Argent
by Caroline Shea
Where She Starts
Whatever version of the story you start with, the girl’s gotten a raw deal: a life of looking over her shoulder, the devil a few steps behind. Her voice stoppered to save her brothers or her hands lopped off for her father’s sins.
Never mind that her new hands grow in slow and sore and silver. Never mind her throne, or her king, or their child. That second heart beating outside of her body. What a stupid way to do things. We should instead be born armored like insects, and only shed that protection later, when life has already dented us and we are harder to wound.
Never mind her happiness. That’s just the breath she takes before the blow. She knows how this story ends.
She ends turned dog or bird or deer, sewing thistles into shirts. She ends with her eyes pecked out, flesh boiled off, bones buried in a riverbank, singing.
Married then murdered. Married then murderess. She’s bold, she’s bold but not too bold. Then she’s dead. Not for long, though. No, soon she’s girl again, setting out to seek her fortune, all her deaths stacked inside of her like dolls.
Death just means the story can start again. Each time it changes but never enough.
She starts down the forest path, blood pulsing in the stumps where her hands once hung. She walks all day and all night until she comes to a garden, its sweet ripe pears glistening in the moonlight. Her mouth waters, but the garden is circled by a deep moat and a sturdy stone wall, its gates too high to climb. Her eyes smart, but she blinks the tears away. When her vision clears, an angel stands before her.
She knows he’s an angel without having to ask. He’s made of different stuff from us, cut on different angles, even if the underlying pattern is the same. When the girl stumbles backward, his gaze follows her, many-eyed and unblinking.
I can help you, he says. The words echo in her head, but his lips don’t move.
“What’s the catch?” the girl asks.
The catch? The angel tilts his feathered head like a crow.
“The price,” the girl clarifies. She won’t be as easy to trick as her father.
Perhaps you’ve already paid, the angel says, and she thinks that he sounds almost sad, sorry for her even. Though she could be mistaken. It’s difficult to tell with angels. Their feelings are shaped differently from ours, too. Perhaps he’s just bored.
Her wrists throb. Later, when the pain fades, when her hands grow back, there will be moments when she forgets their loss completely. Moments when she reaches out to her lover or her son and finds herself surprised all over again by an argent gleam where she’d expected skin. For now, forgetting isn’t an option. Pain nets her each time she tries. She stares for a moment at the silvered branches stretching over the garden wall; she imagines the way the fruit will burst on her tongue, cool and sweet.
“Fine,” she tells the angel, “You can help.”
She knows she should be more gracious but cannot muster the energy. If the angel is offended, he can strike her down. She almost hopes he does. But her savior only smiles and turns toward the moat. He steps onto the water’s mirror-smooth surface, walking across it like solid ground. With each step, the water evaporates, turning to steam beneath his feet.
The girl clambers across the muddy ditch behind him. A miracle, she thinks. She makes a note to be grateful for it later. When they reach the gate, it swings open ahead of them. She’s frozen for a moment, awestruck by the bounty before her. Then she stumbles to the nearest tree. She tries to pry the fruit free with her forearms at first, but she drops each pear on the grass, her arms sore and shaking. Finally, she simply stands below the lowest-hanging fruit and tilts her head back, stretching her neck to bite each round, dangling morsel, the juices dripping down her chin.
Slumped against the far wall, the gardener stares, his wineskin abandoned. She must be a spirit, he thinks, or an angel. Unlike the girl, he doesn’t know the divine when he sees it. His world is unmarred by any magic or lack. In the dark, with his belly full, the girl’s hunger is easy to mistake for holiness.
Three nights she steals into the garden, and three nights she eats her fill from its trees. On the third night, the King waits for her. The gardener has warned him of a ghost. Laughing, the King set out to find it himself. Instead, he finds a girl with flashing eyes and muddy knees, her mouth still sticky with juice.
He should have her in the stocks for theft. Banished or thrown in a dungeon. Instead, he falls at her feet and asks her to marry him. Of all the husbands she’ll have, this first one is her favorite. Sometimes, in her sleep, she still hears him laughing, calling her “ghost.” Then she wakes to find a stranger in her bed, startled at first, until his face resolves itself into familiar lines: another lover, another husband. Their child sleeps in the next room, an echo of that long-gone first.
The first time around, she lasts longer than most. When the devil catches up to her, she’s almost forgotten what it feels like to fear him. She’s started to hope again, to live with one foot in the future—what ifs and maybes springing from her lips like jewels. The devil’s tricks have been thwarted. Her hands have grown back. Her son has grown up. She thinks OK, the story’s over. She’s won. Then one day her son rides off—it’s what sons do, after all—and he doesn’t come back.
People die, her husband tells her. There’s nothing magical about it. No one to blame.
But she knows, now, how the devil works. He couldn’t have her, so he took her child instead. There isn’t a way to win this game. Not for her. Not unless she makes herself a devil, too.
She starts down the path again, fleeing. It doesn’t matter what evil pursues her—a king, a stepmother, a dragon—it always catches up. A stream whispers warnings in her ear. Her brother wanders ahead, bends to drink before she can stop him, and finds himself trapped in the body of a deer.
She picks the wrong flower and finds her brothers—twelve of them, now—turned from men to ravens. A witch waits by their cottage door, smiling. The smile is the same no matter what body the devil wears, and the girl wonders briefly, bitterly, how her father was ever fooled.
“You can save them,” the witch-devil says. “If you want to.”
The devil always gives her the choice. She hates him for that more than anything else—for making her choose, making her run headlong toward her fate, eyes open. She can’t say no. She can’t walk away or abdicate. That would be a different story, a story she has no idea how to tell. And no matter how many times she loses her brothers, she cannot bring herself to let them go for good. Whether they are turned to deer, or ravens, or swans, whether they are cooked, or killed by robbers, or murdered in their beds, their loss stings each time as if it were new.
It means something, to have someone walk with you through the wood. To have someone’s hand in yours as the trees creep ever closer. Her brothers don’t remember their other lives with her, the years of tugging her braids, skipping stones and dodging blows, the thorny grammar of growing up together in a world where children grow up quickly or not at all.
They don’t remember, but she does.
“Fine,” the girl says, “what do I do?”
What She Does
She doesn’t speak for seven years. She weaves a coat from a single thread. She spins straw into gold. She solves so many riddles it would make you sick. It does make her sick—she gags at rhyme. Gets nauseous at the first sign of wordplay.
She guesses the devil’s name, then slits him throat to groin, uses his skin as a rug. She sorts lentils from ash until her fingers bleed. That time, at least, she has fingers.
She outwits a tsar, a djinn, a witch. She saves her father, her brothers, her stupid sisters. She’s born a miller’s daughter and a princess; a third child, and once—by chance—an eldest son. She dies that time, too, her head snapped off in a box. Predictably, they blame her mother. Poor woman, she thinks. And then she turns her back to the past. What else can you do? Your ghosts will catch you no matter what. That doesn’t mean you need to make yourself easy prey.
After a while—she’s not sure how long—she comes to a giant’s house. A blue door stretches above her, a second sky. The windows are lit, warm and yellow like pats of butter.
“My feet hurt,” her eldest sister moans, not for the first time.
The middle sister just sniffles, face stung red and raw in the cold.
The girl sighs. This won’t end well, but she’s never been any good at denying them. She knocks on the door, then knocks again when the wood seems to swallow the sound. Impatient, her eldest sister pushes her out of the way just as the door swings open, leaving her with her fist raised and mouth gaping. The girl would like to say something rude but doesn’t.
A servant escorts them inside. His master is away, he says, but he’ll be happy to host them. The sisters are shown to a room lined with three sprawling beds and the eldest two squeal with delight, flinging themselves across the smooth white sheets. Three beds for three daughters, but they’re already occupied. The girl approaches the bed closest to the door, pokes its snoring occupant, but the giantess only grumbles and flings an arm over her eyes. Asleep, the giant’s daughters look like toppled monuments left by some ancient empire, marble effigies carved to guard a tomb. She hesitates at the foot of the bed.
“They don’t mind,” the servant says, but he won’t meet her eyes.
How long, she wants to ask, have these girls been asleep? But she knows better. Most people move through their lives never knowing they’re part of a story. Never wanting to know. They believe they shape the world, but their world shapes them. It’s better not to reveal the things she knows; the glimpses she gets through the cracks. The way certain stories start to bleed together until she can predict what comes next. She climbs into the too-big bed and curls up at its foot like a cat, content, for now, to wait.
She wakes to a gravelly voice. She knows this voice, though she’s never heard it before. Their host is thirsty. Parched. Water isn’t enough to quench his thirst. His need is deeper and more tangled.
“Bleed one of those puny brats,” he tells his servant.
The girl is unsurprised. She’s known too many men who believed the world was theirs for the taking to find this one novel.
“How will I know which girls to bleed? What if I mistake them for your daughters?” the servant asks nervously.
The giant laughs, but his voice is sad. “How could you mistake them? My daughters are large enough to swallow the world whole. When they still woke, you could drown men in their eyes.”
The servant’s steps move toward the stairs. The girl smiles. Sometimes, when no one’s watching, she can shift the fabric of the story, reknit it into something else. She can’t change the ending, not yet, but sometimes she can change how she gets there. She crawls toward the head of the bed, whispers in the giantess’ ear:
Imagine never needing to duck under another door. Never breaking the good plates when you laugh too loud or move too quick. Imagine a world that was made for you, drawn to your dimensions. Imagine waking up one day and no one whispers. No one looks at you with fear or disgust. No one looks at you at all. You are free from sleep, free from watching eyes. You can wander where you like.
The giant’s daughters begin to shrink.
The girl slips from her bed and whispers in each sister’s ear:
Imagine you are large enough to swallow the world whole. Imagine never needing to duck another blow, accept another harsh word. When you run, each stride eats miles. The ground ripples below you like the sea. No one chases you. Imagine you wake one day and the story’s changed. You no longer need to be good, or pure, or golden-haired. You no longer need to struggle. You don’t need to bend your want into the shape you think it should hold, to fold and twist and bury it until it fits back inside of you. You are big enough, now, to hold anything.
The girl and her sisters grow larger. The footsteps on the stairs are closer now, and the girl stumbles back toward her bed, her bones cracking and shifting as she scrambles under the sheets. She bites her tongue to keep from screaming and swallows the blood.
The servant slips through the door. He frowns at the giant’s first daughter, then shakes his head. He cuts her throat and lets the blood drain into a cup. The girl watches with slitted eyes. He returns twice, killing a daughter each time. While the giant drinks his daughters down, humming to himself, the girl and her sisters slip off into the night. They are their own size again, human and frail, barefoot and sprinting through the woods. Sometimes, the girl thinks, it’s a relief to flee again, to give up waiting for the next blow and just run.
“You let them die instead of us,” her middle sister whispers, horror not quite buried beneath her relief.
“Yes,” the girl says.
She would do it again. She would hold the knife herself if she had to. Perhaps she already has.
Sometimes the King finds her keeping geese in his courtyard or scrubbing pots in his kitchen. Sometimes, he finds her halfway through the wood, picking berries. Once, he’s hunting, and shoots her brother—still deer-bodied—by mistake. Her brother’s blood leads him to her door. He falls on his knees, struck by her beauty, and asks her to marry him. Again.
The display seems less charming than it once did. She isn’t sure if it’s because he’s the wrong man, now, or because she’s no longer the right woman. Once, anything dark-haired and broad-shouldered seemed like a good place to rest. Now, her exhaustion is a deeper thing, unrelieved by kings.
She still says yes, of course. Perhaps you think that’s foolish. Or maybe you think she’s in love. You can forgive that.
Once, it was love. What wins her now is simpler: She’s tired. She asks the King if her brother can come home with them. If there will be a place for him, at court, untroubled by hounds, or hunters, or thrice-cursed streams.
The King looks at her, cartoon hearts in his eyes, and thinks he would give her the world. Yes, he says. Of course.
They get married. He gets her with child. She gives him an heir. Holding the baby in her arms, she thinks: Is this enough for you yet? Is this a good enough story? There’s no answer. She doesn’t really expect one.
She straps her son to her back and walks for hours in the woods, her brother loping beside her.
“Maybe—” he starts hopefully, but she cuts him off.
“Don’t say it.”
Hope, she finds, is like blood in the water. It just draws the beasts to you quicker.
This time it’s their witch of a stepmother and her daughter. The ones who pinched her arms and legs until blood rose to the surface, bruising. The ones who stole her brother’s body from him. They can’t stand that she’s escaped, that now people bow when she passes, and her face is stamped on every coin. So they boil her alive in the bath and brick her up in the wall. Excessive, maybe, but they get points for style.
Her stepsister takes her place. She wears a veil. She barely speaks. The King is charmed by his wife’s newfound shyness. One queen, apparently, is as good as another.
Three nights the girl’s ghost walks the halls, pissed off and dripping. Her deer brother paws at the ground, scrapes against the wall with his antlers. On the third night, the King realizes the woman in his bed is not his wife when he kisses her and chokes on a toad. He would’ve noticed sooner, but he likes to fuck with the lights off.
The King tears the wall down with his bare hands, pulls the girl’s boiled body from the bath. He weeps over her silent form. She comes back groggily, consciousness returning more like a blow than a boon.
“What—” she starts to ask, looking wildly around the room, eyes catching on the familiar cradle.
“It’s a miracle!” the King cries.
A miracle, the girl thinks dully. One of those again.
“Why now?” her brother asks.
He’s a boy again. A man, now, the girl corrects herself. Their stepmother’s magic died with her, returning him to his original form. She fell not far from where they sit feasting, the irons on her feet still smoking. Wine mingles with the bitter smell of burnt flesh on the girl’s tongue. The king jokes with a friend, standing over the bodies. He mimes their wild dancing, the way they wept, at the end. He laughs his loud, booming laugh. The girl shoves half a piece of cake in her mouth, icing smearing down her chin.
“Who knows,” she says. She’s confided in her brother over the years. About the deaths. The endless beginnings. He knows she’s never returned to the same story or the same body twice. Each time she dies, the thread is cut, and she’s forced to start anew. Until now.
If she looks at him for too long, it unsettles her. This stranger’s face with her brother’s voice.
“It’s OK,” he says, smiling. “It’s weird for me, too.”
She shoves a plate of cake in his direction and he starts to devour it methodically.
“Maybe—” he starts again, rolling his eyes when she glares. “You must think about it, sometimes. Maybe this time is different.”
The girl doesn’t answer. She’s looking at her hands. There’s something wrong with them, she thinks, something alien. They aren’t her hands but someone else’s. She can’t trust them to do what she tells them. She takes the thick knife from the cake stand, admiring the way it catches the light.
“Eve?” her brother asks, closing a gentle hand around her wrist.
She can’t remember the last time someone used her name. He watches her warily, like a wild animal, and she remembers that day in the woods all those years ago, when she’d warned him not to drink from the streams.
“You won’t know me as a deer, or a wolf,” she’d said. “You might eat me alive.”
“I’d never eat you,” he said cheerfully. “Too much gristle.” Then, when he saw she was serious: “Besides, I’d know you anywhere. Even as wolf.”
She puts down the knife. Gives her brother a smile. He has no idea what she thinks, the endings she imagines for them all before she catches herself. He has no idea—thank God, she thinks, that he has no idea. He’d cut her hands off himself if he did.
How She Ends (Abridged)
The wrong fruit from the wrong tree. Poison. Curiosity. Beheaded, crushed to death, drowned as a witch, and almost burned, once, before her brothers shed their raven skins to save her. The boiling bath, the wall, of course, you already know. And the smoking iron shoes—she’s been on both sides of that dance, and given the choice, she’d take the boiling. It’s quicker.
She’s died of fever and of pox. She’s bled out giving birth more times than she can count. She’s thrown herself from parapets and facedown into ponds, more than half-sick, at that point, of shadows. Sick of herself, that many-faced, many-fated serpent.
Sometimes, she dies peacefully in her sleep or of the body’s usual failures, her heart stuttering to an eventual, natural stop. Those times, coming back hurts worse.
The last time, the time she comes back wrong, still stuck in the same story, something new happens. Not a death, but a daughter. Up until now it’s only been sons, an endless stream of sons, and though sons have their own trials to face, she’s never been as scared as she is now. Their world is not kind to little girls. But her fear is deeper and more specific: what if, she thinks, the way I am is catching? What if I make her like me, and she dies only to come back again, stuck on the same dumb loop? Once the fear takes root, she cannot shake it.
She finds her brother in the woods. He moves stiffly on two legs now, seems surprised when he catches sight of himself in a mirror. Part of him will always be deer. He sits with his back to a gnarled old oak, watching a doe and her calf drink from the nearby stream. They dart away as the girl approaches, and he watches them for a moment, wistful, before greeting her.
“We need to go,” she says, her daughter strapped to her back. She would like to take her son too, but she knows this world won’t let her. It holds its sons more tightly.
“Finally,” her brother sighs, mugging for the audience.
He has more patience these days, than she does. She starts walking without waiting for him to follow. She knows he’ll be behind her. They walk for a day and a night before they come to a cottage. Eve thinks she could go several lifetimes without seeing another cottage and be perfectly happy. Next time around, she wants a chalet. Or a fucking penthouse. She knocks on the door.
The angel opens it. She’s not entirely surprised. He looks different than before, his face scaled rather than feathered, eyes shimmering like oil slicks rather than blue pools of sky, but she still knows it’s him.
“Tell him I have a new bargain,” she says.
The angel cocks his head. She rolls her eyes.
“I know he’s in there.”
The angel smiles, if you can call the wound his mouth makes a smile. He lets the door fall open wider, stepping back to let the devil pass. He doesn’t look like a devil. He looks like he plays the banjo. He has hair the color of dust and a thin, pale face. She still knows it’s him.
“I only take what I’m owed,” the devil shrugs, an aw-shucks kind of shrug, as if to say: don’t blame me.
She does blame him.
Her father, the first one, the one she thinks of as truly hers, was a poor man. Not poor as in scraping by, but poor as in about to go under. He tried to hide this from his daughter, but she knew. His hands were failing, growing stiff and gnarled, and he’d known he only had so long before he could no longer work their orchard or chop their wood, before the lenders came from town and took their house, their cow, their coop of chickens. They would be left with nothing.
When the devil offered him enough wealth that he’d never have to work, never have to worry again, he frowned. Asked: “What’s the catch?”
“The catch?” The devil said.
“The price.”
“Oh, that. How about the orchard behind your house, and everything in it?”
It seemed an easy price to pay for safety. He agreed.
Eve, high up in her favorite tree, the juice of an apple dripping down her chin, felt a peculiar twinge in her chest, just below her heart. A cramp, she thought, and kept eating.
When her father told her, shamefaced, what he’d done, she wept, face buried in her hands so he wouldn’t see her cry. The devil came the next morning, dressed in his best suit. He reached to take her hand but couldn’t. Grief was too clean a thing for him to touch.
“Cut off her hands,” he told her father. “Or I take you, too.”
She held her hands out, shaking.
“Go ahead,” she said, and her father listened.
Maybe she blames him, too. Just a little.
Once they staunched the blood, the devil reached for her again, before stepping back with a hiss. Love has never felt, to Eve, like a clean thing. More like a bloody, cauterized stump. But it turns out the devil cannot touch that either. She got away, and he’s been chasing her ever since.
“I don’t belong to you,” Eve says calmly.
The devil pouts.
“You still owe me.”
“No. You only bargained for me once.” That bargain should’ve died when she did. “If you want me again, you’ll need a new bargain.”
The devil considers this, nods. He likes rules, and he can’t resist a game. Eve can’t be sure, but she thinks the angel winks.
“What are the terms?”
“If you give me my freedom, I’ll give you a new story. One you’ve never heard before.”
The devil looks tempted but skeptical. He doesn’t think she can do it.
“Sure,” he says, kicking at a pebble. “Why not?”
Eve takes her brother’s hand and starts down the path. Her daughter is silent, watchful, tugging at her hair. Halfway through the wood, they step out of the story.
Where She Starts (Again)
She thought this world would be kinder than hers, but it’s not. Each spring, the coasts flood. Each summer, acres of forest burn. Smoke chokes the sky for months. In the city, the skyscrapers grow taller, high enough the waters can’t reach them. High enough they look down on the smoke.
She rows steadily toward one of these towers, the water brackish and still around her little boat. Her brother sits behind her, eating an apple. They pass a drowned alley where a powerline sparks. An old bodega, its lettered sign crusted with algae. When the old city drowned, they built a new one on top of it. Its edges stretch ever upward, trying to outrun its past. For all she knows, beneath the dead city lies another city, another past. Perhaps it’s cities all the way down.
They reach the dock at the tower’s base and tie up their boat. Eve shakes out her skirts. Her brother runs a hand through his hair. She punches in a code on the panel by the thick metal doors, and they slide open like a tomb. A week ago, her daughter stepped through those doors, looking for the man she loves. Eve followed.
In another life, another story, the man her daughter loves could be a good man. He doesn’t have the essential rottenness that rules some villains; that inborn desire to hurt. He wasn’t born bad. He was just born the rich son of a rich father. A man who signs his name without looking at the bill. He’d spent his life in this shining tower, high above the world his ancestors stripped and killed. Every few years, he descended into the old city, looking for a wife. The women he chose never returned.
The reports said they died from illness or accident, by falling down stairs or by drowning, drunk in their baths. The man left their families generous stipends. He sent them flowers for the funerals, lush bouquets of lilies and larkspur and snapdragons. They withered quickly, down below. No one had water to spare for flowers.
Perhaps the man is innocent, and the women were like his flowers: once you pried up their roots, they could no longer live. Not meant for that glittering city up above, they died because they couldn’t learn to thrive there. Eve finds this rather unlikely.
Inside the tower, they walk toward a bank of elevators and push the button. The glass walls are stained many colors like the windows in churches once were. They catch the light as it strikes them and cast the ripples of the water outside across the floor. Eve doesn’t want to find it beautiful. As the elevator rises, her brother taps his foot, impatient. The doors slide open on another light-strewn room, rainbows shattering across the slick tile floor. Eve is prepared to tear the whole tower down, piece by piece, to find the man who took her daughter.
But he’s already lying dead at her feet. A gold letter opener sticks from his eye, his mouth frozen in a grimace or a scream. Her brother nudges the body with his foot, unimpressed. They step over him and continue into the apartment. It feels strangely unlived-in–too sharp, too sterile, with none of the human detritus places accumulated when they’d been inhabited for a while: scattered plastic newsheets, cup rings on the counters, a coat thrown haphazardly over a chair. No, this apartment is a marbled blank, a void. A beautiful cell.
She finds her daughter standing in a long hall lined with tanks. The tanks are set into the walls in golden bays, the glass thick and intricately flared. Inside each tank is a wife. Their hair floats up around their faces like kelp. They look like they’re sleeping.
“I told you they weren’t dead,” her daughter says.
She stands in front of the last, empty tank, her hands in her pockets.
“Sometimes,” Eve says, “dead is better.”
“Yes,” the daughter agrees. Her face is freckled with blood.
The daughter turns to the tank next to hers, presses a few buttons on the panel set into its surface. The liquid drains from the tank. This wife’s eyes flick open, glazed and unseeing. But when the glass panel recedes, her daughter takes the woman’s pale, drowned hand in hers, and recognition flares in her gaze. The woman makes a short, choked noise and sinks against her daughter. They hold each other tightly, not speaking, their hands knotted in each other’s hair. The daughter sees her mother’s shock and laughs.
“When I said I was in love,” she says, “You didn’t think I meant with him, did you?”
“Ah,” Eve says, a little embarrassed. And then, trying to hide her hurt: “You could’ve told me.”
The daughter squeezes her arm, apologetic.
“I know. But…”
Eve nods. There are some parts of the story you cannot speak until you live them. And sometimes not even then. The freed wife is shivering now, starting to come back to herself. They find a thick, plush, blanket in the bedroom and wrap her in it. The brother boils water for tea in the too-clean kitchen.
There’s a single pane of unstained glass in the front of the apartment, like the hollow of an eye’s orbit cut in a skull. Outside, the roiling, orange clouds are backlit by the sun. The sky flickers like a bed of embers. Even now, even knowing the evening’s gleam means somewhere, something burns, she still finds it beautiful. She will always find this world beautiful. It’s the one she chose, stepping out of that dark dreaming wood. She didn’t know what she was choosing then. She’s not sure that matters.
Blowing on her tea, she says: “We should go.”
She pictures sirens, crime scene tape, men with the consul’s insignia embossed on their caps and jacket pockets, asking endless, patient streams of questions. The other wife wipes the blood off her daughter’s face with a rag.
“We don’t have to,” she says softly.
“Technically,” the daughter adds, “this all belongs to us now.”
“And when they ask what happened to your husband?” the brother asks.
The other wife cocks her head, looks at him as if she doesn’t understand.
“He had an accident, of course.”
Eve wonders, for the first time, if anyone cares enough for this man to notice his death, or if the people here live like the wives in their tanks, suspended high above the turmoil of the world below, unchanging and alone. Her daughter’s lover might be right.
“Well?” her daughter asks, the hope in her voice unhidden, “Will you stay?”
She could. She’s made homes out of thornier places. Scrubbed the blood from the floor and gotten on with the work of living. But she’s been running for so long she doesn’t know how to stop. She’s not sure she wants to stop anymore. This time when she dies, she will die for good. She’d like to see more of the world before she goes.
“You stay,” she says gently.
She steps into the elevator alone, but her brother catches the door with his foot. If anyone deserves a place to rest, it’s him.
“Are you sure?” she asks.
“You’re the one who wanted a penthouse.”
She laughs, knocking her shoulder against his. Her hands are itching again, her pulse throbbing in her wrists. Her brother taps his foot, his gaze fixed somewhere far-off. Above them, her daughter is waking the other wives. Her daughter’s lover is moving her husband’s corpse into the bathtub. They will make a home there, on the bones of a dead city and its people. They will breathe the clean air until it runs out. Down below, Eve steps back into the swaying boat, holding out a hand for her brother. A grizzled pigeon watches them from the dock, eyes beady and gleaming. What’s out there? her daughter asked her as a child, while they rowed through the drowned city’s canals. She’d pointed to the horizon, where the city sank into the sea and the old bridge rose like an ancient gate from the water, its rusted arches dripping. The world, Eve had told her. It’s still out there, the wreck they’ve made of it. She cannot save it, but she finds she cannot leave it either. She starts to row.
Caroline Shea is the author of Lambflesh. Her work has previously appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Narrative Magazine, and Rogue Agent, and was longlisted for the Fractured Magazine Novel Excerpt Prize.
COLD SIGNAL 