By the dim light of a dying candle, Grandmother’s hunched back looms over your small, quivering body, fever high. She presses horn against stone—withered skin pulled taut over smooth bone. Smooth bone hard against jagged, carved rock, pour water, mix—the murky water is magic. 

    When did her hands stop looking like your own? 

    You ask what the liquid does. She says it will allow you to share your illness with her, that it will heal you the same way her grandmother healed her. 

    And don’t worry, she winks and says she’s immortal. She cannot die; she cannot leave you. 

    And so, you take the horn and grind, mix, drink, and watch the horn grow smaller, your grandmother weaker. Yet you continue to drink until your grandmother is gone. You thought that was okay because she was smiling, and she said she was immortal. 

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    Grandmother said children will carry your stories and that they will carry your legacy. But how can they do so when they know none of the history, none of the past if the elders stay silent and ask you to turn from the pain they have suffered, be blind to their sacrifices? How can they ask for your pain when they refused to share their own? How could they ask you to drink the potion of healing when they themselves refused to heal? 

    When they leave old scars untouched in fear that they may open in front of you rather than unseen when they’re buried beneath the soil, hidden in their graves and above their altars. To blindly follow a tradition without question and without knowledge of its past, what it does, who it came from, what it means—but to trust, so utterly, in family, who may betray you, abandon you, as though renouncing the blood you share in their body, flowing in yours. And yet you still drink that horned liquid, milky, powdery white like it is magic, like it would heal even death.

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    In fifteen years, you pull out the severed horn and the stone Grandmother left and grind, mix, but don’t drink. You stir in the water and hold it up to your daughter’s pale lips, kiss her fevered forehead, and wait for her to drain every last bit of it. 

    Your head warms, your lungs cry, your heart bleeds, and your eyes burn, but you feel the peace return within your daughter when her expression smooths, her lips pink, her forehead cools, and white strands like grinded horn sprouting from your scalp. Grandmother never told you where to get a new horn. And Grandmother never told you that the horn was her own. And you won’t tell your daughter that she was drinking what was left of your life because then she’ll lose the same magic you had of believing that, like Grandmother, you are immortal, too.