The nightmare came again.
Same as always.
She was only three years old, her tiny hand locked inside her mother's calloused palm. They were walking home after a long day at her mother's salon in Kombinat — a place that smelled of burnt hair, cheap dye, and quiet determination.
Her mother was everything in those days. She still was.
They lived in Tirana e Re, and the journey home was always the same: a rickety bus ride, the clattering of coins, the wind slicing through the gaps in the windows, and the exhaustion in her mother's eyes. Yet somehow, her mother always smiled when she looked down at her.
Pegi remembered that smile.
She remembered the song her mother would hum — not words, just a lullaby from another life. Something ancient. Something Albanian.
They reached their apartment building — an ugly slab of grey concrete, five stories tall, a thousand years heavy.
That's where he waited.
Her father.
Arms crossed. Jaw clenched. Jealousy radiating from his skin like heat from coal.
He didn't speak. He never needed to. His eyes did the screaming for him.
He grabbed her mother by the arm before they could reach the third-floor landing. His grip was cruel and violent. Pegi's mother tried to pull away, to shield her daughter with her own body, but he shoved her toward the stairwell.
Downward.
Pegi's body jerked forward as her mother slipped. The world spun. Her mother's scream echoed off the walls as she hit the steps — arms flailing, hands scraped raw, spine colliding with cold stone. Blood on the railings. Her doll tumbling down.
And Pegi? Almost taken with her.
She felt the pull, the gravity, the hands — the violence — but somehow, her mother's arms wrapped around her just in time, taking the fall alone.
"Jo vajzën! Jo vajzën time!"
Not the girl. Not my girl.
That's where the dream always ended.
Her falling. Forever. Her mother screaming. Forever.
Pegi woke gasping.
Sheets soaked with sweat. Her chest tight. Her fists clenched. Her gray cat, Shadow, meowed softly at her feet, concerned but quiet.
The nightmare never changed.
And neither did the memory.
She sat on the edge of the bed and stared out the window of her house — her home. It was small, but it was hers. Bought with work, sacrifice, silence, and exhaustion. A mortgage with her name. Nine cats she adored. Her mother in the room down the hall. Alive.
She had made it. In America. Since 2022.
And yet, something inside her remained… unfinished.
She thought about them.
Her grandparents.
All of them dead now.
But they had died long ago in her heart.
Her father's parents never acknowledged her. They had treated her like an inconvenience, a curse, a disappointment. A girl born from the wrong womb.
Her mother's parents weren't much better. Her grandmother — the last one left alive — had died in 2023. And even then, Pegi's mother hadn't been told until after the funeral had ended. Her sister had called hours later, voice cold and flat: "Mami vdiq. E varrosëm sot."
"Mom died. We buried her today."
Just like that.
No notice. No invitation. No dignity.
They had erased them like they were never part of the bloodline.
They had only ever had each other.
Her mother and her.
That was it.
Pegi looked into the mirror and saw the shadows beneath her eyes.
The weight of decades. The weight of generations. Of war. Of silence. Of holding her rage in check because everyone around her told her that "good girls" stay quiet.
But Pegi had never been a good girl.
She had only tried to be. For her mother's sake.
She had been afraid of being hated her whole life. And in trying not to be hated — she had become invisible.
No more.
She opened her laptop and booked a flight.
She was going home.
Not for family.
Not for closure.
But for truth.
When she landed in Tirana, it was past midnight. The sky was heavy with clouds. The air was thick with diesel and nostalgia.
Nothing had changed.
Everything had changed.
She didn't call anyone. She had no one to call.
She took a cab to a small inn outside the city, a quiet place near Dajti, and tried to sleep. But sleep refused to come.
The next morning, she walked.
First through Kombinat. The salon her mother used to work in was now a cheap electronics store. Her mother's name, once scrawled in faded marker on the window, was long gone.
Then Tirana e Re. Their old apartment building still stood. The stairwell looked smaller than she remembered, but the shadows were just as dark. She didn't go inside.
She felt the ghosts of her childhood in the corners of her vision. Not spirits — memories. Unwelcome. Unyielding.
And then she left the city.
She took a minibus north, toward Kruja. Toward the mountains that had haunted and healed generations.
As the road twisted and climbed, something ancient stirred in her chest.
The mountains opened like a breath held too long.
She stepped into the forest alone.
The air was clean. Sacred. And cold.
The trees didn't care about her scars. The wind didn't flinch at her anger. The earth welcomed her with silence.
She found a clearing.
She dropped to her knees and let everything rise.
All the rage. The loneliness. The memories. The injustice. Her father's face. Her grandmother's cold voice. Her aunts' dismissive glares. Her mother's trembling hands. Her own fear of being too much — or not enough.
She screamed.
A scream torn from centuries of women buried beneath obedience.
And as her cry faded into the trees, something answered.
A cry from above.
Sharp.
Fierce.
She looked up.
An eagle.
Majestic. Wild. Albanian.
Its wings sliced the sky like a blade.
It circled her — once, twice — as if recognizing something in her blood.
Tears ran freely down her face.
She whispered,
"I remember you.
I was you once.
I am you again."
The eagle tilted its wings and soared into the heavens.
Pegi reached into her pocket and pulled out a small stone. She placed it in the dirt. Then she unclipped a strand of her hair, tied it in a loop, and tucked it beneath the rock.
An offering.
Not to ancestors who had abandoned her.
Not to the family who never loved her.
But to the land that had birthed her.
To the fire that had survived in her blood.
To the mountains that had remembered her name.
She stood.
For the first time in her life, she felt tall.
Not because someone allowed her to.
But because she claimed it.
That evening, back at the inn, her phone buzzed.
A message from her mother.
"Did they hear you?"
Pegi stared at the screen for a long moment, then typed:
"Yes. And they howled back."