Nothing lasts forever. Not Christmas, with its bright lights and spangled promises of good things that never quite come to pass. Not the dreams of magic that it conjures for children everywhere. Not even Krampus, with his sack of coal and his cold heart. Even villains grow old and achy, age softening their sharp edges, allowing things akin to nostalgia and loneliness to seep to the surface.

It made him wish that the mountain had not been hollowed out, like a sponge, full of tunnels and caves and oubliettes, designed to deter or trap any intruders. Designed to keep Krampus hidden, deep inside the mountain, where he could keep his lists of naughty children and plan his cruelty for the year to come. For if there was someone to seek him, they would never, ever find their way.

And if they did, what would they find? he asked himself, stroking his whitened beard and staring into the fire. Nothing but a sad old bovine, hiding himself away from the world. Disgust welled up inside him like bile. How was it that age had snuck up on him? He could not remember ever having been anything like a child . . . Then again, his type—oh, yes, there were others like him, though they went by different names, in different forms—lived a long, long time.

But nothing lasts forever. Castles crumble, wishes fade, even the oldest of the trees in the woods on the mountain above die after thousands of years.

“Then you must make it last!” he said to himself, rising from his chair and ignoring the knotty pains in his back. He took to pondering how he might do so while wandering the passages that curled around on themselves. Occasionally he stumbled across the remains of young daemons who liked to climb up from the deep fire pits to try to fight him. Even they could not find their way out into the world or back to Hell, once they were lost in Krampus’s labyrinth.

He also stumbled on other things, too, the sort that he had thought hidden for all time. Long-lost memories of a young boy, trying desperately hard to hide his hoofed feet from the other boys in the town. A broken silver fob-watch, its face studded with tiny rubies like drops of blood, lid carved with words in an old language he could not understand. And, in the darkest, farthest corner, where he could not remember having been before, a cloche jar that covered something shrivelled and desiccated. In the candlelight, he thought it looked a bit like a heart. As the flame flickered, he could have sworn that it gave a one feeble beat, then another.

Without knowing why, he lifted the glass gently and picked up the heart. It was warm. He lifted it to his lips, and swallowed it whole. A baby’s cry, thin and hollow, echoed through the hallway, dying away as a bitter wind blew through behind it. And, with that, Krampus knew what he must do—how he could indeed make his story go on forever. He walked through the tunnels, up the thousands of ancient stone steps, exiting through the huge fireplace of the abandoned castle topping the mountain in which he lived. Slowly, as the snow fell and winter bit the air with its sharp teeth, he set out, stumping across the late winter lands in search of his successor.

Hundreds of miles away, the girl Lulah, only ten years old and small for her age at that, set out in her mother’s only winter coat and shoes stolen from the general store in the raggedy strip of shops that had once been a village. She would need them, she knew, but it also didn’t hurt to have added another crime to her short list. Theft, though, was a small thing compared to what she had come to think of as the necessary mischief. Lulah had had to do something impressive to show Krampus she was capable of more than plain disobedience.

The stories her mother had told her about him were supposed to scare her, she knew. Instead, they had left her with a little kernel of hope that warmed her, despite the old shack they called home, the pinching hunger,

I kept my right eye closed because I saw ghosts through it. My parents thought they were imaginary friends I would soon outgrow—they weren’t. But what did they know anyway?

“One—or two?” my optometrist asked, switching lenses.

“Two,” I said. He repeated the process until I recited the words on the eye exam chart a few feet in front of me which had come into focus. To him, there were only words. But through my right eye, there was a woman—translucent, but not enough—in clothing stained by dried blood below the hips, smiling. In her hands, there sat a child’s head. I closed my eye.

“Please keep both eyes open for the exam,” said the optometrist.

My breaths stopped and opened my right eye. I screamed when the woman’s face, merged with the child’s in a strange blurring of features, shuddering momentarily like static channel, appeared before the lenses.

I squeezed my eyes shut, throat burning, tears drenching the neck of my shirt. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, but the other times were bearable—the visions weren’t as clear. It had only been a month since the ghosts appeared, but it felt like it had been years.

Before leaving, I paused by the entrance, listening to my parents’ whispers. Mother clutched Father’s arm.

“Well, what are we supposed to do about it?” Mother said.

“I’m not sure I’m qualified to offer advice on this . . . perhaps a specialist,” said my optometrist.

Behind my parents’ stood the woman with the child’s head in her hands—the faces no longer merged. She squeezed then stretched the child’s face, the skin looking far too elastic.

In a photo pinned up in my mother’s room, she cradled my newborn self on the hospital bed, smiling though her gown was soiled. She was smiling, but there was so much blood.

The woman stepped into my mother’s body, disappearing. And the child’s head floated towards me, its misshappen mouth ajar, mouthing, “Remember me?”

My parents never brought me to the optometrist again.

I didn’t want to see the ghosts, but they wanted to see me.

Later that night, my mother tossed me an eyepatch made of beige silk. “Here, just wear this for now. It should help with your . . . issues.” She swirled the glass of wine in her hand, a drop spilt over the side, dropping onto the red loveseat. A tight smile flashed across both our faces, teeth clenched so tight I was surprised they didn’t all fall out. So similar. I stopped smiling. The fabric of the eyepatch felt rough in my hand, like it had been used for a long while before.

In the bathroom mirror, the edges of the fabric seemed to dissolve into my skin, making it appear as though I only had one eye. Blending in wasn’t a possibility now.

“Why don’t you just put her in therapy?” my father asked.

“I never went to therapy, and I turned out fine,” my mother said, glaring from the corner of her eye.

“Well, did you see things, too?” Though he answered, his eyes stayed glued to his work computer, finding far more interest in his never-ending emails rather than his family. It was how he was raised. I hoped he didn’t expect the same from me.

Mother hesitated for a brief moment before the smile re-emerged on her face. “N-no, of course not.” Then her face hardened once more as she tsked. “Besides, what do you think the our girls at my book club would say if they found out our daughter went to therapy.”

Mother rose from her spot walked over to where I hovered by the living room entrance with some lipstick in her hand. “Here, this might help.” She waved her arms as if conducting an orchestra. “Cover up, if you will.”

She wasn’t trying to be funny, but I couldn’t see how lipstick would help me be more ‘normal’.

“When I was your age, all the girls wore it,” Mother said. Her hands shook as she painted the red over my lips, her eyes blank, as though recalling something she didn’t want to remember.

Mandy finds the jar of baby teeth in her mother’s sock drawer, the week after she turns eleven.

Daydreams about a frothy fairy with butter-blonde curls leaving coins under her pillow have long since evaporated; this is the first of many horse girl summers. The jar, white china with hand-painted blue flowers, is nestled between the tight-rolled pairs of black dress socks that Mandy was sent to borrow; at ten, she already wears the same size as her mother. Mandy takes it out without hesitation, knowing that it is for her, it is hers. The lid clicks against the jar’s hidden lip and Mandy opens it, holding it up to the light from the window.

It’s not a full set. She remembers losing a tooth while playing tag with the neighbor kids in their yard, and another that disappeared into the coat cranny of her second-grade classroom when, after recess, she bit down on her cold wet mitten to pull it off her hand.

All eight molars are there, though, pearly and opalescent and not quite real-looking, like dried bubbles of Elmer’s glue. She presses her thumbnail against one, half-expecting it to leave a mark. The edges where the root died away are sharp and thread-thin, protecting the stained crescent at the center even though there is nothing left to guard. When Mandy pinches it, the points bite into her fingertip. It seems to her as if that should have been the edge turned out against the world: ragged, ready to tear.

“Mandy?” her mother shouts, from downstairs. Her shoes clack up the staircase, but the carpet in the upstairs hall suffers the high heels in silence. She stops in the open doorway, looking at the jar in Mandy’s hand. “What are you doing? Your father and I are ready to go.”

Mandy slides the lid back on. The ceramic squeals unpleasantly, a betrayal of the delicate design. “These are mine.”

“What would you even do with them?” A question to answer the question that Mandy didn’t ask. She strips the jar from Mandy’s hand and settles it back into the drawer. “Come on now. We should have left for church five minutes ago.” Still, she finds the time for a skeptical up-and-down look at Mandy’s black slacks and blouse. “Are you sure you won’t wear that dress? It’s so pretty on you.”

Mandy squirms. “Do I have to wear pantyhose with it?” The slacks are uncomfortable enough as it is, tight in the thighs, not stretching like her jeans do. Hose are worse, with the control top biting into her belly and leaving red marks for hours after she’s free. They always leave her feet sour and sweaty, too, and she’s afraid the other girls in Sunday School will notice.

“Of course you need pantyhose.”

“Then I’ll wear pants.”

Her mother’s eyes narrow. “You look like a linebacker in that blouse.”

Even knowing this might have been coming, Mandy freezes. A deer in headlights doesn’t expect to be saved by its stillness; this is a hopeless gesture, not a sly one.

“Sit down,” her mother says briskly, and sets down her purse. “Unbutton your blouse and let’s see what we can do.”

Goose-bumps prickle Mandy’s arms as she perches on the edge of her parents’ bed. Her training bra pinches her under her armpits; she picks at the ugly little flower on the front of the band, where the two V’s of fabric meet and join.

“Hold still,” says her mother. “This will only hurt for a second. Like popping a pimple.”

Popping pimples hurts, too, of course, and sometimes, when her mother’s fingernails dig too deep, it leaves a scab that softens into a scar. Mandy watches her mother slide open a drawer in a different dresser and take out the scalpel case, holding the blade up to the light, taking one efficient swipe with an ethanol wipe. When she sets it to Mandy’s shoulder, parting the skin, Mandy doesn’t flinch. She feels the scalpel slide between muscle fibers of her deltoid; a solid section separates from the rest. There’s an acute tugging sensation before her mother tidily severs the inser...

This is a work of the author’s imagination, an alchemy of memory and soul’s longing.

Beth joined the turn-lefters, pulled off the highway, and found a park beneath a giant fig tree before the twins even registered. Then heads turned like open-mouthed clowns. Confusion; at last, the dawning.

They’d been restless, constrained by seatbelts and resigned to weekends of bushwalks, caves of glow worms, and low-ropes courses. Today, they were expecting the waterfall trail in the hinterland. Physical activity. When the inevitable had occurred—“Muuuum, he’s being mean to me.” Lucy-Ann kicked at her brother. “Am not,” Jack cried back, slumped in his seat with a huff, rubbed at his scrunched nose—Beth hadn’t intervened. She tried not to exercise her power too often, not since the mums at the school gate had asked how she managed to get the twins to listen and do: the first time, every time.

“Unnatural,” they’d muttered, envious. “Considering . . . ” Marking Beth as different on two counts.

“Are we there yet?” asked Lucy-Ann, blinking rapidly at Jack, her glass-green eyes a mirror for his. She sucked the ends of her fringe into spikes.

Beth nodded, smiled. She’d made one of each. They were seven years old and she still had to pinch herself. Mainly to stop staring at the twins in a manner that bordered on obsessive. Was this normal? There were only two names Beth could have bestowed on a boy and a girl with red hair and freckles—though Enid Blyton’s Jack and Lucy-Ann weren’t twins, but siblings, adopted by the Mannerings in the Adventure Stories.

The striped tent on the oval was unmissable, unmistakeable.

Jack flung off his seatbelt. “A circus? I can’t believe it!”

He was out the door before his words sank in. Had Beth done the right thing? Yes, she decided as she scrambled from the car. It was the trickery, the set up. They’d watched that documentary about children in family circus troupes, witnessed the behind-the-scenes grind of mucking out animal cages, washing leotards, endless rehearsal and injury. The hardened faces under paint.

She caught at a twig-thin arm of each child. “Let me fix your hair.” She spat in her palm and smoothed down Jack’s wayward curl, ran anxious fingers through Lucy-Ann’s matted locks.

Beth had never been to a circus. And she would let nothing dint her excitement. Better late than never. The childhood she’d wanted back when she devoured her Enid Blytons. Big Top adventures. Outdoorsy pursuits. Picnics. Hiking, camping, rowing. Midnight feasts.

The twins wouldn’t feel they’d missed out. No blanks to fill in later on. Life experience overcame the risks of an imagination.

When her parents’ yelling started, Beth would slip out her bedroom window along the branch that scratched at the glass. In the cradle of branches, she’d hidden a metal trunk. Inside, the poppets—and books. Each a self-contained world, so real she tasted the ginger beer, smelled the kerosene lanterns of smugglers, and heard the steady drip, drip, drip in secret tunnels. Worlds more real than her own. Even there, adults couldn’t be trusted.

When crockery smashed on the tiles, downstairs, Beth had made vows to the bound-stick poppets, dressed in feathers and leaves, sitting obediently against the bark. She’d not always imagined twins. Sometimes she would have four, or five, or seven. And a dog.

But never an only child, a lonely child. When she grew up, she’d promised them, hers would have adventures.

As a child, the author sketched detailed character studies of her future offspring. Names, birth dates, hair colour, temperament, interests. By age sixteen, her eldest’s name was set in stone, especially when—much later—she made her bargain.

Ringside seats. Blue plastic barriers. Tacky silver cardboard stars on the spangly curtains beyond. Not what she’d imagined.

Smells of fairy floss and popcorn wafted through the tent flaps,

There was nothing here but swirling grey fog, and me. The laces around my waist were cinched so tight I could hardly breathe. A comb threaded through my hair, and in my hands I held an apple.

For the longest time I sat in the haze, listening to silence.

Then, footsteps. Your face swam into view, all golden hair and emerald eyes. You spoke:

“Mirror, Mirror, on the wall,

Who is the fairest of them all?”

And because you were the first person I’d ever seen, I said, “You, my lady.”

You were scarcely more than a girl then, all laughter and dreams, your words an ever-flowing stream. You spoke of your maids, Gerda and Aili, how they always laced your dress too tight but made up for it with their endless servings of gossip. You spoke of festooned trees strung up in the new year, and how you feared the candles decorating their branches would set them alight. You spoke of hunting trips to the Wild Forest, and how your arrow brought down a boar that had evaded even your father.

I couldn’t see any of this. My only window to your world was that small oval of glass, through which I could see your golden tresses and carefree smile—and sometimes, when the light was perfect, faint shapes of your bedchamber. Your canopy bed, coloured a light purple, and the bookshelf filled top to bottom.

“Will you read to me?” I asked one day.

You giggled. “A mirror, asking me to read? Father would never believe me if I told him. Not even Gerda and Aili will.”

“Then don’t tell them,” I said, because even then, that felt important. “Will you read to me? Please?”

You sat down, and opened a book. Your voice was almost a song, as you read about knightly adventures and festive weddings.

I pressed my hands as hard as I could against the glass separating us, but it wouldn’t give. I hammered my fists against it, raked my nails across its surface. Bent over your book, you didn’t see me, and didn’t seem to hear me either.

You never knew how hard I’d tried to reach you.

“What do I look like?” I asked you once, tugging at the comb in my hair.

You giggled, and said, “My reflection?”

I dropped my hand and sighed. You seemed to understand my disappointment, for you added, “Well, if I stare really closely, I can see a cloud of grey smoke. And . . . yes, you have eyes. Beautiful red eyes.”

“Ah, I see.” I wondered if my only possessions—the laces, the comb, the apple—were mere illusions. Maybe I, too, was fog.

“Mirror, Mirror, on the wall,

Who is the fairest of them all?”

At the sound of your voice, I lifted myself from the fog. “You.” The answer was automatic now.

Once I drew closer to the glass, I realized you weren’t wearing your usual smile. Your eyes were red, as if you’d been crying.

“I guess that’s why that king chose me,” you muttered. “Father said he really liked my portrait.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I must marry the King of Argaull. And I must leave in a fortnight.”

“That’s great,” I said. Because in all the stories you’d read to me, marrying a king was a happy ending.

But you only shook your head, more tears gathering behind your eyes. “But his lands are so far away, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to come home again. He is almost my father’s age, and has a daughter by his past wife already. Do you think she’ll like me, Mirror?”

“Of course she’ll like you. Everyone likes you.”

“That’s not true.” But you smiled through your tears. “I’m glad you think so, though.”

A slow horror dawned on me. “If you are to leave for a faraway land, does that mean you’re leaving me?”

You leapt to your feet and threw your arms around me—or rather, around the glass that separated us. “No, never! I’ll take you with me, even if that means leaving everything else behind.”

It was the closest we’d come to an embrace. I leaned against the glass, and would’ve cried with you if I had any tears.

Fog.

Every evening we tie Mama down.

It’s my job to fold a clean rag for her to bite on, so she won’t hurt her tongue. Three folds, hot dog style. Now that I’m thirteen Baba even lets me place it between her teeth. Ray, four years younger, is too little to do anything except watch, but he wouldn’t want to help anyway. He still thinks only girls should bother with this stuff.

Baba does most of the important parts. He helps Mama into her seat at the dining room table. Buckles the leather straps around her ankles and wrists. Lines up three wooden chairs in front of her.

When Mama is secured and we’re all in our seats, Baba unwraps her scarf from around her neck. Peels away the soft layers of cloth, one after another, to reveal her second mouth.

It sits at the base of her throat, right above her collarbone. No lips. No teeth. Just a narrow slit like the eye of a snake, searching for prey.

Mama tilts her head back. A tongue emerges from her second mouth, wet and pink, and licks at the air. It can taste all the negative emotions we’ve accumulated throughout the day. How lonely I am at school. How stressed Baba is about the layoffs at his company. How angry Ray gets about everything, like when the older boys pick on him at recess, or when he doesn’t get strawberry ice cream for dessert.

Mama’s second tongue laps all these feelings up. Our fears, our worries, our woes. They leave our minds and take form on her body as bulges and bumps. Like tiny fists extending out beneath her skin.

On Bad Days, when we have too many feelings for her to digest, the growths split open and bleed. Mama strains against the straps like a wild animal. She screams through the rag between her teeth.

Most days, though, everything stays under her skin where it belongs. And me and Ray and Baba, we feel better. Empty. Light as air.

When it’s all over, when Mama’s eaten as much as we need her to, Baba takes off her restraints and smooths back her hair. Mama gives us our vitamin gummies. Asks us if we’ve finished our homework. Tucks us into bed, on a normal day, or lies down in front of the TV, on a Bad Day, to hide her bleeding body beneath blankets and scarves, and waits for our sorrows to scab over.

For months now I’ve been checking my neck in the mirror, hoping.

Today I find it. Just above my collarbone, where there used to be a smooth expanse of skin, there’s a tiny nub, no bigger than the tip of my pinky finger. Like a new tooth trying to poke through the gum.

Mama sees it when I come down for dinner with my chin held high. Her eyes flash down to my neck for a moment, and I think she might say something. You’re growing up. I’m proud of you. Congratulations. But her gaze skids away from mine, like a car from a wreck, and she turns back to the stove without saying a word.

After dinner, while Mama’s clearing the dishes, I sneak upstairs to the master bedroom.

Mama keeps all her scarves in the back of her walk-in closet. Dozens of them, of all shapes and colors. She has plain scarves, white and beige and charcoal, the kind every Asian mom gets at H-Mart for five bucks a pack. And scarves she brought with her from Hangzhou, embroidered with patterns of flowers and birds. Even a real silk scarf, bright scarlet, that Baba got her on his business trip to Paris last year, which she saves for special occasions. I wish she would wear it more. None of the other moms in our town have any scarves as exquisite as that one.

I’m not supposed to touch them, not even the ones from H-Mart. That rule made sense when I was younger. Less so now I’m almost a woman myself, old enough to be careful.

The dishes are still clanging in the kitchen. I pull the silk scarf off its hanger and drape it around my neck, the way I’ve seen Mama do it. Scarlet shimmers over my chest, my shoulders. I slide my hand underneath, to feel the base of my throat. What I have is still only a nub,

In time, the dedicated Spelunker will grow to instinctively recognize unreal architecture, senses picking up the minutiae that others miss. Wind coming from impossible directions; shadows cast at awkward angles; a dearth of wildlife; a strange doppler effect to sound, as though distance between source and listener stretched like taffy. Details and nothing more, but the details separate lost wanderers from professionals and the details are where the devils lie.

“Is this the building?” asked Dalvey, who knew the answer before the question left his lips. The subject of conversation was a nondescript, beat-up apartment block like the ones to the left and right, the brightness of the afternoon sun reflecting off windows and rendering the interior occluded.

“Check your map, Andy,” said Benjamin, midday glare reflected on beads of sweat on his forehead, migrating down the furrows of middle age and merging into rivulets that got lost in two days of stubble. Dalvey didn’t have to, the building wouldn’t be there, not on Google, not on print, and perhaps only in the memories of half of the neighbourhood. This was part of the ritual of their meetings. After thirty years, greetings became meaningless signals, part of the syncing algorithm old friends partook of, fresh information parsed and filed and forgotten.

Over the years, the competing gravities of distance and social circles had tugged at their friendship. Dalvey’s multiple stints on production lines being one of many Andy’s hardened his surname around him like a carapace, till there was nothing left but a uniform and a name tag. Benjamin got out, reached escape velocity out of small town backwoods, powered by the rocket of his brain, made enough money before the first crash, enough to retire once, go back into consulting from his home and retire again just around the second crash, coasting the waves of finance like some kind of unsinkable dinghy bobbing to the surface every time.

If not for one common hobby, Dalvey and Benjamin would have drifted apart, perhaps only with Facebook birthday notifications and yearbooks to remind them of shared guilt. They looked up at the abandoned building, knowing that the main door would have the accoutrements of modern architecture; burglar alarms and camera systems, yellowing like teeth under the elements; double doors with streaky glass; gaping mailboxes belching forth fliers and advertisements. And yet, were the two men to have compared what they saw to the details, the discrepancies would have added up. The colour of the doors, for instance, dark blue to one and green to another. Or perhaps the number of floors to the apartment building, or which windows were open or a dozen little things. For these buildings never looked the same to any two people.

“Come on,” said Benjamin, hoisting his gear up onto his shoulder. “We haven’t got all day.”

Unreal buildings are often mislabelled as haunted houses and the like. Their elusive nature makes them difficult to study, for there is no guarantee that the building will be in the same place the next day. Speculation on their existence is confined to forums like ours. While the exterior presents discrepancies to casual observers, interiors are far worse, physics and time seem malleable, with impossible room designs and even time itself becoming untrustworthy.

“Where to?” asked Dalvey. The ground floor was mercifully deserted, the building superintendent’s office empty. The temperature inside was chill; papers blew along the floor, dust swirling in tight spirals. Benjamin gestured to the shut door, the paper streamers on the vents that lay still. No way for the wind to get in. Then he pointed up.

“To the top,” he said, making towards the elevator.

The maintenance certificate in the elevator was blank and yellowing, the buttons arranged in a grid of at least thirty, some of the plastic was cracked, spiderwebbed fractures reminding Dalvey of crushed be...

I dusted the window panes and rolled up the curtains because Akwaugo was visiting. I first met her at the Lagos book festival. Someone in the crowd had stood up and asked a question on race in Africa, especially in black Africa. Did it exist? If we were all cleped ‘dark skinned’, was racism existent in our communities and office spaces? I stared at the direction from where the voice had come, but I only saw the few people sitting across from me. The rest was a blur. The facilitator cleared his voice to acknowledge the question when Akwaugo’s hand shot up. She sat about four seats away from me. My eyes could make out her hands, pale as milk. White.

“Another question?” the facilitator asked.

“No. An answer,” her shrill voice rang through the hall like small lightning. The facilitator looked confused. The audience wasn’t allowed to share their views until the end of the session. A volunteer, before the facilitator could make up his mind, handed a microphone to Akwaugo.

“Hi, thanks for this opportunity.” She sounded eager and excited. “Race has little to do with skin colour or the tribes and languages of people. Racism manifests in our preference of English to our mother tongue, and as colourism when our jobs favour only the light-skinned men and women, and our advert boards hold pictures of light-skinned people. Racism is the track of thought that our blackness is inferior to reds and yellows.”

A loud applause rocked the hall. Even the disgruntled facilitator nodded. Akwaugo sat down and looked across the room, at me because I was staring at her. She smiled. Googly eyes. White teeth. Had she spoken from a position of privilege?

She approached me after the session, her slender figure swishing to the left and right.

“Hi, my name is Akwaugo. Congratulations on the DAB award.”

“Thank you,” I murmured, “thank you so much.”

“I hear you live in Enugu.”

“Yes.”

“I live there too,” she said and smiled.

My bird cawed in the dream.

“I found someone for the urn,” I said to it.

“The lady from the festival?”

“Yes.”

“Do not let her near the urn.”

My bird’s voice did not resonate from yonder. It rang close; around the windows; on the ceilings. The year before, when I turned my thirty-five, the nub of my existence had started shriveling. I’d made futile searches for jobs, tried to engage with sewing and painting and writing. Nothing worked. I owed my apartment’s rent. The depressive episodes kicked in and I felt hunted and submerged by an inexplicable force. My mother took me to her one of her brothers, an old custodian of Udo, the oracle from her lineage.

“Udo!” my mother hailed the oracle from the entrance, “does anyone who knows you go hungry? Your daughter has come in lack. Will you not let her leave in abundance?” Her chubby arms shook as she ululated to the goddesses of her people. She was barefoot. She’d nudged me to remove my shoes too. The shrine was a mud house that stood at the base of Udi escarpment. The burbles of a nearby stream, Nwangele, filled our ears. Overgrown shrubs towered over the hut, giving the building a veiled look. It had a paved corridor. A closed door stood in the wall. There were about five carvings of goddesses sitting at the corridor. Three of the statues had a human face. Streaks of red paint ran from their eyes to their chin. Their arms birthed newer arms that entwined with one another. The remaining two was carved in human form, with birdlike heads. A smudge of fear spread in my heart.

The custodian, unbelievably thin and oblong-faced, appeared from the door in the wall and stood beside the carved deities. He looked like he was locked in a trance. His glassy eyes bore into us, unmoving. Then his body was racked with a loud sneeze, and he jumped, as if into sudden awareness. His eyes were blood shot like one who tumbled down from a place of deep slumber. He glared at us, looking at my mother first,

I always said I got to get out of here, but that was just talk. Now I for sure mean it. Anyway, I’m almost sixteen, so I have to go. Ma and Pa say sixteen is the limit for boys staying in the house.

My two older brothers took off when they hit sixteen, one a year after the other. Mike headed for the gold fields in the Klondike, and Charley went west to look for ranch work. He always liked horses, and there aren’t so many around here, nor people don’t take good care of them, only using them to haul things because nobody can afford a car, mostly. We ain’t heard back from either of my brothers, even though they promised to send money if they could.

Aside from me, my sister Daisy’s the only kid still at home, and she’s just twelve. Or she would be, if she was alive.

My name is Pete, and I live in the attic. My room’s right up under the slant of the roof, only one layer of wood between me and the asphalt shingles, and it gets all the heat in the summer, and not much of it in the winter, despite being upwards, the way heat is supposed to go.

Pa or someone who lived in my room before I did shellacked old ads from the Sears catalog on the wall, things I guess he wanted. One was a shotgun and the other was a guitar. I looked at those things before I went to sleep and thought, that person never got those things, and I probably wouldn’t get what I want, either.

I have radio dreams. Someday I want to sing with a big band like Paul Whiteman’s. He’s the King of Jazz. I’d like to be in his Rhythm Boys, but mostly I’d like to sing like Bing Crosby or Jack Teagarden.

Pa told me, “Get a clue. Nobody’s going to pay you to sing, Pete. There’s a Depression on. Learn to do something you can sell.”

Ma told me later that my voice gave joy to people who listened, like a songbird, but she said there were lots of songbirds out there, and most of them didn’t get paid anything.

Mike and Charley used to live in the rooms on the third floor below me. Ma and Pa slept in the big bedroom on the second floor, and Daisy slept in a closet off the hall across from Ma and Pa’s room. That’s where I still see her sometimes.

All the way downstairs was the kitchen, where Ma cooked and we ate, and the front room, where we did most everything else we did inside awake. The best part of that room was the radio, which we turned on after supper. If I could, I’d live in front of the radio. It wasn’t just the stories, it was the music I loved, live from ballrooms in New York City, where I imagined Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing on polished floors to big band jazz, with glass stars hanging from the ceiling, and everything in black and white. I saw myself up on the stage, crooning into a microphone as the conductor led the band through my favorite songs, “You Took Advantage of Me,” “Aunt Hagar’s Blues,” “Paper Moon.”

When Mike moved out, and Pa got laid off, Pa shifted the broken things from the other attic room down to Mike’s old room. He worked on the junk, replacing a broken footrest on a wooden chair, straightening the spokes of a wheel, planing down a drawer in a dresser that got stuck. He’d sell things after he fixed them, and soon enough he was bringing back other broken things he’d picked up at the junkyard or on trash day to fix and sell.

Ma set up Charley’s room as a sewing room. She put her ma’s machine in there, and piled up fabric she’d bought at sales and thrift stores in palmier days, and whatever odds and ends of buttons and threads she’d squirrelled away over the years. Pretty soon you couldn’t tell Charley had ever lived in there. She did piecework as she could, took in mending when she could find it, and she made baby clothes to sell.

I was at the top of the house separated from everybody else by a whole floor of junk, and sometimes that suited me fine. The parents couldn’t hear me moving around at whatever hours I chose, nor singing,

Time means less when you’re dead, and you’ve been dead a long while. Someone always brings you back, though. This go-around, it’s two little girls with a Ouija board, playing at your grave. Victoria Waite, Victoria Waite, kill my parents so I can stay up late! The rhyme has changed again, it seems. It doesn’t matter. Evolution is part of being a monster; the legend shifts, and you shift to fulfill it. They invoked your name. They’re at a Significant Place. They wished for a death.

You wake.

You didn’t wear the prom dress, that first time you resurrected.

It’s part of your signature, red dress, no shoes, but it only happened . . . the second resurrection? The third? It doesn’t matter, really. The legend shifted, so.

But that first time . . . you wore what your parents had buried you in: an ugly burlap sack of a nightgown, stained with your blood and sweat, piss and tears. The Redemption Gown, they called it. They never washed it, ever.

They hadn’t meant to kill you. Arguably, they’d been trying to save you; they’d been trying your whole life, in secret, in the dark. Things went too far. Head cracked against a wall. Not breathing, for a moment. Confusion, panic. Disposal.

But you were still alive, a little, when they threw your body in the old well.

You don’t remember the exact moment you died. You don’t quite remember being dead. But you do remember waking up that first time: the tiny metal thunk of a penny hitting your cheek. A boy’s voice—Todd’s Clarke’s voice—echoing through the well.

Victoria Waite, Victoria Waite.

Todd. Strawberry hair, big goofy smile. Earnest questions and silly little rhymes. His rented black tux had been a bit too big. You’d put your hands under his shirt. He’d laughed into your mouth.

Victoria Waite, Victoria Waite. Where did you go? Come back, it’s late.

One thing you don’t have is a signature weapon.

Of course, anything can be a weapon. You decapitated a vice principal once with an office door. You electrocuted a mayor with gin and a string of Christmas lights. You don’t exactly make puns—you never speak at all—but you’ve been known to indulge in the occasional irony kill. Your high school gym teacher, for instance. Shoving that golf club down his throat. Really, it made it further than even you would’ve imagined.

Still. You were all bird bones, back when you were alive, easily dislocated, easily crushed. Being dead is different: still skinny, forever sixteen and gawky, but there’s strength in your arms and legs now, even though they’re all bent and broken from the fall. It’s a very particular type of strength, the kind you only get from climbing out of your grave.

You don’t have a signature weapon because you don’t want a signature weapon. Weapons break, get stuck. Weapons are less effective the more you use them. You’ve always preferred a signature method: making flesh origami with your own hands. Snapping bones, contorting bodies. Creating new, agonized shapes.

This is how you killed Molly’s mom.

As a kid, Molly Guzman was an asshole. She shoved younger kids around. She stole their lunch money. She started that stupid chant. Wait, Victoria Waite! Which was inevitable, really, considering your surname—but still. You hated her guts. You hated her stupid pretty face. You hated her streak of pink hair and the bruises she didn’t bother to hide and how she was too cool to know the answer, even though she obviously did know all the answers. You hated everything about Molly until you were fourteen, and she pushed you into the bathroom wall, and you kissed her, suddenly you just had to kiss her, and she kissed you back, she kissed you back a lot, and you were staring at each other, breathing hard, all what the fuck, what the fuck.

“This can’t happen again,” Molly said, and you agreed because if your parents ever found out—

No. They couldn’t. They wouldn’t.