The fingertip bone. The brush, its pig bristles pointing at the ceiling. The lock of hair.
And a tooth.
A thighbone. A cracked vertebra. A kneecap. A desiccated lung retrieved from the dirt under the hedges bordering Mrs. Lyon’s property. More teeth. Five or six of them still stuck in a lonely jawbone. A severed lip she thought at first was a scrap of beef fat fallen between the stove and the butcher’s block. A thumbnail, all the way down to the quick, with a line of dried blood still clinging to the bottom edge. A lump of petrified meat that Sophia thought was probably a spleen, but she couldn’t be sure. A tiny doll made of golden skin with pins for eyes. A little spice bottle with a faded label that once said basil on it in someone else’s handwriting, but was now filled up with blood, capped, and hidden behind the really spicy stuff she never used.
It had been there a long time. The blood wasn’t very red anymore.
Half a skull. A shriveled husk that was absolutely, beyond question, a human heart. And hair, so much hair, all tied lovingly with ribbons, all sorts of colors, straight and curly, thick and thin, fine and coarse. Without thinking about it too much, Sophia had organized them in a gradient circle around everything else, and all together like that she knew it could not possibly all belong to one poor, miserable person.
And then there was the rest of it, less grisly but somehow so much worse. Jewelry that didn’t belong to her. A pair of long sewing shears she’d never seen before, so often used that the handles were yellow with the oils of someone else’s skin. A crystal perfume bottle with a lavender squeeze bulb, though Sophia had never worn perfume in her life. A tube of cracked lipstick in a shade she’d never think to wear. And other, more private objects: a squat flask of yellow milk-grease with a rubber tip covered in mold, a tiny lace cap, a stained quilt barely big enough to fit on Sophia’s lap.
Do you understand? Mrs. Palfrey had said, still wearing her stage makeup. Still wearing her dark wig.
But Sophia didn’t. She still doesn’t. Surrounded by the secrets her house has kept from her, she tries and tries to see the shape of the thing happening to her. But all she has are pieces, these pieces, an incomplete body with too much hair and jewels and teeth but no face to see and understand.
Sophia gets unsteadily to her feet. She reaches up for the lip of the counter to hold on to. And she does understand something then, one thing, one little bone in the hundreds that make up a self.
The table so high she swings her legs in the air.
The bed she needs a staircase to dismount.
The staircase she needs a half hour to descend.
The chairs she drowns in. The kitchen counter she has to reach up to grab hold of. Oh, she thinks. How silly of me not to see. Not to know from the first day.
This house was never built for her.
Someone fashioned it lovingly, brick by beam, for the daily use of a woman much bigger and taller and stronger than Sophia. A giantess. Someone the size of her husband. Perhaps even greater than him. Someone with long, coarse black hair like the wig Mrs. Palfrey wore in the amphitheater.
It had never been her house at all.
Something breaks in Sophia. Or perhaps that little organ of dissatisfaction she had always lacked germinates and begins to send out sprouts at last.
Either way, she runs from it.
Out.
Into the night and the street, past curfew and into the reaching, grasping shadows that have waited for her for so long.
OPAL
22.??The fruit-bearing tree located beside the Eastern Gate is for decoration only and its issue is not safe to eat. Residents are encouraged to partake of all other orchards and groves within the bounds of clearly marked parks, gardens, or Arcadia Gardens infrastructure. Consumption of the issue of said tree shall constitute a gross violation of this Agreement and render it null and void.
BLACK TWIG
Sophia runs until her breath comes only in short, shredding, red flares, air burning out of her, her chest trying to leave the rest of her behind. She collapses where her lungs command. She has no single thought except to, hopefully, annihilate her pain in sleep and never wake.
The grass she lands on feels cool and damp against her hot cheeks. The night wind pilfers through the trees looking for fruit to steal. It prickles the skin on her back. She rolls over in the deep blue-dappled grass and opens her eyes onto the billion stars over Arcadia.
They give up nothing; they only shine as they were told to do.
Sophia’s heartbeat screams through her temples, pulsing in her fingertips, where she tore all her nails down to scraps pulling her house apart, and that’s how she knows it all really did happen, she is alive and she is Sophia, alive and warm and real and in gross violation of her HOA contract.