One toad watches from a scarred wooden table in a rundown kitchen—an only daughter with a stooped back and years of scowls pulling at her jaw. Marigold hunches over golden broth thick with bubbling goo, stirring it with a spoon. One ear tilts to listen for screeches from her half-bird mother. She is shutaway upstairs atop a pile of molted feathers gathering dust.
Ruinous rhymes spit from Marigold’s mouth as the spoon spirals clockwise, then counter, then the shape of the star inside an apple. This will hold the charm that will give her mother a beak instead of an angry mouth. Marigold’s potions have twisted in their making, catching her mother between wing and walking.
She longs to put her mother into a cage and bring her to the forest where her beak can shriek to the dying spruce trees and feed on the slime of rain softened mushrooms. Marigold will be safe then, free. But the liquid in the pot looks troubled now, not quite right. She has scrounged for what she can find close to home, peeling back the brittle pages of her snakeskin-bound spellbook.
A second toad blinks from a shelf heavy with jars. Marigold substitutes fern fiddleheads with long white hairs instead of smooth spines. She sprinkles in the nest of a white-throated sparrow instead of one with a white crown. Bitter sweat drips off her brow, plopping into the brew. Over her shoulder, she curses her mother’s squall of caws that rattle the windows.
Marigold murmurs to the fire, burn faster, burn brighter, and orange flames grow high. Burn faster, burn brighter. They lick the iron of the pot, and broth starts to bubble and foam. Burn faster, burn brighter. Sulfurous liquid splashes down onto the hearthstone, putting the flames out until there are only hissing embers. Steam rises, her face reddens, eyes squint in the heat.
With a stumble backward, she knocks over the rest of the pot. Splashes land on hot coals, where the liquid hardens into darkling beetles. Hundreds of them scurry over each other’s black shells and crawl up her legs, her torso, into her eyes and ears until she collapses under their swarm.
A third toad jumps out from a cobwebbed corner to get a closer look, eyes closing one by one. The other toads hop closer as Marigold’s fingers curl, try to grasp onto the edge of the table as her mother caws from upstairs in half-words, Bring dinner, buttered bread. She calls for her daughter, disappearing under a vibrating mound of legs and hard-shelled bodies.
From the blackened and burned empty pot, snaking vines reach out into the kitchen, their dark tendrils opening the grease stained windows. Their thick roots crack the dirty floor tiles, tilting the table until the spellbook slides off and lands close to the third toad, who doesn’t budge.
Five crows fly in through the open window, quick to the pool of beetles in the middle of the floor. The crows pick up the beetles in their beaks, their feathers flash upstairs to Marigold’s mother. She opens her mouth as they fly into her room, and she swallows each oily bug without chewing once.