“What do you need?” Dryden asked. “Do you want my help?”

“Yes.” His mother smiled. With a cleaver in her hand, she sliced away the flanks and placed them on a wooden cutting board. She removed what was left of the intestines and added them to a separate block, too. After what seemed like forever, his mother finally pulled out a tiny organ and handed it to Dryden.

“By the window,” she said. “Place this on the sill.”

The small organ felt hollow in his hand and left his fingers stained red. “What’s this for?”

“The balance.”

“I thought you said the universe took care of itself?”

“It does. But you must feed the darkness, just a little bit, or beware of the consequences.”

“The consequences?” Dryden placed the organ on the windowsill, just outside of the frame. The blood stained the snow around it, creating the same deep red color as the chair. After washing up, Dryden sat back down with the beads, though he could still feel the sting of blood on his hands. “You mean the beast? Is that for the beast?”

“No.”

When she didn’t explain further, Dryden stayed quiet and unmoved.

She sighed, touching the purple stone she still wore against her throat. “I told you all this already, Dryden. You must listen to me carefully.”

“You told me not to go into the woods. But this has nothing to do with woods.”

“Fine. I will say it again, in a form you recognize.”

She placed the cleaver down on the table and then wiped blood on her apron. She held the fabric out from her body, then chuckled. “A-hah! See the stain? It’s easy to mark up something perfect. Hard to keep something good. Like this necklace I wear, like --”

“But you ruined the necklace,” Dryden cut in.

“Exactly. I left the mistake so the universe would supply.”

Dryden shook his head. “I still don’t understand.”

“I told you before not to go into the woods past a certain point because a beast lives there, right?”

“Yes. The man who made the town.”

“Yes. Good.” She paused. “He is a smaller part of a larger organism. The world is a tree, Dryden. The branches on the top stretch out for what’s good -- but the roots at the bottom reach down far below towards dirt and destruction. There is the high and the low, the good and the bad. But people often forget about the trunk of this tree, and they let it go hollow. The roots and the branches support life, both the good and the bad, but if you leave out the middle, your life doesn’t work. The tree needs the middle to support itself. That is where we live -- and people just like us. We are the center of the whole.”

“And people forget about us?”

“Yes. Because it’s always better to strive for something else. The beast -- the man in the woods -- he started out in the middle of life, too. He started out as a hard-working person with some luxuries. He merely forgot who he really was and became hollow inside.” His mother paused and then shivered as if a chill had passed through the room. “I tell you not to go into the woods, Dryden, because I want you to be safe from him. But I tell you this part of the story because I don’t want you to become him. You can’t forget where you come from, Dryden. We are always the people in the middle.”

Dryden paused. He was used to his mother talking like this, but her words had a distinct weight to them this time around that made Dryden uncomfortable. He looked down at the jewelry he had been making all this week. Each model was perfect with a stone in the right place. But as he pulled his hands away from the piece he was currently working on, he left bloody fingerprints in his wake. He dropped it with a shudder. The jewelry fell to the ground, and the white stone in the center cracked.

His mother sighed, but not in anger. She picked up the fallen jewelry and passed it back to him, rubbing off the blood—but leaving the crack—as she did. “Nature does not like if you outdo her. She will balance you, like she did here. But if you make the error, the universe will fill it in with something good. Someone will buy this, Dryden, even though there is a crack. They will want it more because of this.”

“But why? Beauty has to be perfect.”

“No. It doesn’t. People love what reminds them of themselves, of what makes them human. And perfection is not human.” Her eyes lingered on Dryden’s father, whose cough rattled inside the walls of the house. For a moment, Dryden wondered if his mother kept his father sick so she could sacrifice something good for her own success. When her violet eyes crinkled and her face softened as he coughed again, Dryden forgot the thought. His mother turned back to him.

“If you try to achieve perfection, then the universe will destroy it. That is the lesson of my stories, Dryden. That is why I keep what’s broken and why, so far, we have been so lucky.”

Dryden went back to making jewelry. It was hard to destroy what he had finally made look good, but eventually, he got used to it. His mother continued to chop up the sheep’s body for their dinner that night.

“What does the beast look like?” Dryden asked.

“He is hollow inside,” she said. “That is all I know.”

“From making bad deals?”

“Probably.” His mother nodded. “And from wanting everything that’s beautiful. You can’t have that, Dryden. No one ever can.”