teeth.
“Cat?”
I jolted. I was back where I’d originally been standing, diagonal to the mirror, no dead woman holding me to her breast. Not even a sheen of sweat on my skin to tell you I’d been scared out of my mind. Just silence and the mildewed heat, the taste of the room sitting heavy as altar bread, ashen and stale and oversweet.
“You okay?” Talia leaned her weight against the doorway, arms crossed, a hundred sentences suspended between each syllable, most saliently this: what the fuck are you doing? No real animosity, however. Talia’s too cultured for that. But that perennial caginess because you can dress a pig in diamonds but it’ll still drown itself in slop first chance it gets. No matter how often Talia smiled at me, she did not want me here.
“You were staring at the wall.”
“Was I?”
That slimming of her mouth again and when she spoke, it wasn’t with her satin polish, bitterness coarsening up her tone. “You know, we don’t have to like each other but you don’t have to be a bitch.”
Bitch is the kind of word that reads like a gunshot, rings like a punch. I snapped straight at the sound, the world clarified again: distant warm candle-glow and Talia’s glacial stare. “What is your problem with me? And I mean besides the one I already know.”
“My problem is that you can’t even answer a question without trying to be a smartass.”
“Hate to break it to you but I’m not trying to be smart, I am—”
“See? That’s what I mean. I asked you if you were okay. That was all. And you couldn’t even answer that without some kind of goddamned wisecrack.”
“Did you actually mean it?”
“What?”
“Did you actually mean it?”
“The fuck are you talking about?” Talia gawked at me. “What are you even talking about now?”
I could see why Lin defaulted to wit where he could. Easier to run your mouth, run from the Sisyphean work that was being emotionally open. Easier not to think about her and what my brain mutinied from remembering about the girl in the mirror. I trailed fingers along the roof of my head, patted down my hair, and smiled. “Your concern about whether I’m okay. Did you mean that?”
“Fuck me.” Shoot and score. “That’s what I get for trying to be nice to you.”
“That’s what you get for being fake.”
“What do you want from me?” Her voice brittled. “I’m trying for Faiz. I don’t like you and I don’t think that I’m an asshole for it. You tried to break us up. But you know what? I’m working on that. I would trade a lot of money for you to not be here but this is where we are. Fucking meet me halfway.”
“If it helps, I wish you weren’t here either.”
“I hope the house eats you.” Talia, her charity only good for so much.
“I hope the same about you.”
4
Whose turn is it?”
“Not it.” Lin lobbed a kernel of caramel popcorn upwards, missed its descent by a millimeter. It bounced off his nose and rolled under a shelf. Fat-faced dolls in ragged magistrate wear, chignons still sleek, watched us from beside princesses in full jūnihitoe, cascades of emerald and golden damask, their brows dewed with brass. I stared as a fly hatched from the husk of a boy’s small porcelain skull. Of all the figurines, this was the only one to have not survived time’s touch. It looked like someone’d grabbed him by the jaw, squeezed until the cheekbones snapped, fracturing inwards. A sacrifice.
The thought filled me like ice water.
The dolls—an audience of dozens, set on thin shelves— stayed silent as Talia padded back inside from wherever she had been, their hands on their thighs, suspended on the brink of breath. It was late enough to lose track of the hours to exhaustion. Talia made us parade through every room until we found this one. This one because the last six lacked the right atmosphere. I’d thought it was stupid at first. But as we told stories of drowned things and hungry ones, it started to make sense. There was power here, even if it was of our own invention.
We killed a candle with every story until there was one last flickering survivor. Its light twitched through the shoji screen. The walls here frothed with waves and rough ocean. Through its lambent waters, the paint glittering as though tinctured with crushed sapphire, woodblock octopi watched us incuriously.
“I’ll do it.” I flipped my phone onto its screen, pounded down the last Asahi, chasing down the thin, flat flavor with Lin’s plum wine. My teeth were just sugar now, furred with so much plaque I couldn’t stop working my tongue over them, over and over. Like a horse. Like a dog that’d gotten into a bag of toffee. Back. Forth. Back. Forth. “I’ve got a story.”