GenreCon 2023 Short Story Competition - Winning Entry

February Girl - Jay McKenzie

It's like an advent calendar.

Twenty-eight little doors stand in neat rows of four, in regimented columns of seven, built into a plywood box and affixed with bent old nails and glue. She’s painted it up to look like a Grimm’s fairytale cottage, all cherry-loaf windowsills and tiny swallows and flowers that look like blackcurrant stars.

“What’s it for?”

“February,” Elsie says simply.

She leaves it on the bookshelf, above the battered classics with their tired broken spines and the yellow-leafed magazines.

Later, she catches you tugging at the tiny brass handle protruding from one near the top.

“They won’t open until they’re ready,” she tells you.

When she’s gone, and you can indulge the urge to peer more closely, you notice tiny numbers painted onto each door. They’re dotted about the face of the cottage at random, but you spot them all in turn: one through to twenty-eight.

Christmas hasn’t yet been, and you find yourself longing for February. Of course, it is nonsense, but you’re intrigued all the same. You picture the delicious moment when the clock hands join at midnight, ready to softly step into a new day, a new month. You picture it, then you curse yourself for picturing it.

You’re watching her more closely too: sweet, strange little Elsie, with her platinum eyes and hair like dandelion fluff. If you were an indulgent sort, you might use words like ethereal and enchanted. But you aren’t, so you and the other boys nudge one another and call her the weird pixie.

She just appeared one Autumn day when the air was knitted with bonfire smoke and the trees shivered off their brown-blushed confetti. Riddling House Children’s Establishment has never had such an unusual resident, let alone one without a tired bag and a tale of woe slung over their shoulder.

February announces its arrival with a puff of cold breath, and when you jolt at the stroke of midnight, you wonder why you have woken in the dead of a drizzle-sluiced night. Then, with a thrill, you remember.

You shrug into your warmest sweater - the one that looks and feels like soft moss and has a yawning hole at the elbow - and creep down to the lounge.

A waxing gibbous moon nudges an argent spotlight through the window, perfectly illuminating the box.

You take a moment to admire how utterly ensorcelled the cottage appears in this light. You laugh softly. Since when did you think in words like ensorcelled?

You examine the numbers carefully, though you have memorised the location of the first. Just for the sake of it, you try number thirteen, but it remains deliciously shut.

The brass knob of number one is cold to the touch. You tug it gently and it yields without a fight, soft as butter. You draw your eyes level with the door. Inside, a tiny garnet in the shape of an apple. It is no bigger than the freckle on the back of your right hand, but perfectly rendered, right down to the curving stalk, the etched leaf.

It thrums and glows resting in the river and gullies of your palm. You close your fingers around it and think of Elsie.

At breakfast, she flashes you a private smile, and you know that it was the right thing to take the apple and fold it into a handkerchief in your drawer.

Night two is no less thrilling: a strange-shaped silver pendant. Egyptian, perhaps? In one of the encyclopaedias growing old on the shelf, you find it. Ankh. Crux ansata: the cross of life. It nestles alongside the apple within the linen handkerchief folds.

February strides relentlessly towards March. You spend your days watching Elsie, whose ripe lips bloom, whose cheeks glow. You’re torn between the budding spring light on her hair and the gifts she bestows at night.

Every night, a treasure to add to your collection: a crystal swan, neck curved; a tiny intertwined pair of ropes tied so intricately that you cannot tell where one starts and the other ends; a twisting conch the size of your knuckle; a miniature golden bow and arrow.

Through February, you and Elsie do not speak to one another. This rule is unwritten, but you can’t break the spell.

On day twenty-seven, you find a gossamer-fine shamrock. You are gently plucking the clover from its home when you spy something under the eaves of the cottage.

What is this?

A door, tinier than all of the others rests beneath the painted thatch, no knob, just the faintest outline of a hinge. And there, almost imperceptibly small is a number.

Twenty-nine.

How did I not see this before?

At breakfast, you do the unthinkable: you sidle close to Elsie, amidst the jeers of the other boys.

“Door twenty-nine?”

She smiles, and it is buttercup-warm. “Leap years.”

“This isn’t a leap year,” you say.

“I know.” She nibbles her toast.

That night, door twenty-eight holds a glowing ruby heart, and when you hold it, calm drips through you like honey. All is well, you think, and you too now shine bright as Sirius.

You head back to bed, back to dreams of Elsie.

But.

Your fingers act without your authority. Twitching, jerky, they drag you back to the cottage. You jam your nails under the hairline crack around number twenty-nine.

Don’t.

But you do. And you pull and pull.

The door doesn’t budge.

Go to bed!

But you don’t. You dig through a drawer, find a screwdriver and prise back twenty-nine. It snaps, splintering and cracking the front of the house.

You press your eye to the space.

It holds only thick darkness.

When you check for the ruby heart, your palm is empty. Upstairs, you pull out the handkerchief, which is vacant, crumpled and stained. A thick splinter spears your finger, throbbing, dull, aching.

At breakfast, the boys look at you blankly when you ask where Elsie is. On the bookshelf, a clean rectangle splits the dust.

Jay McKenzie