eleven she had learned to wedge herself between the rafters and read by candlelight while the house settled below her, and from this vantage the rooms looked different — smaller, like rooms seen in a dollhouse, the furniture reduced to the tops of things, and she could see the places where dust collected that no one ever cleaned because no one else lived at that altitude.

The bruises came on Wednesdays. At midnight the weight returned — all of it, instantly, as though gravity had been saving itself — and Brigitte fell. As a child she’d landed on mattresses her mother arranged beneath her predicted flight path. As an adult she positioned herself over the bed before midnight and gripped the frame, but even so the fall was enough to leave bruises: purple-green continents across her shoulders and hips that mapped a private cartography of weekly impact. She catalogued them without self-pity. The Tuesday bruises were the cost of Tuesdays, and Tuesdays, despite everything, were beautiful. She never told anyone this. The hours between the initial lift and the ceiling were the most peaceful of her week. No weight. No friction. No sense of her body’s mass pressing downward through cartilage and bone. She forgave the bruises every Wednesday morning.

Her husband, Diedrich, bolted hooks into the ceiling so she could clip herself to them with carabiners. He moved the good china to lower shelves on Mondays. He slept alone on Tuesday nights because sharing a bed with a woman in active ascension was, he said, like trying to sleep next to a weather event. He said this fondly. He had married her knowing about the Tuesdays, and his acceptance was not patience but genuine disinterest in explanations. The world did what it did. His wife floated. The linden tree in the yard had roots that had entered the kitchen foundation and were climbing the interior walls in tendrils that left patterns in the plaster like veins in a hand held up to light.

The house was changing. Brigitte could see it from the ceiling, which was the best vantage for noticing how the walls were developing textures that had not been there when her mother built the place — fern-like formations near the baseboards where Anneliese’s grief-frozen hands had touched the plaster, mineral deposits in the window frames that anticipated the tears of a granddaughter not yet born, and, in the hallway outside the children’s rooms, scratches on the ceiling plaster that Brigitte knew she had made with her own fingernails during hundreds of Tuesday ascensions, dragging her hands along the surface as she rose the way a swimmer trails fingers across the bottom of a pool.

The scratches formed no pattern she could read. But her daughter Ilse, whose eyes worked differently — whose pupils could dilate until the iris vanished and the eye became a hole through which darkness flowed inward rather than outward — Ilse claimed that in total darkness the scratches glowed faintly, a bioluminescence no one else could perceive, and that they spelled something. Ilse would not say what. She would only stand in the hallway at three in the morning with her black-hole eyes and run her fingers along the plaster and hum a melody that Brigitte, floating directly above her, could feel in her weightless bones like the vibration of a tuning fork pressed against the skull.

Brigitte suspected the house was keeping records. Every frost print, every ceiling scratch, every vibration from the linden roots that hummed on windy days at a frequency she could feel in her sternum — all of it stored. The house was a ledger. The balance it kept was not financial but biological, a running account of what the family owed to the forest that pressed closer each year, its treeline advancing with the patience of something that had nowhere else to be.

II.

Anneliese’s hands were the temperature of whatever she felt.

Anger blistered her palms. Grief froze them — physically, measurably, ice forming along her knuckles in feathered crystals when she mourned. She had worn gloves since childhood, year-round, lined with goose down in winter and unlined cotton in summer, and still, sometimes, in moments of sudden feeling, the fabric would stiffen or singe, and she would peel the gloves off and stare at her hands as though they belonged to someone she had not been introduced to.

Tenderness was lukewarm. When she loved someone, her palms reached approximately the warmth of water from a tap left running a few seconds too long. She pressed these warm-water hands against her children’s backs when they were sick, and the children, who knew no other mother, believed this was how all mothers felt — blood-warm, slightly damp, faintly electrical.

She had built the house. Not alone — Diedrich helped, and neighbors, and a mason who asked no questions about why Anneliese insisted the window frames be deep enough to hold objects thicker than glass. She could not have explained the windows. The windows would not exist for two more generations. But she built the frames deep, and she built the ceilings high, and she planted the linden sapling her mother, Dorothea, had carried from the forest, its roots wrapped in damp cotton, and when Anneliese pressed her hands against the young trunk she felt it respond — a faint vibration, a warmth that was not her warmth.

The house stood at the edge of the forest. This was Dorothea’s choice, not Anneliese’s. Anneliese would have preferred the town, where there were people and noise and the buffer of other lives between herself and the woods. But Dorothea insisted. Her hair grew toward sound, and the forest’s sounds were the only ones she could tolerate, a rustling so constant and so layered that her hair relaxed into it. In town, her hair pulled toward every voice, every cart wheel, every church bell, and the strain gave her headaches that lasted days.

So the house was built where Dorothea could hear the forest, and the forest could reach the house. Dorothea spent her last years on the porch, braids unraveling in the direction of the trees, her hair so fine by then and so responsive that individual strands detached from her scalp and drifted toward the forest — not painfully, not in clumps, but one by one, each strand orienting itself toward the canopy and letting go. By the time she died, at seventy-three, she was nearly bald, and the linden tree had grown hair-thin filaments among its roots that were not roots and not hair and not anything a botanist could have classified, though no botanist ever saw them. They grew through the foundation. They entered the walls.

And over the decades the boundary between forest and house softened. The linden’s roots spread through the walls in filaments finer than thread, and Anneliese felt them when she pressed her palms against the plaster — a branching warmth, a living infrastructure beneath the surface. When she was angry, the roots near her hands withered. When she grieved, frost formed along them, tiny ice lenses pushing the plaster outward in eruptions so slow they were visible only across years. The walls developed a texture like old skin, creased and ridged, and in certain light the frost patterns looked like ferns, and in other light they looked like hands pressed flat against the inside of the wall, trying to push through from somewhere the family could not see and had agreed, by wordless consensus, not to think about.

I.

Dorothea’s mother was named Else, and Else had no gift.

Or rather: Else was the gift’s beginning, which is not the same as possessing it. What she did in the forest at seventeen she could not have predicted and would never fully understand.

She went in for linden blossoms. The women of the town gathered them in June, when the trees flowered — small, pale, five-petaled flowers that smelled of honey and were dried for tea that calmed the nerves, or so the town believed. Else was there for the blossoms and for nothing else.

The linden tree was older than the town. Its trunk was wider than Else could embrace, and its bark was furrowed in patterns that resembled — this was Dorothea’s word, passed from grandmother to granddaughter across the skipped generation, across the normal daughter who was born and lived and died without a single impossible thing happening to her body — that resembled writing. Grooves and ridges suggesting language. Else ran her palm along the bark and the bark was warm, which was wrong: bark in shade is cool. The warmth traveled up her arm and settled in her chest like a stone dropped into water, displacing everything around it.

She picked a linden blossom and ate it.

Not the tea. Not the dried version. The raw flower, standing in the forest with tree-warmth in her sternum. It tasted of honey and chlorophyll and beneath those of something mineral and very old, the same taste her great-great-granddaughter’s tears would carry a hundred years later, though neither of them would know this. Nobody had told Else not to eat the blossoms raw. You were supposed to dry them. You were supposed to make tea. To eat one from the branch was not forbidden — it was simply undone, the way certain things are undone: you do not count the windows of a house you covet, you do not sing before breakfast, you do not eat the thing you came to harvest. The prohibition was so small it did not require a voice to enforce it. It enforced itself through custom, through the body’s own reluctance, through a feeling in the jaw that said not this, not raw, not here. Else overrode it. She chewed. She swallowed.

The warmth in her chest forked. It branched through her body laterally, patiently, following the veins, the nerves, the channels where water moves. It settled in her wrists and her temples and the hollows behind her knees. For a moment she was so warm she believed she was dying. Then the warmth withdrew and left her standing in the forest with half a linden blossom in her hand and a taste she would spend the rest of her life failing to describe.

She walked home. She married a cabinetmaker named Oskar who smelled of linseed oil and never asked her about the forest. She bore a daughter, Mathilde, who was ordinary in every measurable way — no gifts, no anomalies, no moments when her body did something it should not have been able to do. Mathilde lived fifty-four years and died of pneumonia in a bed with clean sheets. The gift had skipped her. She waited her whole life for something to happen inside her body, and it never did.

Mathilde bore a daughter named Dorothea whose hair grew toward sound. Dorothea built a house at the edge of the forest and planted a linden tree that grew and sent its roots into the walls and the walls began to hum.

Else lived to eighty-six. She died in the house her granddaughter built, in a room whose walls had not yet developed frost patterns, whose windows were still ordinary glass. She died before any of it. The morning of her death the linden tree in the yard was flowering, and the blossoms smelled of honey, and the forest was closer to the house than it had been the year before.