Gordon's Knot

by Jennifer Milne

My neighbor Mrs. Henriksson was a princess. At least, that’s what she always said.

“I come from a very long line of ancient Viking warrior princesses, Mary Gordon,” she would say in her thick Nordic accent.

She regaled me with wild tales of her ancestresses the shieldmaidens sailing across the untamable seas, fighting Saxon pirates and going on epic journeys. She said her great-great-something or other grandmother fought raiding marauders out of her village while nursing her baby in her arms.

On one such adventure, she told me, one of her ancestresses found the fabled Tíðknut. Tíðknut meant “Time Knot” in Old Norse and was a piece of rope that had been braided from the hair of the Norns—the Norse equivalent of the Greek Fates. Mrs. Henriksson said the legend was that Norns themselves had given her ancestress the Time Knot after she’d correctly answered their riddle.

The rope had a single knot in the center, and the one who possessed the Time Knot could untie it to turn back time to change one regret.

“That’s a neat story,” I’d told Mrs. Henriksson as I watered her plants one afternoon.

“It is not a story, elskede,” she said (she called me “elskede” which was like “dear” or “darling” in Norwegian). “Well, of course all that talk of the Norns is myth. I believe the Time Knot to be something fashioned by the hands of God himself—a relic of his power. Like the Ark of the Covenant, Moses’ staff or the Holy Grail.”

“Like in Indiana Jones,” I said.

“Yes, yes. My Johann always reminded me of Harrison Ford. But Mary, this power is not a story. I used the Tíðknut myself.”

“Oh yeah,” I said, humoring her. “That’s cool.”

“You doubt me,” she said with amusement. “But it’s true! I was fifteen years old when I first laid eyes on the young man who had just moved to our village. Johann was the handsomest boy I had ever seen, and he was so funny. We had a wonderful moment sorting books in the school library after lessons one day. He tried to kiss me, but I had never been kissed before. It startled me and I pulled away. He mistook my shyness for a lack of interest and left me alone after that. I was heartbroken. My mother gave me the Tíðknut and told me its story. All I had to do was go to the place of my regret and untie the knot.

“So, I went back to the library, untied the knot and found myself face to face with Johann for the second time. No, not for the second time! For the first time, again. This time, when he tried to kiss me, I let him.” She paused and smiled, lost in her memory. “I had fifty-two more wonderful years with my Johann.”

When Mrs. Henriksson got sick, I started going over every day. We would watch TV, I would bring a carton of her favorite ice cream, and she would ask me to tell her about my days at the Jericho Falls Christian High School.

“Mercy Mulligan was picking on me again today.”

Mercy had moved here in sixth grade as a surly, purple-haired weirdo, but by ninth grade she’d blossomed into a blonde-haired, tight sweater-wearing bully. Now that we were in tenth grade, she’d become a minor YouTube celebrity with a make-up tutorial channel. The slight taste of fame had only served to solidify her status as our school’s resident mean girl.

Mrs. Henriksson tutted. “So ironic that she carries the name, yet shows none.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. She’ll corner a girl in the bathroom and demand that they ‘beg Mercy.’ Not ‘beg for mercy’ mind you, but ‘beg Mercy.’”

“Well, a person becomes a bully to reclaim power in their life.”

“She’s the most powerful girl in school! She’s pretty, she’s popular, she gets straight A’s.”

“Hmm,” was Mrs. Henriksson’s response. “One’s entire life is not lived at school, elskede.”

Mrs. Henriksson’s health continued to get worse and a twenty-four-hour nurse came to live with her. When I went over one afternoon, she had a wooden box sitting on her lap.

“What’s that?” I asked, as I sat down next to the hospital bed that had been brought into her living room. She couldn’t go up and down the stairs to her bedroom anymore.

“It is something I would like to give to you, Mary. Johann and I were very blessed, but children were not one of those blessings. You have been such a wonderful friend to me, elskede. You are a peaceful young lady with a selfless heart, which is the most important thing a true shieldmaiden can have. Sometimes battles must be fought, but never by those who thirst to fight.”

She handed me the box and I lifted the lid. Inside, cushioned by some yellowed, crumpled-up newspaper was a foot-long piece of thin, silky rope with a single knot tied in the center.

“Mrs. Henriksson, you don’t have to—”

“Of course,” she interrupted. “That is why I want to.”

After she passed away, I was really sad. And like one of those rats that could smell death, Mercy Mulligan seemed to be able to smell my pain and had ratcheted up her daily torture.

I was in a fog. A heavy fog that felt like it had taken residence in every part of my body and was weighing me down. My grades were slipping because I couldn’t concentrate, and I had no one to talk to about it.

Mrs. Henriksson had been my only friend. Which was weird, I knew that, but kids my age had just always thought I was weird. And truthfully, I’d thought they were weird too. I didn’t care about the stuff they cared about. Which made it hard to connect, even if I’d wanted to.

My parents tried to help but I didn’t tell them about the problems at school. I was fifteen. Soon I would be driving, then graduating and going to college, so I felt I needed to try to handle this stuff myself.

After a particularly bad day at school I went home and took the Time Knot out of the box. Mom had bought me a display case for it, but I hadn’t felt like setting it up. Today, since I couldn’t talk to Mrs. Henriksson anymore, I decided I would get out the Time Knot and clear a place for it on my shelf. I hoped it would help me feel closer to her for a moment.

It didn’t.

***
We had to climb ropes in gym. I hated climbing the rope. Oh, I could do it just fine, but I hated doing it while everyone stood on the ground staring up at my butt.

My stomach was hurting, but not like I was going to barf. More like my insides were twisting around. I didn’t want to go to the nurse because Mercy and her cohorts would just tease me about being a wuss. Even now she stood in her long-sleeved gym shirt (supposedly she had massive sun sensitivity or something, though I joked to myself that she was covering up werewolf syndrome on her arms) stage-whispering rude things about me.

When it was my turn to climb the rope, I did it as quickly as possible. About halfway up an explosion of laughter startled me and nearly made me lose my grip, but I managed to hold on and finish.

As I stepped off the rope I was greeted by laughter and applause. I looked around, confused. Why were they laughing at me? I hadn’t done anything!

Then I looked down.

My gym shorts were covered with red stuff. Blood.

I’d only been having my period for about a year, I was a late bloomer, and I hadn’t gotten used to the signs it was coming. I realized it wasn’t my stomach that had been hurting earlier. I’d been having menstrual cramps.

After that, everyone started calling me Bloody Mary. They would whisper it as they passed me in the halls, they would say it when I walked into class, and they chanted it in the lunchroom—like a sick pep rally in hell.

The teachers did what they could and handed out detentions and stuff, but they couldn’t really stop it. Not completely.

Mercy Mulligan was the worst. After school, as I gathered up my books before heading home, she walked up and leaned against the locker next to mine.

“Hey Bloody Mary,” she cooed.

I ignored her. Mom and Dad had said if you ignored a bully, they would get bored and move on to a more interesting target. So far that hadn’t worked with Mercy. It was almost like my ignoring her only whet her appetite to get a reaction from me.

“I’ve got a surprise for you,” she said.

Which got me to look, but I stayed quiet.

“It’s gonna be fun,” she assured me, giving me a wink and sashaying down the hallway.

That night she posted a video of the rope climbing incident online, and it quickly went viral. Not just locally viral but worldwide viral. The raw video and various joke versions making fun of me spread around the disreputable parts of the internet. Someone even autotuned it into a frustratingly catchy song that YouTube kept pulling down but that would always pop back up. The more reputable sites blurred out my face and wrote a lot of think pieces about “period shaming” and the “bullying epidemic” and “youth and the perils of social media.”

Those were no better than the stories that mocked me.

People started calling my parents asking me to become a spokesperson for anti-bullying organizations and other activist groups. But I said no. I didn’t want the rest of my life to be about this stupid thing that happened to me when I was in high school.

I just wanted to forget about it and move on. God, if I could just go back and not climb the rope or wear a pad or something…

Oh my gosh.

After I was sure my parents were asleep, I took the Time Knot out of its case. I sat in the dark just to be certain I wouldn’t wake them.

I’ll be honest. I didn’t really think it would work. It was just a story. I’d always assumed Mrs. Henriksson was just sharing her culture with me. Passing on what she could.

So imagine my surprise when I loosened the knot and it suddenly felt like God was a DJ and my head was a record, and He’d decided to do some funky scratching.

My hands went limp and I dropped the Time Knot into my lap, but everything still seemed off. The room was blurry but not I’m not wearing my glasses blurry, more like I’m riding in a car going 500 miles per hour blurry.

I picked the rope back up and tightened the knot again and the off-kilter feeling went away. Then I loosened it more carefully and watched as the world around me changed. It was like watching a movie in reverse.

As I slowly separated the knot, I saw the sun creep back up from behind the hill and watched my Mom walk backwards into my room. I stopped it. Time froze and I looked at my mom, completely still like one of those Mannequin Challenge videos only so much more still that it was scary.

I waved my hand in front of her, but she didn’t react. When I touched her cheek, I found it cold and hard, like a statue. I grabbed the Time Knot and retightened it, but I did it too quickly, so my return to the present felt like getting punched in the face and left me with a headache.

But it worked.

It.

Freaking.

Worked.

***
The next morning at school my whole body was buzzing, a mixture of nervousness and excitement.

I had the Time Knot wrapped in a pillowcase and in a separate pocket of my backpack. Mrs. Henriksson had said that you had to be in the place where you wanted to go back in time from, so my plan was to sneak into the gym at lunchtime when there wouldn’t be anybody in there.

We’d been talking about Alexander the Great in history. The teacher told us this story about the “Gordian Knot.” Being about a knot, it piqued my attention. A wagon that had belonged to this great king Gordias was tied to a pole in the town square with a knot that supposedly couldn’t be untied. An oracle claimed that whoever managed to undo it would unite all the empires of the world.

So of course, Alexander decides he’s going to untie that knot. Problem was, he got there and found it impossible to undo. But Alexander didn’t take nothing from nobody, including stupid kings who tied stupid complicated knots. So, according to legend, he pulled out his sword and sliced that bad boy off.

Since no one ever said how the knot had to be undone, Alexander was like “winner winner chicken dinner” and ruled the world happily ever after. Well, you know, until he died at the ripe old age of 32. Probably from an STD.

The moral of the story is about thinking outside the box to solve a problem. Which felt like a sign. Using the Time Knot to solve my problem was most definitely outside the box thinking. Heck, it was outside the space-time continuum thinking.

Mercy Mulligan could kiss Mary Gordon’s Knot.

At my locker between classes, I noticed Mercy and her blonde-tourage of sycophants giggling nearby.

I ignored them though, they wouldn’t have this on me much longer anyway.

When I opened my locker, a bunch of bloody pads fell out, covering me in red. I had a top locker, so the pads had hit me in the face first. It wasn’t real blood, it wasn’t even pig’s blood a là Carrie. Unfortunately, some had gotten in my mouth, and it tasted like strawberry syrup.

How very Hitchcockian of them.

“That was great, Bloody Mary!” said Mercy, as one of her friends recorded me with her phone. “Your last video got me to fifty thousand followers on Instagram, this will put me over a hundred thousand for sure!”

I felt dizzy. I was so embarrassed and disoriented. I tried to just walk away, but she and her horde blocked me in.

“What do you want, Mercy?” I said, my voice cracking.

“Just to see you squirm, Bloody Mary.”

They all laughed. People were gathering around.

I tried to shoulder through them but lost my backpack in the process. Before I could retrieve it, Mercy scooped it up.

“You lost something,” she said in a sing-song voice.

“Give it back,” I said coldly.

“Why? Do you have something super embarrassing in here? Ooh! Krista, get this, we can do a hilarious unboxing video. It’ll probably be better than Bloody Mary!”

I reached out and tried to snatch it back, but she pulled away and laughed.

It made me so angry. Her tinkling laugh with just the slightest hint of cruelty, like it was one of those soft serve cones and her laughter was the chocolate swirl around the edge.

“Give me my backpack,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Or what?” she said, smiling.

I answered her with my fist. Which consequently knocked the smile off her face.

She dropped my backpack as both her hands flew to her face. She let out a wail of pain so pitiful it made me feel bad for hitting her.

All of a sudden, the crowd burst out laughing. I looked around to find the source of their amusement, my mind reeling with déjà vu.

Then I saw it. The wet spot on Mercy’s skirt. The small yellow puddle at her feet.

“What is going on here?” demanded a teacher who appeared from out of nowhere. She looked back and forth between the two of us. I was so angry and confused I couldn’t get myself to speak. “Both of you, to the principal’s office. Now.”

***
Mercy and I got suspended for fighting. My parents had a long talk with me about defending myself versus starting the fight, and how you can’t respond to words with violence. Which I knew already.

Honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure why I’d punched Mercy like that. It didn’t make me feel better. I mean, there was this moment, like right after it happened where I got this… rush, I guess. But it faded quickly and turned into something yucky that made me feel like I wanted to give my soul a shower.

While I was suspended the video of Mercy peeing herself went viral. Part of me felt bad for her but there was also this part of me—one I didn’t want to look at directly for fear of unleashing it—that was sort of glad to see her get some of what she gave.

When I went back to school, people started whispering things again as they walked past me.

Only this time they were saying:

“Nice job, Mary.”

“Way to lay the smack down!”

“You rock!”

“You showed Mercy no mercy!”

I had this weird mixture of positive and negative feelings about it which created this sort of feelings hurricane inside me. I didn’t like that people were so happy about what I’d done, but it also felt really good to be so…

Liked.

It made me reconsider using the Time Knot. I mean, my viral video stuff was dying down at this point anyway. There was a video of some dude tripping while texting and falling face first into a pile of dog poop that had captured the world’s attention, so even Mercy peeing herself was old news.

And nobody was bothering me anymore. Well they were, but in a good way now. People were constantly coming up to talk to me or asking me to sit by them in class or inviting me to their lunch table.

Which was pretty cool.

When Mercy came back to school, she left me alone. She left everyone alone, although they wouldn’t do her the same courtesy. They would follow her around and taunt her just like she’d done to me for so long.

One afternoon I was in the library trying to stay out of the heatwave we were experiencing when I saw Mercy hiding in a study carrell deep in the stacks. She had one of her long sleeves pulled up and was rubbing her forearm.

When she noticed me there staring, she pulled it back down quickly and stormed away as she combined a very inappropriate word that rhymed with water fowl with the technical name for a female dog.

What I'd seen on her arm hadn't been werewolf fur, but I had to be sure before I said anything.

When we were in the locker room together during PE, I tried to get a look at her as she changed but I realized she wasn’t there. The next day I saw her get her gym clothes (a long-sleeved t-shirt) from her locker and take them to the bathroom. She did that every single day. How had I never noticed before?

I brought the Time Knot to school with me, hid in a stall in the bathroom and waited for her to come in to change. The toilet flushed, she walked out of the stall and I heard the sink go on. That was when I stepped out of my stall and loosened the knot to stop time.

The stop wasn’t very steady. It reminded me of this time I’d watched a movie on something called a VHS tape with Mrs. Henriksson. I’d paused the tape to go to the bathroom and it wasn’t a clean stop like with a DVD, but was very blurry and vibrated.

Mercy stood at the sink, so I went over there and played with the knot carefully until I could get a clear look at her. She was frozen as she pulled up her sleeve to wash her hands. On the bit of forearm that was visible I could see angry red cuts all over her skin.

I swallowed but found my throat to be bone dry, then I quickly retightened the knot.

Mercy jumped in surprise to find me standing so close to her, where I hadn’t been a moment ago.

“Holy crap!” she exclaimed, startling away from me.

I shoved the Time Knot into my pocket and grabbed her wrist.

“Hey, let go of me you psycho!”

I yanked up her sleeve and had my fears confirmed. All up and down her arm were cuts in various stages of healing, from jaggedly scarred to fresh and oozy. She yanked away from me hard, her cheeks red with hot anger and shame.

She didn’t yell at me. She wouldn’t even look at me. She just yanked her sleeve back down and stood there staring at the floor. I stared at the top of her blonde head, perfectly highlighted.

She wore her makeup perfect every day, spent at least an hour on her hair, and probably carefully chose her outfit the night before. It made me think about that judging the book by the cover cliché.

“Why are you cutting yourself?” I asked.

“Why do you care!” she snapped, not really asking.

“I care—”

“Since when?” She shook her head and finally looked at me. “You know, I saw A Swiftly Tilting Planet on your desk my first day of school, and I thought ‘oh cool, someone else who’s actually read the sequels to A Wrinkle in Time. But no, just like everyone else you wouldn’t talk to the weirdo new girl. You walked right by me.”

I did remember that. I’d thought she seemed weird and mean. But I guess she’d just been scared and shy. Kind of like when Johann mistook Mrs. Henriksson’s shyness for not liking him.

After years of being lonely and picked on, maybe she decided she would go on offense instead of defense. And I couldn’t help but feel like she targeted me because she felt like I’d snubbed her.

Which I guess I had.

Suddenly she moved, startling me out of my thoughts. I thought she was going to hit me, but instead she spun away and bolted from the bathroom, slamming the door on her way out.

I wiped away the hot tear that slid down my cheek as I realized what I had to do.

No one would ever call me Mary Gordon the Great, but I would take my cue from Alexander and solve this problem by cutting it off before it got all tangled up.

***
I ditched gym and raced through the hallways with reckless abandon. A teacher saw me and yelled at me to stop, but I kept going. I was about to go back in time, so whatever happened now didn’t even matter.

My high school was on a large campus called the Jericho Falls Christian Schools, and had Kindergarten through twelfth grade. I’d been going here my entire school career.

When I got where I was headed, I disrupted a class, but I didn’t care. The teacher demanded, with growing irritation, to know what I was doing in her classroom, and the kids started giggling and chattering. Just as she reached out to grab my arm, I undid the knot quickly and completely, my mind totally focused on the moment of regret that I wanted to rectify.

“Miss Gordon…” said an annoyed voice. “Miss Gordon!” the voice nearly shouted, causing me to jump in my seat and knock my book off my desk.

The class giggled.

It was like someone flipped on a light switch. I hadn’t been blinded while time was moving, but when time actually settled it was jarring.

“Bring me your phone,” said Mrs. Dempsey, my sixth-grade middle school math teacher.

“I don’t have a phone,” I said, and the class giggled again.

“What is that in your hand then?” she asked as she approached my desk.

“It’s just a rope.” I held it up.

“Oh… well, put it away. No toys in class. And put that book away too, this is math class not library time.”

The class full on laughed at the word “toys” and Barry Torvald called me a “baby.”

“Hey Barry, you might want to stop wearing the Sesame Street underwear,” I whispered so no one else could hear. “Especially at the assembly next year.”

His face turned beet red and he turned away from me. I wasn’t trying to embarrass him. I was just trying to save him the humiliation of being pantsed next year at the assembly and the whole school seeing his Elmo undies.

Okay, I was trying to embarrass him a little. He was being a jerk.

When I turned back to the front, the classroom door opened, and the vice principal walked in and whispered to Mrs. Dempsey. She nodded and he went to the hallway and beckoned to someone.

And in walked Mercy Mulligan: purple hair, angry scowl and all.

Mrs. Dempsey spoke quietly to her and Mercy shook her head, her face turning red. Then she was sent to the open seat at the back of the class.

Just like the last time I lived this moment, everyone whispered and giggled as Mercy walked to her seat. This time I noticed her eyes stop on my book and the tinniest glimmer of hope begin to shine in them.

When the bell rang nobody would talk to her.

Until she came back at the beginning of ninth grade looking gorgeous and filled to the brim with vengeful cruelty.

So this time, as I walked out of class, I stopped by Mercy and said, “Hi, I’m Mary. Do you want to have lunch with me?”

***
“After that, everything changed,” I told Mrs. Henriksson. “It got worse.”

Mercy and I had become good friends after the day I’d gone back and talked to her on her first day of school.

For a while.

But just like before, when we got to high school, Mercy got boobs and turned into a mean girl.

“Now that I’ve been best friends with her for three years, she knows all this stuff about me and uses it against me to hurt me.”

Mrs. Henriksson sighed. There were two Time Knots now. She held hers in the special box she’d kept it in all those years. I pulled mine out of my backpack.

I’d tried to untie it again, even though Mrs. Henriksson said it was a one and done deal. She’d been correct. It wouldn’t budge, not even a thread.

“I’m sorry, elskede,” she said sadly.

“I just don’t understand. You were able to go back and fix things with Johann. Why couldn’t I fix things with Mercy?”

She seemed to think about it. “Mary, God gives us the freedom to choose. I did not change Johann’s choice, I changed mine.”

“But I did change my choice. My choice to befriend Mercy!”

“Yes, but you couldn’t change her decision after she… got boobs, as you put it. You can’t save her, Mary, from herself or anyone else. There is only one who can truly save people and that person is not you.”

I sighed. What she’d said about changing people seemed right. My uncle had loved a woman who had a drug problem. He thought if he loved her enough, she’d start to love him more than the drugs. But she didn’t.

Sometimes our love isn’t enough.

“So why do you think there are two Time Knots now?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “This did not happen to me last time.”

She took her Knot out of the box and I pulled mine out of my backpack. Like magnets with opposite polarity they flew toward each other and with a flash of light, melded together.

Mrs. Henriksson picked it up off her lap and tried to untie it, to no avail.

“Please take it, elskede. It is yours to pass onto the next shieldmaiden.”

“Thanks,” I said, taking it. “But I don’t feel like much of a shieldmaiden right now.”

“Mary, do you remember Jesus’s parable about the seeds and the soil?”

“Kind of.”

“The sower threw out his seeds. Some were eaten by birds. Others could not take root on rocky soil and others were choked to death by thorns. But some of the seeds landed on good soil and after time, they grew into fruitful crops.”

I looked at her and shrugged, not understanding.

“You sowed the seeds. All you can do is give time to see what kind of soil is in Mercy’s heart.”

I played with the Time Knot as I thought about her words.

“Well,” I sighed. “There is one good thing to come from this. At least I know to wear a pad the day we climb the ropes.”

Mrs. Henriksson laughed. I’d missed her laugh. It was such a gift to be able to hear it again.

***
A few days after Mrs. Henriksson passed away again, I was in the school library looking for a book, when none other than Mercy came around the corner and nearly bumped into me.

She snorted. “All alone in the stacks huh? Maybe if you hung out with people who weren’t alive during World War II, you wouldn’t spend all your time in the library like a loser.”

She’d hit a nerve. As bad as it had been losing Mercy as a friend, watching Mrs. Henriksson die again was worse. Knowing it was coming hadn’t lessened the blow.

I chewed on my cheek to keep the cry from escaping me.

“How is the old broad anyway? She still telling those boring Viking stories?”

A painful lump sat in the back of my throat. It took all the strength I had to swallow it down just to speak.

“She died,” I said, in what I thought was a fairly normal voice.

There was a long silence.

“Oh,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m… I’m sorry, Mary.”

The sob broke out and I covered my face with my hand. I felt so stupid crying in front of her like this. Giving her more ammunition to come after me.

Then I felt her put her arms around me. I accepted her comfort, in spite of everything.

As I stood there being held by my enemy, I realized I’d never cried before. The first time Mrs. Henriksson died, I mean. I’d kept it all inside, letting it eat me up and destroy me.

Even though she’d been being cruel when she said it, Mercy was right that I needed friends. God is the father, son and holy spirit, and in his image, we’re not supposed to be alone.

One of Mercy’s friends called out to her from somewhere away from us and was comically shushed by the librarian. Mercy leapt away from me like I’d caught fire, but we shared a laugh as we listened to her friend get reamed by the librarian.

“Ohmigod, the librarian needs to get the jagged icicle removed from her—ugh, what are you doing talking to her?” the girl asked after coming around the corner.

“I wasn’t,” Mercy said, then turned and walked away.

***
Later that night as I lay in my bed, I thought about something I had noticed when Mercy hugged me.

Her arms weren’t covered. She’d worn a tank top, and her arms were free of those horrible cutting scars.

Thinking about her scarless arms filled me with… hope. I guess.

The choice I’d made with the Time Knot had made a difference. It had planted a seed. A seed that maybe would keep growing.

I thought about the Gordian Knot story. I wasn’t able to slice right through the problem the way I’d hoped to, but I had loosened the knot.

Because at the end of the day, it was Mercy’s knot. And it was up to her whether she would unravel it.

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Jennifer Milne’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in CinderQ, The Arcanist, the Blue Room Books Southern Humor Southern Crime anthology and other publications. Her screenplay The Conscription has won multiple awards in festivals throughout 2019 and 2020, and her YA romance novella Cupid’s Kiss is published by Rogue Phoenix Press. She lives in San Diego with her family. You can find a list of all her published work at jennifermilne.blogspot.com.

“Gordon’s Knot” by Jennifer Milne. Copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Milne.

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