There is a place in the New Forest where a festival is held. Once a year, celebrations bloom, banners unfurl, music drifts, and the scent of roasting sugar thickens the air. No one can tell you where The Gathering is held because no one remembers the festival. When the sun rises the next morning, all traces of it are gone, including people’s memories. The following year, when it returns, people flock to the field, curious as to how they’d not remembered it sooner.
Selene, the youngest of the three sisters behind the festival, manoeuvred her cart laden with the famous mid-summer pies. She steered between the townsfolk, rarely noticed and barely seen. She was a shadow slipping between laughter and lantern light, as discreet as a concierge and as silent as a phantom. A glimpse of nostalgia emerged in her heart. It felt as warm as the sun on her face, and as tender as the child her sister had cooked the night before.
With a smile touched by regret, Selene shook off the feeling and resumed her rounds. The velvet scent of the pies lingered in the air, a honeyed trail that curled through the crowd, ensnaring passers-by, beckoning them to her. Soon, they would remember the taste. The way the pastry dissolved like a whispered secret on the tongue, the filling saturating every sense with its impossible richness. Beyond indulgence, beyond mere pleasure, the pies promised escape, an exquisite drift into a dreamscape where pain, fear, and sorrow melted into nothingness. They soothed wounds both seen and unseen and granted desires far deeper than the reach of flesh or fortune. So intoxicating, the locals often warned each other, “Never have more than one.” Selene echoed this warning to her customers, much to the disapproval of her sisters. They complained when she lingered over trades or hesitated to close deals. Lysandra, the eldest, had no patience for uncertainty. The Gathering was a transaction; clean and efficient. They gave people what they wanted in exchange for payment. Nothing more. Nothing less.
A couple stood before Lysandra, hopelessly in love, their devotion almost luminous. They hadn’t been together long, but marriage was inevitable. Lysandra handed them pies. As they took the first bite, the transformation was instant. Polite curiosity dissolved into reverent awe. The taste was beyond comprehension, beyond indulgence. What was in it? How had she crafted something so impossibly exquisite? And more pressing still, where could they find another?
Lysandra smiled politely before pivoting to the trade. She would not ask for coins or trinkets in exchange for the pies — the sisters did not need material possessions. They dealt in far rarer commodities. Hidden within their home stood a cupboard lined with glass jars that housed their earnings. Each vessel held a ghostly haze, the remnants of what had once belonged to someone. Some shimmered with luck, others glowed from warm memories. They bore labels: Talent, Wisdom, Affection, Love. Selene often lingered before them, running her fingers over the delicate inscriptions. She longed to claim one, to feel the kind of love she read about in secret, in the books she hid from her sisters. Especially Vesper. How she would laugh. How she would burn them all in front of her. Vesper, the middle sister, delighted in tormenting Selene, almost as much as she relished the villagers’ desperation for mid-summer pies.
Vesper found pleasure in the whispered bargaining, the fevered longing. That fragile moment when someone willingly surrendered something vital for another taste. She never coerced. She merely offered choices. Selene spied her sister deep in conversation with another customer: A middle-aged man in a police uniform. He was tall and proud in posture, but he couldn’t mask the plea in his eyes, the restless hunger coiling within his pupils, tightening its grip, squeezing his reason.
“My wife loves these,” he murmured, lifting a pie with the reverence one might afford a newborn. “She used to write: local history, the New Forest. Even published books, but she hasn’t written a word all year. Shame, really. It’s as if she’s lost her skill.”
Vesper flashed her sister a cruel smile. A flicker of guilt sparked in Selene, but she swallowed it down. Vesper sealed the deal. A pie for his vitality. He didn’t know yet, but from tomorrow, exhaustion would cling to him no matter how much he slept. He’d move through his days sluggishly, dragging fatigue like iron shackles.
Selene quickly moved on. Music swayed through the air, the villagers drunk on revelry, their laughter spilling into the night. They were fortunate, Selene reflected. Would she ever be like them, able to love? To escape the Forest and her sisters? To find a community of her own?
At that moment, someone emerged from behind a coconut stall. Her soul cracked with hunger, desperation twisting her features. The pies had consumed her, and there was nothing left to barter.
“You don’t want another one,” Selene warned quietly, fingers tightening around the wooden handle of her cart.
The woman swallowed, her voice thin, raw. “Got any pies?” Then came the offer, the bundle in her arms. Selene froze. Her stomach turned. A deep, slow churning, dragging memories to the surface. She and her sisters had been traded for mid-summer pies. She could not remember her parents, but she had spent years imagining them, trying to stitch together the life she might have had, the warmth she had never known. She looked down. The baby stirred, soft and unaware. Her sisters’ voices whispered at the back of her mind. Selene made the trade, and the woman left without a backwards glance, no memory of ever having a child. A single tear rolled down Selene’s cheek. Inside her, something fractured, but she knew she could not stop the cycle. She would continue to sell the pies, and people would forget. The Gathering was inevitable, and it was older than her sentimental dreams.
Andy Morris is a long-time enthusiast of short fiction, with published stories in literary magazines and performances featured on podcasts. He teaches creative writing and actively participates in a local writing group, where he enjoys exchanging ideas and fostering creativity. Andy loves short stories and flash fiction with a horror/fantasy theme. More of his work can be found at www.blackcattales.weebly.com.
Regular reader? We need your Patreon support.
