In preparation for her marriage to Koschei the Deathless, the mortal Ira is eating. She is reading about dental procedures that sharpen the patients’ teeth to vampiric points. She is studying videos of pythons in the Florida Everglades unhinging their jaws. She is imagining how the smooth shell of a Great Blue Heron egg would feel against the concave of her tongue.

Most of the married women she knows turned themselves into beanpoles. No, worse: they turned themselves into matchsticks. They filled their fridges with sugar-free jam and flavorless cottage cheese, and they ran up and down and up and down the stairs of their apartments, and they stood in front of their mirrors tapping at their ribs as if they were the keys of a xylophone. But not Ira. She eats six meals a day and as many each night. She’ll eat the whole world if she must.

The wedding is set to take place in five months’ time on the southern shore of Keuka Lake, minutes from where Ira lives with her parents. Of the eleven Finger Lakes, Keuka sits right at the center, and Ira’s dad likes to joke that it’s like their town is giving all of mankind the bird. It’s a wholly American thing, Ira’s mom says, rolling her eyes at her husband: this us-and-them mentality and the middle finger. In Vladivostok, where they’re from, if you want to give somebody a piece of your mind, you stick your thumb through your fist and shake. The middle finger is nothing. It’s used simply, innocently, to point.

Two weeks after moving there, Ira’s dad bought a shirt from one of the downtown gift shops with “Hammondsport Versus Everybody” printed against a forest green background. Fifteen years later, it’s his lounge-around-the-house-yardwork-car-repair favorite, and Ira’s mom scrunches her nose every time she sees him wear it. They have their ESL worksheet wars about it. He says, c’mon, sourpuss, you can’t spell “assimilation” without “elation.” She says, you know what, Tyoma? You can’t spell “assimilation” without “ass.”

Ira explained all this to Koschei on their first date, which was not so much a date as an in-blood marriage contract signing, and now Koschei thinks that’s what Ira’s town is called— not Hammondsport, but Hammondsport Versus Everybody. And why not? Mortals have done stranger things. There’s a village in the Kemerovo Region whose name means “Old Worms.” Another one outside Ryazan that translates to “Kind Bees.”

Despite being a petrifier of kingdoms and an abductor of princesses and an overall not- particularly-reasonable guy, Koschei has agreed to have the wedding in Hammondsport Versus Everybody in the interest of convenience for the bride’s immediate family. The logic being that, even with the recent visa trouble, Koschei’s side will have an easier time getting to Keuka Lake, USA, than Ira and company would to Koschei’s mansion in Rublevka. After all, Koschei’s guest list consists of powerful sorcerers and minor gods, while Ira’s grandmother—who followed her son to the States and now lives across from the Finger Lakes’ premier producer of ice wine— has terrible blood circulation and swears the next time she gets on a plane her legs will swell up like boiled sausages and finally burst.

So, it’s a busy time for all. Ira’s dad is building the ceremonial arch and Ira’s mom is searching for a tasteful mother-of-the-bride dress that’ll fit with the wedding’s pastel color palette. Koschei is getting his suit tailored between prior business commitments, which include dismembering heroes, shoving their limbless bodies into wooden barrels, and casting them out to sea. The suit is a color he hasn’t worn before in all the times he’s been married. A lovely muted pistachio. Perfect for spring in upstate New York.

As for Ira? She is eating.

Not that Ira needs a reason to eat beyond being a mortal and mortals requiring it, but if you must know, she is eating now, in such impressive quantities, to prepare for the wedding tradition of khleb y sol. Toward the end of the ceremony, after the speech about life’s many obstacles and before the single chaste kiss, someone brings out a round loaf of karavay bread and a shallow bowl of salt. The salt represents the gift of something precious, and the bread—well, the bread’s the heart of the matter. Because once the couple is presented with the loaf, each party is told to take the biggest bite they can. Big as a wolf ’s bite, the officiant says, a boar’s bite. Big as a tiger’s bite, a bear’s bite.

And the one who takes the bigger bite is declared the head of the household.

Which is a dangerous thing to allow Koschei the Deathless to become, on top of all he already is: ruthless and brutish, egomaniacal and immortal at that. With hideous tusks he can bare at will and a seven-legged horse that’s the fastest in all the land and will take no other rider. Koschei the Deathless, with twelve wives locked in the basement of his Rublevka mansion and twelve more in the wine cellar of his dacha out east. And those are just the ones the average person has heard whispers about.

Among them is Ira’s best friend, Alice.

As she does her cheek-stretching exercises each morning, Ira remembers Alice. Alice, whose family immigrated a couple years before Ira’s and lived in Hammondsport only briefly before moving to New York City. Alice, who introduced Ira to tankinis and emo rock when they were kids and later invited Ira for weekends at her leaning walkup in Brooklyn. Who said their parents’ old-country superstitions were stupid: of course single people could sit at the corners of the table at Alice’s Friendsgiving dinner, and of course she would hug Ira right over the doorway if she damn well pleased.

Ira hooks two fingers in either corner of her mouth and pulls. She thinks about the brown pelican’s throat pouch, the way it’s basically a big to-go bag for fish. She opens her own mouth wide, wide, wide until her jaw pops and the skin of her lip splits. To make room, she drops her tongue to the floor of her mouth and reminds herself why she is doing all of this in the first place.

Koschei may be a god in some circles, but tradition is the one god everyone knows.

When she takes the bigger bite, she will become the head of the household.

When she becomes the head of the household, she will set them all free.

Ira waits until her parents have gone—her dad to the hardware store to pick up additional lumber, her mom to the salon to consult with a hairstylist about low-maintenance updos—then makes her way to the pantry. She steps carefully around the jars of pickles and the tins of fancy meringues, the boxes of Corn Flakes, and the bags of sushki her mom brought back the last time she went to the city. Then Ira uses her foot to nudge a fifty-pound bag of pilaf rice, which slouches forward to reveal the hammered-out space in the wall where she has been storing her training bread.

Ira has never seen a khleb y sol ceremony before, so she figures to be prepared, she’d better practice with every possible kind of bread she can find. Nareznoy baton was the easiest to get hold of. She bought a dozen loaves at once from the Eastern European specialty store the next town over, thinking it less risky than taking multiple trips, and by now the last of them is dry and stale and completely sapped of its once warm, grainy aroma. She rolls back the paper sleeve. The crust is thick as the mortar between bricks and has lost all its gloss. This one’s going to hurt, she can tell.

She swallows hard, rolls the sleeve back once more, and opens wide until she feels something in the vicinity of her throat give. Then she drives her teeth down like a spade to the earth. Too bad for her, the earth drives back.

The hard crust cuts into her gums. Blood rushes up to meet it as she takes a bite.

After finishing the weeks-old nareznoy loaves, Ira’s gums are red and swollen and dipping into the spaces between her teeth, but she can’t afford to take time off now. Her record for a single bite is only a sixth of a loaf—two or three inches at most—and she’ll have to do a lot better than that if she’s going to beat Koschei, who has been eating for six centuries, though never out of necessity but frequently out of indulgence or demonstrations of power, or spite. He has valets whose sole job is to lift the mustache off his lips, and others to move aside his ten-foot-long white beard so it doesn’t catch crumbs. The one time Ira saw this happen was at the banquet following the in-blood marriage contract signing. It reminded her of a fleet of bridesmaids holding a trailing veil.

Though Ira can’t afford to take time away from her training, she figures she can at least be strategic about it. So, when it’s time to restock her secret stash, she opts for zavarnoy.

She gets it from the same Euro market as before, but this time special orders it. The owner explains the Vasilievs of Watkins Glen had their annual family reunion last weekend and totally cleared her out of the black ryes. When the next batch comes in, Ira can see why: there’s the tender crumb and the gentle tanginess, and the owner confirms what Ira has heard about this bread staying fresh and soft longer than most. The loaves are squatter than the nareznoy, their tops lightly scored and dusted with flour. Ira is in the pantry trying to suss out the best angle from which to approach them when the bridal attendants arrive.

“Hello, hello!” they call through the window. Ira’s mom and dad are at the dance studio taking ballroom lessons for the customary first dances. She shoves the zavarnoy into the hole in the pantry wall, replaces the enormous bag of rice, and hurries to answer the door.

“Hello!” the attendants sing in unison. “Hello, hello!” Five of them, with red hair, yellow hair, black hair, chestnut hair slung in a low ponytail, white hair arranged in a pert chignon. One has delicate freckles, another thick, strong- looking ankles. They wear matching navy blazers and the same expression: one of unflagging, almost frantic enthusiasm about Ira’s upcoming nuptials, cut with fear and gratitude that it isn’t them. Their eyes remind Ira of squirrels’ eyes. Not the lazy, well-fed squirrels who are socialized to people and hang around the dumpsters behind the restaurants downtown. The ones who live in the forest. Who remember they’re still meat beneath all that fur.

“Hello—” Ira replies. They look at her expectantly, faces frozen. “—hel… lo?” she finishes. They break into broad grins and nod.

She waves them into the house, remembering the terms of the contract: One hundred days in advance of the wedding, the bride will be assigned several attendants, no fewer than three and not exceeding six, to assist with wedding preparations including but not limited to: vendor negotiations and bookings, creation and execution of design scheme, dress selection and alterations…

Ira notices the flour dust on her hands and quickly wipes it off on the back of her jeans. “Thanks for, uh, being here. I’m Ira. What are your names?”

The attendants smile brightly. “Names?” one repeats, confused. “Names… names?” another agrees.

They scramble past her, circling the dining room and dropping binders onto the table with loud clonks and tucking number two pencils and plastic rulers and various shades of off-white lace trim behind their ears.

“Oatmeal or eggshell?” Freckles asks.

“Ivory keys or pale dove?” Chignon wants to know. She glances at the flour on Ira’s jeans. “Snow white or white snow?”

Ira feels the bubbles of exasperation gathering at the backs of her eyes and blinks them away. Even though she doesn’t care about any of this, even though lace color was the furthest thing from her mind when she put herself in Koschei’s path at the stables in the Catskills where she’d heard, before the recent visa trouble, he kept his horse while in the States, she knows it’s part of it. The khleb y sol ceremony is her ticket to getting Alice back. And her ticket to the khleb y sol ceremony is the most old- school wedding she and her team of grinning attendants can dream up.

That’s where the fates of the other women fell apart. They got sucked in by Koschei’s dark, heavily lidded eyes, the way he murmured softlyprincessa, princessa during the proposal, which wasn’t so much a proposal as a command, for afterwards he threatened to turn them into deaf adders and their family members into field mice if they refused him. They got sucked in by the gold rings and velvet cloaks, the promise of endless sums of money for college tuition and medical bills, the way Koschei’s skin looked so youthful, so supple, so long as they didn’t get close enough to see the places where it cracks and peels. Once Koschei takes a shine to you, you’re done for. The word “choice” in every language cartwheels right out of your vocabulary.

They got sucked in then and again at every stage of the wedding planning, for all of them wanted one of those modern affairs you see in the magazines: chic designer dresses, bouquets of daisies, deejayed receptions in brick-walled industrial warehouses following no-nonsense ten-minute ceremonies at city hall. No one wanted to wear the shapeless sarafan or the single chunky braid. No one wanted to hear the “lyulee, lyulee” of the traditional folk song as they walked down the aisle, trying to keep their heads steady so as not to let fall the kokoshnik, with the beaded forehead drapery that looked like something everyone’s babushka would say was just darling.

No one wanted the kind of wedding in which an outdated head-of-the-household-setting ceremony would feel perfectly germane.

But Ira does.

At the table with the attendants, she thinks about the zavarnoy in the pantry and fakes a close-mouthed yawn, testing how wide she can take it without parting her lips. Chignon peers her way quizzically.

“Okay, okay?” she asks, eyes narrow.

Ira deflates her cheeks and smiles. “Okay, okay,” she returns.

The attendants Koschei sent may not be locked away in his cosmopolitan mansion or in his dacha nestled in Siberian spruce, but Ira makes a mental note to free them, too.

Koschei the Deathless is having a hell of a time trying to get a visa. Since relations between the two countries went sour—not zavarnoy sour, which is balanced with a bready sweetness, but sour sour, like an all-grapefruit wedding diet— the consulates on both sides are turning nearly everyone away. Koschei himself has been shuffled from line to line, from waiting area to waiting area, from one smudged, sign-taped window to the next. The embassy didn’t even bother to arrange special lines for Koschei, so he’s stuck in the same ones the office workers and old grannies use. Apparently, during one particularly painful visit, he vowed to turn the clerk into a Fischer’s clawed salamander if he didn’t get his papers that day. But the clerk only stared at him blankly and smacked her gum—whoosh, pop!—until Koschei threw his hands up in frustration and marched back out the door.

Koschei is a god in some circles, and a menacing one, to be sure. But consular law is the one god everyone cowers before.

Now he’s been asked to provide documentation that proves his intent to return after the wedding; a consular officer will refuse the visa application of anyone deemed a potential flight risk. Koschei tried to explain that he’s lived for more than six hundred years, through wars and famines, princely feuds and peasant uprisings, nuclear disasters and deadly snowstorms and vicious counterrevolutionary campaigns. When one of his valets muttered under his breath that Koschei had caused most of these, hadn’t he?, Koschei drew his shashka from its scabbard and pierced the idiot through the groin. He requested a replacement valet with a modicum of sense and exceptionally neat handwriting, and said valet is now hard at work compiling proof of Koschei’s ties to his homeland.

Which include a great deal of property, for one thing. The luxury estate in Rublevka with fifteen balconies and a circular drive, the riverside dacha done in the Italianate style—each with their own gallery dedicated to the avant-garde masters—and waiting for him there, twenty-fourliving wives and many others besides. Et cetera.

“Et cetera, et cetera,” Freckles chimes. Ira wonders if everything bears repeating.

While Koschei works to secure passage to the wedding, Ira keeps eating. She goes through every loaf of bread in the pantry, all the time making her bites bigger and bigger, and during appointments with the wedding vendors, she continues her training. At cake tastings, at dinners to sample different catering menus, she stretches her lips into an elastic “O,” makes of her mouth a black, wet hollow. She downs a three-tier cutting cake in a single bite. One day, practicing in the pantry with a kalach, holding it by its thinner side, she surprises herself when she reaches her teeth all the way past the bread’s belly, all the way past its handle, and champs down full force into the skin of her right pointer finger.

“Eeee!” she cries. But the mouthful of bread stifles her scream, so the attendants, who have arrived early to finalize decorations, do not notice. With the possible exception of Chignon—who, hair swept off her ears, has always had the best hearing—the attendants hear from their place on the doorstep only the sound of an excited bride-to-be singing her procession song: lyulee, lyuleeee…

As a natural side effect of her quest to free the captive brides of Koschei the Deathless, Ira has become gigantic. Maggie Sherwood, Hammondsport’s top-rated seamstress, has cleared her appointment books for the entire season to make space for Ira’s near-constant alterations. With six weeks to go, she has let the dress out so many times, and her arthritis has flared up so badly, that she swears after this wedding that she’s cooked, she’s through, she’s done. The attendants arrange for yard after yard of the finest silks and satins to be flown in from the Caucasus—on Koschei’s dime—and with the exception of poor Maggie’s engorged knuckles, Ira doesn’t feel a bit sorry. The bigger she gets, the better prepared; the better prepared, the more likely to win. To bring home Alice, who taught her how to turn a cupcake into a sandwich by breaking the base in half, and who never believed in superstitions or bad luck, even when it met her at the top of the aisle.

As for Koschei? He doesn’t notice any change in Ira’s appearance. The attendants send him pictures of her from time to time, wearing this ceremonial headscarf or that lacy shawl, and always he replies that she looks delicious in everything—only would they make sure that whatever she ends up wearing matches his new pistachio suit?

As far as he’s concerned, most mortal women look more or less the same. He remembers liking Ira’s left earlobe, the way she fingered it that day at the stables when she appeared with a pocketful of carrots and asked his horse’s name. Koschei himself hasn’t had earlobes in years.

Which is not to say that Koschei the Deathless is the accepting sort, or that he looks past the external because it’s what’s inside that counts. Only that every mortal woman he’s ever met looks the same with her limbs bent and fastened, her fingers bleeding and nailless, her tongue lapping at the moisture that comes up from the stone floor after the rain, sometimes, if she’s lucky. All knotted, bleating creatures in the dark.

It is one month until the wedding and the frenzy over the impending nuptials seems to have consumed Hammondsport completely. Ira’s dad is at the gift shop getting shirts custom-printed for party favors—“Koschei and Ira Versus Everybody”—and her mom has borrowed the attendants for a round of interviews with potential flower girls. Ira has a young cousin coming in from northern Pennsylvania, but Ira’s mom won’t hear it, citing the four-year-old’s wobbly walk and terrifying grip strength. “Goodness, don’t you remember the deviled egg incident last Christmas? She’ll grind those rose petals to smithereens if we let her!”

Koschei may be a mighty sorcerer, but nothing traps mortals under its spell quite like the pressure to plan the perfect wedding.

Ira lines up three of the small, thin-crusted borodinskiy loaves on the counter. She drops her jaw and pushes them in one by one, closing her lips around the heel of the last. Her mouth floods with sweetness and spice and she works her teeth furiously, gagging a little each time a half-chewed clump hits the back of her throat.

The Napoleonic Wars. The traveling chemist. Everyone has their favorite version of the story, but the true origins of borodinskiy bread remain a mystery. Like so many things, really. Like what Alice is doing right now. What did Koschei do to mesmerize her that day they met in Williamsburg’s Domino Park? Did he fill her head with pictures of a free ride to her dream design school? Pictures of her brother returning from his deployment safe and whole? Ira saw Alice only once after her friend signed her own in-blood marriage contract. Alice looked good, happy. She was gushing about mermaid skirt silhouettes and DIY donut bars. She asked Ira to be her maid of honor, then Ira never heard from her again.

She’s alive, though. She’s alive.

Another mystery is what Ira will do once she’s declared the head of the household and has freed all the women under Koschei’s lock and key. She figures she doesn’t get to just step down after that. She’s signing herself up for a lifetime of cleaning up messes—a lifetime that, depending how this plays out, may never, ever, ever, ever end. She could extinguish every thought of bloodlust, calm his every brewing storm. She could throw him into the same dank basement where he kept the women, let the cockroaches burrow into his immense white beard, lay their eggs.

What would be best, Ira knows, would be for her to change his name: to do away with the “Deathless” part that seems to be the root of so many of their problems. To do that she’ll have to find his soul, which is kept apart from his body, as naturally a soul would have to be for its body to perform the cruelties his body does. One morning, over hot tea and seating charts, Ira brings up the matter of Koschei’s soul to the attendants using a tone she hopes reads as casual, well-meaning—a wife concerned only for her husband’s health.

“Why, yes,” chirps the red-haired attendant. “As far as any of us know, it’s still inside the needle inside the egg.”

“Inside the needle inside the egg?” Chignon asks. Red confirms, “Inside the egg inside the duck.” “And the duck’s inside the hare?” Freckles probes. “The duck’s inside the hare.”

“And the hare, that’s still inside the chest?” picks up the breathless one with yellow hair.

“The hare’s inside the chest. Yes, yes.”

“And the chest, that’s buried—”

Ira uses her thumbs to rub her temples and her middle fingers to rub her forehead where the gnarl of impatience is starting to build up. “Ladies!” she interrupts, waving the seating chart at them. They turn to her, beaming. “Can we put Volos and Marena at the same table, or are they still arguing over—what did you say it was? The artistic integrity of The Rite of Spring?”

In the weeks leading up to the wedding, Koschei finally gets his visa. One of his valets identifies a loophole: a particularly impressionable officer at the consulate general in Uzbekistan, a young man—a boy, really—who finds himself alone one day after his colleagues are struck down with a sudden bad case of lice, and who, once alone, proves quite amenable to Koschei’s brand of bribery.

In the days leading up to the wedding, Ira outgrows everything. Old Maggie Sherwood is at her hip with shaking hands and a threaded needle right up until the last minute. At the final fitting, Ira is magnificent: sleeves cinched with ribbons at the wrist, her great neck stacked with pendants and pearls, embroidered red fabric billowing in the May breeze like a grand parade float. She has done all she can to prepare herself. She is almost ready.

The morning of the wedding, Ira installs knives behind her teeth. It is an added precaution: she would hate to get so much of the karavay into her mouth only to find herself unable to bite clear through. She makes them out of a serrated metal strip she found at the hardware store the previous night, when the owner dipped his chin approvingly and called it a spectacular choice for jewelry making, setting delicate stones and enamel cabochons and the like. Then he raised one bushy brow at Ira and said, wait, surely she’s not setting her own stone, meaning the stone inthe ring for tomorrow? Ira laughed nervously, but before she could come up with an excuse, he was already talking about the ceremonial arch her dad had constructed, going on and on about how he’d picked a sturdy kiln-dried cedar and even sprung for the combo stain and sealant, which was practically mandatory by the water—a smart man, her father—and she was out the door.

So: Koschei proudly debuting his muted pistachio suit. The giant Ira with her single braid, shaking the lake stones loose as she walks the narrow clearing between the rows of folding chairs. The hired flower girl standing prettily to the left of the arch, not fidgeting one bit. A stranger in sunglasses playing the treshchotka, and God of Night Chernobog crying because the music reminds him of his childhood. God of Fire Dazhbog crying because he can’t help it: he’s drunk and when he’s drunk, he cries any time someone else starts with the waterworks. Svarozhits, also a god, someone’s annoying nephew, crying and making the worn-out joke that, hey, it’s a moving service, and he is only human.

Maggie Sherwood in the back clutching her swollen hands and sobbing. Ira’s parents in the front wiping away happy tears—that is, crying for all the wrong reasons.

Ira and Koschei join hands in front of the arch. On the far side of the aisle, he looked so striking, his beard groomed slick and skin radiant in the late afternoon sun. Up close, though, the dense layer of cosmetics threatens to slide down his face in patches, revealing a millimeter here, a millimeter there of skin like crinkled rice paper, like snakeskin left behind and coated lightly with radioactive ash.

Some words are said. Some more. Et cetera, et cetera. A reverberant moo comes from the gift table. Volos, God of the Underworld and Livestock, has brought a kalmyk bull from the steppe, a bow taped to the amber coat between its short, high horns. It snuffles at the gift boxes, hot and restless.

Finally, they wheel out the karavay.

It’s like nothing Ira has seen before. It takes all her attendants, plus all of Koschei’s valets, plus the hardware store owner and his three strapping sons, to steer the dolly straight. On it, pitched sideways, is the wedding loaf: at least five feet across, golden brown and adorned with the requisite wreath and rings, carved stars as wide as Ira’s hands, sculpted rosettes bigger than the flowers in her bouquet. The guests cheer. The strapping sons sweat. Ira gasps and one of the metal teeth nicks the inside of her cheek. Following the karavay in the processional, a boy she doesn’t recognize carries a box of salt with the approximate proportions of a midsize aquarium.

The officiant nods at the salt, indicating the pair of them should each take a pinch. “May your life together never be bland.” Koschei smiles, baring putty-soft, rotten brown teeth between curved tusks tipped in gold leaf for the occasion. His nature prevents him from truly caring for any of his brides, but he has always been one for ceremony.

The bread carriers heave the massive karavay onto their shoulders and kneel before the couple. Koschei waves for Ira to go first. In his ghastly voice, each syllable a death rattle, he says, “Go on, princessa. I have all the time in the world.”

Every eye upon her, she remembers all she’s practiced: square loaves and round, rye breads and white. She is so full. From months of high-performance eating, yes, but also with memories of Alice: those she can call forth solidly from the past, and those future memories Koschei would rob her of, which she senses only as wisps now—something dormant never to grow. These have more weight than anything. The heavy substance, heavier absence swirl together in her maw and in her belly and they push against the walls of both, which stretch and thin until they’re nearly translucent.

On the fringes, there is something else. Something with the flavor of doubt. How well can her preparation—the training of her mortal body, the scheming of her mortal mind—hold up against a god as fearsome as this? Ira was never the brave one. Since they were kids, Alice was the bolder of the two, the one who marched out in front toward all of their adventures. Will Ira only follow her again now, into that dungeon, another captive crushed under Koschei’s forever spell?

Ira shakes her head free of this. There is no room for doubt. Truer, there is no time.

Nobody likes an overly long ceremony.

She takes a moment to collect herself, then a deep breath, then a bite.

And crams the entire loaf into her mouth in one go.

The crowd falls to a hush. This is not customary. Koschei was meant to have his turn with the karavay, but the bride has devoured it. She hasn’t left him a single morsel.

It dawns on the gods first, when Goddess of Death and Rebirth Marena howls from her seat on the groom’s side: “Bozhe moi, Deathless! What have you done?”

Koschei winks.

Ira kneels on the shore of Keuka Lake clawing at her chest and neck. Spittle dots her tremendous chin and she’s violently choking, the bread taking up space inside her that she doesn’t have. Her mind flashes to the Antarctic minke whale, its throat lined with huge expandable grooves, so-called “pleats” that extend all the way from its jaw to its belly button. She tries to think of her own mouth as capable of holding thousands of gallons of water. For once, it does her no good.

The quantity is so overwhelming that, for a long time, Ira doesn’t taste it. When she finally does, she detects some bitter ingredient she hasn’t come across before. Her parents rush to her side, but with a flick of his wrist Koschei sends them barreling backwards into their chairs, stunned immobile.

“Your daughter,” he hisses, “thought she could control me.” He bows his head in the direction of the bridal attendants, his hands a crooked steeple. “In times like these, we must be grateful to our loyal servants, who keep their masters informed of such wicked matters.”

The attendant with white hair in a pert chignon blushes and mumbles, “My pleasure, my pleasure.”

The gods are on the edge of their seats: dinner and a show. The officiant has fainted. The mortals glance at each other uneasily, wondering if this is part of it, whatever “it” is, and generally thinking: my, aren’t these old-fashioned weddings a bit over the top? Ira’s parents gape from the front row.

Ira feels the karavay forcing itself into every cranny, rushing to the back of her throat and going the wrong direction, up into her nasal passage, causing her to sneeze and retch at once. She feels the thin flap of skin between her top incisors tear, feels the bread plunge her new metal teeth into her soft palate. The dull throbbing in her ears makes her realize the karavay must have somehow worked its way in there too, is going to come spilling out of either side of her head any second. Would be nice, she thinks hazily. Sweet release. Even if it has to take her brains with it.

And that’s when it hits her.

“I could have taken care of her sooner, of course,” Koschei continues, “but then we would all have had to miss the party. Besides”—he holds his arms out and spins—“it would be a shame to have so fine a suit and no occasion to wear it.” Chernobog, who has on a velvety tuxedo jacket of stitched-together bats’ wings and considers himself just as sartorially inclined, huffs in staunch agreement.

“Now I’m afraid we must be off. Sorry to leave you nice people with the cleanup. The terms of my visa are simply barbaric, and I have much to attend to before returning home.”

Koschei reaches for the bottle of champagne waiting in a silver ice bucket. Beside it, the collapsed officiant is just now coming to, a bruise already forming where her cheekbone hit the ground. She points over Koschei’s shoulder, eyes all whites.

As Koschei turns, bottle in hand, his beard catches a nail in the ceremonial arch and the smirk, superior and vaguely amused, slips from his face. His skin takes on a peculiar green tinge—not unlike the color of his suit, really— that all the makeup in Hammondsport and greater Steuben County can’t hide.

Because if Ira’s learned anything from planning a wedding, it’s that the details matter. And the rules say to become the head of the household, you need to take the bigger bite. She doesn’t remember anyone specifying that you need to swallow it.

There, beside some four hundred pounds of wet, bite-marked but mostly intact karavay, Ira wipes her mouth with a dainty, ribboned sleeve. She is doubled over in pain but breathing, an absolute affront to matrimonial etiquette—and, come to find out, exceptionally hard to kill. The world is a smear of colors, spinning. The poison has already entered her system. Spitting the bread out won’t save her, but it’ll buy her some time. Besides, there’s a reason they tell you to eat all the rolls in the basket if you plan to be drinking late into the night. All the bread she’s eaten in the past five months has lined her stomach beautifully. It soaks up the toxin Koschei planted.

Koschei sinks to his knees and something thick and invisible oozes out of him, trickling from the sides of his tusks a little at first, then congealing into a small air-bound stream that travels from his horrid mouth, across the length of the arch, and into Ira’s own.

The dazed officiant doesn’t have to say it. It’s one of those would-be-sweet wedding moments: the bride and groom know it, and that’s all that matters. The head of the household on a technicality is the head of the household nonetheless.

Chernobog drops his head into his hands. Dazhbog and Svarozhits slump down in their seats, silently passing a flask of medovukha between them. The mortals are tempted to leave, but most are not rude enough to actually do so: this is a wedding, after all, and there are social protocols, even if the bride herself opts to ignore them. The few who try to get up quickly realize that they, like Ira’s parents, have been paralyzed.

The head of the household gathers her strength and makes her declaration, and Koschei yields reluctantly, having no choice but to do so. “Choice” becomes a foreign word to him, a shadow in the mist of the mind without taste or smell or meaning, as it did to all the women he took and claimed as his own.

Ira speaks their names. For she has been all this time not only a prolific eater, but also a devoted scourer of missing-persons reports, a cataloger of the wedding announcements sections of every major newspaper in the country. She says name after name after name after name. At last, she says the names of the attendants, the scant names she has for them: Freckles and Breathless and even traitorous Chignon. However tightly they sealed her coffin, they too deserve to be free.

Thousands of miles away, in the basement of the mansion, and thousands more, in the dacha’s wine cellar, the women’s chains fall away without warning or explanation, and they unfold their broken bodies and lick the wounds at their wrists and ankles—first their own, then one another’s. They walk to the door, which is inexplicably unlocked, then up the stairwell, whose incline is much slighter than they remember it being all that time ago when they came down. They walk out into the moonlight, holding each other up at the elbows, and when Alice remembers she has left something important down in that dungeon—a twice-folded photograph of her and her best friend, just kids on a rocky beach in matching tankinis—the other women drive her forward and refuse to let her stop. For there is an old superstition about leaving a place. It pertains to any old place; it need not be a prison. To turn around would be a bad omen. One must never go back for forgotten things.

Koschei is infuriated. Ira is doomed. She will not rise like a god. She will not even rise like bread. But dammit if she isn’t taking her precious time to die.

With one foot in Keuka Lake, the centermost of the eleven Finger Lakes, and one foot on the shore, Ira says the final name, shaking from the labor of staying alive. Her red sarafan is wet down the front with slobber and sick, and her towering kokoshnik has been knocked askew, but her parents and the people of Hammondsport will later report that, despite all this, she made the loveliest bride.

Ira looks Koschei square in the eye and raises both hands in the air before her. With her last ounce of life, she lifts the middle finger of one hand. With the other hand, she forms a loose fist, tucks her thumb into the space between her first and second fingers. The sentence, and its translation. So no one will dare misunderstand her.

Then she opens her mouth for the very last time.

Sound travels fast across the warm, still waters of Keuka Lake. That day, the mortals on the other side will remember hearing a joyous, unmistakable whoop.

The hills where Ezekial and I now stood were older even than the things that lurked in the forest. Here, the bones of the earth knitted together under moss and fern—so different from the world of city streets and closed doors I knew as a child with my mother, although she was the first to…

I leaned over the railing, watching dark water thrash below. Evening light refracted off the lighthouse’s windows behind me and gilded the waves. Without warning, Viola appeared at my elbow. I knew who it was, but in the space between knowing and understanding, I jumped. She grinned at me. “Good instincts, Francis. You’ve got to…

Of course, Lâm got the nighttime shift again. The one shift she thoroughly hated. Neither her coworkers nor her supervisor understood why. Surely it was the quietest time, with the fewest arrivals of Descendants, the least paperwork and processing?

Of course, Lâm had never started on the Path herself. Her Call was old and kept pulling at her, but unlike the Descendants, she had never heeded it. This created a situation that Lâm had not seen with any of the Descendants she met at work: her Call seemed to be completely invisible. At best, her coworkers thought she hated night shifts because of Minh, who was usually running security at that time and whose relationship with Lâm could best be described as tense.

But it wasn’t about Minh (who was, truth to tell, a rigid and sanctimonious idiot).

The trouble was that there was nothing to do at nighttime. Once Lâm was done with rearranging the layout of the reception desk, with cleaning the teaware five times, and making sure everything was in its proper place for the breakfast buffet (it nearly always was, because the evening team had done their jobs), once she was done with all these avoidance tasks, with all the minutiae of small things she could do to stave it off, once she was sitting at reception, staring at the screensaver on the computer, at the slow dance of the Path Company’s logo moving like algae waving in some invisible current…

…Once she was done, the visions of the Call always came.

It always started small: something on the edge of her field of vision, a shimmering, a faint wavering of the paintings in the reception lobby. The backs of her hands itching. A barely perceptible smell of brine, and the sound of the wind slowly and steadily rising, covering the noise of the computer’s fan, the motor of the vending machine, her own frantic heartbeat.

Slow and steady, and never stopping.

Then the odd, uncomfortable feeling of her skin tightening, too small to hold in the whole of her unfurling self—a desperate need to scratch it all off, to finally breathe, in all her power and glory.

By that time, the whole of the reception lobby was usually overlaid with a faint pattern of waves, and Lâm would hear the crash of the ocean in her ears. And then she’d look down and see her hands—the shimmering imprint of scales beneath her skin, the lengthened fingers ending in claws. And it would feel so easy, so tempting to just go towards the waiting Path, to travel its length to its end at the nearest harbor.

Someone was screaming. Something touched her shoulder and it was viscous algae, and she jerked away, and she—

“Excuse me?”

It wasn’t algae. And the person wasn’t screaming, but talking. It was a guest.

Lâm looked up, blinking to clear away the undersea landscape. A hazy silhouette stubbornly refused to come into focus. Her eyes had adapted to undersea sight and didn’t want to return to normal. This had happened before. She was going to be all right, once it cleared. She was going to be all right. All she had to do was her job.

“Yes?” she said. Her voice felt faraway, booming and too large for the lobby. It was unfair, grossly unfair. She hadn’t asked for any of this.

She had found over the last three years that working in a Descendant hotel made resisting the Call easier for some reason. It wasn’t her favorite job: when she worked the night shift, it meant she couldn’t join her housemates for dinner. Nga would make sure she had food left in the fridge—she really behaved like a full-on auntie, mothering Lâm even though she was a year younger. And after night shifts, Lâm usually arrived back home before Công left for her office job, which meant they could catch up over a shared meal—Lâm’s late dinner and Công’s breakfast—discussing the latest books they’d read and the incongruous things they’d both seen on their way through the city, which Công so loved to sketch.

“I’m really sorry, nothing else was working to get your attention.” The voice was female, older than her. “I really do need the room.”

Reflex kicked in. A late arrival. Despite the apology, the guest didn’t sound sorry. There was a faint iridescence to her skin and eyes, which meant she was already some way along the Path and used to the way the Company eased her passage as she slowly made the journey toward the nearest harbor, toward the sea that would become her home.

Lâm tried hard, very hard, not to think of her mother’s own Path, of the tautness in her emaciated face toward the end, of the sheer relief when she and twelve-year-old Lâm had finally reached the harbor after weeks of travel.

Of the way the sea had risen to meet her mother as she waded in—a whirling of ribbons of water spreading out from her and the shadows of dragons gathered in the open sea, calling her onward.

Mother hadn’t looked back or expressed regret. Not once. The Call had erased all that from her—even the desire for land food or drink. Even love for her own child. No, she hadn’t looked back, and Lâm had been left behind, trying to move on. But how did one move on from that?

Nga, drunk at night, often got blasphemous and said that Mother had failed parenthood, and she didn’t deserve to be worshipped or remembered. Lâm would shake her head and say it wasn’t that easy and the argument would end over a plate of mung bean cakes with nothing solved—neither Nga’s bitterness at the way parents sometimes behaved nor Lâm’s resentment and loss. Công simply shook her head and said that sometimes people were weird, and that didn’t help either.

Lâm hadn’t told either of them about her own Call. It was too hard, too personal, too fraught. She didn’t want their friendship to sour or end, the way it was bound to if they had that conversation. Descendants weren’t meant to have attachments or friends once the Call came; everyone knew that Descendants would be inexorably drawn into the sea.

Descendants. Con Rồng. Children of the Dragon. Called to the sea. Blessed, the Company said. Except that, of course, it was everyone else who picked up the pieces and everyone else who had to deal with the consequences of such barbed blessings.

“I’ll need you to fill this in,” Lâm said, sliding a sheet of paper in front of the guest. “And ID and a card, please.”

The guest frowned. She looked a bit like an older Công, all harshness and sharp observations. “A card?”

“A credit card. For incidentals.” Lâm made her most practiced apologetic face. “The Company covers meals and accommodation on your journey, but you may want extra things. Mini bar. Room service.”

The guest studied the registration form as if it had personally offended her. Lâm studied the ID on the desk. Nguyễn Thị Nguyệt Uyển, a traditional and old-fashioned name. Place of birth was in the western provinces, a long way from Azure Sky Hotel. She was near the end of her Path. But asking about her Path would be too personal, too intimate, and Lâm didn’t want that sharp gaze turned on her. So instead, she slid the card and the ID back and proceeded with the registration.

“Here you go,” she said. “Your room number is written on the leaflet and the lifts are this way. Breakfast is at 10 a.m. and here are your access codes for the Path app. It interfaces with the guidance system on your phone’s maps, so you’ll know where to go next.” Not that she’d need it—as Lâm herself was ample proof, the Call was relentless, as unerring in its accuracy as the instinct of migratory birds. Descendants never got lost. They went where they were supposed to, all of them.

All except middle-aged, stubborn, selfish, scared Lâm.

Lâm expected not to see Nguyệt Uyển again. Her shift ended early in the morning, before the breakfast room was opened. And she was exhausted. Lately, night shifts left her feeling that way, like she’d run a marathon and never stopped. She’d come home and collapse, barely able to talk to Công or enjoy Nga’s food.

But when she emerged from yet another bout of visions and hallucinations and went to the tea rooms to boil water for a grounding drink, she saw that Nguyệt Uyển was sitting cross-legged in front of the table furthest from the kitchens. She’d gotten herself one of the complimentary tea sets, and she was staring at the delicate blue porcelain cup in front of her. Lâm couldn’t see her expression. From the back, she looked so much like Mother that Lâm felt a stab in her chest, an icy twist around her heart.

Don’t do it, Nga would have said. It’s not worth it.

She’s not Mother, Công would have pointed out. But Lâm was neither of them.

Before she knew what she was doing, she was walking toward the table. It was highly improper to bother a guest, but what propelled her was even harder to resist. “Are you all right?” she asked. “You should get some sleep. It’s a long journey.”

Nguyệt Uyển looked up, her distant gaze returning to focus on Lâm. The faint scattering of scales on her cheeks disappeared. “That’s very kind of you—” she stopped, leaving an all- too-obvious space.

“I’m Lâm.”

“Would you care to join me?” Nguyệt Uyển gestured towards the tea.

Lâm hesitated. She wanted to go home. She wanted to sit with Công at breakfast and discuss Nguyệt Uyển the way they discussed that odd man on the bus, or the child disguised as an ornate lion dancer near the noodle shop. Odd, amusing, the subject of distraction and laughter. Distant. Safe.

“It’s late at night,” Nguyệt Uyển said, “and it’s not like there’s much to do. Or would you rather remain alone with your Call?”

Lâm had not expected that. Not—not that. No one was supposed to see her Call. “How—how do you know?”

A smile from Nguyệt Uyển. “It’s my job. Or used to be.” There was an odd inflection in her voice: half-regret, half-anger. “Marine theologist. I studied dragons and Descendants.” She snorted, genteel and careful. “Somewhat ironic that I’d end up being Called. But anyway, it’s hard to miss the look of the Called. You’ve got it and you’ve got it bad.”

It was all too much, all too casual, all too probing. Lâm sat down, overwhelmed, watching Nguyệt Uyển pouring tea in a practiced gesture. The smell of jasmine and cut grass wafted up to Lâm. “You don’t sound very concerned about being Called.”

“Concerned?” Nguyệt Uyển stared at her tea. “I suppose I’m not.”

It was Mother all over again, wasn’t it? A wound that could never close no matter how much therapy Lâm tried on it. And yet… perversely, she found herself envying Nguyệt Uyển’s serenity. She seemed utterly unperturbed by the effects of the Call. “Have you no family?”

“I do. My husband was Called a few years back, and our daughters are grown now. You?”

“No,” Lâm said. She’d had a few girlfriends, but the Call made it hard. By daylight, it was sort of manageable, but few relationships could endure night after night of nightmares that would leave her gasping and struggling to distinguish between vision and reality. But she had Nga and Công, her little community of people where she belonged. Those who looked after her as she looked after them. “It’s all right, really. I’m not lonely.”

A sharp look, but Nguyệt Uyển said nothing. Instead, she poured them both more tea. “I made my goodbyes to my daughters, but it’s not like I’m going very far.”

“Dragons don’t come back.” Lâm’s voice was harsher than she meant it to be.

“Hmm.” Nguyệt Uyển sipped at her tea. “That’s not quite true and you know it. Get a boat and go out to sea, and they’ll come.”

She’d tried that once, when she was twenty. A small boat hired with Nga and Công, the movement making her seasick; the wind buffeting her as she stood on the deck, the smell of the sea everywhere, swallowing up Nga’s angry words and Công’s observations. Then, silence. And dragons. Dark silhouettes seen underwater and then by the side of the boat, staring up at them as the wind died down.

“Yeah,” Lâm said. “They do. But they’re not the same.” They’d all looked alike, and whatever language they spoke had made no sense to Lâm. One of them had come closer, staring at her, antlers shining with sea salt, droplets of water scattered in their iridescent mane. She’d called Mother’s name but they hadn’t answered, just remained there staring at her with the open sea between them. But then the other dragons had called out, and they’d turned and dived back into the water, blessing delivered, storm quelled, nothing more.

Nguyệt Uyển’s gaze was sharp and compassionate. She didn’t ask who Lâm had lost. Instead she said, “The Call runs in families. Not always, but often. So it wasn’t exactly a surprise for me.”

Lâm said, before she could stop herself, “Is that what happens, when you walk the Path? You just… stop caring?”

“About what?”

“Everything. People. The family you leave behind. The things of the world. Just—” The pleasant warmth of the sun on cobblestones; the small terraces with tea and dumplings, Nga’s and Công’s laughter wafting in the evening breeze; the sharp, acrid taste of the first tea in the morning, looking at sketches alongside Công.

A silence. Nguyệt Uyển was breathing in the tea, slowly, deliberately. “Everything you lose…” she said. “Drink your tea,” she added, not unkindly. “I’d like to ask you a question. You don’t have to answer. Though I’m older than you and a guest, and I measure the respect and obeisance you think you owe me, I’m not here to pry. At least not unduly. How long ago did they leave you for the sea?”

Lâm was silent for a while. She’d not told anyone on the staff. But there was no one else she could talk to in this way, and it felt like a burden she’d borne for too long. “I was twelve,” she said. She stared at her hands, half- expecting to find the imprint of scales on them again. “I don’t know how I’m meant to deal with that.”

“The same way we deal with everything,” Nguyệt Uyển said. “The best that we can with what we currently have.” She sighed. “You say I’m not concerned. I am. I’m angry that I have to leave everything behind. I’m sad that I won’t get to see either of my daughters marry or have children or be there for the rest of their lives. I’m scared of what it’s really like, to be in the sea. And I have regrets. Of course I do. But it’s not like I have much of a choice.”

“And so you just… give in?”

A shrug. “I’ve learned to accept it. It’s what the Path is, isn’t it? Why the Company exists. Not for accommodation and meals, though I guess that’s part of it. But with each stop—” Another shrug, a touch of rainbow light in her eyes, reminiscent of the dragon’s gaze on Lâm all those years ago. She could hear the roaring of the wind in her ears. “With each stop, one gradually yields to the inevitable. As I said, I’ve made my goodbyes.”

“I refuse.” The words were out of Lâm’s mouth before she could stop them. There was too much bitterness bound up in all this. “I have people here. I won’t leave them.”

“That’s good, I guess.” Nguyệt Uyển didn’t sound convinced.

“Are you mocking me?”

“I’m not.” Lâm saw that there was pity in her eyes and that felt even worse. “You said you were all right. I’m glad you are.” She set her cup back on the table and looked up, behind Lâm. “I think your colleague is looking for you.”

Lâm turned. Minh was there, his face flushed—by his expression, something had gone wrong, and he needed Lâm’s softer touch to untangle whatever messy situation a guest had come up with. “You’re right,” Lâm said. “I have to go. Thank you for the tea. And you really should get some sleep.”

Nguyệt Uyển inclined her head. Her gaze was distant once more. “May we meet again,” she said.

May we not, Lâm thought, but she was rattled enough that she couldn’t get the words out of her mouth.

Lâm finished her shift with no further incidents. She rode the bus all the way back to her flat more exhausted than she’d ever been, the visions of the Call superimposing the darkness of the depths atop the shops and the streets.

At home, Công was waiting for her. “Hey,” she said. “There’s shrimp soup in the oven. Nga left it to warm before she went to work.” She was sipping a bowl of congee with salted eggs. “How was your night?”

Lâm found herself at a loss for words. Behind Công, she could see algae clinging to the kitchen cupboards and the sound of the wind was almost drowning out what Công was saying. “Not bad,” she said, automatically. “How was your day?”

“Interesting,” Công said. “I found a little temple on the Fifth Avenue, near the Azure Gardens. Had no idea it was there. Look.” She opened her sketchbook. All Lâm saw was waves and dark shapes, and instead of Công’s enthusiastic descriptions of worshippers, all she heard was the whistling sound of the wind and the thunder of the distant sea.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I’m exhausted. Can we talk later? When I’ve had sleep.”

Công’s face darkened. She opened her mouth, said something—and when Lâm didn’t react, reached out to touch her shoulder. The visions died away. “They work you too hard. You know that? You’ve barely gone out in months. You always say you’re tired. Can’t you just say no to them?”

“Please.”

“All right,” Công said. She swallowed the last of her congee and closed her sketchbook. “I’m off to work. I’ll see you tonight?”

“Of course,” Lâm said, and it felt bitter on her tongue, as if she was lying.

After Công had left, Lâm retrieved the soup from the oven but found she wasn’t hungry. Maybe something else?

She brewed herself a last tea before bed. It was jasmine green, the same tea Nguyệt Uyển had made. She stood in the silent kitchen for a while, breathing in the smell of jasmine and grass. The visions were gone, for now, and her skin was her own, if a little too pale from lack of sun. She should go to the botanical gardens on her next day off.

Except… when had she last been able to go out for more than work?

She stared around the room. A small kitchen with an impeccable counter. Bookshelves. Flowers.

A routine. Colleagues she didn’t confide in. Friends she hid her Call from. No, worse. Friends she couldn’t even properly hear anymore.

How long had it been since she’d been able to have a conversation with Nga or Công? The Call had started to overlay everything a while ago. A long, long while ago, if she was honest with herself.

Have you no family?

You said you were all right. I’m glad you are. She lifted the teacup. She wanted to cry and she wasn’t sure why. She paused, the teacup at her lips.

Nguyệt Uyển.

Echoes of their conversation, of the ease with which it had happened, how she’d opened up in response to Nguyệt Uyển’s own confidences. A sudden, sharp, wounding realization, like a blade in her innards.

She’d had more connection to a lone stranger than she’d had with anyone in years.

She felt her hand start to shake.

She had Nga. She had Công. But… but every moment with them, she wasn’t telling the truth. Every moment with them, the Call encroached.

It would always be there.

Lâm thought of Nguyệt Uyển serenely pouring tea. Of all the other Descendants on their Paths, going hotel to hotel until they reached the sea and the dragons came to welcome them. Of Mother’s sigh of relief when she’d finally reached the water.

She drank the tea. As it left a trail of warmth down her throat, she felt understanding shift within her. She could wait and wait until the Call hollowed her out, keep living this half-life. Or she could go, abandoning her housemates as Mother had once abandoned her. She could keep on resisting until the bitter end—but what would be left of her, if she did?

It wasn’t that Mother hadn’t loved or cared for her. She had, as much as Lâm cared about Nga and Công. More, even. But, she thought, some things just were, like the calm at the end of a storm or the foam as a wave crashed on the sand. They happened, and the only freedom was what dignity to behave with and what kindness to extend to others. Neither Nga nor Công deserved to share the half-life Lâm was living, the constant exhaustion that no longer allowed for joy or true moments of community.

The Call was trembling at the edge of her thoughts—visions waiting to take over once more. She breathed in, and felt not serenity, not calm, but something like a weight settling on her. An acknowledgement of who she was. Of whom she was meant to be.

Descendant. Child of the dragon.

I’m scared, Lâm thought, and she felt like she was twelve again, watching Mother immerse herself in the harbor’s waters, watching her change. She was twenty, staring at the dragon over the prow of the ship, the moment trembling in the air. She was thirty-seven and watching the iridescent light playing in Nguyệt Uyển’s eyes.

Her hands shook again, unsteady. The tea shivered in her grasp.

She swallowed her mouthful and set the cup back on the counter, staring, for a brief moment, into its trembling depths. Then, before she could change her mind, she began writing a letter to Nga and Công, keeping it brief and factual, until she was ready to sign off.

I care about you deeply. I love you and I miss you already, but I have to go.

She left it on the table next to Nga’s cold soup and Công’s empty bowl of congee, where neither of them could miss it. They would be angry or sad; they would seethe at her lie and her lack of goodbyes in person, or weep for her or miss her. Or perhaps all of these.

But the wind was rushing once more, scales forming across the backs of her hands, waves rising up in front of her.

Lâm walked away, through the door, toward the streets lit by the rising sun, toward the hotels and the distant harbor, and, eventually, the fated sea.

psalmody there’s a woman sitting seiza, bare shoulders hunched and bent in the sordid kind of agony only thought up by a man and hovering there right above her, eternally suspended, a drop of blood so shocking in its red her son’s thorned crown upended and the man with scuffed shoes at the lectern reminds…

8:53 a.m., Friday, October 30th, 2066. I’m freezing my tuchus off, standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Washington. Behind me, in the window of the business, a gigantic digital clock is ticking cruelly while a 3D-animated cartoon man underneath it taps his wristwatch and repeats the phrase, “Don’t wait until the eleventh hour!”…

“You’re going to love it here, Dad,” the stranger says. She has blond hair, thick eyebrows, and a sharp chin. My chin. My daughter? My sweet little . . . Abigail? Rachel?

“I’m sure I will, sweetie.”

Her eyes green like my wife’s. Always wet, like drowned emeralds. “I know it doesn’t look like much, but the doctors here seem really nice. They’re going to take good care of you until you feel better.”

“Better?” I say, dumbly.

She laughs though the smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “Better,” she says, as if the word were a talisman. “Then we can bring you home.”

“Home,” I mouth the word, loving the way its roundness fills my mouth. “That sounds really nice, Abby.”

Her eyes well up and she squeezes my hand. “It’s Victoria, Dad.”

I smile through the heartache. “Right.”

I blink and I am sitting alone, the light through the window now the soft gold of evening.

“Vic?” I cry for my daughter, eyes darting to the corners of the empty room.

My new home is a ten-foot by ten-foot box with a window overlooking the yard. My bed is a twin, topped with a king-sized comforter. There is one photo on the wall. In it, an unfamiliar man in a tuxedo has his arms wrapped around a woman in a white gown, his hands resting on the luminous curve of her pregnant belly. They both smile at me.

“That’s me?” I say aloud, standing and hobbling closer, my knees aching. Why do they ache? That’s right, I’m old! The man in the picture is handsome and young though, his eyes full of life.

Excited, I take the picture from the wall and move to the bathroom mirror.

I am fatter than the man in the photo, a rounded gut hanging over my waist. Gray hairs poke out from my ears, and my face looks like a melted wax caricature of the man in the photo. I touch the stubble on my chin and the loose gizzard flesh that hangs beneath.

“I’m old,” I say aloud, though the delight is gone.

I put the picture back on the wall.

I begin to weep.

“Think of it like getting lost in a fog,” a woman tells me. She is middle aged, with a thick jaw and a snake’s nest of curls atop her head. She is sitting in a chair in front of me, jotting notes on a clipboard.

I am sitting on the edge of my bed, and I am wearing a different robe than I was a moment before. My face is dry.

“How long have I been here?” I ask.

“You were checked in four days ago,” the woman responds. “Henry, are you here with me?”

Four days? My God, I lost four days?

“Yeah,” I croak, throat dry. “I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

The woman studies me over the edge of her cat-eye glasses. “The fog metaphor. We’ve found it eases the transition into and out of the fugue state. The jumps, the missing time, those will only get worse. But with the right attitude, we can make the process as comfortable as possible.”

“Fugue state?”

She nods tiredly. “Imagine an entire world covered in a deep, impenetrable mist—you’re lost in it, but you can see a mountain. We’ll call it Mount Clarity. Every day, your brain tries to climb that mountain. Some days, you won’t succeed. And some days you will climb all the way to the top and be your old self again. The important thing to remember is that it won’t happen every day—it’s okay when you don’t make it to that peak. We’ll be here to take care of you until you’re back with us.”

I open my mouth to thank her; only a groan comes out.

When I dream, I am in that fog. It is colder than I imagined, a thousand icy fingers worming their way into my skin.

I see Mount Clarity in the distance, and I run towards it, eyes fixed on that sharp spire rising above the white blanket. There are others here too—shadows racing, scrambling up the slick sides of the mountain.

There is something in their faces that I don’t like, a mindless terror in the way they look over their shoulders. They screech like animals, growling and crying. Their fingernails scrape against stone until they crack off in bloody splinters.

“The fog isn’t empty,” a voice whispers in my ear. “You need to run, Henry.”

I try to catalog what I know. I have the vague memory of writing in a leather journal. A woman with green eyes always insisted on it, even on the bad days, pushing it towards me along with a glass of orange juice. In the absence of it, I catalog aloud.

“My name is Henry,” I say. “I am old.” I reach for more and am delighted when I find it. “I was a soldier, like my father. After that, I built roads and married a beautiful woman.” At the mention of her, my eyes are drawn to the photo on the wall. “She took care of me, until she went away.”

I reach for more; there is only fog.

My stomach rumbles. The world beyond my door is a mystery, but my nose still works, and I smell bacon.

I stand on creaky legs, thankfully remembering to put my pants on before exiting into the hallway. The walls beyond, painted a chipped yellow the same shade as piss, are lined with old pine doors.

I step over a muddy bootprint outside my door and follow the scent down the hall, stopping only when I notice two men in scrubs working in a nearby room. They are collecting bedding and shoving it into a laundry cart. A trash can sits in the hall just outside the door, a receptacle for the prior occupant’s worldly possessions. On top, there is a photo—a white-haired woman with her arms wrapped tight around the chest of a little girl. The glass is cracked, a dark line splitting the woman’s face in two.

“Who was she?” I ask. The men pretend they don’t hear me. A shred of a memory rises from the fog. Victoria’s gap-toothed smile radiating up at me, her blue eyes bright.

No, I think, that can’t be right. My Victoria’s eyes are green, not blue. Yet, I cannot abandon this girl to the garbage. Someone should remember that she existed, that she loved the old woman in the photo, and that for at least one moment, she had the same smile as my Victoria.

I slide the photo from its frame, fold it, and place it in my pocket.

The rec room is large, six battered hardwood tables positioned across its width, centered on a pair of well-worn couches. On the TV, John Wayne is pointing his trusty Mare’s Leg at a couple of scoundrels, and I think I know the movie, the thrill of memory drawing me close. But, before John can waste the bad guys, someone calls my name.

“Henry! Earth to Henry!”

I turn, dumbfounded. It’s a woman, her black hair standing out amid a sea of blue and gray heads. She is wearing a bathrobe, has a narrow face, dusky eyes, and a wry smile. I suck in my gut.

A man sits next to her, hunched over a crossword puzzle, a pair of round-framed glasses

perched on the tip of his withered nose, bald head covered in dark liver spots. He holds a shaky pen above the paper but doesn’t write.

“How do you know my—” Then the revelation hits. “Berta!”

“That’s me! George, he knew me today!” she slaps the man beside her. “Come Henry, sit with us.” I join them, my memory chugging to life like an old diesel engine. She is Berta, a widow from the war. She is the youngest person here, only sixty-one, but insane.

“I got a head full of ghosts,” she told me once. The other is George, a lifelong bachelor, an

accountant, and an expert on WWII. One day, fairly recently, George and I sat in the garden while he explained to me how Joseph Goebbels had turned a nation of normal, loving people into Nazis.

I settle into the chair opposite them. “How are you today?”

Berta’s smile, all white teeth and crow’s feet, is infectious. “Still crazy. And you? Are the boots still keeping you awake?”

“Boots?” I ask, brow furrowed. “I don’t remember, what do you—”

George grumbles something, cutting me off. Berta shoots him a worried glance. “He isn’t doing too well today. Hasn’t said much.”

George is like me, I recall. Just further along into the brain rot. I crane my neck to see his puzzle. He has only written one word, four letters in a row made for eight.

HELP.

“You hungry?” Berta asks conspiratorially, grabbing my forgotten stomach’s attention. “Breakfast is already over, but I saved a couple slices of toast.”

She produces a paper plate from under the table. The toast is cold, covered with a red jelly that tastes like summer. I wolf it down, eyes watching George, ears listening to Berta as she regales us with stories about her summer spent in Venice, and the lovers whose hearts she broke there.

George continues to work on his puzzle. By the time he’s done, the light outside has turned red, and he has written the same answer for every question.

I am lying awake in bed; the clock on my nightstand reads 3:00 a.m. I draw the comforter up to my face and breathe in the scent of home, warmth, and a woman’s lingering perfume.

There is a sound out in the hallway. That’s right, I remember, that’s what woke me, those heavy boots invading my foggy dreams. I listen to them move down the hallway, passing right outside my door. Then, a moment later, they return, going the other way.

A chill sweeps over me; I can smell blood. Unconsciously my hand drifts to the edge of the mattress and reaches underneath, running my fingers along the crinkled edge of the photo I stole from the trash bin.

As a short scream echoes down the hall outside, I bury my face in the comforter and let memories of better days drown it out.

The next morning, another room is being emptied by men in scrubs. I am intent on passing right by them. I woke with a clear memory of Berta and George, and I cannot wait to tell them.

Yet, when I near the room, something stops me. I stare, watching the two men empty the former resident’s trashcan into the larger bin in the hall. Receipts, an empty pack of cigarettes, a couple of empty whiskey shooters.

“What happened to him?” I ask the young orderly as he steps outside to toss a pile of birthday cards into the bin.

The boy shrugs. “He died.”

I stare down at the cigarette pack. Marlboro, like my father used to smoke.

“How?” I ask.

The boy glances back at me, clear annoyance on his face. “Got old, I guess.”

I don’t bother to tell the boy that I, too, am old. Something in the way he looks at me tells me that he already knows.

Once his back is turned, I pick up the Marlboro pack. The lingering smell of tobacco inside tickles a memory, silver smoke curling around a dark mustache.

“What was his name?” I ask.

The kid sighs. “Beats me. Look, man, I got a lot of work to do. Head on down to the rec room. I hear they got musicals on the TV today.”

That night, I am a child, sitting atop my father’s workbench, watching him rub varnish into the side of the oak canoe we have spent all summer building. The muscles in his arms ripple as he spreads sealant on the hull, his rugged afternoon shadow making him look every bit the war hero I believe him to be. This is years before I learn that

he spent the war getting shit-faced on a patrol boat off the coast of Brazil. He impregnated a woman there. She sent him letters, dozens, first swearing her love, then begging for money, then cursing his name, and finally pleading for him to come back. I will find these letters on the day of his wake, and I will weep while others toast his name.

But at this moment, it is summer, I am a child, and my father is perfect.

“How fast will it go? Can we take it down the Mississippi?” We had just read Huck Finn in school. “Maybe not the whole Mississippi,” my father says, puffing his cigarette, silver smoke curling over his mustache. “She’ll take on the pond out back just fine.”

“Can I name her?”

He arches an eyebrow. “Naming a boat is a serious business. Give a boat a bad luck name, bad luck is all she’s going to give you. You sure you’re up for it?”

I nod, gravely.

He looks at the canoe again, then at me. “Well, then she’s all yours. What’s her name, cadet?”

I deliberate silently, head bowed until the perfect name comes to me. I open my mouth and the word breaks apart on my tongue. I try once more to say it, but only a dry hiss leaves my throat.

It’s hard to think. Someone is walking behind me now, heavy boot falls scattering my thoughts like clouds of gnats. I look to my father and his face is gone. In its place, a circular window has been cut into his head, through which white fog falls in billowing sheets.

“What’s your name, cadet?” he asks. “Gotta hold onto that.”

I wake, covered in cold sweat. The boots are in the hall again.

I go over what I know. It isn’t much.

Except for the dream. It’s my only clear memory, a lighthouse in the fog.

“Do you believe in the afterlife, Henry?” George asks me. It has been a time since the dream, days, maybe weeks. Long enough for the flowers in the yard to bloom.

We are sitting in a pair of battered chairs on the back lawn, watching Berta as she sketches the butterflies on the begonias. She works in crayon, all they’ll let her have.

I consider the question, searching my brain for anything that might tell me how I feel. “Maybe,” I say with a shrug. “I hope my wife is there.” Loreen, her name swims to mind. The name tastes like tears, and my heart twists.

“Me too,” George says. “Except the wife. Between you and me, I never saw the appeal.” He runs a leathery tongue over his thin lips. “What do you think it looks like for people like us?”

“People like us?”

George rolls his eyes and taps a finger to his wrinkled temple. “Ya know, people with the Mad Cow, the brain rot, the Forget-Me-Nows.”

“Same as everyone, I guess? Maybe we get it all back.” I try to think about what that might feel like. The few memories I have are so precious to me now, each a beacon of light radiating in the lonely dark.

“Maybe. But… what if we don’t?” His eyes are distant, his hands clasped in a white knuckled grip.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what is a memory if not a piece of us? And when it’s all gone, what happens? Our souls won’t know where to go? Or worse, what if we can’t go anywhere. Like, without the things we did, neither side knows where we belong. No heaven, no hell, just…”

“The fog,” I finish, thinking of the hole where my father’s face had been. We both fall silent for a moment, staring at Berta, at the butterflies, at nothing at all.

“Way I figure it,” George says glumly, “we are going to find out one way or another. And chances are we’ll both be drooling idiots by the time that happens.” He falls silent for a moment, his eyes set and hard, lips drawn back in a skeletal grimace.

Then, he slaps me on the shoulder and stands, knees cracking in protest. “Suppose all we have are the good days, and Lord knows neither of us got a lot of those on the horizon. Come on old man, I’ll whoop your ass at some checkers.”

We play most of the afternoon. Neither of us remember the rules, so we make them up as we go, working around our Swiss cheese brains. By the time Berta joins us, the board is cluttered with checkers, markers, a black pawn from a chess set, and forty-seven dollars in Monopoly money. We are both red-faced and sick with laughter.

That night, feeling more myself than I have in a long time, I pray to God that my Loreen is at peace. I pray that she is watching me as I inhale her scent from the comforter.

The boots are in the hall again.

It is close to 3:00 a.m., the only sounds are the constant hum of the air conditioner and the soft squelches of the boots’ wet rubber soles against the linoleum.

I look around the room. The same nightstand, the same clock, the same photo on the wall. Only, the couple in it is no longer smiling. Her eyes are filled with pity, his with horror.

The boots draw closer, the smell of blood announcing their arrival, a choking coppery scent that seems to fill my throat. I gag, pressing myself down into the bedding as if the ghost of Loreen’s perfume could kill the slaughterhouse stench and drive the thing away. It doesn’t. The boots come to a stop outside my door.

“What do you remember?” a voice asks and for a moment I think I recognize it. It’s a man’s voice, deep and sure. But wrong too, as if a dozen other voices whisper softly just beneath it.

I look at the door. Surely I didn’t hear that? I have a bad brain, the Mad Cow, the Forget-Me-Nows. It was some fragment of a dream, dragged into the waking world. Yet, I find my hand snaking under the lip of my mattress, touching the photo, then the cigarette pack.

It speaks again, this time louder, as if smelling my doubt. “Do you remember me?

I do not dare to respond. I lie there, frozen, eyes on the door until I hear the sound of the bootsteps retreating down the hall.

When I next emerge, a woman is at my door, a plastic gold tiara set into her wild tangle of black hair and a tray of blue frosted cupcakes in her hands.

“Good morning, Henry! And before you ask, no, we are not lovers. Good thing, too. Lovers get the door; friends get to share my birthday cupcakes.”

I smile. “I’m sorry, darling, have we met?”

“We most certainly have. And now, you’re going to spend the day worshipping me.”

Sitting at our table in the rec room, three of us eat until the frosting has dyed our lips and tongues blue, prompting the Queen’s bald friend to remark, “It looks like we just blew half of Smurf Village.”

Her laugh is like a cannon, blowing through the room, leveling all in its path. We laugh with her. She manages to convince an orderly to put on her favorite movie, an old black and white film where people dance their problems away. Halfway through, watching Fred Astaire foxtrot with a red-headed beauty under a crystal chandelier, the Queen gets swept away by the music and begins to dance herself.

She pulls the bald man to his feet despite his protests. “No! No! I couldn’t, my knees! Berta! Berta!”

“Up!” she commands. “Respect the crown and rise, serf!”

He rises, to my surprise, and seizes her around the waist. He leads her in a fast waltz around the room to the delight of other patients, creaky knees be damned. By the end, he is smiling and red-faced. He gives a flourished flip of his wrists as he bows to the crowd.

“Thank you,” he says, “thank you. Please stick around for the after-show and enjoy the buffet. I’ll be here ‘til I die.”

The Queen comes for me next, and I don’t fight her. I try to lead her, as the bald man did, but succeed only in smashing her toes with the first step.

“No worries, my dear,” she whispers, “I know the way.”

She leads me into the dance and before long the music takes us. The bald man claps his hands in rhythm with our steps, the entire room spinning around us. Then, she deposits me in a chair and takes to the tabletop.

Her skirts billow about her as she kicks and spins, the orderlies rushing to pull her down, only for her to dance away, leaping to the next table. She blows a kiss to one of the orderlies.

Each time they get near she jumps again, her eyes wild with delight.

“Do you think she is going to be lonely, when we’re gone?” The bald man asks, voice hushed.

I blink at him, placid as a cow. “I think she’ll be fine. She’s a charmer. Besides, I’m not planning to go anywhere. Are you?”

He looks at me a moment, then sighs. “Do you have any idea who I am?”

“No,” I admit, “but I think we’re friends.”

“That we are,” he says, looking back to where the Queen is balancing atop the couch, teal-scrubbed men closing in on all sides. Just before they pull her to the ground and jab a long needle into her neck, she takes a bow to raucous applause.

They drag her back to her room. Just as she leaves our sight, the bald man stands, and I smile up at him, unburdened with even the simplest of thoughts.

He stares at the hallway to the residential rooms, where the Queen has just vanished. “Do you ever hear the boots outside your door?”

“No,” I tell him, “I don’t think so.” Yet, for some reason, my stomach churns and my breath catches in my throat. I feel cold. I smell blood.

He nods, bright eyes set knowingly on me. “That’s good. Take care of her.”

George is gone. I know it before I open my eyes, the thought repeating like a pounding drum, summoning me back from the emptiness. I sit up in bed and stare at my closed door. Outside, other residents shuffle by on their way to the rec room, their slippered feet whispering on the tile.

George is gone.

How long ago was Berta’s birthday? I can’t be sure, but I think no more than a week, maybe two. George was bright that day, brighter than me. He couldn’t be gone. Most of the people who died of the Forget-Me-Nows were broken things by the end, barely able to move, let alone dance. George, by contrast, was alert, strong. Some days, it’s almost like he isn’t sick at all.

I’m just being paranoid, I reason. I stand, shave, and brush my teeth, the familiar routine easing the dread in my stomach. Then, I step out into the hall and turn, intending to walk down to the rec room like any other day.

George’s door is open, a trash bin in the hall outside.

A sharp, cold blade slides into my heart. Inside, two orderlies are stripping the room of everything that made it his.

“Where is George?” I ask.

“He died,” says one of the orderlies.

I don’t ask how. I already know the answer.

I grab one of George’s half-filled-out crossword puzzles from the trash can in the hall. Every question has the same answer.

HELP.

That night, I slide the crossword beneath my mattress to join my other meager treasures in the dark.

I spend a day with Berta in the yard, sitting on a bench near the small flower garden. It has been a time since George died, though to me, it feels like earlier that afternoon.

Berta tells me that she once seduced a prince who gave up his crown to be with her. She spent a long summer with him, hunting tigers in India before running off with the captain of a whaling ship and breaking the prince’s heart. I sit on her words with rapt attention, believing every one of them.

“Do you think George knew he was going to die?” I ask when she is done, the question loosed before I know I want to ask it.

Berta watches a butterfly, a Painted Lady, crawl over the top of a lily. She sucks in a breath, puffs out her cheeks, and lets it out slow. “He did. He said the boots were going to get him.”

“The boots?” I ask, unable to hide the quiver in my voice. I expect Berta to say George was delusional at the end of his life. I expect comfort.

Instead, her face goes pale, voice a haunted whisper. “You must have heard them. Everyone does around here, eventually.”

“Who is it?” I ask.

“More like what.”

“What is it then?”

The butterfly takes flight, rising slowly into the air above us. “I don’t know,” she whispers. “Maybe it’s death. Maybe we can hear it coming, when we’re close. Or maybe it’s a ghost; people die here all the time.” She leans back, eyes unfocused and set on the chipped wooden fencing where a horizon ought to be. “I think it’s a hungry thing, though. I can hear it salivating.”

“Hungry for what?”

“Who knows? Does it matter how it gets you? Result is the same.”

The finality in her voice twists the dagger that has been in my heart since George died, and I choke, fighting back tears. It’s real, God help me, it’s real. “It spoke to me.”

I don’t notice my hands are shaking until she takes one in hers, folding her fingers over my hand and pulling it to her chest. “What did it say?”

“It asked if I remembered it.” The memory is clear in my mind, without the faintest shred of fog. “I don’t. Or I don’t think I do. But its voice—I think I know it, but I don’t remember where from. It’s driving me crazy.”

She doesn’t reply for a long time. We sit, watching the sky turn gold then the purplish-green of a bruise. Finally, she lifts my hand to her lips and kisses me on the knuckle.

“You can stay in my bed tonight. I’ll sneak you in,” she says. “No funny business, mister. You shouldn’t be alone right now. Not with the boots after you.”

“Do you really think it’s after me?”

“Yes. But not tonight. Tonight, you’re mine.” Despite what she says, there is funny business that night. It is sweet, and gentle, and kind. I call her Loreen. She doesn’t correct me.

“I miss you,” the woman with drowned emerald eyes tells me. She is sitting beside my bed, one hand extended and folded over mine. We are alone, but we are not in the hospital. My bed sits in the middle of a clearing in the fog, its billowing walls stretching up out of sight on all sides.

“Do I know you?” I ask.

She laughs, then chokes. “Yeah, I should think you do.”

I study her for a moment. Her face is familiar but her hair is short, and unnaturally dark, dyed.

“I— I’m sorry—I don’t—”

She squeezes my hand tighter, “It’s ok, Dad. You don’t have to stress yourself, I’m right here.”

“Victoria?” I blink. “You changed your hair.”

The smile she gives me is a summer sun, its warmth penetrating every part of me. “Dad! I’m sorry, that must have confused you,” she runs a hand through her dyed locks. “I didn’t think, I—”

I give her hand a return squeeze, “No, it looks good.”

She laughs again, and then, inexplicably, begins to sob. Operating on some ancient instinct I cannot name, I pull her towards me and she curls against my side. In a flash, she is a child again, her arms stretched wide over my belly, her face pressed against my chest. In one moment, a thousand forgotten nights drift through my mind, nights spent holding my little girl as she quaked in fear of thunder or the terrors that lived in her closet.

“I wanted to see you again,” she says into my chest. “The doctors called. Said it wouldn’t be long now.”

“Long till what?”

She doesn’t respond for a long time and when she does it is in a small whisper, the kind reserved for words too painful for daylight. “I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry. When Mom died, I knew you needed help. I should have brought you home, I should have cared for you. This place, it is all I can afford but you shouldn’t have to die here.”

“Hush,” I whisper, running a hand through her hair. “There, here, all about the same to me now. It will have me soon.”

“I could take you home?” she says.

I shake my head, “Not enough left of me to take.”

“I don’t want my daddy to die.”

I point to the wedding photo that floats over the end of my bed. The man and the woman are smiling, their hands pressed flush against the woman’s belly.

She lifts her head and sniffles. “That was our beginning. All three of us.”

“Then remember them,” I say. “Remember us.”

We lie like that for an eternity, just me and my little girl in the fog. I know what is coming next, can hear it echoing across the emptiness, the sound reverberating in the icy air until it seems to surround us, enclose us.

It’s coming.

Berta is gone. Her room is bare and empty. I ask an orderly if she was moved. He tells me he doesn’t know. I have to find out from one of the nurses that she suffered an aneurism in her sleep a month ago. I sit on the bench in the garden, where she and I had once shared a long afternoon, and touch the sun-warmed stone where she sat.

I try to remember the way she smelled, but the only scent that comes to mind is blood. I weep. I am still weeping when I see the butterfly, the Painted Lady. It is dead, lying on its side in front of the bench, and I lift it as if cradling a child.

“I miss you,” I whisper.

A passing wind flutters the Lady’s dead wings.

“I’ll remember you, as long as I can.”

The boots are coming, the soft squelch of rubber on linoleum dragging me inch by inch back into myself. I make myself small, comforter drawn up over my head, eyes peeking out of a thin slit to stare at the door.

The smell is worse this time, rotten, like offal left under a summer sun. Then, to my horror, they stop at my door.

“Do you remember me?” it asks from the other side.

“No,” I blurt out, heart slamming in my chest. “No, go away!”

The thing in the boots doesn’t reply, but already I can hear something else, the soft click of metal sliding against metal. The brass handle begins to turn. I bolt to my feet and press my back to the wall. My mind races, thoughts melting together into a panicked, animal scream.

I need a weapon and, as if drawn by some strange gravity, I find myself reaching for my mattress. I grab the edge of it and flip it up. The photo of the little girl is there and the empty pack of Marlboros, but that isn’t all. An empty tube of lipstick, a crusted band aid, a peach pit, and more. Where had it all come from? And more importantly, how the hell can it help me? I push the trash aside, hoping for a knife, or a rock, but there is nothing. My hand falls to the photo of the little girl, my little girl. I grab the photo and remember the way Victoria pressed against me, and the atom bomb radiance of her smile.

Maybe we can feed it?

Berta’s words flash across my mind. Feed it? Feed it what? I have nothing but these trinkets, these—

“Memories,” I whisper, my voice cracking, eyes wide on the photo in my hand. I think to grab a different one, anything other than my Victoria, but the brass handle has almost turned enough to open. I hurl myself against the door in panic, and the thing on the other side pushes back with a terrible, inexorable, strength.

“Give it,” the thing on the other side of the door moans.

My legs are already burning, my neck painfully taut. I’m not strong enough, I realize with a growing dread. The rest of the treasures are safely tucked across the room from me, though they might as well have been on the moon, for all the good they could do me now. I stare at the photo crumbled in my hand and begin to sob.

“I’m sorry,” I choke. “Please, forgive me.” Then, shoulder still braced against it, I slide the photo under the door, my fingers tracing the little girl’s face right up until it vanishes from sight.

The shaking stops and I hold my breath.

I hear the crinkle as the photo is lifted off the ground. All falls quiet—too quiet. I strain to hear.

“Good enough,” the voice eventually says. A memory comes to me, so clear and sharp it seems to be happening right now.

“To the moon!” Victoria demands. It is a sunlit day, and I am young and whole. I take her in my arms and thrust her toward the sky, making rocket ship noises with my lips.

“Mission control, this is Houston. We have a problem!” I dive her headfirst toward the ground, stopping her fall at the last second and carrying her at a jog, her face hovering inches above the grass, her arms spread wide.

“Faster!” she screams. “We gotta reach the moon!”

I release her and she glides forward on the wind, before breaking apart into fog, one bit at a time.

It is almost dawn before I manage to remember how to stand and open the door.

The photo is gone.

“Who are you?” I ask the stranger.

She squeezes my hand and says a name, but the sound comes out like a dry wind.

“Do I know you?”

Her tears are hot when they drop from her face onto my palm. “I wanted to stay in town, till it was over.”

“Till what was over?” I ask. “Am I going home?”

I give it the lipstick tube the next night, the memory of a girl I loved and lost in college. Then the night after that, the peach pit goes and along with it a soldier I fought beside in another life.

As my last thought of him fades, I can almost see him standing in the room with me, dressed in combat fatigues, a foggy hole where his face should be.

“What’s the exit plan here, Hoss? You don’t got a lot of ammo to spare.”

I give it the crusted band aid, a pink sock, a shiny pebble, one step at a time, marching dutifully towards perdition. As I give it the pebble it speaks again, voice so familiar but so wrong, alien.

“These memories are weak,” it says. “I know you got something better. Feed me, Henry.”

I feel thinned out, my thoughts growing wispy and ephemeral. My body aches down to the bones, and my eyes feel like lead balls sinking into my skull. It isn’t leaving. Must still be hungry. So, I go back to my hoard, snatch up the empty Marlboro pack and begin to shove it under the door.

Then, with a violent tug, the pack is pulled the rest of the way through to the other side. There is a dismissive snort, and a chuckle that sounds as alien as it is hauntingly familiar, distorted and wet. I imagine a throat filled with blood, spilling endlessly out of a twisted mouth.

“Do you think this will satisfy me forever?” it asks.

“Will it satisfy you tonight?”

“You know what I want.”

“Just go away, please. Don’t take them too.”

It does not respond. As its heavy footsteps fade, I remember my father, sitting tall in a canoe as he glides silently down the river into a bank of icy fog.

I stare down at the space beneath my mattress, crippled with an impossible decision. Only the crossword puzzle and the dead butterfly remain.

The boots come slow tonight, one methodical step after another.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, hands hovering over the two objects before finally lifting George’s crossword. I read his final words one last time, trying to hold his reddened, laughing face in my mind.

Then, with a stone in my stomach, I slide it under the door. Yet I can’t let go of it, my fingers pinched on the corner. The boots come to a stop and yank at the puzzle.

“No,” I plead, tears in my eyes. If it takes the paper, George will be gone; nobody else is left here to remember him. I try to pull the puzzle back, but it’s too strong, ripping it from my hands.

It laughs, not with one voice but hundreds, thousands, so loud it hurts. I scream and weep, begging it to go away or to just kill me.

It leaves, eventually, but not before speaking in George’s voice.

“Help me, Henry,” it says. “For the love of God, help me.”

George dances in my head. He takes a bow and becomes fog.

In the morning, I ask for a sheet of paper and a pen from one of the staff. Sitting alone in my room, using the nightstand as a table, I write a letter to Loreen.

I tell her I miss her, and that I can’t wait to see her when I get back from the war. I tell her that I think we should finally have children, and that a couple as good looking as us have a civic responsibility to procreate. I tell her that I think I could be a good father, if given the chance.

Then I remember that she is dead, and my tears make a black smudge of my signature.

I blink and I am sitting in front of my door, cradling the dried-out corpse of a butterfly. I hold its gossamer wings apart, pinched delicately in calloused fingertips.

I almost drop it in surprise, looking around my darkened room, eyes wide. How did I get here? I was just thinking of—of who?

“Do you remember me?” the thing asks from beyond the door, and my heart freezes in my chest. That’s right, that’s why I’m sitting here, holding my only friend.

“Please,” I whisper, “not her. Please.”

“You have to remember me,” it says.

“I don’t!”

The door shakes in its frame. “You have to!” it shouts, its shout twisting into an inhuman metallic whine. “You have to remember me, Henry!”

I scream and shove the butterfly’s corpse beneath the door.

“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry Berta!”

The door shakes, the thing echoing back my scream in my own voice. I scramble under the bed, dragging the comforter with me and screeching like an animal, my entire body rigid, my muscles cramped in terror. I scream and scream, until two orderlies burst in and drag me into the light.

They press something sharp into my arm. A warm darkness envelops me.

Berta walks into a foggy jungle and vanishes.

When I wake, I know I have always been alone here.

“How are you feeling today?” The doctor in the cat-eye glasses asks me.

I moan in terror.

“Non-verbal,” she says, scratching on her notepad. “Are you in any pain?”

My words are but a groan.

“Just try to relax,” she says, already standing to move along to the next room. “It won’t be long now.”

I take the photo off the wall and hold it up to the thin light from the yard.

I wonder if this is how those faceless others felt, before the end. I wonder if they found peace in the afterlife, or if they became hungry things.

The boots are in the hall, walking at a leisurely pace, a victor’s march.

The man in the photo is a stranger to me. I trace his narrow jaw and bushy eyebrows with my fingers. Distantly, I think I remember the feeling of holding my wife close as we danced at our wedding. Did we make love that night? Was I a good man? Does it even matter anymore?

The boots come to a stop outside my door and I brace myself.

“Do you remember me?” it asks.

I look at the photo, then at the door, and for the first time I realize I do know that voice, have heard it before, but never like this, never outside my own head.

The door swings open.

A figure stands in the shadows, with a clean jawline and dark, piercing eyes. It is dressed in a tuxedo, standing tall and strong. Where its face should be there is a hole, from which fog falls in freezing sheets. I look to the photo, the man is smiling wickedly up at me, the woman dead in his arms.

“You know who I am?” And I do. I see it all, reflected in this thing with my voice. I see myself holding my wife’s hand as cancer devours her, I see the love in my daughter’s eyes, I hear guns firing, a jackhammer screaming, the sound of George’s knees creaking as he and Berta dance, all the moments that make a life. Every bit of me, stolen and glued back together until this thing is more me than I am. All but one piece, all I have left. I feel something tug inside my head, a thread pulled taut.

“Henry,” I whisper.

I press my face into the comforter and breathe deep Loreen’s perfume, basking in my last mote of light. The thing steps forward. George’s face appears in the window in its head, leering maliciously down at me. Then Berta’s, and Loreen’s, and a dozen more, a slideshow of familiar strangers that ends exactly where I know it will. With a man’s face, my face.

“I’m so hungry.”

The thread snaps.

My name is Henry. I am old. I was a soldier. After that I built roads and married a beautiful woman.

My name is Henry. I am old. I was a soldier. I was a road. I married a beautiful woman.

My name is Henry. I am. I was.

My name is Henry.

My name is—

The last thing my sister Elspeth tells me is what she and Terric had done did not, technically, qualify, and so probably she would be fine. When places like this say “virgin,” it’s really more along the lines of, like, how young they are. It’s supposed to be only virgins who can face dragons. Maybe you’ve…

The cornfield’s dirt is black and its stalks are luminous. The broken heavens above are shaped of dark fog; there are places where a purple void studded with white stars show through. I am grateful that my eyes can interpret light from such distances. I undulate in the dirt, waiting for my mother- in-law, feeling the…

Don’t trust the Egyptian priestess, with her gloopy dollar store mascara, pewter ankh, and vaguely Egyptian eyeliner, when she tells you your wife has communicated from the Great Beyond and has requested—no, demanded— mummification. Instead, laugh. You two have been communicating just fine through levitating chairs and flying chinaware. Likewise, don’t be swindled by your Catholic priest who tries to sell you an expensive plot in the church graveyard. You’ve already had her body cremated, the ashes baked into bread then fed to the ducks at Mulberry Park, where you had your wedding photos taken. In fact, tell your priest that she is more alive than she’s ever been and that you don’t appreciate the threats of excommunication.

Your wife spends her time rattling her kitchen equipment and jingling the unpolished silverware in the dining room drawers. She has yet to speak, and you imagine that if she did, she would say words like honey and hubby and help, extending each ‘h’ into a spine-tingling hiss. Wish out loud for her to charge the stand mixer with psychic energy and take possession of dough so that it might knead itself into award-winning loafs. You miss waking up in the morning and filling your lungs with that honey-dripped, yeasty aroma and walking into the kitchen through a cloud of bacon grease. But most of all—you think—you long for a way to monetize your wife’s newfound powers.

Once bedridden and shackled by tubes, your wife now floats lazily through the kitchen or stomps, child-like, up and down the basement stairs. Talk to her during the witching hour as she wanders the hallways, creaking floorboards and running her yellowed nails along the grooves she’s made in the floral wallpaper. Tell her you’re glad to have her back. You were an absolute wreck on your own.

Say, “I was so alone without you.”

She stares blankly past you, moaning, so imagine what she might say: They use ovens as iceboxes here; or, I love what you’ve done with the place. Brown box chic. Promise her you’ll figure out a way to make things more intimate. Lie in bed and stare into her eyes. Ask, “What’s the other side like?” as she hangs from the ceiling, dripping the pus that once flooded her lungs onto your new satin comforter. The first time she does this will be disturbing, but learn to love her in spite of it. Become an expert at washing pus out of satin. She responds to your question with wheezing. Her head flies off like a spinning top and comes to rest in your lap; admire the pale weightlessness of it. Reach out to stroke her cheek, only to have your hand pass right through.

In a moment of weakness, countless nights later, reach, not to the wife that crawls along your ceiling leaving hand and foot prints of blood, but to the wife in the photos on your nightstand. The wife you want is feeding ducks with botched bread, shooting down your design for her new website. The wife you want is in bed next to you, not hanging from the ceiling fan.

Ask, “Why are you doing this to me?”

Drip, drip, drip, she says. Translate it into, Because it’s what you wanted.

Tell her you love her. Don’t begin to deconstruct the meaning of the word “love” and the phrase, “‘Til death do us part.” You are blessed.

Take her out to dinner Friday night. Not to that run-down hole-in-the-wall diner that has the waitress with the piercings and the short, colorful hair, and not dressed like the slob she always used to say you were. Take her somewhere fancy, where the servers dress better than your old Sunday congregation, where the table never runs out of fresh artisan bread and you drink ice water out of wine glasses. Rub the tablecloth between yourfingers and stare through the eyes of your wife to a table behind her, where a fully fleshed couple is laughing and drinking expensive wine (All the wine here is expensive. Order iced tea.). Watch the two interlock arms and drink from each other’s glass and wish you had done that with your wife before she was rendered ethereal. Wish that she would at least wear something nice to date night and not the threadbare, soiled hospital gown she died in. Wonder if it’s too late for your wife but not too late for you. Maybe she’s holding you back. Maybe you’re holding her back.

Order the calamari appetizer and the New York strip with a side salad. You can’t afford it, but what’s another hundred dollars? A drop—a speck—in an ocean, a universe, of debt.

Ask your wife what she’s having. You used to admire her for her decision-making and take- charge attitude, how she’d see to the awful task of calling to make appointments or inquiring toward business hours. But now she’s shy. You had to call to make reservations tonight, rehearsing the speech in your head a dozen times over. Your wife hides from the world and the server ignores her. Tell him she needs a few more minutes to decide. Even on this date in this candlelit restaurant, she won’t reveal herself entirely despite all your efforts. Instead, she turns the candle flames a pale, banshee blue.

“Ungh,” she says.

Take it to mean she’s hungry. Offer her some artisan bread, its crust a pale imitation of what she used to make. Imagine that if she could use words, she would tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the bread: its hydration level, its baking temperature, the variety of wheat used in the flour. Suggest the French onion soup.

“Ungh.”

Suggest the wedge salad with blue cheese dressing.

“Ungh!”

Slam your palms onto the table. The muffled shock rattles the ice in your glass, causes the candle flames to return to a soft orange. “Well, what do you want?”

She looks at you like a child staring at a television.

“What do you want?”

The server comes by, asks if everything is alright.

Grind your teeth. Cancel your order. Ask for the check. The server tells you the iced tea is on the house. The bread, as always, is free.

Scrubbing ghostly handprints off walls has become habit. Clean the ceiling, re-hinge the cabinet doors, then watch the first five minutes of The Tonight Show before your wife crawls out of the television screen. When you catch yourself in the hallway mirror, observe how you’ve lost weight, how you’ve developed the look of an obsessed artist. Compliment yourself, meekly. Watch in the mirror as your wife wraps her translucent, marshmallow baker’s arms around you and exhales unintelligible whispers into your ear. Imagine her asking, Where did we go wrong?

Say, “For starters, you died.”

Her arms tighten around your neck. Reach up to tear them off, though your hands will pass through like they always do. Remember the nights you spent curled in your corner of the bed with your own blanket because when you shared, she stole them in her sleep. Remember the frustration, the fatigue, the threats of separation, all for the sake of a good night’s sleep. Remember the make-up sex, anger turned to lust turned to exhaustion, and how the both of you slept like babies afterward, the idea of separation as distant as death. Realize that you’d rather have those arguments, tangible in steaming breath, spittle, and thrown pillows, than the current cold nights wondering which piece of furniture her head was going to pop out of next. Desire a warm body. Not a person with a face, but rather a heart pumping blood through arteries and veins, supported by bone, encased in flesh. Most of all, you want to get laid. Suggest an opening of the marriage as she reaches a pale claw out from the mirror. You’re a modern couple, and, after all, monogamy is for the living, isn’t it?

She moans and gurgles, black tar spilling out of her mouth. Imagine that this is her way of saying she’s all for it—she was dropping hints and hoping you’d bring it up.

Fabio’s ghost was coming onto me earlier, invited me to a party. I didn’t know how to answer.

Think, But Fabio isn’t dead. And isn’t he gay? Or maybe just a 5 on the Kinsey scale.

Is this really the hill you want to die on?

Say, “Just one date. It’ll be good for us.” Feel her raspy, bone-cold breath against your neck. Shudder as you inhale and try to shake the feeling of wisp- like fingers constricting around your heart. You have become a master at communication. You can make your dentist appointments all on your own now.

Fill your online profile with phrases like “down-to-earth” and “fun-loving.” Write that you enjoy hiking even though you haven’t been on a trail since you were in high school, and that you spend your Friday nights going out with “the guys.” There are no guys on Friday nights, just you and a bucket of ice cream watching your wife crawl out of the television during commercials. Leave the income field blank.

Your wife is there, playing with the computer monitor, making it flicker and produce face-like images, when, miraculously, you receive a message.The woman seems interested, says her name is Tammy. She makes a bad joke about how so many men are down to earth she’s beginning to think they’re all mole people.

Type, “LOL” anyway. She thinks you’re cute: that counts for something. Ask Tammy—who sings karaoke with her friends on Fridays and who has never seen the movie Donnie Darko because it seems too scary—out on a date.

Meet in a coffee shop that charges five dollars for a cup of coffee. Your wife has come along because she is concerned or jealous or curious. She hisses and wraps herself around the espresso machine, contorting her body and sliding around the machine’s levers and metal fixtures like an octopus tentacle. Tammy greets you with a hug. Take a moment to savor it—the weight of her thin arms around your shoulders, the warmth they give off, the slight compression in your chest—but not too long. Recall that hugs must be long enough to show interest, but not so long as to turn a person off. Wonder which kind you just gave Tammy. She has weathered and tanned skin, but her blue eyes are bright and she smiles between sips of her latte, foam sticking to her teeth. Take a sip of your fair trade, eco friendly, single origin coffee and sigh. Feel an unwinding of your heart, as if someone has released the turnkey and only now can the springs and gears inside finally begin their motions anew. Your wife is clinging to the male barista, ruining his latte art and splashing microfoam into his face. Turn coffee into dinner. Go to neither a hole-in- the-wall diner nor a cloth napkin place. Pretend to be young with disposable income. Eat at the food trucks downtown, run through the park and feed garbage to the park’s mechanical goat. Do not act your age and do not act like a widower.

Return home to find your wife sitting in the living room, her face a pale, blank slate. Her hands rest in her lap and hold the features that have fallen off: two brown eyes, a flat, wide nose, a thick pair of lips, a set of natural bushy eyebrows. Tell her about your date, about Tammy. Tell her she should have been there to run through the fountain and eat greasy food truck meals.

I was there. I saw the whole thing.

Say, “I’ve never felt so alive.”

I’ve never felt so dead.

“I’m sorry.”

Your wife rises from her seat, letting her facial features tumble to the ground, where they turn into mealworms and wiggle into the floorboards. Get the feeling she’s become a different person. Tell her so. You want her to be happy but wonder if she wants the same for you. She loved you, but does she still love you? Ask her while she hangs out of the medicine cabinet, pressing her forehead to yours as you brush your teeth.

Think about Tammy before you drift to sleep.

Restructure your debt and continue to date Tammy. Your wife, once the awkward third wheel, spends her time haunting other people. On the news, you see construction accidents, homicides in meth houses, police brutality. She has been broadening her horizons and spending fewer nights at home. Enjoy your newfound freedom from housekeeping chores and sleepless nights. Your nights now are sleepless in a good way. When you lie in bed with Tammy, wonder where your wife is and if she’s safe. It’s natural to be concerned for loved ones. Tammy loves you, but you are unsure if you love her, if you will haunt her when you die. You still love your wife, but you are unsure if she loves you now, wonder where has she gone. Long for a ghastly pile of ethereal fingers to turn up in the vegetable crisper or for a figure to stalk you down the hallway at two in the morning. Take pleasure in the pleasures of Tammy’s flesh and let your mind wander to ducks and bread and funerals. See your wife in every minor kitchen accident and settling of the house. Stop Tammy in the middle of sex because you could swear, swear, you heard your wife moan from down the hall. But your wife’s dead. She’s been dead. She’s moved on. It was just the wind.

Say, “It was just the wind.”

When I was in the seventh grade, I thought I could control dice with my mind. My middle school drama class was on a bus driving south from Tampa, on our way home from the Florida State Junior Thespian Competition. At a store near the convention center, my friend Vanessa had bought something called The Psychic Abilities Exercise…

When we made them, they were mere bundles of light and flesh. They couldn’t speak, we thought, because we didn’t make them for speaking. At first they had no faces, because we didn’t make them so they could look upon ours. We made them so we could reap from them what we needed—a heart, a liver, a pound of flesh….