Asimov’s, September/October 2026
On New Year’s Eve, fifteen-year-old Kee announces at family dinner that she plans to take the Year Walk, an old ritual in which a person circles the church three times at midnight and looks through the window for a vision of the coming year. Her father assumes she wants to see a future husband, but Kee has a different, unspoken purpose. Outside afterward, her neighbor Erik joins her, as he always does, and warns her of the dangers of walking alone at midnight, listing the malevolent spirits said to haunt the winter roads, including mylings, the restless souls of unbaptized infants who beg to be carried to consecrated ground and drill their bearers into the earth if not buried in time.
The narrative moves back through the year that brought Kee to this point. Her older sister Soley became pregnant by Erik’s brother Nicholas, who abandoned her to marry someone else. Kee watched Soley hide the pregnancy, deteriorate, and eventually begin bleeding in the dead of winter. Their mother took over Soley’s care wordlessly, already aware of the secret, and one morning handed Kee a wrapped bundle to bury in the woods, telling her the baby was gone. When Kee unwraps it privately, she finds only afterbirth, no infant, revealing that Soley had already given birth alone, likely weeks earlier, and disposed of the baby herself. In the nights that follow, Soley unravels, sobbing and beating her head against the wall, and Kee comes to understand that the baby’s spirit persists nearby, tormenting her sister.
Determined to end her sister’s suffering, Kee sets out alone at midnight to find and bury the myling before it can harm anyone or destroy Soley entirely. As she searches the snowy village, the creature makes itself known, climbing onto her back and growing heavier as it repeats its demand: bury me. Kee struggles toward the churchyard gate under its increasing weight, tormented by visions of what Soley endured and by her own suppressed feelings for Erik. She collapses short of the threshold, and Erik, who has secretly followed her, hauls her the rest of the way into the graveyard, where the myling finally sinks into the consecrated ground.
Believing she has completed the ritual, Kee looks through the church window for her promised vision and sees a wedding: Erik in a suit, glowing with love, dancing with his bride. She assumes it is her own vision until the couple turns and she sees the bride is Soley, not herself. Erik never loved Kee the way she has loved him. Shaken, Kee almost tells him everything, the truth about Soley, Nicholas, and the dead child, but stops herself. She resolves instead to protect her sister’s future, reasoning that with the myling put to rest, Soley can recover and eventually marry. Kee will carry the secret alone, describing it to herself as a second invisible bone lodged inside her, one she will bear silently for the rest of her life, believing this concealment is itself a form of love.
Stephanie Feldman is the author of the novels Saturnalia and The Angel of Losses, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, winner of the Crawford Fantasy Award, and finalist for the Mythopoeic Award. She is co-editor of the multi-genre anthology Who Will Speak for America? and her stories and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from Asimov’s Science Fiction, Catapult Magazine, Electric Literature, Flash Fiction Online, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Rumpus, Uncharted Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Weird Horror, and more. She lives outside Philadelphia with her family.