“Be careful walking to school,” Vimala says, a mantra that is common in their mornings. Her daughter Chinni has to walk half an hour to get to school, and while she is always accompanied by her friends, Vimala still worries. The road is more of a dirt path, and she knows how easy it is to be tempted by something off the path. People with safety and security could dream of paths less taken and find whimsy in twisted, poorly maintained routes. For people like Vimala and her family, the well-worn paths were the easiest and the shortest paths to the destination.

“Yes, Amma,” her daughter says, and Vimala wishes that she could offer her daughter more than just words of advice and warning. Her husband owns a bicycle, but he is off to work at the break of dawn. In the evenings, he leaves the fields for the local bar, spending half his salary on cheap liquor and fried snacks. Vimala does not know what he finds in the sordid, dirty place. The few times she has visited to bring back her inebriated husband, she found a place filled with grimy men, cheap string lights covering a thatched shed, some delusion of being something more than the place actually was. It was a place of vice, a place where dreams died, a place where men withered and finally let go of their hopes of leaving the village behind for something grander and greater.

Chinni is well-behaved, and she comes home with report cards with high numbers and comments from her teachers that Vimala reads with pride. But she is alone in her pride. Already, she is hearing from her in-laws about the eventual day when Chinni will be taken out of school. The only thing keeping Chinni in school is the free lunch given by the government and the free childcare provided by the teachers. But the colleges that come after school will ask for tuition, and there is no college within a traveling distance from their home. Chinni will have to be kept in a hostel, and Vimala knows that in their family, such things are unheard of.

In their village, daughters are treated like yearly crops. They are raised to harvest and then sold. Sons are trees, watered and cared of, expected to provide shade. Daughters are never treated as one’s own. Vimala sees that thought in both men and women. She remembers the sting of her own childhood, of never belonging. Her mother’s home became her brother’s, and this new home she has with her husband is her husband’s. But it seems she is alone in remembering. Everyone else around her seems to understand and accept that it is the way the world works, and it is the way the world must continue to work. They want her daughter to repeat Vimala’s life. When Chinni is a girl still too young, she will be placed like a doll in front of some strange family and their son. The family will appraise her value and demand a dowry, as if they are doing Vimala an enormous favor by taking her daughter away from her.

Vimala wants to say she will never partake in the ritual, but her life is evidence that she has done everything just as other people have. She will live the same life as the people around her, and perhaps the only inheritance she will leave her daughter is the same fate. A transactional marriage with a man that others deem appropriate, a lifetime of domestic chores and simple living, a life devoid of dreams. Vimala wishes that her daughter could live any life other than her own. Anything would be better than a life so barren of love, so bereft of hope, and so destined for an inconsequential life and death.

But she cannot offer anything more to Chinni. Instead all she can offer her are the smallest of pleasures. Vimala takes out two candies from the knot she’s made at the end of her saree. They are hard mango candies, sweet and sour, wrapped in thin paper. She presses them into Chinni’s hand.

“Come home right after school,” she says. “Don’t hang around the school field.”

Winter is coming, and the days are growing shorter. The path from the school to their home is too narrow for cars, but people travel on bicycles and motorbikes, and she knows the recklessness of men when they are given anything that can go fast. “Chinni” means small, and her daughter has always kept to her namesake. She is a bird-like thing, thin and gangly, easy to miss.

“And walk on the side of the road,” Vimala warns her.

“What if I don’t?” Chinni asks, a joking tone in her voice.

“Then the Boochodu will get you!” Vimala yells, tickling her daughter’s sides. It is a frequent joke in their house. A threat of a mystical bogeyman who will take her daughter away. Vimala had received the same threats from her mother when she was a child, although the tone had been different. Vimala had thought the Boochodu to be a real person, some shadowy figure in the night who came and abducted unruly children. For her daughter, the Boochodu was a character restricted to bedtime stories. Chinni knew he wasn’t real nor a real threat.

After Chinni leaves, Vimala sets out to complete the day’s work. She is considered a housewife, but the house is much to maintain. She hears of women in the cities who have maids or machines to do the dishes and the laundry, but in their little village, all she has is her two hands. They are rough and calloused now, and she resents the day Chinni’s will be the same. She feeds the chickens in the yard and cooks lunch for her and husband. With the steel lunch box tied up in cloth, she walks to the field to join her husband in working the land.

It is difficult labor, under a sun that does not relent, but it is the only work available in their land. She sets out to leave earlier in the evening than her husband. Someone has to be home when Chinni returns. A train passes through the edge of the farm land, and she imagines the journey of the train, all the people traveling inside of it. The train makes the same journey every few days, but it has seen more of the world than Vimala has. She has never been to a city, and the little television in their home is a relic of the past, with a screen that curves outward and where everything is too colorful, too artificial.

In the evenings, after Chinni comes home from school and before her husband comes back, she watches a soap opera for a half an hour while Chinni does her homework. It is the one little pleasure in her otherwise mundane life. The woman in the show is belittled and humiliated, overworked, and Vimala sees parts of herself in the woman. Granted, the woman lives in a palatial house, wears jewelry even to sleep, but at the core, their problems are the same. A bad husband, a sad marriage, and a life that seems devoid of hope. But in those soap operas, hope does sprout eventually. All the problems are resolved by magic. The woman’s husband changes into a romantic hero, and the heroine herself discovers she is special and talented. After thousands of episodes and countless misunderstandings, there is a happy ending.

But Chinni is not home yet, and the soap opera episode ends on another cliffhanger. Vimala goes out of their little house to see if she can see a little figure walking on the road in the dusk. There is no one, and the light is rapidly diminishing. Soon, she will be able to see nothing. She lights the kerosene lamp and heads out beyond their compound fence.

It is only a half-an-hour walk, a route Chinni has taken for over a year. Sometimes she does come home late, disregarding Vimala’s warnings to play with her friends in the dusty school field. From her home, Vimala ventures out on the path to school, but she sees no one. She goes to the homes of Chinni’s classmates, but they tell she left the school on time while they stayed behind to play. She comes home again, hoping that she might find her daughter in the house, but it is empty.

At the bar, her husband is too drunk to be of any help, and so she walks the path between their house and the school. She checks behind the school building, where there are always abandoned beedi butts and broken bottles of liquor. She checks the fields and the bus stand and finds nothing.

She continues her search, poring through the streets of the village, knocking on every door that she can think of. Chinni is light enough that most adults can carry her with one arm. There are so many places where a little girl can be hidden. So many ways to hurt a child so fragile.

Finally, she makes her way to the bar, where her husband is sitting with friends. His face is slack with drink, his words slurred. It takes him a minute to register what she is saying, and when it does, he is not as worried as her, not nearly as concerned. The men start from the bar, each armed with heavy steel flashlights and lanterns, searching through the fields and the nearby forest, calling out her name.

The other women come to Vimala and escort her back home. Her home is relegated to waiting, to wailing in silence while the sky gradually lightens into morning. The day passes and another, and a week goes by. Her house remains empty. The police are informed, but there is little they can do. The truth is that village lives do not hold much value, and Vimala herself knows that it could be a freak accident. There are old wells in the village that have never been filled up or closed. As more of the forest is being converted to farmland, kraits and cobras are beginning to crawl through the rice paddies and the village alleyways.

After a week, there is an unsaid acceptance of Chinni not returning. Her husband stops his search and buries himself in half-hearted grief and alcohol. The police ignore her gaze when she goes to the police station for updates. Vimala is not angry with them. There is nothing to search for. The old films she sees on television have crimes with clues, with pieces of fabric left for detectives to find, with motives and money to be gained, but in her case there is nothing.

Vimala continues her search, scouring the fields and shining lights into open borewells, venturing further into the surrounding forest and calling out Chinni’s name and getting no response. She stops going to the fields and stops cooking their humble meals. Their house gathers dust and she gains the feral appearance of those on the fringes of society.

She goes out earlier and earlier on endless searches in the same area, seeing if there is some new hiding spot in her old village she will discover. Hope is long gone, but she wants an end. She wants an answer. One morning she leaves for the rice paddies far beyond their village. She has scoured the land multiple times before, but soon it will be winter and the mornings will be too cold for her to walk for long periods.

She spots small footprints in soft soil, and she thinks of all the times Chinni has walked and played in the village. Her one pair of shoes were things to be saved and sparingly used, polished every morning before school and kept neatly outside the door of their home.

Vimala follows the footprints. It cannot be Chinni, but it is perhaps some other child lost in the fields. It is early enough that the snakes will still be out, and their village rests at the foothills of mountains known for leopards.

She follows the footprints and goes into the forest, to where the trees are so densely packed together she has to squeeze between them to pass. The footprints are now dirty marks of mud, and she gets the feeling the child was running. Vimala notices the increase in the length of the gait, but it takes her minutes before she sees how the footprints are different now. They are an adult’s footprints now, and the forest is no longer filled with the morning birdcalls or even the sounds of her own footsteps.

The footprints disappear, and when Vimala stops, she sees she is lost. It is a simple thing most days to get back to the village. It is only a matter of heading downhill, where the forest meets the edge of the fields. Now the land is flat where it should not be, and the trees are strange and gray.

Vimala hears footsteps, slow and deliberate. When she turns, there is no one and nothing.

“Who’s there?” she asks, hoping it is not a leopard or a bear.

Instead, it is a young woman dressed in rags. She looks like Vimala, yet is taller and wilder. Her hair has ribbons streaked through it, and her feet are not barefoot but bound with cloth. It is Chinni, but not so small anymore. Instead, she is a changed thing. She is a wild and free thing, unhindered by responsibilities and untethered from the rules of society.

“Amma,” Chinni says, and her face is filled with joy but devoid of childhood. She has seen things, this young woman, and survived things. She stands straight in a way Vimala can never stand. In her life, she was expected to bow to the world, to the people around her, to her husband. But the young woman in front of her does not slouch to hide her body or wear a veil to cover her hair.

“Chinni?” Vimala asks.

It is a mirage or a delusion. Vimala has finally succumbed to the madness, and she welcomes it. It is a pitiable thing to be half-mad. To embrace the madness fully is to no longer see the concerned and critical looks of the people around her. It is a madness in which she can be with some form of her daughter.

Vimala embraces her daughter. She ignores the changes in the temperature, the way the sky is red, and the way her daughter’s form flows and changes shape like water within her arms. The way something is not quite right, because something wrong is better than nothing at all. Because the monster who steals disobedient children away may be spiriting them to a place where they belong. And for all of her effort and all the ways she shrank and bent herself to fit into the roles she was given, she never felt she belonged.

In the village, a little girl returns to an empty home. She keeps her shoes to the side of the door, and calls for her mother.

Annie nudged the lizard, her companion, to climb higher onto the rock for a better view. The lizard’s tail dragged behind as it inched its way up. It was weary from their afternoon of exploring, chasing, and eating bugs. It shook its head, and her concentration wavered.

She watched the road from the rock outcrop. The sun was getting low in the sky as the rider rounded a steep bend in the road. Shoulder-length hair flowed out from under a sweat-stained sombrero that concealed his eyes. A scruffy, gray-streaked beard shrouded his lower face. As his horse struggled up the grade, he dug rusty spurs deep into his horse’s flanks. He smirked. Annie could feel each twinge of pain and wheezy gasp from the poor beast.

That man is broken.

As he passed her, his eyes flitted from side to side as if searching for something. For the briefest of moments, his eyes locked on her. Could he see her? Her concentration faltered as the lizard companion exerted its will and forced her out.

_Blink_

The darkness of the other side enveloped her, and the lizard’s silver light moved away. She felt how relieved her scaly companion was to be rid of her. Annie’s lesson that day was to recognize each creature’s different lights by sight. Instead, she had chosen to play, stayed out too long, and was dog-tired. The shining thread that bound her to the world of flesh grew taut, demanding her return.

_Blink_

She lay still, eyes shut, her breathing shallow, and waited. Her arms and legs were cold, heavy, and tingling. Annie wanted to sleep, but she had to get up and move.

She was in trouble; she knew it, if not from Mama, then from Grandma Ochuca for skipping her chores and the lesson. Of the two, she would accept Mama’s any day. Annie had been training for years, but Grandma was never satisfied.

Annie was four when the dreams had begun. Dreams, sometimes nightmares, of being one creature and then another. It wasn’t until she was six that she had discovered the truth. They were not dreams. One night, she had a dream about their cat, Espina. She had watched through Espina’s eyes as the cat stalked a mouse in the kitchen. When Espina pounced, Annie had felt her claws and teeth tear into the mouse’s flesh. She had awoken screaming.

The following morning, Espina had sat at the bottom of the stairs, proudly displaying the mouse she had killed the night before. Slowly, the veil between the waking world and the other side had parted. Annie had learned that she could move from creature to creature and bend their wills to her own.

One day, while exploring the other side, she had strayed too far and had got lost. She had panicked and flown in one direction and then another. The silver thread that had always led her home had stretched and faded. Adrift in the cold blackness, she had felt her connection with her body slipping away. That was when she had encountered Ochuca for the first time.

Ochuca had come like four horse-drawn wagons hurling down a winding, steep switchback trail. Her light was brighter than all the creatures’ lights combined. Annie had tried to flee, but her strength had left her.

A giant, shining, slithering rattlesnake had circled her. Its scales were as white as snow. Its glittering gold eyes were the size of dinner plates. When its fanged mouth had opened, a blood-red tongue had flicked from it and cracked like a whip. Her hiss was louder than a rushing river, and her rattle was like thunder.

It had circled her closer until she could almost touch the white scales. Annie had screamed a soundless scream, choked with panic and fear. And then a sense that no harm would come to her had washed over her.

The great rattlesnake’s thoughts had formed in her head. She said to call her Ochuca, which meant “grandmother” in the language of Mama’s people. Ochuca had returned her to her body and waited until she had woken up before leaving. As she had sped away, she had hissed and told Annie she had much to learn.

She had been afraid to tell Mama right away. When she finally did, Mama had made her promise never to tell anyone. Ochuca was the people’s guardian spirit, and few could hear her, much less cross over to the other side. Ochuca had saved her, so Annie was indebted to her. The thought had terrified her so much that she had stopped traveling to the other side for a while.

Soon, Ochuca’s rattles thundered in her head and commanded Annie to come to her. Grandma taught her the other side’s ways, and said that in time, Annie would become ‘Kukini’ —a respected one. Grandma gave Annie the name Waheia, which meant troublesome because that was what she was. Five years had passed, and Grandma Ochuca taught her the old ways, but she was not always the best pupil.

She was so cold.

Squinting against the sun’s setting rays coming through the stable doors, she sat up. Straw stuck to her hair and clothes from lying in the hay. There were times she wished she never had to come back. There were no chores, no parents to badger her, and no little brother to watch. Mama kept saying she was special. But if that was so, why did she still have to wash and mend clothes, collect firewood, and clean the guests’ rooms?

It was not fair.

Annie rubbed her legs and arms to get warm. She walked stiffly into the sunlight, picking bits of straw from her hair. In the courtyard, her brother Sean chased chicks in circles until he was so dizzy he fell over laughing. He was only six and still allowed to play, but soon, he would have help with the chores.

Papa was the roof of the smokehouse, nothing more than a pile of old timbers hammering on a board. He was constantly fixing things to keep the old inn from falling apart. From inside the Inn, she could hear Mama’s singing. Annie knew, regardless of the time of day, that Mama’s smile would be waiting for her. Well, possibly not today because she had skipped her chores.

A chill wind blew off the desert, promising a morning frost. Ochuca would give her heck the next time she summoned her.

“A rider is coming,” Annie rasped hoarsely.

Papa looked up from his work toward the gate. “I don’t see anybody,” he said, shaking his head. “Annie, darling, where have you been?”

“Just playing, Papa,” she said, giving him her sweetest smile as she passed.

Papa shook his head and got back to work.

She leaned against the gatepost and gazed out at the road. Papa knew she was different but refused to acknowledge it. More than once, she had heard Papa argue with Mama about Indian superstitions. Mama said he believed in the white man’s God. And that their ways belonged to the evil spirit the whites called the Devil. Mama was happy that the inn was far from Capistrano. Any closer and Papa would have forced them to go to the church and school of the Black Robes.

The minutes passed, and she heard the faint clop of a horse’s hooves, and the stranger came into view. Papa looked up from his labor at the sound of the approaching rider and glanced at her as the man rode through the gate. The stranger pulled up the reins as he stopped in front of Papa.

“You look done in, friend,” Papa said, staring from the stranger to the horse. Fresh red spur welts crisscrossed old scars on the horse’s flanks.

The stranger took in the courtyard and the open door leading into the inn. The sun settled behind the mountains to the east, and the air began to cool. Annie could feel a cloying heat radiating off him.

The stranger spoke, but without looking at Papa, “Nice place.”

“I am Timothy O’Malley,” Papa said. “You’ll not find a better inn between Capistrano and San Diego if you don’t mind my saying.”

“A room, food for me and the nag,” said the stranger, as he eyed Papa up and down, “and mezcal if you got it… Timothy O’Malley.” He swung from the saddle with a loud grunt.

“We have all three,” Papa said, grabbing the skittish horse’s bridle and stroking its neck. “Anne darling, show our guest inside.”

The stranger untied his gear from the horse and followed her. His Spanish-style spurs jingled out a cheerless tune. He was a big man, as big as Papa, maybe bigger. As they reached the door, Sean ran up and skidded to a stop. He stared up at the man and smiled.

The stranger glowered at Sean until his eyes became slits and snorted, “Boy, you’re a breed, aren’t you?” he whispered.

He dragged the back of his dust-encrusted hand across his mouth. A toothy snarl showed through his fingers. He rested his free hand on the butt of his pistol and tapped the hammer with his thumb. Sean’s eyes followed the stranger’s hand, and his lower lip trembled.

“No English, little breed?” he growled and squatted so they were eye to eye.

Sean winced and blinked, his eyes widening in fear. A single tear wound down his dirty cheek, leaving a swath of light brown skin in its wake. A satisfied chuckle rumbled from the stranger’s throat. Annie stepped between them, shielding Sean from his taunts. She could feel Sean’s fingers grasp her leg like tiny fishhooks. She kept her eyes on the ground, not wanting to meet the man’s gaze.

“Now, what do we have here, an Indian lover? Wait, don’t tell me, is this breed your kin?”

Annie was about to reply when he took her chin in his hand and pushed her head back. She twisted loose, and their eyes met. The hard lines on his face softened, and he chuckled. Ochuca’s rattle echoed in her head. She felt his emotions from that one touch like a black fog, wanting to swallow her. He smiled, patted her head, and pushed past them into the inn.

Annie wanted to grab Sean and run and hide. Instead, she turned, placed her hands on his shoulders, and told him everything was all right. Sean grinned, wiped his cheek, and hugged her around the waist. She pried him off and shooed him away to help Papa.

As she entered the great room, the smell of roasted chicken, rice, and beans wafted in from the kitchen. The stranger stood with his back to her. He surveyed the room until his eyes fixed on the bar and liquor bottles. He tossed his gear on the nearest table, walked behind the bar, and helped himself to a bottle of mezcal. Annie heaved the heavy steel-hinged wooden door shut with a loud creak. Then she stepped into the shadows, her back pressed against the cold adobe wall.

Mama’s singing drifted in from the kitchen. He uncorked the bottle, sniffed, and crossed the hall to sit near the stone fireplace. He yawned, then lifted the bottle to his lips and drank deeply of the amber-colored spirit.

“Muy bueno!” he bellowed and smacked his lips several times. “Girl, tell the cook your guest hasn’t eaten since this morning. Be quick about it.”

He acted like the Spanish tax collector, Señor Del Anza, as if the inn were his personal property, not Papa’s. She wanted to tell him to leave, but she obeyed and headed to the kitchen. Mama met her in the doorway. A tight-lipped look of concern creased her face.

“What is all the yelling about, Annie?” she asked, having caught sight of the stranger.

“Mama, we have a guest, and he’s hungry.”

Mama studied the stranger. The crow’s feet around her eyes deepened as she squinted. She wiped her sun-darkened hands on her apron. Then touched the leather pouch hanging around her neck.

Does she sense it?

“Light the evening lamps, Annie,” she asked as her hand dropped from the pouch.

A chill ran down Annie’s spine as Grandma’s rattles echoed in her head. Mama turned her back and walked away. He spat on the clean tile floor. Annie imagined that she saw tongue-like, dark wisps follow her as she retreated to the kitchen. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, they were gone.

His eyes followed her around the room as she lit the lamps. She smelled of liquor and stale sweat as she lit the lamp on his table. He smiled oddly at her, and his face flushed with color. It reminded her of the smiles Papa and Mama traded on those nights when they went to bed early.

“That Indian, your mother?” he asked, leaning across the table as if to snatch the answer from her.

She lurched back and almost stumbled into Mama, carrying a steaming plate of food. Mama stopped short of the table, set the plate down, and slid it toward him, careful to avoid his eyes. His head rocked from side to side, taunting her to look at him. Then, he tilted his head back and laughed. Annie stepped in behind Mama.

“Do I scare you, woman?” he slurred. His gaze was as vacant as a dark corner in an abandoned house. “Are you Serrano or one of those tamed Gabrielano, maybe?”

“No, señor,” she said, but her eyes said otherwise. “My people are Juanero, from near Mission Capistrano.” Her hand searched behind her for mine.

The stranger slapped his thigh, chuckled, and mumbled something about ignorant Indians. Mama turned and gently pinched Annie’s cheek. A shiver ran through Annie as Mama gestured with her eyes toward the kitchen.

“What did I tell you about getting underfoot? Go now and tell Papa that supper is ready before it gets cold. Hurry,” she shouted, pushing her away.

Her shoes thudded dully on the tiles as she ran through the kitchen and out the back. Espina slipped inside as the door swung shut. A sparrow dangled by its wing in her mouth.

Sean’s laughter echoed in the courtyard as Papa burst from the stable. Sean rode on his shoulders, yelling, “Giddy-up!” Papa galloped across the courtyard, dipping and rearing like a wild stallion. As he barreled toward her, he let out a whinny that turned to laughter. Sean slid from his back as he stopped before her and ran ahead.

Papa took her face in his rough hands. “Darlin’, your skin is like ice. Get inside before you catch your death from the cold.”

Annie grabbed his hand and said, “Mama says your supper’s ready.” She whimpered and blurted out, “The stranger is drinking.” She wrapped her arms around him and began to tremble.

Still so cold.

Papa pulled her close and said, “Darlin, there’s nothing to fear. Our guest is just tired and needs some company.” His shoulders hunched as he walked away with her.

Don’t trust him, Papa—he’s broken.

As Annie set the table, she could see the stranger stuff food into his mouth between sips of mezcal. Mama seemed relieved when Papa placed his big, calloused hands on her tiny shoulders. They whispered to each other, and Papa glanced at the stranger.

“I’ll speak to him after supper, Sesia,” he said, scooping up Sean, and they went to wash up.

Annie placed a clay water jug and cups on the table. Grandma’s rattle rumbled louder in her head and would not stop. Grandma, please—what do you expect me to do? She stepped closer to the stove but could barely feel its warmth.

“Mama.”

“What is it, Annie?”

“Mama… can you hear Grandma?”

She closed her eyes and mumbled in Juanero. The corners of her mouth turned down. She clutched the medicine bag around her neck tightly, then, after a moment, released it. “I felt something earlier, but now…” For the briefest moment, Mama’s eyes seemed far away. She shivered as if a cold breeze swept through the kitchen. “Annie, are you sure?”

“Yes, Mama!” she said, grabbing hold of her skirt.

Before she could say more, Papa and Sean crowded into the kitchen. They sat, and Papa asked for Christ’s blessing on the food and their guest, a bit louder than usual. As Papa broke a loaf of bread in half, the stranger’s shuffling footsteps drew their attention.

He stood a few steps back from the doorway, his upper body hidden in shadow, supper plate held in one hand. Gravy dripped from the chipped earthenware like rain on the toe of his boot. He stepped into the light. A disarming smile hid who he was.

Annie’s breath caught in her throat.

“Missus, may I have seconds?” he asked, his words slurred from the drink. Mama got up from the table in a flurry of motion and served him. His smile changed briefly to a snarl, like when his spurs dug into his horse.

He shifted his gaze to Annie and stared into her eyes. Her vision blurred as if a cloud of smoke obscured him.

Papa looked up and said, “Forgive me. I have been a thoughtless host. I will join you for a drink and a smoke later.”

The stranger nodded and accepted the plate from Mama. “Thank you kindly, Missus O’Malley,” he said with exaggerated respect. “I look forward to that, Mr. O’Malley.” He winked at Annie as he turned to go.

Annie began to tremble. Her stomach knotted up something terrible. It became hard to breathe. Ochuca’s summoning rattle roared. She covered her ears, squeezed her eyes shut tight, and prayed it would stop. But it did not… So cold.

_Blink_

_Why have you summoned me?_

_Look, Waheia_

Ochuca’s rattles shook high above her scaly head—she hissed. Beyond her wall of scales, Annie saw a bloated shadow enveloping the stranger’s light. Dark red pulsing tendrils stretched toward Mama, Papa, and Sean’s lights.

_What is it?_

_See what I see, Waheia_

She peered into Ochuca’s golden eyes, and she knew. It was a Soul Eater. An evil spirit that stole the light of the living, extinguishing them forever.

_Grandma, save us_

_I cannot pass between our worlds_

_Then let me go_

_Waheia, you will all die… Stay, and I can protect you_

_No, please let me go_ Annie pulled away. Her silver tether became her lifeline back to the world of flesh.

_Blink_

“Annie, wake up,” Papa said. “She’s ice cold.”

“It’s all right, little one. Mama’s here. Annie… Annie, open your eyes.”

She could sense Papa lifting her off the tile floor and carrying her away. The pounding of Papa’s heart drowned out their voices as her head rested on his chest. Then, her bed’s familiar embrace welcomed her as Papa laid her down.

She was so, so cold.

Mama chanted in Juanero, and her voice faded into the fog. Annie shivered so hard that she thought it would never stop.

“Husband, fetch a bucket of hot coals from the kitchen. She is freezing,” she continued to chant.

Mama stopped her chant and pressed her hands to her ears. It was the thunder of Ochuca’s rattles demanding her return. It felt like it would shake the inn to pieces.

It took all her concentration to breathe. Mama stroked her cheek and whispered her name. Her breath was sweet and warm on Annie’s face.

She opened her mouth, and she tried to speak.

Mama whispered, “I hear Ochuca, Waheia. What does she want?”

The shiver worsened as she spoke, “Sss—ssss—sssss,” hissing over her tongue.

Mama jerked away and let go of her hand. The hissing grew louder in the back of Annie’s throat. From downstairs, Sean screamed. Papa and the stranger shouted at each other, and a pistol shot exploded. The last thing Annie saw was Mama’s back as she ran from the room.

_Blink_

 _No_

Ochuca’s coils squeezed her. Annie strained against them, trying to break free. The more she struggled, the tighter they became and the sadder Ochuca was. She could feel Ochuca’s love and desire to save her from oblivion.

She watched as Sean and Papa’s lights flickered. The stranger’s dark shadow hovered over Papa, smothering him. Mama’s light came into sight and merged with Sean’s, and they fled.

_Then let me go_

Once more, she tried to follow her silver thread to her body, but it flickered and went out.

Sadness radiated from Ochuca as she released her.

_Why had she wandered so far today? Why had he not done as she was told?_

_Go Waheia_ And she turned to face the Eater.

Annie searched for a light that could serve her needs. A quivering pinprick of light hid in a corner of the great room. It was Espina, their cat. With regret, she dove into Espina’s flesh like a thief. Espina shrieked in agony as Annie took her. The cat’s soul shattered into pieces like a clay pot.

_Blink_

She could feel the hair on Espina’s back rise. Her spine arched, and her claws extended. Through a forest of table and chair legs, she saw Papa on his knees. The stranger held him by his collar—a knife to his throat. Blood dripped from between Papa’s fingers where a bullet had ripped through his side. A throaty yowl came from Espina’s mouth.

_I am coming, Papa._

“Hey, stay awake, Mr. O’Malley,” the stranger yelled, slapping Papa across the face. “Or you’ll miss all the fun once I find your Juanero whore and half-breed brats.”

“No, please, I have money. Take it,” Papa begged.

“You are stupid, Indian lover,” he growled, waving the knife in his face like an accusing finger. “I don’t want your money.”

Annie took a few cautious steps. She had done this so many times with Espina when stalking prey. Her vision narrowed and sharpened. The taste of the sparrow Espina had eaten earlier was still on her tongue. She had new prey now.

The stranger whispered into Papa’s ear. Tears flowed down Papa’s sunburnt cheeks. He fumbled helplessly for the stranger’s pistol.

The brass pommel of the stranger’s knife came down on Papa’s head, and he slumped forward. The stranger slapped him again and said, “Stay awake.” But Papa lay on the floor unmoving. “Eh, oh well.” His hand rose, poised to plunge the knife into Papa’s chest.

Espina’s instinct took over. Her ears flattened. The hair along her spine bristled higher. A snarl formed in her throat. Her claws flexed in and out of their sheaths, scratching the tile floor. Annie’s rage thrust her onto a table and into the air.

“Yyyeee-Ooowwwlll.”

The stranger’s head snapped to the side as she landed. She smelled his fear. Teeth and claws labored against his soft, yielding flesh. The hot, salty taste of his blood filled her mouth.

The stranger dropped his knife and tried to pull her off.

I got you!

They spun like drunk dancers. Crashed into the bar and tumbled to the floor. He grabbed her head. She sank her fangs deep into his thumb. He grabbed a hind leg and yanked her off, tearing away flesh as he did. Her claw raked across one eye. He shrieked in agony and held her at arm’s length. She clawed at empty air. He grabbed her neck, twisted, and bones snapped, and tendons tore.

_Blink_

The pain of Espina’s death left her dazed in its grip.

She could make out Ochuca’s white scales stained black in places. The Eater lashed out with blood-red tentacles, slashing her. She struck back, burying her fangs into its shadowy body. Ochuca reared up and struck over and over. With each bite, the Eater shrank until Grandma’s jaw opened wide and swallowed it whole.

_Go._

Annie searched for the nearest knot of bright lights. She moved from one unwilling creature to the next, searching for the one that could make a difference. Fragments of sound echoed around her. She smelled dung. The shrill shriek of hens. The tortured bray of their donkey. The squeal of the pigs as they tried to escape the madness of her passing. Then, one light larger than the others was before her, and she crashed into it.

_Blink_

“Come out; you can’t hide from me,” the stranger screamed from the courtyard.

The sound of the stranger’s voice made this body tremble with terror. Four powerful legs held her up. She had taken his horse. The horse’s will melted away, and all its tormented memories at its master’s hand poured into her.

A pistol shot rang out.

Annie could see the stranger drenched in moonlight through the stable’s open doors. A red halo surrounded his ruined face. He swayed drunkenly, moaning. He fired his last shots at an imaginary attacker. He dropped the pistol, unsheathed his knife, and strode toward the stable.

“If you don’t come out, squaw, I’ll finish off that husband of yours,” he growled.

Annie reared up on her hind legs and smashed her head into the thatched roof. Then she rammed the stall’s gate. It creaked and splintered but held.

“I hear you in there,” he shouted. “You thought you’d get away?”

He searched each stall and lunged at shadows. Finally, he reached hers. Annie tried to control the horse’s trembling and her fury.

He gazed into the stall with his remaining eye and gripped the latch pin. Annie shifted from hoof to hoof and backed up, as he would expect. He grasped the latch pin, cocked his head, and listened. From outside, she heard Sean’s muffled crying. A look of glee spread across the stranger’s tortured face as he turned to leave.

Annie sprang forward and drove her muzzle into his chest. He staggered back and pulled the latch pin free. The gate swung open, and she charged. He looked confused. She guessed he could not believe his horse would ever dare to challenge him.

Annie bit his shoulder. The stranger slashed and stabbed with his knife. Annie reared up, and her hooves rose and fell again and again.

Papa shoveled dirt onto the stranger’s shallow grave beyond the outhouse and spat into it.

Favoring his wounded side, he walked to where Mama sat under a big oak, Sean beside her. She cradled a lifeless, shroud-wrapped child and sobbed. Not far from the tree was another grave.

Papa didn’t say a word. Tears filled his eyes as he stroked Mama’s hair and pried the body from her unwilling grasp. A small, pale, delicate hand slipped from under the shroud as he lowered her into the grave.

Mama got to her feet and swayed unsteadily. She drew Sean into her arms. A purple, swollen bruise marked Sean’s face from jaw to brow, and a bandage circled his head.

It was becoming harder for Annie to see. She, like Mama, swayed unsteadily on the horse’s legs. Warm blood trickled down the horse’s chest from the deepest stab wound.

She could no longer stand and rolled onto the horse’s side. Mama gazed from the grave to the coral. Her hand reached out to Annie, and she began a sorrowful chant.

_She knows_

The horse’s breathing became ragged, slowed, and stopped.

Annie could hear Ochuca’s rattle call her home. Annie shook her rattle in reply and joined Grandma in the eternal night.

_Blink_

I turn over on the couch, where I’ve curled into one corner. In the middle of the night, I didn’t have the energy to move Lena’s laptop. Instead, I just slept around it.

The couch smells like dried-up white wine in one spot, something I never realized until I started sleeping here. We must have spilled it a long time ago. We haven’t had wine in the house for two years, since before the IVF, before the cycle-coded calendar in the kitchen and the evenings we’d giggled and clinked together the matching self-insemination syringes.

Cheers! We’d said.

I squint into the living room, listening for the baby’s whimper as I look at the time. It’s 5:30, which feels like a blessing. Four hours of sleep. I’m sure Lena got less.

The baby sounds rise and fall, closer. Under them, I hear Lena’s slow footsteps padding down the hallway. There’s a sear of guilt as I consider, split-second, whether to pretend to be asleep still. But then they’re here in the room.

“Good morning, mama,” Lena murmurs, more to the baby than to me.

“Good morning, mama,” I say back, smiling.

As always, when the baby is actually here, in front of me, with her tiny wiggling shrimp fingers and her face squashed up in the huge effort of crying or gurgling or smiling, I melt.

What’s happening to me? I’d said to the delivery nurse, when I felt my eyes overflow all at once, nothing like the crying I was used to.

Welcome to parenthood, she’d said. It felt practiced, tailored to the bewildered men she was used to seeing in the delivery room. Not to me, who could have been in Lena’s place if it had gone that way.

“I’m going to make some decaf,” Lena whispers to me. The baby is settling into her chest, little face slack over the edge of the wrap Lena wears to hold her close, to be one being. “Will you do the bottles?”

I nod and roll out of the throw blanket that I’ve gotten used to sleeping under. Lena sways toward the kitchen, her soft hums keeping the baby quiet. As I turn to fold the throw—a semblance of the normal, neither of us want to talk about how I’ve been sleeping out here—I see them.

Four wet shapes on the floor in front of the coffee table.

Smudged half-circles I can only see because thin light through the living room window catches them.

I gaze around the room, trying to identify the source. My face feels slack with sleep and confusion. Maybe I spilled a glass of water as I moved the coffee table in the night, half-awake? But, no, it rests on modern, square legs. Too heavy for me to have shoved it semi-conscious, and the wrong shape to leave those marks. And there is no glass of water.

“Did you move the crib last night?” I whisper to Lena when I’m in the kitchen, rinsing bottle rings as she clicks on the coffeemaker.

She frowns at me over her shoulder.

“From our room?” she asks.

It stings to hear her say our room. It is ours, but I’m on the couch now and she’s with the baby. I wonder if that’s what she means, even by accident: her room and the baby’s room. Ours.

“Yeah,” I say. “It looks like something got moved in front of the coffee table.”

“What do you mean?”

“Marks on the floor,” I say. “Did we spill something?”

Lena shakes her head in the same gentle cadence that she approaches every movement, now. Back and forth, quiet and smooth. Serene. I feel like I can’t keep up with it.

“Maybe we have a leak,” she says, handing me a mug.

The baby makes a quiet little sound and a fist emerges from her onesie to curl toward Lena’s hair. I take a sip. Decaf coffee tastes the same as regular, to me.

It takes almost until evening for me to remember to check the living room ceiling. The baby is restless today, a continuation of last night. Lena tries to open her laptop for the third time only for the baby to wake and squeal again.

“I thought you were on maternity leave,” I say, trying to tease gently. I worry it comes out shrill.

“Just a couple of emails,” she whispers, reaching for a bottle as she pulls the baby into her arms, balancing the open computer.

“They should know better than to email you,” I say. “Let me take her.”

Lena hesitates a millisecond too long.

“Thanks.”

The baby is always warmer than I remember. Even though I touch her dozens of times a day—when Lena showers, when she wants to change her clothes or stretch her arms–it’s as though my skin forgets. And my nose forgets her smell, which up close is overpowering, the raw scent of brand-new flesh, of being completely alive. I kiss her forehead and try to ignore how immediately she returns to fussing in my arms. I whisk her away into the kitchen to defrost the 4pm bottle. I try to replicate Lena’s soft sway as I walk and it feels clumsy in my hips.

Lena takes a half hour to frown over her laptop. The baby, meanwhile, naps fitfully in my tired arms. I don’t know what to call it when, dozing, she turns her sucking mouth to my breast. I know that I scowl and then turn red, ashamed.

When Lena joins us, a thin crease has appeared between her eyebrows. It’s the face of the old Lena, the Lena who would stride through the front door promptly at six, who would lean in to kiss me at my desk, who would regale me with complaints about her coworkers over dinner, to my delight.

Her reading glasses are still on, giving her eyes a slight distortion that makes me love her with such violence I’m surprised at myself. I lean over the baby’s head.

“You’re so beautiful,” I whisper.

Lena rolls her eyes.

“Never prettier than when I’m wearing nipple guards,” she says.

But she kisses me anyway, lingering in a way that weakens every joint in my body. Her mouth tastes like the syrupy tea our doula gave her. I watch the crease smooth itself as she nestles the baby onto her shoulder. And then they both are gone.

The new Lena, born with the baby, floats on something I can’t see, a buoyancy in her movements that gently bobs her away from the shore, out of reach.

I pull out the stepladder and haul it to the living room.

The ceiling is dusty. Cobwebs form tracery against the stucco. I find several things I need to do—fix a piece of crown molding that’s coming loose, replace the batteries in a smoke detector, repaint—but I don’t find a leak. I even check around the casing of the ceiling fan’s motor, wiping lint from its blades which falls like snow. But the ceiling is unblemished, and there are no signs that anything has dripped through it and onto the floor.

From the stepladder, I can barely see the smeared shapes, but when I climb back down, the light hits them again. Four sloppy curves, evenly spaced. They’re not water stains, I realize, or not just water. They’re greasy, like oil wiped by a rag. One of them is crusted with a thin rind of mud, as though tracked in and left there, but there is nothing in any other direction.

I sweep up the lint and spray down the smears with cleaner. When I come back with a handful of paper towels, I can’t even see them anymore.

That night, I make soup for Lena with as many beans and vegetables as I can. My body feels hollow from lack of sleep, and I can only imagine the wear on hers. It’s hard not to compare how I think I’d do in her place.

There were pros and cons for each of us, but we’d agreed it was lucky that Lena had conceived instead of me. Her company’s maternity leave was generous, whereas my freelance work was spotty at best. And so that was the reason we clung to, along with little things: the year difference in our ages, Lena’s family a few hours closer than mine. But we both knew the real reason: that she was better at hard things.

It was my hands that had gone numb as she pushed through the tenth hour of labor, and it was me that the nurse handed a cup of juice to, saying I looked pale.

When dinnertime comes, Lena doesn’t eat the soup because the baby can only settle when she’s bounced on tiptoes. I offer, half-joking, to feed Lena spoonfuls as she bobs.

“I’ll get a bowl in a bit, when she’s down,” she whispers. “Smells amazing.”

Much later that night, I awake in a panic.

Before my eyes are open, I’m thrashing to get my legs untangled from the couch throw. The baby has screamed louder than I’ve ever heard her, and my heart pounds in my throat. But as I struggle to sit up on the couch, I realize the house is silent. I stiffen and wait for the next round of cries. I listen for Lena. But all I hear is the soft click and hum of the refrigerator’s compressor and the faraway whir of the white noise machine that Lena plays for the baby. I must have dreamed the scream.

I blink into the dark living room, waiting for my breath and pulse to calm, trying to make out the bleary shapes around me.

And then, one shifts.

Just slightly. An adjustment. The rise of a spine with a breath.

I do not move.

I know I am mistaken. I must be. My eyes dart to the curtains that I forgot to pull closed all the way, so that they billow in the air from the vent. When my eyes slide back, the shape has resolved itself—a heaped blanket with one of the baby’s slings sprawled on top of it—and I’m alone.

I squint at the heap through my lashes, trying to recreate what I thought I’d seen. But it stays gone, the objects insensate. They do not breathe again.

I fall back asleep. It takes a long time. The baby sleeps through the night.

“You can always just get her flowers,” my mother says through the phone.

I am loitering in the detergent aisle. We don’t need detergent, but I’ve already put the fruit Lena asked for and all the other things on the list into the cart, and the conversation doesn’t feel finished.

“They’re nice,” she’s saying, almost defensive. “It’s a cliché for a reason. That’s what your father did, and I always loved them. Keep it simple.”

“That’s true,” I say, trying to remember Lena’s favorites. Lilies? “I guess… I don’t know, for her first Mother’s Day I want it to be special.”

“Sweetheart, you’re going to do this every year. Next year with a toddler, and then the macaroni art starts to come home from preschool and that’ll be better than anything you could buy her.”

She’s doing something in the kitchen. I can hear cabinets opening and banging shut. I picture her pinching her cell phone between her shoulder and ear, like I’m doing.

“Bottles every four hours, still?” Mom asks.

“She slept almost seven hours last night,” I say proudly, like I’m supposed to. My mother is excited to hear this.

“Isn’t it so sad when one stage is over?” she says. “You miss it, even though you couldn’t wait to be done.”

Mom promises to text me a website that has the kind of lilies she remembers Lena ordering for our wedding.

“And get yourself something, sweetie,” she adds. “You’re a mom, now, too.”

When I get home, Lena is asleep on the armchair with her feet up on the coffee table, the baby napping on her chest. They’re beautiful together, matching in soft beige without meaning to, dappled in the afternoon light. I feel for my phone to take a picture. Something to send to my mother, though I realize it’ll mean keeping the picture myself. I don’t think about that. One of the grocery bags rustles in my hands and Lena opens an eye.

“How’s the world?” she murmurs.

“You’re not missing anything,” I whisper, snap a picture, hit send.

I stare at the ceiling fan. Dim light filters in through the curtains from the street lamp. A shred of lint that I missed hangs off of one of the blades.

I had promised myself, locking eyes with my reflection as I brushed my teeth, that I wouldn’t check the time. I remember the deep breathing exercises I’d learned from an online video years ago, and resolve to try them instead, letting breath fill my lungs and press against my taut diaphragm. Hold for a moment. Then out in a hiss. The video had dissolved into slow-motion footage of waves crashing against sand, and I close my eyes, trying to picture them as I breathe in and out.

As I slide into sleep, the sound of my breath twists and doubles into a sound like the rush of water at the edge of my consciousness, filling the room.

In the morning, my hands are still clasped to my ribcage where I’d placed them to measure my breaths in. On the floor, the prints, greasy and caked with thicker mud, are back.

“Have I ever sleepwalked?” I ask Lena.

I’m picking up each of my shoes, looking for grime. She’s feeding the baby in bed, a curved pillow wrapped around her like a cloud. She looks up at me and I see the bliss drop from her expression slightly.

“No,” she says. “Why?”

“These marks keep showing up on the floor,” I say. “It’s not a leak. I checked.”

Lena shakes her head slowly.

“Maybe you tracked something in when you shopped yesterday?” she said. “I bet we’re just too tired to notice. Things are going to fall by the wayside for a while.”

I nod, but I don’t agree. She doesn’t seem tired at all. She is doing so much. The least I can do is keep the house together.

“I’m going to mop again,” I say. “Do you need anything?”

She smiles at me, looks down at the baby who swallows softly and grips the bottle in her tiny fist.

“I’m all set.”

The marks on the floor are clearer. This time, before I spray them down and fill the mop bucket, I examine their shape. They are heavy on one side and delicate on the other, as though whatever made them was leaning off-kilter. And there are small splits down the center of each that remind me of something I can’t place right away.

When I’m filling the mop bucket, I remember the summer in my early teens that I spent at a wilderness camp, where we earned points for correctly identifying animal tracks from a chart. Graceful crescents for whitetail deer, skinny cat-paws for red fox, cloven lobes for bison.

I stare at the prints now, bottle of cleanser in hand, blinking. In the split-seconds between my eyes opening and closing, I try to conjure whatever creature I imagine leaving these tracks. Do I see afterimages shimmer behind my closed eyes? Gnarled legs, jet-black and dripping, thick-knuckled and long. I know I am imagining them, but they are clearer than anything I’ve imagined before. Images shift and warp in my mind, usually. These stay. I close my eyes as long as I dare. A few seconds, and then my pounding heart forces them open. I spray the floor down again and leave the mop there.

At five, I take out the package of frozen ravioli, but I forget it on the counter. When the washing machine chimes, I gasp and realize I’ve been sitting on the couch for almost an hour. I rush to switch the laundry and start a pot of water boiling before Lena and the baby wake up from their nap.

When Lena comes in, her hair is tied back in a bun, her glasses pushed to her forehead, and her phone in her hand. The baby is wriggling in her sling.

“You’re not going to believe this,” she says. She doesn’t whisper. She’s right there.

“What?”

“I swear,” she says, “They can’t do anything.”

Pacing with the baby as I chop an onion for sauce, Lena details the disaster unfolding at her workplace. The someone or someones assigned to cover Lena’s HR management role in her absence have fumbled their jobs so badly that a former employee has filed a lawsuit, throwing the company into crisis.

“Unbelievable,” I sneer, gleeful. The gossip feels precious, the laughter between us at others’ expense a balm. I’ve missed this more than I can bear.

“But,” she grins, “You’ll never guess what else.”

I widen my eyes. I am her audience and my attention on her is rapt.

“They offered me half-time to help organize everything for the lawyers. They’ll pay me for full-time, plus overtime, plus they’ll grant me additional leave.”

Lena caresses the baby and talks on about the timeline of the suit, the benefit to her resume, the validation that she is indispensable to the company. I smile approvingly. I ignore the heat in my face and the spikes in my throat.

“It does mean,” she says, “That I’ll need to leave the baby with you while I’m at work for a few weeks. Just a couple hours a day. I hope that’s okay. They’re offering so much money. It has to be worth it.”

I nod vigorously, blinking water from my eyes. I wince at the tang of onion and the taste of salt.

“Of course,” I say, and then the lie tumbles from my lips. “What could be better than more time with my favorite person?”

That Wednesday, the house sounds different.

Lena is up early, and all the lights in the kitchen are on. The radio reports the news, and she pulls out the stepladder to get the regular coffee pods out of a cabinet.

“I pumped already,” she says, winking. “There’s more than enough milk in the fridge for today.”

She pours coffee into a tumbler, grabs her keys, and is gone.

The baby frowns up at me from her bouncer, squinting in the bright light.

From the kitchen, I can see the tracks on the floor in the living room, in front of the coffee table.

The baby cries almost all day. I do not go into the living room. The prints are still there that night.

I sleep with my arms folded around my head, covering my ears. All night, I keep waking to the sound of something very loud, but very far away, a crushing roar like a waterfall.

At dawn, I peer under my forearm and think that I see an eye, huge and black, glistening and soaked.

I do not breathe until Lena bustles in to hand me the baby and kiss me as she breezes out the door.

Nothing is there when I look back.

“Have a good day,” I whisper, but the door is already closed.

Today the baby screams at me nonstop as I try to give her a bath. I give up, shaking and sobbing, and pat her down with baby wipes while she howls. Her little face contorts and turns red, then nearly purple. I back away.

“I’m sorry,” I plead. “Please, I’m so sorry.”

She purses her lips when I try to give her a bottle, later. She kicks me when I change her. I’m sweating through my clothes by the time Lena comes home.

She takes the baby from me without a word.

I scrub the living room floor until my cuticles bleed. The tracks do not disappear.

The baby cries throughout the night, and I lose count of how many times I hear Lena get up to soothe her after the first dozen.

It is darker than usual, and I realize that the streetlight has gone out. I stare across the living room and do not flinch when it appears.

All of it.

Skinny, contorted legs lead up to a body twisted with jutting bones, at once heavy and emaciated. An angular head with one bleary eye that sees nothing and another that gazes at me, shining, wet, and huge. Whether the thing drips with water or some greasy tar I can’t tell, but the whole of it is a smear, dribbling down limbs to the floor below, as if oozing from the pores beneath the thick, dark fur.

The baby’s cries echo down the hall and the creature opens its blurry mouth. Water gushes out, more and faster than can be possible, as though draining an entire sea. I am drenched, and it is not cold but boiling and salty, and it blisters my skin and the raw flesh of my throat as it pours over me in waves. I feel pieces of myself dissolve and then I wake up for real, gasping as I wipe thick sweat from my eyes.

I rush to check on the baby, but Lena already has her.

It is the weekend, and Lena shakes her head at me as I stumble into the kitchen well after ten.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I overslept.”

“You look terrible,” she says. She feels my forehead with the back of her palm. “You’re warm.”

Panicked, I fumble for a face mask from the junk drawer, but Lena waves it off.

“You’re probably just run down,” she says. “I can’t imagine how hard it is to take care of her all on your own.”

She points me into the bedroom with strict instructions to take acetaminophen and rest. When I lie down, the bed smells like Lena, but it is not familiar at all.

I am small in my fever dreams, shrunk down to half size or less. I wander around our house for what feels like hours, dream-time stretched out and disjointed. I’m looking for someone, but not for Lena, and I can’t figure out who it is. When I call out, I find my mouth doesn’t form words, and my voice sounds absurd. Our house bobs up and down as though it is floating on a river. I hear the roar of water everywhere.

On Sunday afternoon, my fever breaks. Lena brings me a plate of leftovers from the takeout she has ordered.

“We miss you,” she says. She’s not carrying the baby. Sensible, in case I’m contagious. I wrap my arms around her and squeeze her tight.

On Monday, Lena lingers in the kitchen, her keys in hand.

“You’re sure you’re okay with her?” she says. “You’re feeling up to it?”

“Of course,” I say, smiling. I’m bouncing the baby, who wiggles in her sling in my arms.

“Call me if you need anything.”

I walk around the house all day with the baby wrapped tight against me. I get the laundry done, then re-organize the kitchen and clean the bathroom. Whenever I walk through the living room, the creature stares at me and drips.

My mother calls, and I pinch the phone between my ear and shoulder as I throw silverware into the dishwasher.

“Sweetie, what’s wrong with the baby?” she asks, alarmed.

I hadn’t realized she was crying. I drop a handful of spoons and get a bottle out of the fridge.

“Gosh,” my mother says, more to herself than to me. “She sounds like how you did when you were that age. Blood-curdling, that’s what your father used to call it, when you cried.”

I don’t know what to say. The baby whimpers a little as she sucks down the bottle of milk, as if she’s angry with me.

“It’s so hard at this age,” my mother continues. “But it’s really not forever, sweetheart. You’ve just got to get through the first year, really.”

I don’t know what time it is. I can’t even think past the next hour.

“You know,” my mother says, “I sometimes used to run the faucet in the sink and turn the shower on at the same time when I couldn’t get you to settle down.”

My breath catches.

“Something about the noise of running water seemed to help,” she says, and then laughs. “Or maybe it was just that I couldn’t hear you and Lord knows I needed that little break sometimes.”

I don’t register what else she says. I’m running water over the dishes in the sink, and it’s deafening. The sound is all around me, and then it concentrates in the living room, drawing me to it. I drop my phone and it splashes on the floor.

The creature turns toward me. Its mouth is open down to its knees.

Lena is shaking me. With a sting, I feel her slap across my face.

“What?” I shriek, “What?”

“Where is the baby?” she screams, her face flushed with rage. “What’s wrong with you?”

“She’s—” I flounder, looking around frantically. “She’s here—”

I’m soaking from head to toe, my hair dripping into my face and onto the living room floor.

Lena has left the front door open and I hear her crashing through rooms down the hall.

“Why?” she screams, “Why is she in the bathroom by herself?”

I don’t hear what she says next, so I don’t know where it is that she says she is going with the baby, who she has wrapped in a towel and is hugging close while she throws things into the diaper bag and clutches her keys. I can only hear the roar of water. I feel the look she gives me though—heartbreak, sorrow—like a knife to my stomach.

I turn to the creature as the door slams behind them.

It looks back at me, eyes streaming. I hear something, now. Beneath the water’s roar, I hear the whimper at last, a little cry of terror and anguish. It’s been there the whole time, an urgent pull. Please.

I open my arms.

“Come here,” I whisper.

It climbs into my embrace, its sickly legs trailing down into the pool of water beneath us. It is light and fragile, and I feel the tiny warmth within it, the fluttering of its heartbeat. I smell the wet scent of its skin. It trembles against my collarbone.

“It’s all right,” I whisper. I rock gently back and forth. I move to the couch, and we nestle as one into the soft cushions. I find a blanket and dry us both.

“I’ve got you,” I say, over and over. “I’ve got you.”

– National Ukrainian song

When the Vasylkovs’ willow dried out, the family decided to leave.

The Vasylkovs lived near the forest, where the houses were new and extravagant. Few people liked them because Oleg, the father, worked in the town, and their mother never bought anything from the local shop. The kids were like everybody else though: bruised knees and elbows, grimy faces, funny laughs behind jagged teeth.

Zhenya knew they were lucky. Their old but sturdy house, built by her great-grandfather, was at the crossroads far from the Vasylkovs. Her father was neither a policeman nor a rich man, but the news came to him first, like gifts. People brought their words, pains, and fears to him. Perhaps because he had plenty of others’ dreams, her father had never had his own. He had a tanned, sharp, and noble face — as a kid, Zhenya often imagined all knights in fairy tales with his chin. And not a single person dared call him a rascal.

Zhenya’s father had always been the head of the village, though power had never tempted him. Maybe that was the reason everyone liked him so much. The habit repeated itself: the news about the Vasylkovs’ willow was brought to them first.

“Talk to him,” said Maria, nervously studying the window. “Olezhka’s ready to leave. He’s not completely insane, is he?”

“He isn’t local,” answered Zhenya’s father. “Hard to guess what’s in his head.”

Zhenya saw the doubt on his face. That was why no one wanted the newcomers in the village: they lacked the guts to sprout here, and their trees were weak too. Far worse: the Vasylkovs had almost cut down theirs when they moved in! They would’ve been refused their house deal had her father not intervened. It was strange, in a way. The willow near their house was watching them from above every night, and they didn’t even know. It was watching, without averting its gaze, and it knew where everyone slept.

“I’m coming with you,” Zhenya caught her father’s sleeve as soon as Maria left. “I’ve got to learn, after all.”

He gave her a small sort of smile. Their family had only one child, and it would be only Zhenya who would listen to the future people’s grief. She already knew them — saw them in her dreams. She was visiting everyone head by head, like houses. Zhenya was her mother’s daughter, after all; it had taken years for them to get used to her.

“Just don’t make them too uncomfortable,” her father said softly. “We need them to stay.”

Spring was cool, as if it shied away from the village, kissing it lightly and stepping back. Her light touch was barely audible in the air. The motionless branches looked dead when Zhenya and her father went outside the yard. It felt like bad weather. Moribund.

While they were walking to the Vasylkovs’ house, Zhenya saw frightened faces in the windows: children and adults who did not want to go outside and join the talk. They didn’t want to look at the willows in their yard, like a person with cancer who would not want to know their diagnosis. But they watched anyway. Tall, strong silhouettes, like elongated figures, were waiting for them.

It seemed to Zhenya that those peeking at them from every yard were not only people. The willows, leaning forward, almost climbing out of the ground, reached out to them, bent their long, delicate hair-like branches, and almost touched the road. Scratched their heads with catkins. Zhenya jumped over the puddle, slipping on the dirt —

The wood creaked right next to her. Above her ear.

She turned sharply and raised her head. The dark crest of the tree kept looking at her, peering into the depths of her pupils. A chill slowly crept up her spine. The thin fingers of fear.

“Zhenya,” her father called, “Don’t look.”

She ran after him. Ancient, wise, hungry creatures these were. There was something predatory about them, as if this motionlessness, this being stuck in the ground was an artifice. As if they were playing a game: look away — and they will catch up.

Everyone in the village had hoped that her father would persuade the Vasylkovs to stay. Zhenya looked uncertainly at the high fence, the new car, the dry twigs near the roof of the house and muttered:

“How did they last so long? Did you look after their tree yourself?”

Her father stayed silent. He probably had something to say because he was gentle, weak towards his wife and daughter, never saying a rude word to them. But he did not say anything this time because Oleg opened the gate and went out to the car. His face was sweaty despite the weather, and his hands held the boxes too tightly. His fingers were whitened from the power of his grip. Her father looked behind him, but Zhenya already knew everything herself; she moved aside, hid her hands behind her back, and stood up like a guard. She was always a bit of a wild child, slow in her movements, but something about her, despite all her attempts to appear nonchalant, scared people. While her father got people’s respect, Zhenya… Zhenya was needed so that they did not run away. Sometimes, they joked about it at home when no one heard. Mother always laughed the most.

“Ivan,” said Oleg gloomily, and then to her: “Hello, kiddo.”

They always spoke to her like that, as if the name did not belong to her. Zhenya did not even blink. Her father took Oleg by the shoulder when he put the box down and faced him. He was strong — stronger than most — but his fingers were relaxed. Calm. Oleg was standing like a statue; his shoulders shook like twigs in the wind.

“You don’t have to do this,” said her father, “you know, Olezhka. Just plant a new one.”

Olezha had the face of a wounded dog. Zhenya knew that he would die soon. It was similar to an apprehension some people possessed when they guessed the weather in the evening.

“Your Katya should have told us,” Oleg spat on the ground. “And now what?”

Something passed between them. Zhenya stared at the grass. She hated people attacking her mother, but she knew there was no use arguing. Her father cleared his throat, and his courage almost broke.

“She is sick,” said her father, “she can’t guess anymore. The Kovalchuks’ tree is already dry. Old Liuda’s, too. Don’t take that on your conscience. Plant a new one. Stay.”

Instead of eyes, Oleg had bottomless wells.

“It has already infected those houses, Ivan. I have two children.”

Zhenya kept looking at his shoes, at the old sneakers, green from grass and paint, and thought: who will catch up with him? No one plants willow trees in cities. There is no need. But Oleg would bring his disease into the world, and they would find him, and he would not rest. She had dreamed about it, but dreams, like tree seeds, had a tendency to scatter everywhere. Not all of them sprouted.

“At least close the windows,” said her father, “and they won’t get in on the first day even without you inside.”

Because willows were about home. About people on the other side. What climbed from the dead trunks did not spread to other families until it opened the house like a shell. And it was the duty of everyone who lived in the village to be a bank that could not fall. An obstacle.

“Well,” said Oleg, “I’m not a complete asshole.”

He didn’t look at them anymore.

On the first day, they loaded the car. On the second, they left. On the third, twenty people gathered, all of them with seedlings. Zhenya was among them, holding two pieces. But she had to do everything herself. People always dropped stuff when she was around.

She slowly dug a hole, stroked the tiny leaves like they were puppies, and urged them to grow. She listened to the noise of people while the sky above them slowly darkened.

In the morning, before the fog had lifted, they found the Kovalchuks on a willow. Father, mother, son, swaying. It was a high tree, protected for generations. The legs barely rocked without the wind.

“Don’t look,” her father told her, “Zhen’ka.”

But she did anyway. She noticed that the Kovalchuks’ son, Kolya, had rather tiny feet.

Her father covered her face with his wide palm, and the dry hand softly hid everything from her.

“Turn away. Stop! No. Find their cat. The black one, remember? Take it home.”

They knew the cat would be alive because it was not human. Zhenya remembered it: small and weird-looking, a little cross-eyed. Cross-eyed cats sometimes wander into the wrong places. So they say. Zhenya knew that such creatures had better intuition, and she rushed to the Vasylkovs as soon as a black tail appeared behind the fence. Her father also saw that and did not stop her.

Strange, Zhenya thought, crawling through the hole in the fence, and the house was still standing. If they broke into it, there would be cracked windows and broken doors, not a home but merely a box. And this one looked as if nothing had happened.

Zhenya went around the house, not looking at the tree trunk. She had heard that they were climbing out from there after the tree had died. Where there was an old hollow, something slowly moved and shuffled, and the noise grew.

Something blew into her ear, like her mother in childhood, and Zhenya turned her head a little and felt the cold slowly flowing under her feet from the dry roots. It was as if something slowly creeped out from there, pulled out of the ground like rot. She never looked. The cat didn’t look, and she wouldn’t. Animals are smart. The wet grass tickled, said sorry, sorry, and rustled sadly. All the windows looked at her with black eyes, barely catching the sun’s rays. Dead, the house stood still, deceptively friendly. Like a trap.

Zhenya stepped aside and made an arc around the house. She went out into the backyard, which was littered with old things. She looked at the windows behind. They were closed tightly.

Except a window into the basement.

Zhenya felt a damp fear slide down her neck.

There was no need to break the glass or the door if at least one way was open. They climbed into the house and studied it, felt the walls, penetrated the floor, the ground, and furniture, and the place was lost. And then they attacked the neighbors.

“Prick,” hissed Zhenya.

Oleg had propped up the window with books, leaving it wide open. He did not protect his own house, and in taking his barrier down, he had let the putrid current from the dead willow’s heart flow through the Kovalchuk’s house. His house was a lost cause, and it didn’t stand its ground, the barrier disappearing instead of resisting the attack. Oleg gave the Kovalchuks up to the creatures like a badly wrapped present.

If the families’ willows didn’t die out and continued to grow, they weren’t found on the branches. Everyone knew it, and everyone was ready. But such families were few.

From morning till the evening, the children collected catkins around the lakes and near their houses, passing them from hand to hand, from palm to palm. And put them on the windows and around their homes. Little by little, the smiles disappeared from their faces, something empty nesting in their eyes. House after house fell like dominoes. The cemetery, which had known no deaths for years, was expanding, and the smell of damp earth hung in the air. That’s why they didn’t hope anymore.

Within a month, the Hudymchyks’ willow tree also withered. They were neighbors. Zhenya was playing with Liza, their youngest daughter, in her yard, but the girl kept turning her head, looking back at the dead tree. Zhenya didn’t look. She believed that it could feel and get inside.

“Can’t your dad do something?” asked Liza. “Anything at all?”

Zhenya counted her own fear through the beats of her heart against her ribs. She had already thought everything through. Everything she could. She considered offering Liza to stay at her place for the night, but the shadow on Lisa’s face stopped her. Anguish had already left a mark on her; you couldn’t hide that in the house.

So Zhenya knew that Olezha and his family were dead. She heard the Vasylkovs’ willow breathing heavily with strained dry branches and felt its sad murmurs when she watched the family’s house and its closed door. Good riddance. Not Liza, though. Not all the others.

Words got stuck in her throat, but she did not cry. Zhenya restrained herself, knowing that if she revealed her alarm, it would only rot Liza’s mood. And the willows needed to be believed in.

“Listen, Lizka, my folk’s the same as yours,” said Zhenya, “and you planted the new ones. They started to grow, didn’t they?”

Liza looked at the thin trees, caressed by the weak spring’s warmth. A crinkle passed between her eyebrows. She thought intensely.

“They did.”

At night, after closing the windows and hiding the cattle, Zhenya and her father listened to the night. Zhenya looked into the living room, coming into the pale light of the TV. Her mother was silently crying, covering her face with her hands. She fell ill and could no longer hear the willows. Zhenya thought that she also heard them sometimes. Their rustling of leaves, their hungry sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh, like a creature lulling a child to sleep before suffocating it. But her mother was like a radio station, and instead of music, she heard the tongue of trees. Zhenya sat beside her and patted her shoulder awkwardly, like any daughter trying to comfort her mother. She heard her father enter the room and listened to his soft steps approaching. He surrounded them with such peace and warmth that even Zhenya’s tears stung her eyes.

“This has happened many times before you, and it will happen after you,” said her father into her mother’s hair. It was thick, curled at the tips, and it tickled Zhenya’s cheeks. It looked a bit like the catkins. Zhenya could feel how calmly her father’s heart was beating and wondered: was he telling the truth, or had he learned to lie calmly?

They went to sleep. Tears always made her fall asleep better.

The thump was quiet and stealthy, and the hair on Zhenya’s arms rose up. The house was asleep, but they had woken up outside.

If she didn’t listen, she could imagine rain pounding on the walls and roof, sickeningly beating its rhythm. She could open the window, place her palm under the drops, and catch one.

Or they would catch her.

It sounded like hundreds of paws running on the Hudymchyks’ house.

A few passed right along her bedroom wall, jumped on the window, and Zhenya pressed herself against the bed, petting the dog. It twitched a little, and Zhenya felt the animal’s pulse racing against her fingers, fearing that it would now snap, revealing them, and the creatures would turn their heads to the two imposters, catch the glance of them through the curtains, absorb their fear.

All sound vanished from the street.

Zhenya kissed the dog on the nose and smoothed its ears, mentally asking: be quiet, oh pretty please, don’t whine. Her heart pounded in her throat, and she didn’t know whether they were noisy because she couldn’t hear anything underneath the static in her head.

Slowly, very slowly, the dog fell asleep. Fear left Zhenya’s body in waves, leaking from the sweat, and she started to dream, wrapping her arm around the dog. It seemed to her that this way, she could control it till the morning.

Just before dawn, she heard the glass outside cracking. At first, it was a tiny, barely audible sound, like the distant buzzing of a mosquito, then an explosion, as if someone had yanked it with all their might. Zhenya sat up sharply, forgetting all about caution, and her consciousness was going away with the sound of the glass breaking. The dog was nowhere to be seen, and Zhenya slowly stood up, burning her feet against the cold floor. Now, it was no longer quiet. It was complete chaos.

She pulled the curtain aside.

The moon was full, and everything around was gray and flat. Hundreds of bodies, black as nothing, fell through the window of the Hudymchyks’ home. The creatures were as flexible as water. There were many of them, and they crawled and covered the house with themselves.

Liza shouted, then stopped. Zhenya got up to go to another window, pressed her face against the glass—

The window was barely open, like the mouth of a half-sleeping beast. There was a shadow right next to it. Zhenya froze next to the glass, her eyes leveled with the eyeless, mouthless face. Its face was nothingness. It clung to the house like a piece of cloth, and its head spun from side to side.

It did not breathe or make noise, but the space around it seemed incredibly loud. It was looking for an entrance. It was listening.

Zhenya took hold of the edge of the window and pulled inaudibly, not breathing.

She knew that it came from the Hudymchyks and didn’t get lost — the creature was looking for more. There were many of them against her wall: bodies in a negative photograph. They pressed against the glass on the other side so the sky vanished.

Zhenya pulled again. Her fingers barely found the thin handle. She was shaking. She tried again, but her fingers did not obey.

Zhenya swallowed. She made a movement so rash and quick that she almost slammed the window. The glass began to crack from the pressure of bodies. She stopped a second before making a sound.

She bit her cheek from the inside, slowly rocking her whole body, coaxing herself to calm down, and with that movement, slowly, centimeter by centimeter, she closed the window.

Her wet palm froze in front of a creature’s face. It poked its face into the glass. Let me in, asked the creature silently. Zhenya sucked in air through her teeth and froze. She could no longer feel her fingers.

Someone shouted — and the creature jerked away. They all ran, and their stomping rang through the house for the last time.

Liza’s mother screeched. The sky became visible again.

By the end of the month, the bodies hung like bells in front of almost every house. The willows were no longer protecting them, only letting more and more creatures out. Children were not allowed outside, and their thin parents were trudging and collecting the remains of catkins, boarding up windows and doors. The streets became empty.

Zhenya went downstairs and saw two silhouettes, her father and mother, against the background of a foggy window. Everything was gray and melted in the air. And they? They were as if carved from wood. But Zhenya stepped forward, the board creaked under her feet, and they slowly turned their heads towards her. They did not retreat, did not run away. Her parents had always loved each other simply and honestly, and it was the best truth about her life, the first she had learned after their love for her. The same was happening right before her eyes. She was made of their faces, their bodies, woven from their emotions, and everything they felt, she also knew.

“No,” said Zhenya, “no, no.”

The light did not pour but slowly flowed through the curtains, threadlike, not the enemy of darkness, but its lazy, attentive brother. Her mother patted Zhenya on the cheek as she took a step towards her, and they hugged. Zhenya’s thoughts, except for this one, were slowly decaying, but then, something was unfolding inside her, clinging to her throat, like Zhenya to her mother’s shirt.

She started to shake and cry. There was the same dead light under her eyelids. The village was slowly dying; she knew they would be the last. It should be so.

She and her father took axes and kindling. Only Zhenya cried. While Zhenya was clinging to her mother, she leaned over and kissed her daughter’s forehead. She smelled like spring, sun, and leaves.

“Sometimes it doesn’t work out, no matter how hard you try,” said her mom, “But it’s alright, little one.”

They cut down and burned all the willows in the village, both healthy and diseased. They went around all the houses, walked through every road to the forest. Few people helped them because they knew it was none of their business. Such things stay in the family.

Leaves with flowers covered the ground like a carpet. The catkins stuck to the skin, the droplets and dry branches hid behind their ears and fell into their pockets, and her father and Zhenya did not look at each other. They did not listen to the slow crackling of the fire. Like families destroyed from the root, dozens of lights emerged all over the village.

Scratches and calluses bloomed under Zhenya’s fingers, and her eyes were blinded by tears and smoke.

In the evening, when not a single willow tree remained, they walked home to the joyous, drunken shouts of the survivors. Zhenya saw small children, pregnant women, and tired men waving to them. Only the faces of the old people were sad. They did not congratulate Zhenya and her father; they mourned.

The infection passed, but the payback was theirs.

Zhenya and her father entered the house; the warm light of the corridor caught the black eyes of the open door from the shadows. No one came out to them. How difficult it was for her to take at least one step! To break this silence!

They went into the room where her mother was. It was dark there, although the moon was visible through the open window. Zhenya looked at the bed, feeling the taste of ash on her tongue. Her father allowed himself the first sob and took a step forward. His tired hands touched the bed.

They collected everything left: burnt bark instead of skin, leaves instead of braids. They took it all in their palms, kissed it, and burned it in the backyard.

She doesn’t know why he’s here. Her eyes dart to him every time she takes a sip, but he doesn’t seem to want anything. His face is as she’s always known it — round and open with enormous mud-brown eyes — only a little bit paler, and lacking completely in life. The man sitting before her is dead, definitely, but he’s also not a figment of her imagination.

Krish Three is sitting beside Krish Two with his face turned away from her, his mud-browns fixed on the cereal cabinet. No shame in loving coco puffs, he’s said before, but he can’t say that now. And he did love them, sometimes more than her, but never more than the pills, which are also stashed in there. He can’t eat them and will stare blankly when she will take them out later and empty them into the bin. She will then scoop up some coco puffs with her fingers and shovel them into her mouth even though she hates chocolate.

Krishes Four and Five are in the kitchen, both wearing his favorite t-shirt. Urdu letters scream khanabadosh in lemon yellow against their black chests. One of them watches the stovetop when Noor cooks her meals — chicken curry, mostly, in defiance of mourning protocol because who’s going to stop her? When she eats, she eats for him too. Krish Five squats next to the fridge because that’s where the rum is, wedged between the vinegar and the sticky bottle of Rooh Afza. This, she doesn’t drink for him.

Krishes Six and Seven are standing with their backs to each other in the bathroom. Each time she comes in through the door, she finds Krish Six looking at his vial of attar, now nearly empty because he left its mouth open when he used it for the last time. Gill 1460, which made him smell like the rain, now makes the bathroom smell like the monsoon. Krish Seven, looking the other way, stares at his splintered reflection in the mirror — once shiny and whole, now webbed like a windshield that’s been hit by something hard enough to crack, but not break it. The narrow shards of glass lodged in his knuckles glint darkly in the LED light.

Krishes Eight and Nine appear on the sofa the next day. She positions herself between them and watches a mushaira for Krish Eight, who is facing the wall-mounted television, letting Ghalib’s poetry mist over the 4K display and perfume the room like incense. Krish Nine sits on the other side of her with his hands clapped to his ears, his eyes squeezed shut, and his mouth thrown open in a silent scream.

On some nights, curled under the dohar on her chosen patch of carpeted floor outside the bedroom door, she thinks about how all of this is Ghalib’s fault.

کوئی ویرانی سی ویرانی ہے
دشت کو دیکھ کے گھر یاد آیا
There is a desolation more desolate than all others:
a desert reminds me of home.

Pulling the dohar over her ears, she tries to hear the sound of her husband’s voice reciting this sher. But a different couplet curls vapor-like into her mind, dragging up with it her first real memory of him. In a classroom where Mathematics was taught in the mornings and Urdu in the evenings, he had offered it to her like it was a rose.

ان کے دیکھے سے جو آ جاتی ہے منہ پر رونق
وہ سمجھتے ہیں کہ بیمار کا حال اچھا ہے 
When she looks at me, my face becomes so awash with light 
that she thinks I — an ailing man — am well.

Krish Eighteen is looking at a wheelie bag in the closet. A black American Tourister, hard-shelled and reliable. It holds the clothes he carried on his last business trip. Fancy dress time, he would joke every morning while putting on his office shirt, aware of how ridiculous he looked in it. The fit was never quite right, no matter how many sizes and cuts he tried on.

Noor took the bag down from its shelf yesterday, thinking she’d empty it over the next few days. Now Krish Nineteen is curled up in its spot with his face to the wall. She remembers this from last year, when rum and employment were distant memories and the pills weren’t killing pain like the pharmacist had said they would.

I want to be a father, he said in that evening’s haze and something he saw on her face ignited him. There was some shouting, a dinner plate hurled at the wall, a chair smashed into the floor and kicked a few times, finger-shaped bruises on her neck, a brief blackout, hours of worrying and calling former friends, before she realized he’d never left the house.

In the morning he said, I should never be a father.

درد منت کش دوا نہ ہوا
میں نہ اچھا ہوا برا نہ ہوا
The pain is not indebted to the medicine,
as I am neither better nor worse.

Krish Twenty-four stands facing an empty dust square on the living room wall. There are many others like it, but the one his eyes are fixed on previously held a picture of their wedding. The two of them outside the registrar’s office, him in a cream kurta pajama, her in a red-and-gold Banarasi saree, looking happier than they’d ever be again. The former inhabitants of the other dust squares — their families — had chosen not to attend.

A few feet behind him, the carpet covers a black smudge marking the spot where he started the fire using the photographs he took down. Krish Twenty-five sits cross-legged on top of it, his face turned up toward the patch of soot still suspended from the ceiling.

جلا ہے جسم جہاں دل بھی جل گیا ہوگا
کریدتے ہو جو اب راکھ جستجو کیا ہے
Where the body has burnt, the heart, too, must be charred
As you scrape through the ashes now, what are you looking for?

There are too many of him, blighting the house, crowding every room but one, against whose door she now stands clutching her dohar. She searches behind her back for the doorknob and hears it click against the enormous silence of his everywhereness.

Inside, there is only one of him — the very first, who appeared by himself on the night of his disappearance. She spotted him in the far corner of the room, a few hours into her routine of searching the house and calling people, and knew what had happened before the police called.

She spent the auto ride to the hospital trying to decipher what she was feeling because she really couldn’t tell. The closer she pushed herself to how this was supposed to feel, the farther she felt from everything she knew. It was like trying to fit Krish into a shirt — grief was a piece of clothing she looked ridiculous in.

When she stood before the stretcher, the morgue assistant looked away so she could weep like all the other young widows who came in every day. But all she could do was stare at Krish’s open eyes, which held a strange look of wonder, like he had witnessed a miracle in his last moments alive.

At the crematorium, the scent of rain wafted up to her as he lay on the trolley, a white bundle on the whirring metal belt, restless to be on its way. The cremator swallowed him before she was ready, and in the deafening echo of its mouth slamming shut, days and days and days had passed, soaked in the surprise and unreality of it all.

Every other Krish who had appeared in the house was one of two truths, black and white, and choosing one while denying the other was as easy as breathing. But this one — he was too many truths at once. Desert and home and light and dark and ailing and well and medicine and pain and worse and better and body and heart and she loved him and hated him and wanted to remember him and wanted to forget him and she thought her head would explode. So she slept on the floor outside the bedroom door and never came in.

But now she’s here, with nowhere else to go, and there is only one thing to be done. She walks up to his corner, stands in front of him, and looks into his eyes. They look back at her and begin to fill with wonder, like she remembers from the morgue — like they’re witnessing a miracle. The room feels warmer than before and the floor, cooler. She becomes suddenly conscious of how hard and smooth the granite is, how solid beneath her feet. As she lets the weight of what she’s been trying to wear leave her, he begins to crumble until all that’s left is a pile of grey ash on the floor.