Tatterhood
by Matt Knutson & Ross Nervig
In the black woods of the long-ago northern forests, a large manor overlooked a river whose waters reflected the grand homestead. Nature had imposed its squalor on this place. Vines crept up the facade and loose leaves collected around the overgrown bushes. In the manor lived the widow of a lumber baron and her two daughters. Some stories concern themselves with twins who are the mirror image of each other. Other stories concern themselves with twins who couldn’t be more different: when one is given the gift of rarest beauty and the other cursed with beauty’s exact inverse, when one sends poets searching for words to describe her fairness and the other sends farm hands to the woods. The twins, Dominika and Tatterhood, were such a pair. Even their own mother wondered how they shared a womb at all.
Dominika, whose looks went unrivaled, possessed a smooth brow and eyes that burned green with a wanton and mischievous fire; the other sister kept her face hidden under a hood of tattered rags so she might spare folks the fright. Dominika’s mouth was as red as strawberries; Tatterhood’s mouth, a rip of broken tusks. Dominika played at court with her lady mother, while Tatterhood toiled as a house servant. She’d once had a girl’s given name, but it had been so long she’d been called anything but “Tatterhood” that even her mother couldn’t remember.
“Tatterhood,” Dominika would say to her sister, “you are uglier than a cow.”
“Dear sister,” Tatterhood would say, “your breath smells like the troll’s ass you ate for supper.”
“Tatterhood,” said Dominika, “you truly do have a face like a dog’s breakfast.”
Under a chandelier grown fleecy with dust, their mother would sputter wine and laugh when the twins teased each other so.
Asked Dominika of Tatterhood: “Who used your face like a piss trough?”
Tears of glee sprang to their mother’s eyes. Laughter and wine flowed on that cold eve as the wind made moan.
It was the autumn equinox.
Enraged and seeing red, Tatterhood nearly blurted out that the neighboring lumber baron’s son had been tossing pebbles against Dominika’s windowpane at night, but sisterliness stayed her tongue. Or perhaps, it was her own abiding admiration for the young man that kept her from saying anything. She’d loved the boy herself since seeing him swimming in the river one summer. Her hood felt hot and itched when she thought of him. That he was fond of her sister meant Tatterhood might catch glimpses of him, and this was not something she would willfully sacrifice.
“Tatterhood, be a dear and clean the mirrors. They have grown smudged,” said her mother.
“You should tell Dominika to stop kissing the mirrors and besmudging them so,” retorted Tatterhood.
“Tend also to my bird cages,” added Tatterhood’s sister.
There were many mirrors at the manor. There were silvered mirrors and glass mirrors, looking glasses in gilt frames and others in frames of thick, rich wood. Some rooms housed mirrors that stretched the length of whole walls, others held small end tables whose express purpose was to provide a marbled surface upon which to rest a handheld mirror. A number of mirrors were losing their luster and some frames were tarnished so.
Tatterhood took her wash bucket and rag from under the stairs. She began with the mirrors in the sitting room, plunging her rag into the bucket of water mixed with vinegar, wringing it and abolishing the dust and lipmarks with violent strokes. Occasionally she would hear a peal of laughter ringing from the dining room like a silver bell.
Tatterhood, try as she might to avoid it, would catch a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she was washing: the wall-eyes set far apart on her face, the hog nostrils full of black brush bristles that met with the wisps of hairs adorning her upper lip. Her thick brow would knit, her fleshy lips would twist and the vision would obscure in welling teardrops. How unlovely, thought she. Her mother and sister were right when they told her their father had taken one look at her in the crib and died of a broken heart.
Having finished with the manor’s looking glasses, Tatterhood made her way to Dominika’s aviary, knowing her low spirits would be further dampened by the sight of those pretty songbirds imprisoned in their rust-eaten cages. Yet, a commotion interrupted her thoughts. There was something strange happening outside. Tatterhood heard rumblings, and crashings, and the squelching steps of unnatural things. Peering over the sash in the aviary, a chill on her cheek, she glimpsed beings gathering where the field met the edge of the woods.
In this forest there existed fae creatures and oddities in the far reaches beyond roads and townships. In the woods danced witches; beneath waterfalls and ruined bridges lived trolls and ogres and other monstrous and strange neighbors. On certain nights, when the spheres nearly touched, these strangers, these hags and trolls and devils, came from their lairs to look upon the world. Tonight they’d found a house vulnerable, its candles sputtering, the little drafts of autumn air seeping through unmortared cracks. So they came to the very edges of the forest and swayed, their faces dim in the candles’ glow.
“Tatterhood!” called a voice.
It was their drunk mother, standing at the edge of the hallway. She brandished the wooden spoon she oft used when the spirit moved her to beat her daughter. “Get away from there,” she hissed. “We must be careful on this night.”
Dominika came running toward the window, crying, “I want to see!”
“Who are they?” Tatterhood asked.
“O!” said their mother, “Penniless hags. Mayhaps they’ve come to beg.”
“My, my,” remarked Dominika. “They’re as ugly as you, sister.”
“They are witches and trolls,” their mother exclaimed, “We shan’t be inviting nasties like them inside.”
“Well according to you,” Tatterhood said, “I’m a nasty, too. I’m going to visit with them.”
Tatterhood saw her chance. She would cast the creatures from their estate. If she could not join Dominika and their mother in fairness and grace, she would rise to the role her father had abdicated in death. She would become the protector of the manor.
She’d had her fill of cleaning mirrors.
“Tatterhood…” their mother said. “There will be no dinner for you for a year if you leave this house.”
The noises grew louder.
“Whatever you do,” Tatterhood said, “if they really are so bad, keep these doors and windows closed.”
Snatching the spoon from her mother, the tatterhooded girl leapt from the manor and launched into battle, her hood of rags falling to her shoulders. A great commotion began. Witchy shrieks and weird cries echoed across the grounds. Inside the house dust fell from the rafters, raining a fine haze upon the desolate hallways.
“Mother, I want to watch Tatterhood,” cried Dominika.
“No, my sweet,” said their mother. “Go to your room.”
Upstairs, Dominika crouched in a corner, frightened and unsure what to do. She sat with her back to the window and watched the shadows on the wall. Little bursts of light and noises emanated from outside, like sows stuck in a well, like whispers remembered from a dream.
A great flash creaked the shutters. She stood up and stepped toward the window, little tufts of dust rising in the eerie light as she unlocked the latch. The cool air pushed at the panes. Dominika peered out. The chill on her face brought blood to her cheeks. There was a crisp pine smell. Shapes rose to the window on either side, gliding as if lighter than air. And perhaps they were so. Long fingers like the hair on the ends of turnips, faces, and teeth like the wrack found at low tide leered at the girl, such a pretty prize was she. As Tatterhood’s sister began to scream, ghoulish hands reached out and took ahold of her head, turning first one way and then the other. One witch gripped the girl’s head as the other held within her talons the head of a cow’s calf. As easily as handing off a ball, the first witch uncorked Dominika’s head and the second replaced it with the calf’s, twisting it once to ensure a proper fit. When they had their treasure secured, the witches flew off, the body still struggling on its chamber floor, the head still screaming as it flew over the fields below, into the dark woods and away.
At the darkest hour of the night, stubborn leaves clung to near-barren branches in the wood.
Tatterhood returned, excited to tell her family she’d beaten back the witches and trolls. She searched the house, then her mother’s bower. “Mother?” she called. “Dominika?”
The hall was empty. A gust blew from the stairwell, tugging at a candle.
“Hello?” called Tatterhood.
She heard a sound like a young cow lowing in the field.
A strange monster, worse than anything waiting in the woods outside, crawled from the stairwell. Unfolding from the dim end of the hall the creature scuttled as if drunk, its slender torso unbalanced by something ungainly on its head. It moaned.
“Moooooo!”
When the creature emerged into a circle of candlelight, Tatterhood gasped.
“What have they done to you?” she whispered.
It was her Dominika. In place of her beautiful head, her golden hair and fair features, she wore instead the dull face of a calf. In the place of her eyes of green and gold, a pair of dark, baleful eyes blinked back.
Tatterhood beheld her sister and was stricken, unexpectedly, by grief.
Their mother wailed and threw her arms around the calf-headed Dominika. After a while, she said to Tatterhood, “I suppose you’ll want to travel to the witches’ land.”
“And if I did?”
“I suppose I could lend you coin for a boat, and a crew to man that boat.”
“The boat I will take, but only my sister and I will journey upon it. After what’s happened here tonight, I need no help.”
A new melancholy enveloped the manor. A boat was bought from the fishmongers upriver and Tatterhood shepherded her cow-headed sister aboard. Together, they started downriver from the house in the high heath toward the low country and the sea, toward the distant rocky cliffs of the witches’ country.
Down from the knotted hinterlands of thick evergreens and bare sharp mountains Tatterhood’s boat sailed. She held the steerboard and adjusted the rigging while her sister watched the banks of the river. Tatterhood kept a sack of oats nearby and occasionally flung handfuls of feed towards her sister. While Tatterhood’s feet slipped on the deck’s smooth boards, Dominika developed an eerie agility despite the incongruity of her parts. She galloped on all fours and occasionally walked upright, leaping in strange ways when the river ran calm and the ship was steady.
When Tatterhood shaded her eyes against the sun and squinted at the river’s starboard bank, she spied a hulking black bull keeping pace with their boat, weaving betwixt and between the trees. Steam rose from his body and his nostrils smoked. How long he’d followed them, she didn’t know.
During those days and nights of travel, Tatterhood and her sister spent their time above deck. Around them, flags of mist unfurled across the water and birds howled in their careening. The river had grown wide and either shore appeared as a shimmering line of ghostly trees.
Tatterhood caught Dominika staring at her reflection in the water on a bright moonlit night, touching a hand to first her wet nose, then her ear, strong and thick as belt leather. Was that bemusement Tatterhood spied on her sister’s face? It was hard to tell and harder to fathom. Her sister had no shame and she felt like she should chasten her.
“Well, well, my calf-faced sister,” Tatterhood remarked. “I hope this teaches you a lesson.”
Dominika only returned to snuffling her oats.
“I hope this teaches you that your precious beauty is a fleeting thing. Like the moon’s reflection on the water. Here tonight, gone in the morn.”
Again, Dominika responded not.
“It can’t be laid by, nor can it be relied on to stay put when you have it.”
Shortly the riverbank turned to coastline and the boat sailed into open sea, where low waves sprayed salt as they rumbled below. The hulking black bull watched them from a promontory.
Tatterhood drove toward the pole star, toward the birthplace of cold winds and evil dreams, where cliffs rose from the waters as fortress walls. For three days they sailed this way, into a gray menace without feature, until Tatterhood spotted a stony bay below a ruined cathedral.
“Remember, sister,” Tatterhood said. “Many years ago, when father was still among the living, he told us he’d heard the strangest story in the village. A great cathedral in a far-off city had been stolen! ‘How can a whole cathedral be stolen?’ I asked, and he said: ‘It sounds to my ears like the work of the devil, daughter. Mayhaps it was witchcraft.’ I think we have found the stolen cathedral of father’s story.”
So they had come to the witch’s land.
To her calf-headed sister, she said to stash herself below deck and sowed a great heaping of oats in the cabin. Best not tempt the witches with the girl’s body too. She maneuvered the ship into a rocky landing place.
“This is not a place for calf-headed girls,” she whispered into the creature’s ear. “Now, I must creep to the top of this precipice and see what is there, whether I like it or not.” And with that leapt onto shore.
Slowly Tatterhood went, stepping surely among the crags and cliffs. In the sea air she gripped the cliffside, clutching her hood against the wind. She came thereupon an old woman sitting at the mouth of a cave in the cliffside. In her lap, held she a wooden bowl of milk from which lapped two kittens.
“On your way to the witches?” asked the old woman.
Tatterhood, cold and weary, nodded, asking: “Is there any easier path, grandmother?”
The old woman shook her head and said the following:
“Nay, there is no other way to that cursed house. Why do you seek them out?”
“They have stolen my dear sister’s head,” said Tatterhood. “Why do you abide in this place?”
“Once, I lived with the witches. I was one of them. But I erred in my ways. Unwelcome in my home, I live here, amid the crags, like a gull.”
“Your family does not welcome you?”
“My family wanted only daughters who could be married off. I was no such daughter. To my eyes, you might be the same-such girl.”
“Tell me then, witch. By what dark power do they separate a head from its shoulders and replace it with another?”
“I want you to understand something,” said the old woman. “You and I – we – are creating this story. We are weaving the cloth of experience together. So if I do this” – she twisted each kittens’ head and away from their small shoulders the heads came – “my notion of the story, my notion of the cloth’s weft, is merely stronger than your notion of the story.” The old woman crossed her arms and set each head on the shoulders of the other. “It is that simple,” said she. The kittens bumped into each other, falling over as if nothing had occurred.
“Does this power avail itself to all folk?” asked Tatterhood.
“Yes, it is our birthright. Though many have forgotten, and more than a few have never known.”
Tatterhood bid the woman farewell.
She came eventually to the cathedral’s desolate grounds. A few thorn bushes broke from the crumbling rocks. Where in other seaside places birds would circle and screech, here eerie forms hovered and swooped about the stone towers, which slumped and fell in such a way that the stronghold appeared as though it had not been set upon the ground with any care. Where stone angels and crosses once kept vigil upon the facade, now shards and defaced fragments stood crumbling away.
Tatterhood studied each window, those that still opened into existent rooms and saw, hanging by its hair from an aperture near the castle’s gate, the head of her beautiful twin sister. It was neither grimacing nor afraid, but appeared so very bored, looking as it did into a gray and featureless sea without trees to appreciate or birds to watch. Tatterhood could only conjecture why they wanted her sister’s head. Mayhaps they needed to replace the head of a witch whose face had been marred in a witch’s duel. Mayhaps they needed to trick a mirror into showing them something important. Mayhaps they needed her head to marry the severed head of an evil man. Tatterhood was glad she hadn’t delayed.
Between the cliff and the cathedral lay a barren plain of stringy grass with no fair place to hide.
The witches, who had been hovering and mumbling queer and frightening things, as was their way, now saw a strange speck approaching their home and looked from one to another, wondering what to do. No one came here, to this distant country and nothing of value was there for any brave adventurer to abscond.
“It is the twin,” one whispered to another. “From the house in the heath. The ugly girl, with the hood.”
And as a flock of them descended, Tatterhood approached the open window where her twin sister’s head was hanging. She grabbed the head from where it hung and made a sharp turn back toward the cliffs, little flecks of wet earth and pebbles flinging from her heels as she raced across the plain. But the witches, of course, could fly, and just as Tatterhood reached the jagged precipice, two of them swooped her over the edge, carrying her forward. For a moment Tatterhood thought she’d finally learned magic herself, that she would fly all the way back home.
But no, the witches snarled, and whispered, gibbered and groped, and Tatterhood came again to her senses. She remembered the old woman’s words and saw everything for what it truly was. The blue pall pulled over the earth, separating the folk from the vast night, the droplets of rainwater flocking together to form clouds. And she finally understood the old woman’s words. We live in a world of masks and veils. All was illusory and subject to the beholder. “My notion of the story is stronger than yours,” she recalled. She looked at the witch’s broom – once a branch of pine, but at its very pith, Tatterhood saw it contained the raw potential to become anything. She focused her thoughts, as best she could, eyes narrowing to slits. The broom became a sword and the witch fell sundered into halves. With her free hand, Tatterhood snatched the weapon before it fell away and aimed its lethal point at the other.
“See that boat down there? That is where you will take us.”
They hovered closer and closer to the cliff, descending toward the water. The ship’s deck approached, hoving up toward them from the waters. And so they landed, clattering on the pinewood boards and spiraling out from aft to stern.
A flock of witches descended from the cliffs. There was no time to replace her twin’s head atop her body. Tatterhood went quickly towards the steerboard and sculled the ship from the stony landing. Tatterhood brandished her blade. The witches, seeing her flashing sword, ceased their pursuit.
Once the sisters reached open waters, Tatterhood brought Dominika back up from the cabin and onto the deck. Despite her mismatched parts, there was something charming about her new appearance, some queerness Tatterhood felt but couldn’t speak. The way Dominika moved seemed more carefree than when she’d been beautiful…
“My notion of this story is stronger than yours,” said Tatterhood to Dominika.
The calf-headed girl blinked her big baleful eyes.
Tatterhood, throwing back her hood, carefully removed her own head and replaced it with Dominika’s pretty head.
The calf-headed girl balked, eyes growing wide with understanding.
“You have a choice, dear sister,” said Tatterhood, her words issuing from lips red as strawberries. “You can walk the earth with my old head on your shoulders or you can remain a cow-head until the end of your days. Which will it be? Choose now.”
The calf-headed girl threw back her head in what could have been a laugh, for Tatterhood heard their sneering mother’s cackle in it.
“So shall it be,” said Tatterhood, smiling, eyes burning green. She pulled at the steerboard and under the promontory’s shadow they veered.
“Look, sister,” called Tatterhood to Dominika over the waves crashing against the shore they were fast approaching. “Your lover remained true and steadfast for thereupon the promontory still he stands!”
The bull’s horn caught the sun and glinted. A string of thick white saliva fell from his black chin down the cliff and onto the deck near Dominika’s feet. Tatterhood laughed and both girls heard their mother in that laugh too.
“Off you go, dear sister.”
To Tatterhood’s utter astonishment, her sister thrashed through the fronds of the bank and, once free, took up the hem of her skirt and dashed to the bull. Tatterhood watched as Dominika laid a hand on his broad forehead and he – mindful of his great horns – nuzzled her.
And so Tatterhood rowed on alone, up into the knotted country of woods and bare sharp mountains. When she returned to the manor, her mother came to greet her.
“Dominika, dear girl, you’ve returned to me!” she cried.
Tatterhood leapt from the boat with a bundle under her arm and hurried to her mother. “Yes, mother! I have returned to you!”
“Where is your tatterhooded sister?”
“She felt so at home with the witches and hags, she decided to abide with them for a while,” explained Tatterhood to her mother. O with such love and adoration did her mother look upon her when a beautiful head graced her shoulders!
“But why do you wear her hood of hideous tatters?” asked their mother.
“Don’t worry your pretty head about it, mother,” said Tatterhood, and quick as any well-practiced witch, she switched her mother’s head with the head her sister had refused. Their mother didn’t know what happened and looking aghast and confused, a trembling hand touching that rip of tusks and cleft chin, watched as her beautiful daughter pitched the head of their dear mother into the cold green river.
That night, Tatterhood raided her mother’s wine cellar and forgoing any of the glass goblets in the hutch, drank straight from the bottle. In Dominika’s room, she threw open her sister’s wardrobe, tossing outfit upon outfit onto the bed until she found the most fetching ensemble, a chartreuse number cut low. She beheld herself in her sister’s full-length mirror, turning this way and that, touching her hand to her beautiful face.
Just then, a pebble struck the windowpane. In the mirror, Tatterhood caught a smile spreading upon her red lips. She laughed and tipped the wine bottle. Another pebble struck. She raised the window and beckoned the lumber baron’s son to her bower.
She drank again, listening for the boy’s boots on the stairs.
From downstairs, Tatterhood heard her mother say, “What are you doing here at this hour?” Her voice sounded wrong coming from the tusks that belonged once to Tatterhood.
“Quiet, you horrible troll,” the lumber baron’s son hissed.
He burst into her room, and the two met in an embrace Tatterhood thought she would never know. He drank wine from her lips and licked where it trickled down her chest. Emboldened by wine, she pushed him onto the bed, on top of all of Dominika’s pretty gowns. In haste, she unbuckled the belt of the lumber baron’s son and clambered onto his lap.
Looking down, she saw the boy gazing up at her. He touched her face with hands admiringly, those hands of his caressed the soft down on her cheek, stroking her neck, running his hands through her locks.
“O Dominika,” he said.
“Look at me,” she said and couldn’t hide the passion in her voice. She wanted them to lock eyes. She wanted him to pour his soul into hers, but his gaze only lingered on her fair mask and did not penetrate. Their spirits did not meet and mingle in the chasm of love. He looked only at her face. A gasp escaped her lips and the lumber baron’s son took it for a cry of joy, trying to meet her with vigor. Again, another gasp left her mouth. She was answered by the songbirds one room over, singing in their cages.
Matt Knutson is a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop. He’s been a resident at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and his work has appeared in Cola Literary Review, Expat Press, Bat City Review and elsewhere. His manuscript “Quiet Homes In The Hills” was a semi-finalist for Iron Horse Literary Review’s 2024 Chapbook Contest, and his story “So Far Behind I Thought I Was First” was a finalist for Bridge Eight’s 2022 Summer Short Story Prize. Originally from San Diego, he now lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and cat.
Ross Nervig grew up on farms and ranches in Iowa and Colorado. After a career as a communications strategist, he received his MFA from the University of New Orleans in 2020 and there won the Svenson Prize for Fiction and the prize for Best Thesis. His publications include Kenyon Review, Southwest Review, and Bayou Magazine. In 2018, he was a writer-in-residence at the Lemon Tree House residency in Tuscany. Currently, he lives in Nova Scotia with his wife and son.
COLD SIGNAL 