“Because it gets lonely down in the dirt,” Phillip continued, while I held my tongue to the steeple of my mouth. “Why do you think there are so many stories of ghosts trying to get people to kill themselves? Because they miss having someone there, someone warm. It doesn’t matter how many corpses are lying in the soil with them. It’s not the same. The dead miss the sun. It’s dark down there.”
“That’s—” Talia walked a hand along Faiz’s arm, a gesture that said look, you have to understand that this belongs to me. Her eyes found mine, liquid and unkind. In that instant, I wanted badly to tell her again that the past was so sepulchered in poor choices, you couldn’t get Faiz and me back together for bourbon enough to brine New Orleans. But that wasn’t the point. “—That’s pretty fucking metal.”
“We’ll be fine. Freshly certified man of the cloth right here.” Phillip pounded his sternum with a fist, laughing, and Talia immediately kissed Faiz in answer. He took her knuckles to his mouth, grazed each of them with his lips in turn. I stared at the skins of woven straw thatching the floors, shuddered despite myself. I was abruptly dumbstruck by a profound curiosity.
How many dead and dismembered women laid folded in these walls and under these floors, in the rafters that ribbed the ceiling and along those broad steps, barely visible in the murk?
Tradition insists the offerings be buried alive, able to breathe and bargain through the process, their funerary garments debased by shit, piss, and whatever other fluids we extrude on the cusp of death. I couldn’t shake the idea of an eminently practical family, one that understood that bone won’t rot where wood might, ordering their workers to stack girls like bricks. Arms here, legs there, a vein of skulls wefted into the manor’s framing, insurance against a time when traditional architecture might fail. Might as well. They were here for the long haul. One day, these doors would open and wedding guests would pour through and there would be a marriage, come the cataclysm or modern civilization.
The house would wait forever until it happened.
One girl each year. Two hundred and six bones times a thousand years. More than enough calcium to keep this house standing until the stars ate themselves clean, picked the sinew from their own shining bones.
All for one girl as she waited and waited.
Alone in the dirt and the dark.
“Cat?”
I blinked free of my fugue, fingers clenched around my wrist. “I’m okay.”
“You sure?” Phillip cocked a worried look, hair haloed by a slant of owl-light. “You don’t look like you’re fine. Is it—”
“Leave it,” Faiz said softly. The joy’d gone out of his expression, replaced by concern, a twitch of protective anger that carried to his teeth, his lips peeling back. I wagged my head, smoothed out a smile. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. “Cat knows we’re here if she needs us.”
The look on my face must have been a sight to see because Phillip flinched and ducked out of the room, mumbling about mistakes, cheeks blotching. I ran through my to-do list thrice, counted out chores, precautions, a thousand trivialities, until order restored itself by way of monotony. I glanced over, breathing easy again, to see Faiz and Talia bent together like congregants, a steeple made of their bodies, foreheads touching. It was impossible to miss the cue.
Exit, stage anywhere.
So, I followed the shutter-pop of Phillip’s new camera to where he stood in an antechamber, painted by the evening penumbra, dusk colors: gold and pink. A moting of dust spiraled in the damp air, glinting palely where particles caught in the cooling sun. At some point, the roof here had fissured, letting the weather slop through. The flooring underneath was rotten, green where the mould and ferns and whorls of thick moss had taken root in the mulch.
“Sorry.”
I shrugged. There were wildflowers by the lungful, swelling at Phillip’s feet. “It’s fine.”
His eyebrows went up.
A bird shrilled its laughter. Through the wound in the roof, I saw a flash of ambergris and tanzanite, the teal of a feathered throat. Phillip stretched, a Rembrandt in high-definition. “Cat—”
“You were just worried about a friend. It happens.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I’m not going to throw myself off a building because you were trying to be nice. That’s not how it works.” I swallowed.
“Okay. Just . . . tell me what you need, all right? I don’t—I don’t always know the right things to say. I mean, I’m okay at some things, but—”