I was no more than twelve when I felt that terrible tingling in my throat. I had fallen sick a few times before, but they were nothing like this.

“Stay home today. There will be plenty of work to be done tomorrow.” - my mother told me despite my pleads to go to the field with them.

By the time the sun was up that morning, I was coughing to the point of vomiting. So they left me behind with my grandmother. The thing about my grandma was that she had a deity-like status in our village. One day they’ll build her a statue next to the one of Perun, I swear. She was the oldest person in Tamno, in the villages nearby, and possibly in the world.

Her hair had long lost its color, and despite her small size, her presence towered over people. Her hair was thin and pale. Most old people knew plenty of stories and legends to tell the younger generations. My grandmother had lived through these tales. She mentioned the warriors and gods by name and often corrected the bards that came through our village.

“It wasn’t like this.” - she’d whisper to herself while the musicians were singing about someone’s feats of bravery.

Despite her age, she still got up before everyone and walked distances that made young men crumble. One of the first days after I fell ill, I heard her yelling from the back of the house. I rushed, afraid that she might have fallen and hurt herself, only to see her chasing a chicken with a small hatchet, its head dangling on one side.

She wanted to make me chicken soup, but finding the animal’s neck was too hard of a task for her sight. So now we had a partially beheaded chicken that ran around the yard, spraying blood everywhere. It ran for a full minute before we managed to catch it and bring it in, covered in its entrails.

I think she had something against chickens in particular. She was only looking for occasions to make soup, and I gave her plenty of excuses to chop one’s head off with my cough. What was supposed to be a couple of days turned into a week. The week turned into two, and before we knew it, it was a whole month that I had spent indoors. The chickens suffered greatly because of me.