When I opened my eyes again, all was gone, but I felt a deep, stomach-hollowing dread, like meat being carved off of bone.
I did not have time for dread. On the white tile floor, a rosy band of light fell like a dropped knife. I braided my damp hair and hurried downstairs in my housecoat, the spiny-tailed monster scuffling at my heels. I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. In the foyer, the grandfather clock gonged seven.
The water squealed inside the kettle, and I poured it into two teacups. My hands, though shaking, looked as they always did: the old burn mark scored across my palm and my knuckles stippled with tiny scratches where my teeth cut into the skin when I jammed my fingers down my throat.
The most impossible of all impossible things had happened last night: I had gone out of the house alone and come back the same. My lie had not transformed me. Oblya had not sullied me. Foreign men had not ravished me, carriages had not trampled me, street music had not made me bleed from my ears. I had sneaked past Undine and not been caught. I had disobeyed Rose and I had not felt my stomach gnaw and clench in protest.
Perhaps, it occurred to me, I had undergone the most terrifying transformation of all. Perhaps I had become a girl who did not care about lying to her father or betraying her sisters. I thought of the compact I had buried under the tree, but the thought was evicted from my mind in an instant. I could hear Papa’s footsteps on the stairs.
Breathing all too steadily, I went to the icebox. My scarred hands lifted the lid. It was empty.
No, this couldn’t be. I closed the lid and opened it again, as if it were a music box and I could reset the song, start it over from the beginning. But still there was nothing inside.
I could not understand. I had cooked a chicken liver with browned onions for Papa last night, and it was well before Sunday, which was shopping day, when my father went out into the city and came back with all the meat and vegetables we needed for the week. The icebox had been full of varenyky filling and the jars stuffed to the brim with pickled cabbage and whitefish.
I let the lid slide shut and stood up and perused the shelves. There were only vials of herbs, mostly empty, and onion skins that lined the cabinet floor like autumn foliage. A roach skittered inches from my reaching fingers. I closed the cabinet door.
And then fear spread deep and cold in me, like a pond in winter. Papa had gone into the sitting room; I heard the floorboards groaning under his weight and the silk of his housecoat rasping against the couch’s velvet cushions. The kettle on the stove had gone silent, and the water I’d poured into the teacups was only lukewarm.
My bare feet were numb against the tile as I crossed the threshold of the kitchen, to where Papa sat, without anything but my own trembling, empty hands.
“Marlinchen,” he said. The bags under his eyes were exceptionally purple and fat. “Where is my breakfast?”
“There’s nothing,” I managed, the words squeezed through the small gap in my closing throat. “The icebox and the cabinets are empty. All the food is gone.”
I watched the fury rise in Papa, fettered behind his eyes and bound in the white knuckles of his clenched fists. His whole body shook like a spirit trapped in an oil lamp. He stood up and came close to me, so close that I could smell the sourness of sleep still on his breath and see each bristling hair of his beard, straws of indigo that held none of the buttery morning sunlight, that swallowed all of it up into a matte and pitiless blue.
I shut my eyes and readied myself for the blister of air that his screams would visit across my face. But all that came was a whisper.
“I’m so hungry, Marlinchen,” he said, his voice dreadfully soft. “I feel like there’s a snake in my belly that eats the food that falls down my throat. I feel like it’s been a hundred years since I last put a bite of anything on my tongue. I can hardly remember the taste of pork varenyky or sour cream or blackberry kvass. The curse has its teeth in my mind, not just in my stomach. It’s chewed up all the parts of me that remember what it’s like to be full. What it’s like to be sated. It hurts, Marlinchen. It hurts.”
I opened my eyes. There were tears beading on Papa’s stubbly lashes, which were as blue as his beard but finer, limned with sunlight that made his tears look like morning dew on wheat grass. It took another moment, the grandfather clock ticking out each unbearable second, before I understood.
“Did you eat it all?” I squeaked out. “Everything in the icebox and the cabinets—”
Before I could finish, and in one swift, uninterrupted movement, Papa’s hand was on my chin, fingernails digging into my cheeks. I gasped as his thumb pushed down hard against my throat, hearing my own pulse thumping under his skin.