After being abandoned in a forest for the last nine years, four siblings are left to forge their family back together when they are discovered by a world that had long thought them dead.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Nearly a decade ago, a h...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The final morning belonged to a picture on a nightstand, to a boy known as Bigger.
Bigger didn't know he was Bigger, even though he would've given anything for the knowledge. Anything and everything to bring the Wolf back to them. He would hunt every rabbit in their forest to read her mind. Carve every tree into a bookshelf to understand her. Twine every reed into rope just to know why she had become what she became.
The Wolf used to know this. She used to feel the same sort of devotion back when she was noosed by the word sister. Daughter. Caretaker.
The Old Skin. The lesser half. A hole.
Elisabeth, had been her name.
There were many holes in the Holtzer family, divided and shattered as they were. And yet despite the distance, father and son and daughter each shared a hollow that had once been full of a girl named Elisabeth. Hendrik struggled to solder it. The Wolf struggled to suppress it. Bigger struggled to remember it.
It was getting harder for all of them.
But the world was about to turn inside out, so it was okay.
The final morning of September 17th happened nineteen miles from where the Wolf had woken up, several hours after Hendrik had allowed the world to be drowned in rain. It was 11:27 in a forest near a town called Cedarbrook, Colorado. This is where Bigger sat at the edge of the creek that carved through his cave home, sharpening one of his last three knives.
Bigger had a real name, of course, and it was Nicolai Holtzer, since he had forgotten the middle one. Nicolai had one older sister named Elisabeth, and one younger brother called Luciano who had a twin called Leontyne. Their mother, Birdie Holtzer, known in some circles as the 'Bird of Bordeaux', had been a classical-crossover singer who named all of her children after her favorite operatic voices. And their father, Hendrik Holtzer, loved Birdie so much that he let her without complaint.
They'd been that kind of family, once upon a time. Many, many mornings ago.
But in the many mornings since, the Holtzer children had grown like vines around the names they'd been given, growing instead into the names they'd given themselves. They'd become people like Elsie, who had loved to draw with charcoal. Cole, who had learned to carve things out of wood. Lucky, who liked to tell stories. And Leo, who looked at stars. These were the people Cole knew, the people who had been born on the day their mother walked into the trees six years ago carrying those grand, heavy names with her.
She had not returned with them.
So Cole was just Cole.
When he wasn't Bigger, anyway. Not that he knew he'd acquired such a name.
There were a lot of things Cole didn't know.
He didn't know he was lost. He didn't know that somewhere out in the world there was a headstone in a graveyard with his heavy name on it. He didn't know what the inside of a school looked like. He didn't know the bubbly taste of soda. He didn't know what a movie theater was, or the way fresh laundry smelled, or how to safely negotiate traffic.
