Bargain

I didn’t know how to deal with loss. I’d never experienced loss like they had. The kind of loss that set families off-kilter and pounded cracks through them. I wasn’t prepared for the heavy quality of the air in the house, as if the loss of one person was the loss of a pillar under a ceiling that was constantly pressing down. I’d known people distantly who’d had deaths in the family, from illness or car accidents. But a family that had lost a child, and not lost a child in death, but lost them, to some place or even to some person, was entirely different. I expected they would be frantic, searching for answers, or upset that the police investigation had ended. Torn apart and looking like it.

They weren’t like that.

The first thing that struck me about Lisbeth’s family was how functional they seemed. No one looked ready to dissolve into a puddle of tears. I’d met her mother before, before Ariadne had gone missing, and she looked just as she had that day in the spring. She wore a cardigan and had her hair up in a very utilitarian bun. There were shadows under her eyes but they could have been from working late. Lisbeth had said that her mother was taking regular twelve-hour shifts at the hospital, on-call constantly and finding a reason to be out of the house. She stood there in the living room looking worn but not taut, not pulled to the end of her emotional tether as Lisbeth had when Ariadne had first gone missing.

Lisbeth was better now. Coping, as her mother obviously was. Sean didn’t look like he wanted to cope at all.

“Sean,” Lisbeth said when he didn’t get out of his chair to greet me. “Aren’t you going to say hello? Ella’s here.”

His complete lack of interest was the first thing that told me that he was dealing with Ariadne’s disappearance differently from his sister and mother. Sean was full of vitality, and his personality always had an edge to it, like he was an inch from bursting into laughter or shouting. It was intense, like the sharp and handsome features of his face. He usually said hello, looking either aggrieved to say it or genuinely glad to see me. There was nothing on his face now but a distant disdain, as if he were angry with something none of the rest of us could see.

“Sean?”

Sean pushed out of his chair and headed to the kitchen. He grabbed a glass bottle from the countertop and a bottle opener. Without answering, he headed toward the stairs, prying the top off the bottle. Listbeth muttered, “asshole,” under her breath as he stumbled on a step. Soda (it was too fizzy to be beer) sloshed over his hand. He grabbed for the banister and pulled himself up, not bothering about the fizzy mess on the floor. He stomped up the rest of the stairs.

At the top of them he turned so quickly the carpet under him slid and he almost slipped. I heard him going down the corridor above us too, and the crash of a door being flung open so hard it hit the wall beside it. Then another slam as it closed.

I didn’t say anything. Lisbeth might have been embarassed in another situation, but now she just looked furious. “He thinks this is all his tragedy,” she said. “Asshole.”

“He’s been having a hard time with the police and the inquiry,” Lisbeth’s mother said beside us. Her hands were twitching as she held them in front of her. The expression on her face was reassuring and brittle, so shiny that I knew there was something darker beneath it. I felt like I should say something about her daughter, but in doig so I might open up and bleed that darkness. “He doesn’t like the attention. He wanted to be alone for all of this. And it was a shock to all of us. He just doesn’t want to think about how we might have lost her. He’ll be embarrassed later. He’s just angry for now. We all have our ways.”

Lisbeth gave me a newspaper clipping in her room later and I read it while she painted her toes. It summed up the entire investigation, she told me, and I took this to mean that she did not want to explain it to me. I knew only bits and pieces, and after I read the article, what I knew was this: Ariadne, fourteen, disappeared three weeks prior. Went for a walk before dinner, never came home to dinner. The investigation started a couple hours later because she was a minor. It had been three weeks and there was no sign of her body, though the woods in the ravine by the house had been searched. There were no clues. The public searches had been called off.

I tried to recall Ariadne as I’d last seen her. The youngest of the family, Lisbeth’s small sister, who looked even smaller, who read books about mythology and loved the original fairy tales and spat at Disney adaptations. Lisbeth had once told me that Ariadne wanted to be a fairy hunter when she was older.

“Mum cries all the time, now,” Lisbeth said. She tapped the wall behind her bed, between her and her mother’s room. It made a hollow sound; her nail scratched the wall paper as she slid it down. “Sometimes at night. Don’t worry. You’ve got your mp3 player, right? You can put it on if she does it tonight. I don’t think she knows that I can hear her.”

I looked outside at the ravine. It dipped into a green mess, filled with so much foliage that from this vantage there was nothing to see but the tops of trees. The ground under it, which I knew from experience was filled with rolling hills, some as high as if they hid houses under them, all covered with moss, was invisible. I imagined Ariadne in those woods and where she would have gone. A hand reaching out to grab her, from the roots of a tree. A tree swallowing her up.

I didn’t sleep well that night. I was used to waking a few times in a night, as if, no matter how deeply I fell into sleep, there was always something attached to me, something wound tightly around me, that was ready to bring me back with a small jerk. I was jerked back to wakefulness and Lisbeth’s long, slow, bragging breaths in the small hours of the morning. It was dark and cold, the wind biting at me where it crept under the windowsill. Lisbeth had opened it, likely, when I’d been asleep. She always complained about being a hot sleeper.

I was a cold sleeper, and now I was not a sleeper at all. I pushed my legs over the edge of the bed and looked for my jumper. I tugged it on, tucking it into my sweatpants. The floor was dark, but there was a prickle of moonlight that bled a line across the room, like a long blue light bulb hung above the bed. I crept out of the room and pulled the door shut behind me. In my socks I went to use the bathroom, blinking when the light seared my eyeballs, stumbling for a moment when I turned the light off again while the toilet flushed. Darkness always seemed darker when there’s been a reprieve from it.

I went back toward Lisbeth’s room, but didn’t go inside. There was a sound coming from inside, like she was scarping her nails against the wall again, but the light was off. I knew she must have been asleep, so I didn’t bother opening the door. I wasn’t going to go back to sleep if I lay next to her, if I lay down at all. Sleep was far away. I left the muffled noise along and continued. I padded past Sean’s room. The light wasn’t on either, and it was completely silent.

I went downstairs, as quietly as I could. Sean was there. I paused on the bottom step of the stairs, staring at the couch. It was easy to see him, with his wild dark hair and dark eyes, and his sharply-cut face and body. The moonlight lit the room like a sun under a silver veil. It flooded in through the glass doors that made up most of one wall and looked out into the small garden. The world outside was grey, dark, misty. I could see the grass just in front of the door, the shapes of trees not far away, but nothing else.

Sean was sprawled on the couch, his bare feet hanging over the edge of one arm. Under his heavy eyelids I saw a sliver of black. He was awake, drumming his fingers on one leg and on the couch cushions. He tilted his head toward me when I stepped off the stairs. “What are you doing up?” he asked.

“I don’t sleep well.” I came over and sat on the edge of the couch. He didn’t make room for me but he was lean enough that, propped up at this angle, he left enough room that I could perch on the cushion.

“So you came to invade the living room instead?” He sounded annoyed.

“I didn’t know you would be here. It isn’t your bedroom.” I crossed my arms. The cold air must have been coming in through another window. Gooseflesh rose on my arms. “Why aren’t you in you bedroom?”

“It’s my house,” Sean pointed out. “I couldn’t sleep.”

I tried to think of something to say to him. Sean and I had never had real conversations. I’d never had a real conversation with Ariadne, either. I had no idea what they meant to one another, or what to say to him. I tried to imagine was I would want to hear if someone I loved had vanished without warning and not come back. When people were suspecting the worst. I couldn’t think of anything except a question. “What do you think happened to her?”

Sean’s pointy face got pointier.

“I’ve heard people talk about all the things it could be,” I told him. “I don’t know what it’s like, obviously, but- It’s just, I know everyone says that they want to help and you can talk to them. But I’m actually good at listening. And not saying anything. So it’s almost like not talking to anyone, except I’ll actually hear. And I won’t give you advice. Or anything. So, if you want to talk…”

Sean’s narrowed eyes got a little wider. I could hardly see them in the hollows under his brow. “Congratulations for saying what almost everyone has said. With your own twist. I’ve never heard anyone say it so free of eloquence.”

“I try,” I said, even though I didn’t.

“I can tell,” he said. After a long moment, when he wasn’t looking at me, he said, “Thanks.”

We stayed on the couch, and Sean moved over just a few inches, enough that I could relax the leg that had previously been holding half of me up, and I could slide fully onto the cushions.

Something hit the glass door. It was a clear sound, like a nail tapping a crystal glass. Sean’s eyes went so wide they looked like tunnels. He didn’t turn toward the doors but reached a hand forward, spreading it across my knee. It gave me a jolt but only because I could his fingers were shaking. “Ella, are you looking at the door?”

“Yes,” I said, as there was another tapping sound. I recognized it. Someone or something had thrown a rock at the door. Whatever it was, I couldn’t see it through the grey. There were squirrels near my house, resting in all the trees that surrounded it, and acorns were constantly dropping on the roof. These taps were from objects hurtled horizontally, though. “Why?”

Sean ducked his head as another tap came. He didn’t answer as there was a fourth. This one was aggressive, the small pebble ricocheting off the glass with the force of a bullet. Whatever was throwing it was strong.

“Are you still watching?” Sean whispered. He was so quiet. I could tell he was trying to breathe softly, trying not to disturb the silence. “Is there anything there? Do you see anything?”

I shook my head. His quiet was contagious. I had the sudden desire to stay silent too, soundless, though I couldn’t tell why.

“Pretend you don’t see anything. Pretend you don’t hear anything. Ella-” he breathed. His hand on my knee reached for my wrist. He pulled me down on the couch, rolled me so I faced him, my legs lining up with his. His pupils were blown wide, his breath puffing on my cheek. I could feel his pulse in his wrist. He was blinking fast, as if with each blink he could see the world more clearly.

“Ella. Don’t move at all,” he whispered. “Don’t say anything.”

Two hands hit the glass door.

Their fingers lingered as the palms pulled way, then they retreated back into the mist.

“Sean,” I whispered. My voice felt like I was speaking around cotton. My pulse was dangerously quick. “What was that?”

The scent of mist and moss was pervasive, as if we’d opened the doors, and every window.

The mist hissed, like the wind through the trees. But a wind would have pushed the mist away. The sound slithered in the air, in the space between my heartbeats. It was several sighs at once. “Sean. Sean. Come out. Come out, Sean. We want you.”

“What is that?” I said again. I couldn’t take my eyes from the place where the hands had been. The prints were still there, clear in the condensation.

“Ella, you have to go back upstairs,” Sean said. “Come on, go. I’ve got to go.”

“What? Where?”

Sean pushed himself up on his elbow. I was on the outside of the couch, trapping him in. He looked down at me. “I’m going outside. I’ve got to see them. I don’t want them to come inside. I don’t want them to come after Lisbeth too. That’s not fucking happening.”

“Too? What do you mean too? What are-”

“I have a feeling,” Sean said, pushing himself up the rest of the way, knocking my feet out of the way so he could stand on his.

I wasn’t nearly brave enough to go up the dark staircase on my own. But I was brave enough to stand next to dark-coloured Sean as he walked to the back door. I said, “I’m coming.”

The mist swirled around our feet as we walked down the steeply sloped side of the ravine. Sean had let go of my wrist but sometimes I wanted him to take it again. We were walking close enough that we wouldn’t lose one another in the mist, but the possibility still made my stomach twist. It was probably a good thing that he didn’t. I would have crushed his fingers.

My socks were soaked through when we got to the bottom. The springy moss felt as wet as if I’d walked through a stream. There was dew on the trees. The boughs were a complicated, blurry spider web above us. Occasionally we heard sighs, from far away, then so close that I spun in the mist, not wanting to see the source of them, unable to stop searching.

We found a clearing. There was a stream running through it, slowed to a trickle. Sean grabbed the edge of my shirt to pull me to a stop. It was cold as winter here, as if we’d climbed into a dark hole. Sean stood in the moss, squinting into the mist.

“Do you see them?” he said-

-just as they came out from behind the trees. The water at our feet shivered. The trees seemed to bough. The mist rolled at our ankles like a tide pushed up onto a beach. I watched the hands curl around the trees, the delicate bony feet stepping out, the faces appearing. I could not tell if they were girls or boys, they were androgynous, like children whose faces had not had time to mature. But their features were sharp, sharper than Sean’s. Their skin was poreless, as soft and fine as porcelain, their hair shining, drifting about them like seaweed in water. They were naked, but they had nothing to identity their gender, their bodies smooth, without crevices. I tried to summon a word for them, for the entities, but I could come up with nothing that did not sound impossible.

“Oh, Sean,” they sighed. Their voices came from all around us, like they were the air itself. “Sean, you brought company. You came for us.”

I counted them, the things that came from behind the trees. I got to seven, all in front or beside us. There might have been one behind us, or a few, but I didn’t look. I saw that one of them held something in its hands, a lump of fur that wasn’t moving. Another smiled with a cluster of teeth that was not perfect, but thin and sharp. There was something about it that was so other. I tried to reason that what looked bad, or cruel, wasn’t always so. But it was everything humanity was not and something deep inside of me recoiled from it.

Sean looked at them with empty eyes. He released the hem of my shirt and spoke to me without turning his head. “They- I don’t know what they are. But Ariadne… she…” his voice caught and he stopped trying to speak, but I knew what he wanted to say.

The creatures came a little closer, but not within touching distance. Some of them were smiling, or making an approximation of it. Nothing on their faces could convey actual joy. Their features moved like some moldable mask, but there was nothing human under them. They reached forward with long, long fingers. Every one had an extra knuckle.

“Sean, what do they-” I began, but I stopped. Because all of their gazes had turned to me, as though they hadn’t noticed me before. Seven pairs of green eyes, seven toxic green gazes, settled on me. They were eyes you didn’t want to see in the forest at night, eyes that cut through mist and the dark.

I remembered something I’d once heard from Ariadne. When she’d tried explaining that people were wrong about fairytales, that the real enemies weren’t just humans. That in other parts of the world there were myths about creatures, creatures with long fingers that reached into cradles, or beckoned from beneath waves. Horses with teeth or seals with human legs under their skins.

I saw a face in the mist. It was quick, like a coalescence of shadows and moonlight. It might have been a trick, of the light, or my eyes betraying me, but my throat burned anyway. The face had Lisbeth’s amused mouth add Sean’s strong eyebrows. “Sean.”

“It’s her,” he said. His voice was as violent as the look he’d given me when I first saw him the day before. “I know. But I don’t know how to-”

The creatures must have seen me looking. They gave me those imitation smiles again. They faded in and out of the mist. In. Out. In. Out. Then in again, much closer to the both of us. I almost stumbled back.

“Pretty,” one of them crooned, reaching a hand forward like she meant to touch my hair. I felt a whisper on my scalp, as cold as if dew had fallen on my head, rolling over my crown, toward my ear.

Sean, jostled me, throwing out an arm. “Don’t touch her.”

“He likes her,” they sighed, together. Sean went still. My fingers felt numb. My face was prickling. “How much? How much?”

I took a step back then, quickly. I could still see half of Sean’s face, hardening, his eyes darkening. “Sean. How do we leave?”

“Bargain,” one of the creatures shrilled, and the rest shrieked with delight. The sound was a death knell, high and keening like the howl of a hyena.

“Sean…” I began.

“For what? What do you want for Ariadne?” Sean said.

Something came back to me. I recalled passing Lisbeth’s room, the scraping sound, as if she were dragging a hand across the wall, or the floor. The cold air in her room of the window I no longer believed she’d left open. “Oh, Sean,” I said, before they could. He looked at me. I didn’t want to say it. But it wasn’t my choice. He had to make it. “Lisbeth. Would you rather have Lisbeth or Ariadne?”

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Where She Went

Mama and Papa didn’t understand that he wasn’t imaginary. Mama said imaginary like she really meant dream or hope, and when Papa said it he always sounded as though he’d missed the words fucking childish and landed on imaginary instead. I tried to explain that he was invisible, not imaginary, but that seemed to siphon away at their conviction instead of fortify it.

Mama asked if he was my guardian angel. He was my guardian. I couldn’t say he was an angel. He looked nothing like the creatures in the stained glass windows of the church we went to Sunday mornings. He looked nothing like the paintings I saw in a picture book at school that looked more like a catalogue for the L’Ouvre than a children’s story.

I didn’t have a name for him at first. I thought of him as an echo, because he arrived after spring, in June, when the damp was tapering and the heat was swelling and bleaching the rocks in the river, schorching the grass and turning our yard into a burnt brown rug. The air was filled with breathlessness and swelling like it would pop. He appeared, cool and dark like soil that had been rained on, like an echo of spring. I was trying to sleep under my bed, which was cooler than under my sheets. I was covered in sweat, everything sticking to me, and flipping onto my stomach, then my back when sweat pooled on my stomach. Outside the window cicadas were already humming, too loudly to hear thoughts. Frogs chirped. Birds didn’t bother. It was too hot for their song.

It was black. Outside the room. Inside of it. Even with the fan whirring and blowing a weak cold breath across my tummy, I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t think I would ever sleep.

I turned my cheek against the floor. It was sticky but cool, the ridges of the wood so pronounced I could feel it as I rubbed the side of my face against it. I whispered a word into the dark, to test it. House. Language dissolved in the dark, as if the neural mechanism to turn sounds into words could be eclipsed by the dark. House sounded made up. It delighted me endlessly to say it, over and over, hushed.

House, said a voice that was not my own, joining in.

He was on top of the bed, speaking over the edge of it, down to me. His voice was smooth, like butter softened by the summer heat. It was deep like nighttime. I giggled so loudly that Papa came stomping down the hall in his boxers and Coca Cola logo t-shirt to tell me to shut the hell up because the middle of the night was no time to make noise and it was already too goddamn hot and loud to sleep. If I wanted to goddamn play I could do it when the sun came up. He didn’t mention my invisible friend.

But I didn’t stop talking. We traded nonsense words through the night, in whispers, both of us trying to speak more quietly than the other until we couldn’t hear the words we exchanged at all. House, sugar, gecko, bat… We played with my dolls and I tried to show him how to use a yo-yo, but he just liked to watch me do it, even when I tangled the string and had to get it undone, slowly, in the dark, feeling for the knot.

One night, before bed, I was having tea with him, when Mama came and stood in the doorway, with a can of beer in her hand, condensation gathering on her fingers, her eyes narrowed, or maybe just looking narrowed because they were red and puffy. I looked up at her, because he did, and said, “Mama?”

Mama didn’t look at me at first. She looked at the window, like I’d spoken from outside. The heat made her curls stick to her neck. Her curls were shiny, her lip stain fading, but I thought she was beautiful. Mama was always the prettiest person, I thought.  Then she turned to me. “What?”

“I don’t know what name to choose. I want a good name. He needs one.”

Mama’s red lips pursed. One of her eyebrows was critical of me. “Who’s he?”

“My… guardian.” I tried out the word on my tongue. It tasted like house did in the dark.

“Why can’t your guardian think up his own name?” She didn’t sound indulgent or amused, but not angry about him, like Papa was. She didn’t care what his name was, and that bugged me, made my throat sticky.

“He wants me to name him. But I can’t think of anything good.”

“Spot,” Mama said.

I shook my head. There was an age when you realized your parents didn’t have the answer to everything, and I wasn’t at that age yet, so answers that didn’t satisfy me still left me feeling betrayed. “That’s a dog name. He needs a good name.”

“Alshat.”

Alshat was a star’s name. Mama had probably learned it in her days at university, which we almost never talked about because one time I’d asked my parents if I was going and Mama had gotten a sour, pinched look on her face while Papa’s cheeks and ears turned red. But Papa didn’t know Alshat was a star’s name. Mama called him Alshat when she asked if he was coming to dinner, or asked if he needed an extra seat at the table. Papa told me that if I didn’t stop pretending Alshat was real, I was going to get my head shoved in a toilet at school because people don’t like retards, Ginny.

Mama and Papa got into a lot of fights over that summer. It was too hot not to fight, and too hot to stay in the same room, so once they were done shouting they always went into separate rooms, or Mama left the house while Papa knocked something over. They were fighting in the kitchen while Mama made gravy and Papa tested the meat to see if it was done cooking, glaring at its pink insides. Alshat and I were sitting quietly at the table in the dining room to wait for dinner. I’d put out all the plates, but Papa had shoved the meat back under the grill, so I guessed it would be a while before we ate.

“-dying out here. This heat. There’s nothing to paint. Nowhere to study, for Christ’s sake,” Mama said. The wooden spoon she used to stir the gravy traced a wobbly shape in the air as she talked and gestured. Alshat was watching it too. “Not that you care. What’s wrong with university? Too hard or do you really not care about living in this dust bowl with no idea what’s out there in the world? Do you even know who Van Gogh was? Do you know him from your brother?”

“Don’t condescend to me. I bring home your food. What fucking right do you have to talk to me like that?” Papa snarled, sounding more like an angry cat than a man.

“I have every right,” Mama said. “I-”

“Alshat, don’t say that,” I said, putting my hand on the table between us. I leaned in and whispered, “We can go to my room and finish having tea. Or we can build a castle.”

Papa slammed one of the cupboards in the kitchen closed. It banged, once, then twice as it bounced. Mama looked ready to kill. “Fine!” Papa shouted at his fist. “Go to your fucking room, Ginny. Go!”

“Don’t you dare speak to her like that!” Mama growled. “Ginny, baby, don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about your daddy.”

I wasn’t worried about Papa as much as I was about her. I didn’t like the scraped sound of her voice, or her gentle hands curled like claws, reaching for me. I hopped off my chair, Alshat behind me, and bolted for my room. I pulled it shut, even though it was like putting cardboard between myself and the hallway. I lay under my bed, the fan pointed at me, tracing my fingers in the dusty, and another in the sweat on my tummy. The dust stuck to my hot palms. “Alshat. I don’t want you to say that again, all right? They were just having a fight.”

Alshat apologized and found new words to make un-real. Then he started to sing. It felt like a siren, like an ambulance coming down the road, like the promise that something bad had happened and it was only going to get worse until it didn’t.

The next day I went to the front door and looked for my shoes. They were usually under Mama’s but Mama’s weren’t there. I put on my shoes and looked for her boots, the ones with the little hills and the holes at the toes that made her look beautiful and made men look at her when we went to the proper grocery store. Mama was gone with the shoes. Papa came out of his room to make coffee and grab a bear, and in the afternoon he went to the backyard and starting putting together the flattened cardboard boxes we kept in the shed. He made one phone call during dinner, and I watched him while I ate spaghetti from a can. I couldn’t hear the person on the other side of the phone but I guessed it was Grams, because he kept saying No, She’s your daughter, and Well, she’s all right, I didn’t tell her anything, I don’t know what the hell to say, She’s fine, Really?

“Ginny,” he said, holding out the phone as far as the cord would stretch. “It’s your Grandma. Talk to her. Stop talking to your invisible friend, talk to Grandma, come on.”

“Yes, sir.” I took the phone- somehow the cord stretched a little bit more to read me, all the way down on the kitchen floor, because the received was high on the wall. The phone smelled like Papa’s beer and cigarettes. “Grams?”

“Ginny. Oh, baby,” she said. She sounded a lot like Mama, but like Mama’s voice on a scratchy record. Mama had never smoked. “I’m getting a bus. I’ll be with you the day after tomorrow, all right?”

“Mama’s gone,” I said. “Alshat, stop.”

“Al- what? I know your Mama’s gone. You’re going to be just fine, sweetie,” Grams said. When she said it I knew that Alshat had told the truth, and he hadn’t listened to me the night before when Mama and Papa were fighting.

Grams came two days later, with her small bag full of things that smelled like her house in the larger town. She cleaned the linens and I helped her hang them on the line in the garden. She prodded Papa until he took a shower, then vacuumed his room while he was in the bathroom, then the living room, and my room. She set up a chair at the table for Alshat, even though Alshat was tall enough that he could stand during meals. She asked me to stay quiet at night because she was a room away from me and could hear me talking to him.

Alshat stayed all summer. Grams did too. The branches on the trees sagged, like the heat took something out of them as well. The air over everything shimmered, like the earth had become a furnace. Papa ate in the garden, or his room, and didn’t give Grams the chance to vacuum his floor a second time. When we ate I spoke to Alshat when Grams was staring at nothing, the way Mama sometimes did. But Grams heard me, when Mama didn’t. She looked disappointed when I only gave her one-word answers to questions. But I didn’t have anything to say to her at the empty table.

“You’re excused,” she said, voice laced with sadness. “You can go to your room, Ginny. You and Alshat. Except- listen. Even if your Mama doesn’t come back, you know maybe she’ll send you a letter, right? You know she loves you, right? She didn’t leave because of you, baby. You know that, right?”

I nodded and waited for her to finish. Sometimes people needed a few moments to let the words coalesce and sort themselves out on their tongue before speaking them. Grams leaned across the table and patted my hand. She had painted nails, like Mama, but her hand was covered with wrinkles, like the folds in laundry. She raked my wrist with her nails as she pulled her hand away. Alshat was looked at the spot on my wrist she’d touched.

“And here,” she added, picking up something from one of the chairs. It had been pushed under the table so I hadn’t seen the shopping bag sitting on it, but it had a plastic bag inside of that, and in that there was a Polaroid camera. It was black and plastic-looking with a few stickers on it. “It was your Mama’s. She said you could have it. She said you could have anything of hers you wanted. That’s nice, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I remember smiling, so wide it almost hurt, because I’d never had my own camera. And Grams looked happy to give it to me, and I could feel Alshat excited beside me. “How many pictures can I take?”

“As many as you want,” she said. “We’ve got extra rolls of film. Try to make these ones last at least a week, all right? I have to go into Golden Lake to get more film, and I don’t want to do that too often.”

I nodded. I didn’t say thank you. I was already running to my bedroom. I kicked the door shut and told Alshat to pose for the camera. He didn’t want to pose anywhere except under the bed. I lay down on my tummy and slithered halfway under the bed, turning the camera on, the bulb leaping up, ready for action. It was dark under the bed, even though the sun hadn’t gone down and my room was bright with sun. “Say cheese,” I said, like the photographer who took our school photos.

Alshat didn’t say anything. I took his picture and listened to the camera spit it out, looking at the shiny grey surface of it before I waved it around, waiting for the grey to resolve into shadows, into shapes, into Alshat. I held up the picture to show Alshat himself, like wide crocodile-mouth, his eyes like slashes of light, the outline of him, which was all that appeared in the dark, and all that showed up on film.

Your Mama is never coming back for that camera.

“I know that, Alshat,” I said.

Alshat’s eyes were all colour in the Polaroid picture. No pupils.

Do you want me to get rid of your Papa too?

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Getaway

I paid with blood and bone. I made gifts of myself

And put them on my door to keep it away.

Sorrow is a monster.

(Sorrow is coming out for you)

I locked my door, to my siblings, to my mother.

It crept in the windows.

I ran into the woods, that the trees might hide me.

But what do trees owe me?

It heard my heart like it was quaking earth

Sorrow threw me into the water.

(Sorrow dug into my bones)

It will be my blood that surfaces first, then my heart.

Art by Robert Carter

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Beast

Wild beasts rule this city

Rage with fang and talon

Language without words

Song without notation

Awake and eat that thing called man

And sleep inside that thing called man

As for me I am the only artist

Crawling along in an animal hide

Think me no less fierce for what I do

I’ll dip my brush into your veins and paint

Art by Naomi Butterfield

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Ocean Bed

The ocean crept up on me

From over the horizon it climbed my toes

Sprayed salt on my skin

Algae on my stomach

Slipped sea grass into my throat

I said no to its body on mine

But it was already in my hair, on my lips, in my clothes

When the rip tide pulled me under

Pushed me into the ocean bed

With the waste and sea glass

I was full of reef and sea

Sick with unbridled current

And crawling with sharp-toothed creatures

I surfaced and crawled onto the sand

And spat my last mouthful of salt

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Punishment

It was dirty work. It didn’t matter how often I did it- which was every night, or every day; if I’d bothered to count I might have known- it never got any less unpleasant. Dust and dirt and bones and clay aren’t good company, no matter how you look at it. That’s all it really takes to make one of them. Bones, of any kind, dust, from a fireplace or a windowsill. My place was full of dust and dark, and I had nothing else. Dirt, from graves or from the ground beneath you feet. And clay, to hold it all together. I spat in it, each time, to keep my creations at bay. They were like horses, I learned after  a time. If they learned the scent of me, they learned the lines not to cross. Even before they were born. In some inchoate way, they would not cross any line I spat onto. They would heel if I spat on my hand and held it up.

They were nothing until I gave them a name. But I could not think of any animal they were like. They were an animal I’d seen from the corner of my eye, when my mind tricked me into believing one thing was another. A smeared version of a cat, a bird, a snake. Nimble, beautiful, with a starry pelt. A collision of paints on a palette, not so much a step on the evolutionary ladder as a branch.

They weren’t good company, without voices, without tongues. Tongues came last, because I wanted the silence until I had no choice at all to hear them. Their voices made small my hands, and small hands made poor, slow work. I could have made them anything else, but I could not bring myself to make foxes or birds or dogs. Nothing I would have recognized from my life. There was no real creature I could stand to ruin.

Breathe I told the head of one as I gouged out eye sockets ith my thumb, and smoothed out the inside of the cavity. The bones of its skull were hardening slowly, the longer I kept my hands off the clay. Wake I said to the ears as I shaped them. I patted the dirt around the bones, held the crumbling clumps with clay and smoothed it into joints. Stretch. I painted mud over the rib cage, spat into the mouth and nose, separated the paws with my longer nails.

This was where it became important and difficult. Difficult to get their faces right; so much rested on how much cruelty was in their faces, what expressions I gave them. A cruel face could spur the animal to do anything, so long as it involved bloodshed. There are some animals that eat you with their eyes; my Chimaera created meals with their eyes, and tore them to pieces with their teeth. I could have not given them teeth, but they would have found another way to tear. A way I was sure I could not stand to see.

If I had the eyes to.

When someone else stumbled inside, I knew that I was close. And that it was my turn to teach. I tried to remember, how it had been done before. My thoughts were all start and stop; I could not think and keep my hands moving. But molding the Chimaera was not optional, and everything became secondary to it. I knew that, no matter who appeared here, they could not help when the time came. They might have been able to help before, though. And I bent my mind to the task of teaching them to make Chimaera with me. I had nearly made it last time. Two away. Twice as many hands might help me.

At least, that was why I assumed he was there. I couldn’t guess at anything else.

“Are you going to stand there forever?” I said when he swayed in the dark. Perhaps his feet had fallen asleep, because the rest of him looked wide awake. I had meant it to be a joke, but I’d spent too long without company (excepting Chimaera) and did not know how to make him, or anyone, laugh. In any case, I’m not sure he was listening at all. His eyes wandered from dark corner to dark corner. The problem was not the dark, but the number of corners. Which was exactly enough to eradicate corners entirely. There was just darkness on either side. No use arguing against it, though. If that was where he wanted to stay, he could stay there. “You’ve going to be here a while, though. You’ll have to get used to sitting on the ground at some point.”

He said nothing. He pushed his hands into his pockets as though he might find something, but my pockets were empty when I came. My fingers had shaken badly when I’d not been able to find my lighter, even though the craving itself never came. I wondered, if he’d had cigarettes on hand, would he invite me to have one? I didn’t kow where the smoke would go. I thought of the filter between my lips as I dabbed the pad of my thumb over the end of the creature’s snout to dimple it. There was a circle of dirt around the skull. The inside of the skull cooled, while the outside warmed, as though flesh were growing on it as I watched.

The other occupant of my place couldn’t have been old. He was younger than me, a young man, filled with uncertainty, but not fear. He looked as though he believed he’d walked into the wrong room, but truly his face just didn’t lend itself to true reactions. I had begun on the long curving spine, which involved laying out the bones atop a bed of dust and clay, rolling it between my hands after to mold it. I wrapped the clay around the chain of bones and patted it down gently. Though from what I’d seen, it could handle not-gentle.

“I don’t understand,” said my companion, without preamble. “I don’t think I can do that.”

I didn’t dare look at him. I’d not seen someone like myself in a long time and I knew that I would get caught up in it, would miss my deadline. There was so much I wanted to see in the human face from then, but I couldn’t risk it, not now that I’d finished my second-last. “I’ll show you how. It’s really not hard. The clay wants to do what you want to do. It’s about intention, mostly.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Well, what did you mean?” I asked, though I could already guess what he was about to say. It would start like this, wouldn’t it? The way it had started with me. It had been a good time before I’d realized. It wasn’t a matter of realizing it, anyway. That was a matter of staying safe. This was a matter of understanding. “Do you mean you don’t know how to use the clay and bones? They’re the only materials you have. You’ll have to use them.”

“I mean,” he began, eyes narrowing. He looked haughty and righteous, a sinner riding on the law and riding it at the same time. “Why would you do this? Why not leave it alone? There wouldn’t be anything, then. No more pointless attacks.”

One more, I told the underside of a wing as I began stuffing the clay with feathers. I wanted to explain to him why it had to happen, but I could only think of the time, of the last of the Chimaera. It was almost time, and if this did not go as planned, he would learn soon enough how it worked.  

Chimaera, I named it as I gouged a single hole into the side of its ears and ran my tongue along its hardening teeth.

“Fine. What happens if you don’t try at all?” he said with some aggression.

I ran my hand along spine to tail, then slipped it beneath the creature. “If I do nothing, it’ll be worse. I can choose the object now at least and I get the chance to make them obey me. I can mold them however I want to.” What it boiled down to was this: I got to choose my poison. I chose one that was easy as I could make it, and familiar.

“But I don’t get it,” he replied. “What for?” He sounded petulant, as if he thought, after all this time, I was here to meant to help him. I could teach him about intention, I could teach him about clay, but he was not the one who would be facing the consequences of being a Chimaera short in a few minutes. On more.

“Because something has to happen, and I’m trying to lighten the load,” I said. There was no lightening the load, really. Only the traditional way. But it helped to have something to think of. The skull was fully formed, and two wings, four paws. I was unfurling the spine and lining up the rib café when the clay stiffened beneath my hands.

My stomach twisted. I sighed, and this sigh sounded like every harsh breath I ever exhaled at once. There had been a time before this, I thought. And there would be a time after. But it did not hide the fact that I was one short. One short of a herd of Chimaera. Just enough to turn it outward.

The Chimaera lined up on the floor twitched, like dogs waking from dreamy sleep. Some crackled through the air, a current twisting around me so sharply I felt it like the touch of an eel. I stood back to watch the first Chimaera breathe. I’d been careful to give them each kind faces, but it took all of a few seconds for several of them to scowl, and in scowling, reveal each tooth I’d crafted. They pressed themselves closer to me, and I saw my companion stiffen, as though they might come for him. They might be curious, but-

“Don’t worry about it,” I said to him as the Chimaera shook themselves awake. “Just stand back and they won’t touch you. But don’t try to interfere. Don’t try to enter or stop.” It felt a little useless to say, since I already knew what he wouldn’t be doing, and that was: he would not be stepping in front of me to protect me. I didn’t expect him to. There was no such thing as heroics in the dark.

“It has to happen to you?” he said, sounding shocked and sad and for the first time as though he understood. “Why?”

“Because I didn’t finish,” I said. Or said, mostly. I was looking at the floor when I said it, and some of that rock must have swallowed up my voice. “You have to watch this time. I guess every time, until I’m done.” I’d thought at first that the Chimaera would hurt him, or someone else. That I was creating a weapon, but it was only a weapon pointed at myself. You would think that I would be merciful then, but in this place, after the first time they got a hold of you, you stopped wanting mercy. You wanted pain to get rid of other pain. And then once you started, you couldn’t stop.

Pain begets pain I thought, as I pulled away from the circle of dirt on the floor. I could see the outline of myself where I’d been sitting, as the first of the Chimaera lunged.

They all bounded at me. Wings flapped uselessly above them, tongues rolling from their mouths, eyes happy and bright. The largest one pressed it paws to my shoulders first, then followed me down as I went. They didn’t want anyone else. They wanted me, and when the first one swallowed my scream, they got to their happy work. They didn’t seem to have a preference for whatever they took apart. They took apart my arms and legs first, snapping at them until they burned.

This is when I cheated on my first boyfriend. Something wet smeared my cheek and my ear burned. I put a hand up to the side of my head and found I did not have much in the way of ear left. This is when I lied to my mother about getting fired. One of the Chimaera twisted over me and buried its muzzle in my abdomen. I was smeared across the floor of the space. Already, my companion had pushed far back into the darkness, realized there was nowhere else to go, and wondering what would happen when his time came.

I curled inward, as though it would help. It was less the Chimaera, more the thoughts. I felt prodded into smallness. My wrists felt fragile, my ankles thin as the tines of a fork. There went another layer. I’d been so happy when my friend and I stopped calling one another. I would never have to tell her that I was sleeping with her boyfriend. I’d been glad to die in that car accident. I would have died after it, if I hadn’t. Once I’d known how few people had actually survived.

The Chimaera slowly melted away, as though they were being pushed through an invisible sieve, coming apart in the air in powdery clouds. The dust fell on my legs and clung to the red smears on the floor. Already things were starting to regrow in me. There was a strange sensation as though someone were pushing their finger into my ear. I could taste dust in my mouth and knew that it wouldn’t matter if I spit into the Chimaera’s mouths next time. It would not keep them at bay.

I put a hand to my abdomen. The skin was almost fully healed. My organs were blooming under it. My companion watched as he took a step forward. His face was drawn, his eyes asking why him, why did he have to go through it.

“I was one short,” I told him.

His wretched face became more wretched. He was gnawing his lower lip, tearing the skin from it with his teeth.

“If you’re fast,” I said, “You can get out of here fast.” I began to shape each feather I would need for the wings. I rolled clay into suitable lengths for fangs and began to taper pieces of it into points. “I had a fight with my friend. It’s not really important what the circumstances were. But there was a family in the other car. None of them made it. I was so drunk I couldn’t know until I’d sobered up in the hospital for a night. In time to have an aneurysm.”

I could see it slowly dawning in his face. And I could feel that dawn was coming too, soon. Or sunset. Either way, I was back at the beginning, with the clay and dust and dirt and spit. He seemed to realized what this meant, how inevitable it all was, the creating the turning-on-you. I’d been doing my job, teaching him, without realizing. I didn’t think he understood how long it was, though. Not when he sat down so quickly and plunged his hands into the dust.

I wanted to ask him what he’d done, to get here. To deserve it. But I’d volunteered my information. He was under no obligation to do the same. He crossed his legs, like I had, and hunched forward. He would also learn, very soon, that it was murder to find a position you could stand sitting in for more than ten minutes at a time. I shoved some more dust in his direction, then spat in the dirt to make mud to use as glue for the feathers.

His hands were dirty immediately. They wouldn’t be clean again until he left. I had gotten over that pretty quickly. As a part of my intestine regrew, I rubbed the spit and dirt between my fingers.

“So,” I said to him. “Do you know how to use clay?”

Art by Leilani Bustamante

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Sugar in the Garden

I used to think Mother and Father used religion like a shield. When we went to mass and I sat through excruciatingly long homilies and was warned against sprinkling my garden with sugar because it would bring about the sugar gliders and God would no longer see me as worthy of ascending after death, I though they were telling me a story, to warn me. Fairy tales are warnings, I reasoned. But in the end Red Riding Hood escaped the wolf and her grandmother was saved. That is a single version of it, but I believed it. Because I wanted to.

Which was how religion worked, I thought.

I wasn’t to speak to sugar gliders. I was not to posture about whether or not they belonged in heaven or hell because they were unlike any creature on earth and therefore belonged in no place that had been concocted by a mind on earth. Even purgatory didn’t seem the place for them. Consider fairies: angels, not good enough for heaven, cast out. Sugar gliders knew nothing of heaven or of being cast out. There was nothignt o cast them out of. They appeared and disappeared, riddled with brevity as mayflies.

I knew sugar gliders- no, I knew of them. They sometimes peaked at me from behind the wall of wisteria in our front garden, though there was nothing about me that could hold their attentions for more than a few moments. Attentions as fleeting as mayflies too, Mother used to say. I saw them on the street when it was too cold too early and the winter struck them down mid-flight. There was an awful winter in which we could not drive down the street without the car rattling, bumping over each sugar gliders’ body. I’d thought they were beautiful, covered in new frost. But when I’d seen enough of them, their beauty became invisible. Wonders get tiring very quickly.

One of our neighbours did sprinkle his garden with sugar. It glittered like snow atop the hydrangeas and grass and morning glories. Butterflies rested before the sugar gliders came. There were two of them, when they did, and my neighbour looked pleased, pleased and proud as though he had drawn them there himself. The sugar gliders ran long fingers along the tops of leaves and the thorn-less parts of vines and licked the sugar off their fingertips. After, they lay down in the grass and ran their tongues along the grass blades. There were many of them that summer in our neighbourhood because someone had decided to sell lemonade and orange juice on the street perpendicular to ours. They were spilling sugar daily, handing out 25 cent cups to anyone that came by. Until their mother told them not to sell to sugar gliders, and then had to explain who they were. She tried to point them all out but sguar gliders grow rapidly, and it was a lot of work to be able to recognize both child and adult sugar gliders.

I rode my bike in the park every afternoon that summer, trying to rid myself of the wobble in my wheel. It was possible less a fault of the wheel and more a fault of my own. Balance required speed and speed required confidence. Atop a bike I was skittish, and I could hardly keep my wits about me enough to stop when someone did enter my path. I rode under the horse chestnut tree, tried to avoid the spiky green shells, and barely avoided hitting the sugar glider.

“Oh. Are you alright?” the sugar glider asked, looking down at me. I was doubled over, my legs on either side of the small bicycle, feet on the ground, waiting for the ground to feel as though it had stopped moving. I had nearly hit the sugar glider, though she didn’t seem to mind. She had a face like a sunset, which was to say a face that blazed and made you feel as though she were already leaving. I quickly did a mental inventory of my person, but I’d left my sweets (I’d bought a packet of sugary gum against Mother’s wishes the day before) at home.

“I’m fine,” I said, wishing she would look the other way. Sugar sliders were never disgraceful. They moved with the ease and certainty and balletic glide of huge cats. I knew because I’d watched them often. Mother said that the youth these days were going to waste away watching either television or sugar gliders. I could not see how she and Father couldn’t see the way sugar gliders were beautiful. “I’m sorry I almost hit you.”

“Don’t be.” She sounded like she was smiling, or chewing. Maybe she was chewing a horse chestnut. But no- they were too busy for sugar gliders. She folded her hands in front of herself; I saw them because I was still looking down. There was delicate, diaphanous webbing between her fingers, the same pale shade as her fingernails. “You didn’t actually hit me. What do you think would have happened if you had?”

She sounded amused. Like she had looked at me once and already knew the answer.

“You’re fragile,” I said, because it didn’t occur to me that she might be insulted. I saw those pale hands twitch. “Frost kills you. Cars kill you.”

“And neither of those would kill you?” she said. “Or not in the same measure?”

I frowned. I could be brave enough to contradict her if I was not looking at her face. “Winter kills your kind. If I touch you, I could kill you.”

The sugar glider laughed. It was less delicate than I thought it would be. A jackal’s cry and a small explosion that rippled through the air. It drew my eyes; I saw her throw her head back. Her hair was the muted colour of wheat. It was wild and unbrushed, curling between her shoulders and around her arms. “How do you think you would accomplish that?” she asked.

I looked up at her bright face. She might look older than me, as any sugar glider over a day old did, but I was older, I reminded myself. By years. I tried to summon those years into my voice when I replied. “My touch could tame you. What will you do when you don’t know anymore how to hunt? How to feed yourself?”

Her mouth half-curved, gravity and lingering bemusement warring in her face. Her sunset expression darkened. She was leaving already. “That is always a very real risk,” she said. “But if it were so dire and easy as all that, do you think sugar gliders would walk around the street so easily?”

I was frustrated, by the answer to her question, by raising more questions for me than I had answers to. Sugar gliders were tricky things, I decided then. Mother would have been pleased that I’d learned it, finally. Even if I didn’t learn it in a church.

The sugar glider was distracted, already. She walked away, toward a group of sugar gliders opening a packet of hard caramels on the baseball diamond. I wheeled my bike home and blamed my skinned knee on my wobbly wheel.

At the beginning of high school, academics and the church tried to teach me the importance of silence. It was not forbidden to speak to sugar gliders, but God didn’t like it, the pastor didn’t like it, and my teachers didn’t like it, nevermind that it was the hottest summer for years and over-heated sugar gliders were dying on the green outside, plastering themselves all over school property. A group of seniors dragged away a dead sugar glider, pulling her by her hair. She must not have weighed much. I knew nothing about the weight of them, but she slid along the grass easily as they turned toward the field in the back.

Sugar gliders were not allowed in churches. Mother and Father impressed upon me that it was not safe for them either; they were clearly trying to appeal to my empathy. Mother had wanted an empathetic child and did not realize how well her plans were working until I asked her one day for a spoonful of sugar for the starving sugar glider outside. Empathy can be a sin, now, she might as well have said for the long lecture she gave me before confiscating my empty spoon and closing the front door to the sugar glider.

Mass occurred twice a week, and with the installation of crews the regularly clean dead sugar gliders from the pavement, I saw fewer and fewer of them. I proposed bringing one into church and tried to explain what the sugar glider had told me a few years before. “They’re not that fragile,” I told Mother. “The church won’t hurt them that much.”

“It absolutely will,” Mother said. “You don’t want that kind of pain on your conscience, do you?”

“No,” I said. Then, because she hadn’t actually explained why the church could possibly hurt a sugar glider, I went to Sister Agatha. She told me that church was safe only for those with souls, though that didn’t mean, of course, that I had to fear sugar gliders. Or I would never step out of my door otherwise.

“So they don’t have souls?” I said. “Not like us.”

“We don’t have souls either,” she pointed out. “We are souls. We have bodies. Now do you understand the difference between sugar gliders and yourself?” There was a scorched quality to her expression, as though she wished I hadn’t come to her with this line of questioning.

“So they can’t go to heaven?” I said. It was unfortunate, I thought, that they should have nowhere to spend eternity. They lived so few days, and now had no other days to spend, in any state, in any place.

Sister Agatha’s arched brows arched higher. The mouth beneath them twisted and thin. “With what? There is no soul, and God only chooses good souls to ascend to heaven anyway. If they had souls, do you know what they would be?”

Sinners was probably the answer she was looking for. I pretended I did not know and Sister Agatha pretended she was too busy to answer questions and asked me if my parents expected me home for dinner?

When Sister Agatha was busy, I tried to coax one of the sugar gliders into the church with me. She didn’t seem afraid, not the way I expected, but perhaps fear only existed in those with souls. I pulled her along by her hand. It was the first time I’d touched a sugar glider, and their hands felt very much like ordinary hands. Maybe a little softer, for not falling down or lifting heavy objects. The webbing between her fingers felt like I was pushing at cloth. Her hands were small; I’d chosen a sugar glider only a few hours old. She was already almost as tall as me, but she smiled a kitten smile. A budding spring smile. I squeezed the bones in her hand; they were thin as toothpicks, strong as iron rods.

“Why the church?” she asked. Her eyes were very wide, very alive, very oceanic. She was like one of those Russian dolls that opened up over and over again until they were too small to open, but in reverse. I felt I could open her up as much as I wanted and find only more layers, and if I backtracked she would be as impenetrable as a fortress.

“I want to see what God thinks of you,” I said.

She shook her head. Her hair flapped around her like wings. “He won’t think much,” she said. “It’s a He isn’t it?”

I nodded and pulled her inside, right up to the knave. When the sugar glider didn’t take her hand out of mine right away, I remembered what Mother had said about taming them. Taming them didn’t seem as awful though when you considered they only lived a few days at the most.

“I thought this would hurt,” the sugar glider said.

“Why?”

“They told me it would.” She looked at the pews. “What are the seats for? Without tables?”

“We pray here,” I said, and sat down and plucked a volume of songs from in front of me to show her. “For mass. Or when we need to.”

“I could never simply sit that long,” she said. She sounded confused, and lacing that was admiration.

I wanted to show her what praying looked like, so she would understand that it was not as incredible as she might have thought it was. Instead I put the book back and closed my hand. I could not tell if I was feeling my fingertips in my palm or my palm with my fingertips. Only that my hand was colder than the sugar glider’s.

There were a few harsh winters and short summers after that. Sugar gliders died all over the streets, frozen solid in snowdrifts, blocking traffic, leaning against street signs and rubbish bins and cars. In the summer they were ravenous, and desperate to get their population back up. There were few of them, then, suddenly, hundreds. All over the place. There were new names for them, too. But I didn’t say them and pretended not to hear them.

Because Mother hated when I used the word whore.

Without Mother and Father around, breaking their rules was easy. There was only one rule I didn’t break and, in fact, if I hadn’t gone to mass, I wouldn’t have seen her. She was just outside the church, looking at the sky. It was cornflower, stretched over the top of a yellow-leafed tree. It was just the edge of summer, with spring still lingering, and the yellow tree looked out of place. Ridiculously bright and buttery, insincere. It was still a little cold for sugar gliders, but she was there, sucking on a jawbreaker that stained her lips green.

She looked a little lonely. She was the only sugar glider visible across the green and she would probably be dead before she found another. She was perched on top of a bollard, hands curled around her knees, ocean eyes damp and wide. Sugar gliders were rarely this close to a church, and the church-goers went around her as though she spat sparks.

When they had all left and the pastor was back inside, invisible from the doorway, I went to the sugar glider. I had walked past several dead ones the other day in an alley. They tended not to get cleared away unless they were blocking major throughways for pedestrians or vehicles. I tried to gauge her age from her face. She looked a bit older than me, so she’d probably been around a day and a bit.

I stopped in front of the bollard. She looked at me and her green mouth was curious.

It was hard to be brave, face to face. So I looked at the green stain.

“You’re alone,” I said.

“So are you,” she said.

I remembered the first sugar glider I’d touched. I’d pulled her into a church. And here was another, just outside of one. “Are you hungry?” I asked.

She nodded. So we went to get food. The grocery store was a few blocks away, and she looked like the wind blew right through her, but she didn’t want my coat. I realized that I was supposed to be seeing my professor for History to the 16^th Century about my thesis outline. Instead I bought a bag of sugar and we went outside to look for grass.

“What was that you came out of?” she asked me. “Just now. Before you came up to me?”

I looked at her over the top of the sugar bag. “Mass? In the church? It’s something the pastor leads. I go to it twice a week, usually.”

She lifted her hands and looked at them as though they were the concerning thing. “But why? What do you get out of it?”

“I go to pray,” I said. “So I won’t get sent to hell before I die.” I realized that even if I explained hell to her, she might not understand it. Sugar gliders only had a few days to commit sin, if it were possible to get them sent to hell. There was so much more time for the rest of us.

“That’s what you’re doing with all of this?” The corner of her mouth twitched, like she was amused. She was not trying to hide it. It prickled me, strongly, like stinging nettle. I wanted to rub my skin where she was looking at me. “Just praying to try and take care of yourself when you die?”

“What do you mean all of this?” I asked her.

She made a small flourish with her hands at the sky and the street and the grass, then sat down in the middle of it. Her gaze bounced onto the bag of sugar, then away. “All of this. What if the point of the rest of it? School and everything you all do?”

“To learn. To grow.”

“Are you grown yet, then?” She pulled apart the seal on the bag, licked her finger, and dipped it into the bag.

“Grown for us means dead,” I said. “At least, when we’re done growing.”

“And then what?” She tipped the bag over and sprinkled it in the grass, then sprawled on her belly. Her long legs tangled with one another. They were bare where they emerged from the hem of her dress. It was not warm enough for that kind of skirt yet. “You go to heaven?”

“Hopefully,” I said. So she did know a little about religion. Did she care that she didn’t have a soul, I wanted to ask. Did she even know? “That’s my plan post-mortem. What about you?”

“Oh, I don’t plan.” She shrugged and licked at a blade of grass. Sugar glittered on her tongue for the long moment it took her to pull it back into her mouth. “That’s ages away. Have some.”

I should not have laid down next to her, but the grass was cool and it sparkled with sugar instead of frost. The dirt was hard and cold, but she was warm and soft. She got older as she licked the sugar off the blades under her. She got older as she kissed my mouth. Then it was harder to forget she would be dead soon.

She refused to go to church with me the next day for mass, but we went in before, when the pastor was still driving to the church. She looked as unperturbed as the first sugar glider I’d brought into a church. She didn’t burn without a soul. She just looked at the candles at the altar and asked what happened when one was lit. She looked unimpressed when I told her that nothing happened.

“So if I believe in Him,” she said, “I would have to decide between heaven and hell by doing something good or something bad.”

“By being good or being sinful,” I said, but these were not easy concepts for her grasp. I didn’t tell her that she was thinking of religion the wrong way, either. “If it doesn’t happen, what do you think does happen when you die?”

“You stay dead,” she said. “And you don’t have to go to hell.”

“Or heaven. Aren’t you afraid?”

She put one of her fingers on my cheek and pressed until I opened my mouth. But she didn’t kiss me, just stood next to me and wrapped her webbed hand around my fingers. “We should go,” she said. “If the church is making you cry.”

Mother did call, a few days later, when the sugar glider was dead. She asked if I’d been to mass. She asked what I’d been up to. I didn’t tell her that I’d had to take a dead sugar glider out of my room the day before, into the main street where she would be cleaned up and taken away. I still had half a bag of sugar in my cupboard that the sugar glider hadn’t eaten. She’d gotten older until she hadn’t been able to anymore and if she had a souls he would have gone to heaven. I’d been with her most of her life, long enough to know how many sins she had committed.

Long enough to know I would commit many more.

Since I had so many more days to go.

Art by Rebecca Yanovskaya

Text by Lucie MacAulay