They looked up from their phone, and there he was.
Standing in front of them on the sidewalk. As if someone had cut twelve years from time’s reel and spliced it rough, leaving new scratches at the corners of his eyes. Seams of grey in his hair, but his hands the same. Half-curled at his sides, that immortal, restless reflex to grab and hold.
“Riley,” he said. Brushing dust from the name, it seemed. Stiff with disuse and fragile where the syllables joined. “God. You look…”
Seams, deep, at the corners of his mouth as well. He had said he would age.
He had said he would be practically human. He hadn’t seemed to realize what he was implying about them by saying so.
“Don’t.”
They hadn’t planned to speak. They hadn’t thought they could. Their lungs seemed full of nothing words could be made out of, a hot, sick, ballooning pressure fired by every beat of their heart. Their pulse throbbed in their grip on the phone.
If he’d dared to look surprised, whatever was in their lungs might have blown. But what he offered them in a wince was barely better—apology of the cheapest sort, defunct currency digging deeper shadows into the corners of his eyes.
“I know you’re upset,” he acknowledged. “But I need to talk to you. It’s about…”
His gaze tracked down to their hand trembling around the phone. The ring that banded their third finger, biting prettily into the skin with the strength of their grip.
To what should have been the point of pain. A man passing them, a blur on the edge of their awareness, hissed in discomfort and rubbed at his hand.
They loosened their grip. Finger by finger, and slid the phone into their pocket. Their awareness spun out again on its natural axis, tracking everyone who passed them by.
Everyone close enough to threaten, or be threatened by, their person. Twelve years they had lived at the center of that paranoid rotation, and it was all because of him.
“You think it’s that simple?” they asked. “You think I meant ‘I never want to see you again unless you decide you have something important to say’?”
Three people passed them. Two glanced their way, the smug, nervous eye roll of pretending not to be fascinated by a lovers’ feud in public. Careful, that paranoid center of their consciousness warned.
He raised a hand halfway, hovering from his side. Not quite towards them, but that curl in his fingers still so clearly wanted this to be a problem he could solve by holding them.
The hurt in his eyes said he had hoped it would be. Somehow, he had managed to convince himself there was some chance they would sink into his arms.
“Riley—”
They stepped back against the flow of the sidewalk. Someone’s elbow clipped theirs, rocking their awareness on its worn track. Someone else cradled her arm and cursed as she carried away the pain they should have felt.
“Just stay away from me,” they said. No longer speaking from the pressure in their chest. The look in his eyes had bled it off, draining their voice from a shout strained through teeth to the bottom of their lungs. “I don’t want anything to do with you.”
They turned away. Tensed against the flow of the sidewalk, the eyes that tried to meet theirs. The possibility that he would follow them.
He didn’t. The hum of the sidewalk accepted them back into itself. Its curiosity dispersed back into the indifference of dozens of people with their own destinations, their own worries and unwelcome pasts.
Riley held themself by the arms, the ring a wink of reflected grey sky in the corner of their vision, and walked away from theirs without looking back.
They looped back home by the next street. It meant a longer walk, more time spent skirting people who didn’t deserve the risk of their proximity, but better that than the risk they would have run by trying to walk past him.
That he might reach out. Catch them by the arm, and, staring so closely into his eyes, it would have been impossible for them not to remember.
How simple it had all seemed, once. How happy they would have been to see him.
When he had been the strangest thing in their life, and that had seemed like a good thing. A cracked-open doorway of the borderline bizarre, a confidence that said he was plugged into something electric. A flagrant, romantic familiarity with the past, talking about the world centuries buried like a show-off who had been there.
Riley leaned past the balance of their fists, braced on either side of the sink.
The rust stained into its bottom, overlapping circles of tin cans past, divided their reflection into senseless Venn diagrams of a face far too young for the grim set of its mouth. For the distance in its eyes, staring back at a life they were starting to lose track of.
City by city. The day was collapsing through the smeary window above the sink, flattening November’s gaunt, dreary light to a thread on the horizon. The rail yard wound iron and purposeless towards it, still except for those hanks of mangy grass grown long enough for the wind to catch and tear.
The wind wailed and exhausted itself against the side of the trailer. A lean and creak in the walls; lying awake the night before, they’d thought of what would happen if it collapsed on top of them.
Not asking themself. Not wondering. They would crawl out of the rubble unharmed. Someone else nearby would die, their body springing apart in a sudden, senseless eruption of blood and shattered bone.
Riley would follow the wind to another city. Wash off the dust and no blood. Find another set of four precarious walls to call home, for now.
The wail and creak tapered to a sigh. The subtle lean in their world straightened; in the silence, they could still only just hear the knock at its door.
Soft and tentative. The ring bit into their tightening grip.
Four months they’d called that place home, for now, and not once had anyone knocked on the door. They knew, didn’t they?
Of course. The bare bulb above the window hummed its thin filament glow. They couldn’t pretend not to be home.
Not well. But they didn’t owe him the courtesy of pretending well, did they? They could turn on every light in the trailer, curl up small on the kitchen floor, and leave him in the cold. Listen for the sound of footsteps leaving. He couldn’t outlast them.
No one could anymore. They turned towards the door.
Not compelled. Nothing had ever forced them to orbit him the way they had.
No telepathic influence or supernatural gravity. It would have been easier if they’d had something like that to blame. But it had only ever been them.
It had only ever been love. Not the kind they’d ever expected to put a ring on their finger; not a kind they’d ever thought would need to.
They opened the door.
And there he stood, of course. On the concrete slab outside, hunched and holding himself, his cheeks whipped to high color by the wind.
Hands trapped under his arms for warmth. No sign that he had wondered if he would have to knock again.
The look in his eyes, pale, concrete confidence, said he still knew their orbit. They’d never circled as far away from him as they had thought.
Their grip tightened on the doorknob. Something desperate, pleading, real broke through a crack in his confidence.
“Wait,” he urged them. “Just listen to what I have to say. Please—I promise, I wouldn’t have found you again if it wasn’t important.”
“Important to you doesn’t mean jack shit to me.” The ring scratched against the doorknob. There hadn’t been a day in the last twelve years when they’d managed to forget it, but his return had brought it up raw, sharper than ever through the skin of their awareness. “I told you to leave me alone. There’s nothing for you to fix here. Understand? You blew it this time. It’s over.”
They tried to slam the door as if they meant it. The walls around them shivered with the impact.
Then with the wind, wailing around the pocket of safe silence they had tried so hard to keep for themself. They stood still with their hand on the doorknob, trying to mean it.
It wasn’t fair that slamming the door on him felt so much like slamming it on their best memories. The ones he’d wound himself into, like a cough that seemed benign until it started to rattle deep in the lungs. Whatever he should have been, his place in those memories made him a reminder of happier times.
The first time they’d visited an antique shop together. He had been almost rowdy with excitement, darting from one curio to another as if through time. He had tipped a brim-worn top hat over his brow and winked at them, and they had laughed for how much he looked like he belonged under it.
The giddy August night, all mist and humid city light, when they’d shown him their engagement ring. He had smiled; at the time, they had blithely accepted it, but in hindsight, that smile had been load-bearing. Straining beneath the weight. He’d said he had never thought they would actually go through with it.
The last time the wind had howled around them both. Beating thin sleet against the window of a hospital room, and he’d held their hand in both of his, pressing his ring and voice against their cold fingers.
I can fix this. His words had seemed to drift down to them, coalescing slow and heavy from the morphine haze. I can fix this.
Their grip tightened around the doorknob again. No coercion. Nothing to blame. Just a fascination, maybe, with how much it could still hurt—that wound of the heart they couldn’t have given away if they had wanted to.
They opened the door again.
He stood with a hand half-raised to knock. At least he hadn’t been quite that sure of them.
Brows raised. A question in his gaze, tears at the corners, stung to life by the wind.
They stepped back from the door. Breaking their gaze down and away from his, making space enough, just, for him to step across the threshold without touching them.
He did. They let the wind’s riptide take the door from their hand, and he caught it before it could slam, easing it silently back to its frame.
He glanced from the gaunt fingers of water damage that reached down from the ceiling to the latest groan in the walls. If he showed even a glimmer of pity, they would throw him out. Lock the door behind him and leave him to the night coming on frigid.
He didn’t. They had never seen where he’d lived during their years of friendship. Maybe he’d stored himself in the same out-of-the-way spaces; the set of his jaw said he understood.
“All right,” they said. Holding themself as he had against the wind, hands trapped cold against their ribs. “Talk.”
His gaze tracked back from the trembling walls to them. The tropic blue of his eyes washed out by bare light and uncertainty. Had they ever once, in all the years of their friendship, seen him at a loss for words?
Once. In the nauseous floral fug of a funeral parlor, too late to call it a friendship anymore. The last time they had ever expected to see him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That isn’t what I came here to say, but it has to come before anything else. I’m sorry I didn’t warn you.”
“But not sorry for doing it.”
“You were dying.” His voice dipped on the last word. The circle of paler, softer skin the ring had once left around his finger had roughened and ruddied, no sign now that it had ever been there.
“At least I was doing it honestly. You knew that, if you’d asked me, I never would have agreed to it.”
“I didn’t know it would be him,” he insisted. “Just someone nearby. If I had—”
“And you think that would have been better?” Their fingers curled tight against their ribs. “If some nurse had ended up with my cancer instead? You think I’d have been all right with that?”
“I don’t know,” he said. Fists clenched at his sides, another phrase in the tactile language of the man they’d once been naive enough to think they understood—nothing I could have done. “Would you have been? Could you have learned to live with that, if it meant you and he could have been happy together?”
“But we couldn’t have,” they pointed out. “You know that. You knew. I can’t even age without putting the ‘misfortune’ off on someone else. If you had asked, I’d have said to just let me die. You can’t come in here and apologize for never giving me that choice.”
Twelve years later. Twelve years of city to city, never staying long, never stealing more than a few months from any one unlucky neighbor.
Twelve years of supporting themself on an unsuspecting net of other people. Shedding the blood of their mistakes from strangers, dealing out the diseases manufactured in the proven-faulty factory of their body. No apology could make up for making them such a monstrous, involuntary parasite.
“So don’t try,” they said. “Just tell me why you’re here.”
He stared at them. As he had twelve years before, in the humming, unreal light of a funeral parlor, fists twitching half-open and shut at his sides—there must be something I can do.
“I need it back,” he said.
The wind leaned long and wailing against the side of the trailer. The only sound for miles, except the brittle tinkling of the bulb above the sink.
“You said you couldn’t take it back.” Their voice hung fragile in the air. Like a taut tungsten filament itself, ready to break. “Back then. You said it didn’t work that way.”
“It doesn’t,” he confirmed. “I don’t need it back for me. There’s someone—”
“No.”
He blinked. Surprised at last, and had they ever seen him that way before? Not even in the funeral parlor. Not even when he had finally seemed to realize he was losing them for good.
“You’ve got someone else you want to inflict this on now?” they asked. “Someone you want to ‘save’? No. God, you actually had the nerve to say you were sorry. You haven’t changed at all. You—”
“Please. She’s—”
“—still think you can just—”
“Riley.” The firm grip he tried to keep on their name wavered and broke. That silenced them, more effectively than any shout would have. “Please. She’s dying.”
His eyes shone with new desperation and the same old righteous urgency. They sighed.
“And I don’t suppose you’ve told her what the alternative would be,” they said. “If you had—if you explained all the consequences and asked if that was something she could live with—maybe I could believe you’d actually learned something from what happened between us.”
Maybe they could have believed his apology had been more than a foot in the door. But his gaze trailing to the floor told them all they needed to know.
“You haven’t changed,” they repeated. “Could you even take it to her yourself, or were you expecting me to do it?”
“I can’t carry it,” he admitted. “If you tried to give it to me, that would count as you abandoning it. It would be back on your finger before I made it to the highway.”
The way it had reappeared when they’d tried slipping it between the bars of a storm drain, or burying it in a field on the edge of the city and winter. Hoping for the frost to hold it. It had always been back by morning, sparkling clean of dirt or drainage. The carvings around its band as brightly polished as they must have been when something else had first passed it into human hands.
“Come with me,” he urged them. “You can ask her yourself. Or I’ll ask her while you watch. We’ll make sure she fully understands the consequences before you pass it over.”
His gaze had brightened back from the floor. The same old inspired resolve, an eager twitch in his fingertips.
Still the same man they had once so recklessly thought they’d known. The one who had worn that ring like a choice—who had seemed to see the world as a challenge, equal parts carnival and empty threat.
“If I pass it over,” they reminded him. “If she said no, you’d have to accept that.”
“Of course,” he agreed, too quickly. “All I’m asking is for you to give her a chance.”
The chance he’d given them in their sleep once, to live? Or the one he hadn’t given them, to choose whether they wanted to? His eyes, his hands, said he wanted it to be that simple again. He wanted what he had always wanted, which was not to lose anything he’d decided was his.
“I’ll meet her,” they decided. “That’s all I’m willing to promise for now.”
A broad smile, all relief, softened the lines of his face and urgent light in his eyes. Not quite the same man they had once thought they’d known. That man had never seemed to doubt anything in the world enough to be relieved when it didn’t hurt him.
“That’s all I’m asking for,” he repeated. “Do you need time to pack anything?”
They turned their gaze across the place they’d called home like an uneasy compromise. The bare light and stained walls. The card table and single chair that had been standing there when they’d arrived, and nothing they had brought with them.
The closed bedroom door with a sullen seam of darkness around it, always.
“No,” they said. “Let’s get out of here.”
His car hummed through the moonless night.
The tension that had crawled into Riley’s stomach when they’d first seen it had settled into light slumber. If they were ever in a serious accident, it would be a horror story for someone, yes. A bloody wreck of a body in a nearby farmhouse, in bed, perhaps, found crushed and still tucked beneath gore-soaked quilts by someone who would never understand. But he drove as deftly as ever, barely waking the world as they passed. Pulling a breeze through the grass that bent corn silk-fine across the ditches, shadows from the ruts and stones in the road.
They watched the world shiver in the rearview mirror, in the fading red of taillights. The countryside turning over in its sleep; they rubbed their thumb at the base of the bare finger beside the ring, where they had worn another, once, by choice.
“You never congratulated me when Adam and I got engaged,” they recalled.
He glanced their way for the first time since pulling away from the trailer. His fingers flexed tighter around the wheel.
“Didn’t I?”
“No.” They rocked their head against the backrest. “You talked around it. ‘That’s a hell of a thing.’ ‘I never thought you’d actually do it.’ If I hadn’t gotten sick, would you have done what you did anyways?”
Gaze front again. The headlights’ glow held him in profile, tracing the lines of doubt and weariness the last twelve years had etched into his face. He had learned something about pain in those years, hadn’t he? About being a valid target for the world. For everyone but them.
He, alone among everyone living, wasn’t a valid target for the misery they spun off. Former bearers of the ring still carried that much favor, at least. When he’d told them so in the funeral parlor, his voice had been filled with unforgivable hope.
“No,” he said. “I was going to start phasing myself out of your life after the wedding. I had already put it off longer than I should have. Four years, wasn’t it?”
“And two months.” They let their eyes fall shut. The hypnotic hum of tarmac at speed held their skull from behind and burred almost inaudibly in their voice. “Were you going to tell me why?”
“No. What would have been the point? I was going to make up something about work. ‘Relocation, sorry, kid, you know how life is. Let’s keep in touch.'” He paused. They didn’t look to see whether his gaze had strayed back to them. “It might be hard for you to believe, but I did want you to be happy.”
“I believe that,” they said. “You’re just not a good judge of what happiness looks like for other people. Maybe you were, once.”
Long before they’d ever met him. Before the ring, and a life measured, by necessity, by how much harm he was willing to do to other people.
“I wanted to be,” he said. Softly, almost lost beneath the sound that bore them through the sleeping dark. “For what it’s worth.”
“Not much,” they said. Settling from him towards the window, opening their eyes on the ghost-rush of grass and faraway lights. White flares marking the people they could put their pain off on, strangers who would die their death for them unasked if it came to that. “Maybe nothing at all.”
He made no answer to that. The headlights pulled them on through the dark by breeze and shadow. They sat with their head supported against their hand and the window, the ring a cold glint in the corner of their eye, and waited for the miles to bring them to the same choice he had once taken from them.
They’d half-expected him to drive to a hospital. They’d braced themself for it, as they had for stepping into the car.
But as November’s milky, fitful dawn began to tug at the horizon, he swung a traveler’s circle around a city they’d lived in six years before. He turned off on a tiny concrete capillary leading into the suburbs, one of hundreds, a labyrinth of lush arboreal names. Birch Street and Sycamore, an asphalt, apologetic echo of the forest they had replaced.
The neighborhood was just starting to blink awake in a scatter of lit windows when he slowed, turned at last into the driveway of one of its dove-grey, identical houses. Dark windows, and silence once the engine died.
Riley opened their door as soon as it did. Levered themself up into the silence and driveway, before the dread they’d been carrying for most of the drive could set and harden.
They stretched their arms overhead and found no soreness to loosen down the length of their spine. Of course not. A handful of people on the path they’d traveled would wake road-stiff and baffled as to why. It would be some of the most trivial harm they had ever done to strangers.
He watched them from across the car. Nothing in his face they could read, hands hidden. Not a word as he turned to lead them towards the door.
They followed. In theory, they could still have run. Lost themself in the counterfeit forest of the suburbs, the same way they could have dropped the ring out the car window on some cold stretch of road without a name.
Both would have been equally pointless delays. Like the ring’s polished carvings, a cursive abstract that had never resembled anything to them but a circle of grasping hands, eternal give and take, their life had always been coming around to that. Back to him, and the decision the ring demanded implicitly, eventually, from anyone who wore it.
He held the door for them. They stepped inside ahead of him, and wondered what they’d expected.
Some sign of soul? The sort that was supposed to seep into a place called home, no for now appended? No surface they could see seemed porous enough for that. White walls bare as theirs, but pristine, fresh paint outpacing dawn with its own mirage-wet glow. Reflected as an immaculate ghostlight against linoleum the same, ceding surgically clean, smoothly to wood and a silent, perpendicular hallway.
They stepped out of their shoes. Bare feet on warm linoleum, the faint vibration of a furnace somewhere below.
A cloying sickroom heat. Anxiety skated across their skin. In theory, they could still have left.
He stepped ahead of them. In theory, they could still have bolted for the door.
Run. If they struggled, they could still stretch that circle of time a little wider. Buy themself another twelve years before they looked up to find him standing in front of them on a sidewalk again.
They followed him down the hall. No pictures hung on pristine white walls. After Adam, they’d had no one left to outlive. How long had it taken him to become the sole survivor of wherever he’d started?
The closed doors, silence, said not long enough. He stopped before the last door, closed at the end of the hall, and turned, and waited.
Watching them. Nothing in his face they could read. Hands held open at his sides, the body-language equivalent of radio static. No signal, no message.
They reached past him. The doorknob turned smoothly in their grasp. The door glided inwards.
Walls striped white and lavender inside. The first thing they saw with clarity was the poster over the bed, cluttered in next to the window. A round, blithely smiling cartoon rabbit, one paw raised in an aimless wave.
A chill poured down their back, prickling between their shoulder blades. A liquid seep of realization, last-second dread as their gaze drifted down to the bed.
Sheets dotted with balloons, bright yellows and blues. Clutched tight in one small hand, shoved away from the other, a thin arm flung towards the light that lapped at the windowsill.
A child’s face, flushed and sticky with fever. Riley stood in the doorway. Their pulse broke over them in waves.
He stood behind them. Breath held, silence above the hum in the floor and their head.
Released at last in a rough, tentative sigh. “Riley—”
They pushed past him. Back down the hall, carrying something like the throb and gasp of that terminal fever in their own chest.
Feeling for the wall. They followed it with one numb hand, tracing its lack of history towards a vague thought of the foyer and fresh air.
They found the dining room instead. Light ran in long, oceanic ripples across a varnished table. Two chairs.
They didn’t sit. Gripped the table’s edge instead, staring down at the waxy smear of their reflection in its surface.
His steps padded softly after them. Stopped close enough that he could have reached out and laid a hand on their shoulder. He didn’t.
“I didn’t—”
“You knew.” They tried to channel all the crushing heat from their chest into the words. But their throat had narrowed to an ache and let so little of it through. “You knew I’d—god. I honestly thought you might have changed.”
“I tried to,” he claimed. “I’ve tried to do right by her. But when the doctors said—”
“Who is she? Yours?”
The breath by which he might have explained himself hitched back into his throat. Held, then given up as another of those unsteady sighs.
“Not biologically,” he said. “Just someone who slipped through the cracks. I’ve been looking after her.”
“Out of the goodness of your heart.”
“Yes, actually.” He stepped up beside them, a fist set against its reflection on the table. “I saw an opportunity to do some real good. No crooked bargains or fae curses. And it worked out that way, for a while.”
The silence whispered what he had left tacit—until it hadn’t. Until she’d gotten sick, and the world’s natural laws, bear your own suffering, die at your own time, had said her time had come.
“You just can’t let it go,” they murmured.
He stared past them, over the table. The day waking muted his eyes to hazy, long-suffering grey.
“No,” he said. “I suppose I can’t.”
“You know it doesn’t make you a god. It doesn’t even let you do good. It just shuffles pain around. She’ll regret it someday.”
“The way things stand,” he pointed out, “she isn’t going to have a someday. Maybe she will regret it. Maybe she’ll hate me for it, but all the good she could have between now and then…can you honestly tell me you haven’t once been happy to be alive in the last twelve years?”
Of course not. They were as prone as anyone to being caught off-guard. Thrilled by the sound of snowmelt singing the world back to life, or charmed by the dense gemstone colors of a midsummer night. Of course there had been times they’d tilted their head to the sky and thought they could be forgiven for being glad to be alive.
“You’d be putting it off on someone else.” Their reflection stared back at them. Too abstract to be anything but impassive, a smudge of moving mouth and a glint in shadowed eyes. “You’re asking me to put it off on someone else. Someone in one of those houses we drove past is going to die.”
“I know.” His fist tightened, a blunt whisper of nails against varnished wood. “You can’t think I made this decision lightly. She—she deserves to live. All we can hope is that whoever it chooses deserves to live a little less.”
“It’s not your decision to make,” they reminded him. “Not this time. It’s mine.”
“You’re not going to ask her?”
They scoffed. A sound too far below hope to reach their throat, a hollow, humorless twinge in their chest.
“You know that would be pointless. You knew when you asked me to come. Of course a child is going to say they want to live. They aren’t going to understand the price. Do you want her thinking later that it was her fault? All that pain and suffering was because she agreed to it?”
A smile turned the corners of his lips. Bleak as winter sunrise, older by far than the lines bracketing his eyes.
“Funny,” he said. “That’s more or less how I justified it to myself when I gave it to you.”
“Are you trying to talk me out of this?”
“No. I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’d take all the responsibility for it if I could. If I could have just taken it from you…”
“You’d have mugged me in my own kitchen?”
“Better than asking you to make this choice.”
“You giveth and taketh away?” At his sharp glance, they looked away. Through the divided panorama of the dining room windows, at the tidy square of yard where a child, healthy, might have played. “You’d make a lousy god. You don’t even make a good friend.”
“Is that what anyone wants from a god?”
They shrugged. The ring threw dawn at a keen angle into the corner of their eye.
They’d never managed to forget it. Or their body, but his gaze highlighted them as nothing else could, as what they were.
A faulty transfer. A shell, like a shuttle running thread through a sewing machine. A small god. They were the one giving and taking away, misery and years. Someone nearby was road-sore. Someone was exhausted, hungry, failing desperately to feed or relieve a pain that wasn’t theirs.
“Have you decided, then?” he asked. Looking at them like what they were—the only part of an unkind world he might still be able to turn against its axis. They could still have run.
They pushed away from the table. It still felt important to know.
In the arches of their feet and the slight swing of their arms. They still had exactly as much freedom as they’d brought there with them. The choice they made would be theirs—they would carry their share of the consequences.
The foyer shone on their right, the porthole in the front door half-filled with a soft grey moon of morning light. They passed it by, following the hall he had led them down before.
To the door still open at the end. The furnace had quieted below, and they could hear the girl in the bed tearing thin, ragged breaths from the air.
They stepped into the room. Silent, bare feet to her bedside. Would it be better to wake her, at least? Make it a moment she remembered, even if it wasn’t one she would understand until much later?
No. Maybe he’d been right about that, after all. Better for it to be a moment she could never have done anything to change. They lowered themself to one knee on the warm linoleum, in the heart of the sickroom smell they had once known so well. Sweat and disinfectant, sour, thin bile, all the body could spare to try to purge itself. All its rank, desperate efforts to survive.
They pinched the ring between two fingers, and a sliver of fear shifted in their heart.
They still remembered how it felt, down to their nerves. Twelve years had done less than they would have guessed to dull the memory.
The pain. Too small a word for something that had seemed to bank coals and burn with their every breath. An organic fire clogging their lungs, a light through the morphine fog that had smothered every other sensation, every thought but the brilliantly clear, vaguely surprised I’m dying.
They could find themself in that fog again someday. Without the ring, every pain would be a possibility again.
Cold. Hunger. Aging—as hollow and terminal as it had felt to think of themself as forever, they’d still had twelve years to do so. How would it feel to know again, beyond any doubt, that they were going to die someday?
They could feel him in the doorway behind them. Had he had the same moment of hesitation, sitting in a darkened hospital room? A moment of, stripped of all other nuance, choosing to become mortal for someone?
With no one there to watch him, to know a choice had been made at all if he’d chosen to let them die, he had chosen to make them live. They slipped the ring from their finger.
No thunderclap. No sense of condemnation, or even loss, yet. Just a prettily sinister trinket holding the light between their fingers. Held that way, it seemed almost escapable. Almost as simple as its form.
But they had tried. They had buried it. They had run. It wouldn’t suffer to be abandoned—like pain itself, it could only be endured, or passed on.
They nudged the sheets aside and lifted the child’s hand from where it lay. Clammy fingers grasped automatically at theirs. Trusting, seeking, even in deep sleep and fever.
They gently uncurled one of those fingers, and slid the ring into place around it.
Far too large. For one second, then they blinked, and it was fitted tightly around the child’s finger. Doll-delicate, as if it had been meant for her all along.
They waited for loss, condemnation to crash down on top of them. But that fragile, transitional feeling still held, like blown glass trembling in the shape of their chest. An emptiness as they stood away from the bed. A weightlessness as they turned to find him watching.
Where they’d sensed him, in the doorway. Open hands at his sides—it’s done.
“Thank you,” he said.
They shook their head. Moved to pass him, and he stepped aside to let them.
They paused, one step into the hallway. Close enough, just, to hear the girl in the bed draw and release a deep, dreaming, easy sigh.
They wouldn’t let themself trail a hand along the wall as they walked back to the foyer. Didn’t turn to acknowledge him following. Only when they reached the front door, the final moments of the last time they might ever see each other, did they stop again.
“Don’t try to find me again,” they told him. “If I want to see you, I’ll know where she is.”
The same way they now knew he had been able to sense them. Like a phantom limb, a curse and a chance at forever given freely away.
“I’ll take care of her,” he promised. “I’ll make sure she does as little damage as possible until she’s old enough to be told.”
He drew a deeper breath. Rough at the edges; they could have left then.
They could have, a hand on the doorknob, but found themself hesitating still. It could be the last time, after all.
“I wish it could have been different,” he said. Clearly not the farewell he’d meant that breath for, but the only fitting benediction for either of them. A eulogy for good intentions. “All of it. I still—”
They opened the door. A clean crack of sound across the conversation, cutting off all it could have been.
He paused. The air between them, cold stirring with dawn through the open doorway, was still heavy with everything they could have said.
Confession and benediction. I’ll never forgive you and remember when…? They could both mime letting go, but they couldn’t put down the knowledge that it would never be so easy with anyone else. No one else would believe their most intimate confessions. No one else could forgive them.
“Goodbye,” he said, as if he still hoped it wouldn’t be.
Riley stood staring out into the grey. Dawn prickled against their skin, needling their nerves awake from long hibernation. A hollowness stirred, turned over in their stomach. But the only pain they felt so far was in the word, accepted and returned.
“Goodbye.”
One step across the threshold. The door sighed shut behind them.
They stood. In the grey, and the silence of the day still waking. In the certainty that he would still be watching them.
Through the door’s small window, still hopeful. It would never really be over between the two of them, would it?
Their stomach groaned, a hard-sleeping, sullen-rousing sound. The cold found a stronger grip on their arms, curling its fingers without resistance through the fine weave of their coat.
It would start to hurt soon. All of it. They stood, waiting for the fear of that to finally break over them. But the hollow-glass feeling they’d carried out of the bedroom still held—that sense of being new and fragile, free and terrible in the sight of the rising sun.
Stripped clean and more culpable than ever. It would never really be over.
They started down the driveway. Carrying that thought like a new talisman, a truly permanent favor and curse, towards the street and the world waiting, with all its pains, beyond.
| Nyx Kain is a Canadian writer whose passion is to celebrate and explore those things the human mind makes real—the what ifs and bumps in the night, beloved characters who will never die despite never truly living, and the questions that will never be answered by the word END. Their work has been featured in Andromeda Spaceways and Flame Tree Publishing’s Weird Horror anthology. |  |
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