It’s her mum that finally brings her back.
A call from an unknown number: Hello, is this Priya Chaudhry? This is she. Hi, Priya, nice to meet you. My name is Dr. Franklin. I’ll cut to the chase, Priya, I work at Baptist Regional, and I’m calling about…
She was on the next flight to Seattle. A voicemail to her dad: “Hey. Mum’s hurt. Something about a fall or—look, I’ll call when I land. Love you.” She rented the first car the airport would give her, left her dad another voicemail, and drove ten miles over the speed limit the entire ride to Tacoma, and she didn’t let herself think about where she was going to sleep. She didn’t let herself think about the scar across her right cheek. She didn’t let herself think about that voice that wasn’t a voice but stayed in her head like one.
She did think about her therapist and about that thing Brenda always told her to do. Take a deep breath, Priya, and feel the world around you. Give me one thing you can do with each sense. What can you smell? Come on, Pri. It doesn’t work unless you want it to work, you know that. Oranges. How about taste? Also oranges. Look at you. See? You. Hear? Also you. Feel? My…jeans.
By the time she pulls into the drive, she’s named three things for each sense except taste, because she’s only named two—but she’s not being critical about her grounding techniques right now, so it still counts.
She watches the blinds of the living room bend in the middle and then, before she’s even really parked, sees her mum’s wide grin peeking through the screen door. Her stomach does a flip. Yes, well, your mother recently came in for some pain…
Her mum doesn’t look bad. Her clothes hang off her the way they always do. Her arms still have that bit of extra fat towards the armpit. But there’s a ramp in front of the door now instead of stairs, and she’s walking with a cane in her right hand, fingers wrapped tight around the head in a way that makes Priya’s own feel numb. She gets out of the car before her mum has a chance to hobble the rest of the way to her. Once she’s close enough, Priya throws her arms around her mum’s shoulders. She’s careful with the weight she puts on her, careful not to put pressure anywhere that matters. Unfortunately, when we did the CT scan of her back, we found…
“Oh, my darling girl,” whispers her mum as she cradles the back of Priya’s head. “Welcome home.”
“Hi, Mummy.” Priya presses her nose down into the hair on her mum’s head and inhales as much of her as she can. She smells lavender and finches and something chemical. She doesn’t smell the breaks in her mum’s spinal column, or the marrow as it refuses to knit itself back together, and that’s the fucked thing, isn’t it? If she hadn’t been told, she wouldn’t even know. In all honesty, she should have come in months ago, because as it is, her body isn’t responding the way we need…
Her mum sighs, nuzzling into the swell of Priya’s throat. “I’ve missed you, lovely.”
“Missed you too, Mum,” Priya forces out, instead of Are you going to try the surgery, you’re going to try surgery, right? or My friends over at the university hospital told me there’s some new drug that can help manage cases like yours, or Mummy, were you ever going to tell me?
She moves her hands from her mum’s shoulders to her wrists and presses her index fingers to her mum’s pulse points—and when she finds the pulse, she keeps her grip steady and finally turns her head to get a better look at the house.
She focuses on the ramp again. It looks like good material, like something someone would have put together for her at the hardware store; she needs to swing by and thank them while she’s in town. She forces herself to look past it, and her eyes immediately begin to climb the side of the house. Dread builds in her gut, a trickle into a pour. There’s something she’s missing, and she knows it; a warning shot fires through her brain. A reminder of what has been here before. No, she thinks, frantic. No, don’t be back, please.
Then her eyes are pulling up to the second story, and her heart is hammering out a beat of here it comes here it comes here it comes against the walls of her chest, and she doesn’t even want the certainty brought on by a look, and then—there it is, and it sits like a promise, doesn’t it, that horrible circle of light, burning through one of her windowpanes.
Seeing it is enough. It’s worse than enough. It’s the ball at the top of the Rube Goldberg machine tipping over, rolling down the track, landing on the button. A few seconds to orient itself, and then the five-year-old memory shoots through her: My Ishani in her ear, a burning hand in her hair, a blinding light on her ceiling. She watches the edges of the light in front of her blur and bounce, definition lost as her vision flits between past and present. A circle is a ceiling is the same—light is light is light.
“Priya?” Her mum, and her voice comes through as if from behind glass. Priya fights through the memory of white light sinking to her floor like a dripping canvas, of heat digging holes into her gums, of fight or flight or freeze, and tries to break through the surface.
Her mum is shaking her shoulder, she knows, but she still feels disconnected. Priya circles her fingers tight against her mum’s wrists and sucks in a breath. Lavender. Finches. Something I can smell.
“Are you all right, my love?” her mum asks, and Priya takes time finding her eyes again. Something I can see. Thick brown, hints of gold, like looking at honey in the dead of night with only the moon to see by.
Her grip tightens. Something I can touch. A pulse that isn’t hers, bounding under her skin. It takes her a moment to reacquaint herself with her mouth, but then there’s a short, stiff chuckle, and a “Yes, Mummy, I’m fine!”
Her mum’s eyebrows crease, and Priya thinks she’s going to ask, and that maybe Priya is going to have to confess—but two seconds pass, and her mum doesn’t pry. Her gaze flits over Priya until she seems satisfied; she makes a noise (Something I can hear) and stands on her tiptoes to place a kiss at Priya’s hairline, right at the peak.
Priya glances back up at the light. As she is watching, it moves slowly from one corner of the windowpane to another, agonizing inch after agonizing inch. A chill creeps through her body. It’s just the window, she thinks. But she isn’t convinced.
“I think you’re going to like being back,” her mum finally says, snapping Priya’s attention back to her. She slips out of Priya’s grab in order to hold one of her hands fully. She squeezes it as she leads them into the house. “I got a new bird, Nigel, and he’s really taken to Mary, in fact I think they may lay eggs, and…”
They talk for hours once they’re inside, and Priya welcomes the distraction even though it comes with a different sort of interrogation. Her mum asks about her dad, and Priya answers as best she can. Yes, he started that new job. No, he doesn’t really like it. Yes, I’m by myself at home a lot, but it’s fine, Mum, don’t worry.
By the time 8 p.m. rolls around, Priya’s almost forgotten about the light at her window.
She yawns and stands to hug her mum one last time. She’s easy, easy, easy, but her mum isn’t able to hide the wince she lets out when Priya presses in a little too close. Priya jumps back, of course—but her mum’s eyes still squish together, and she has to hold her by the elbows until the pain passes.
“I’m okay, lovely,” she insists, but Priya simply shakes her head, and her mum’s mouth falls shut again.
When she really is okay, Priya starts her on the slow walk to the bed, guiding her carefully from one part of the house to the other. Her mum doesn’t even try to argue, and that’s what does it for Priya, what proves it to her. Her mum should have told her sooner; her mum didn’t. Simple as that.
She lays her down. Priya watches her mum’s mouth pinch in again and knows she’s holding back another wince. Once she’s sure she’s settled in, the comforter pushed up to her chin, Priya sighs.
“I love you, Mummy,” she says. “Get some sleep.”
Priya leaves and walks up the stairs to her own room—and something is immediately wrong when she opens the bedroom door.
Specifically, something is wrong with the window again, and with the way the dying sunset falls onto her carpet. She twists the cord for the blinds, and more sun comes through, masking the slice of light that was already sitting there. Then she twists the cord back the other way, and the blinds shut, taking all light with them, save for that one line that refuses to go.
Back when Priya first left—had first arrived crying at her father’s doorstep, first sobbed into his skin, first curled into his chest and had been lulled to sleep by the steady beat of his heart—she tried to convince herself that it wasn’t real, and everyone else tried to convince her of that too. Everyone but her dad, who saw her spiral from the comfort of a few inches to the right of her, and immediately brought up therapy.
“If you’re going to stay with me, Priya,” he said, and he’d been standing with his hands tucked into his armpits, and that was how Priya knew he was serious and scared and full of love for her, “then you are enrolling in therapy. Okay? I don’t know what happened, I don’t know if it was—real,” and the way his voice jumped around the word real made her head hurt, “but I know that something happened. So, therapy. End of discussion. Okay?”
“Okay,” Priya agreed, and that was how she met Brenda.
The point of thinking about this now is: Brenda told her that it might not have been real, but it was real to herdid come back, Brenda wanted her on the phone with somebody she trusted. She wanted Priya to know that the people she cared about also cared about her, even if they couldn’t see what she could.
Priya stares at the white light coloring her bedroom floor. And she thinks about Brenda, and about her father, and about her mum downstairs. She grabs her phone off the bed and pulls up her dad’s message thread and quickly glances at the last text she got from him forty-five minutes ago: I love you. Call me if it’s too much.
She thinks of the broken pieces of her mum’s body, and she thinks about the words My Ishani. She thinks about her bedroom back at her dad’s place, and she thinks about her dad, sitting on her covers, waiting for the screaming to stop.
We’ve still got some tests we would like to run, but she will likely need some kind of outside help until…
She looks back at the light, and a tremor rolls down her spine. Half-inch movement on the right side. She only knows this because she memorized the speck of dirt that was lined up with the edge, and the light has moved past that now, just barely.
I’m good, she types with one hand. Just not sleeping well. Love you.
“It’s just a light,” she whispers harshly—she doesn’t know who she’s trying to convince. But she flips the blinds open again, erasing the threat in the last few shafts of sunlight, and she gets under her comforter, and she turns to face the wall.
“Everything is fine,” she mutters to herself, squeezing her eyes shut. She focuses on her heartbeat and on in and out and in and out, and eventually, impossibly, she falls asleep.
She dreams, because of course she does; she always dreams when she remembers the light, more so when she remembers to be scared of it. The dream is simple: her back is against a tree. The tree isn’t on fire, but everything around it is. The shape the flame takes is indecipherable to Priya, but something about it feels familiar. She screams to the fire like she knows it, like it’s hers. “Please don’t make me follow you!” The fire roars, and it sounds like a scream. Priya begins to laugh.
When she shoots awake, there are stars high in the sky, and the beam on her floor is gone.
Priya doesn’t see the light again for four days, but she dreams about it every night, and it’s always some version of this, a new edition of a dream she’s already had before. Priya stands at the edge of an angry ocean, on the cusp of a cliffside, on top of trampled ground. There is fire, all around her, and sometimes she swears that it’s screaming somebody’s name as it burns up everything within reach. It won’t touch her until she asks—and she always, always asks. There’s something there, some invisible thing between her and the flame, a feeling or a wish or a promise, and it feels like she’s breaking it every time.
On the fifth day, the light comes back. Priya stares at her mum’s shadow and tries to explain it away.
“I just don’t think this is necessary,” says her mum as Priya watches bits of her silhouette disintegrate on the floor. Holes burn through her shadow like flash paper; Priya can practically hear the embers crackle as their edges continue to expand, darkness curling into light. Her mum is looking out the back door into the yard, and the midday sun is falling on her just so. “You shouldn’t have to worry about me—”
Priya’s gaze snaps up. “Mum. Stop.”
Her mum turns her head towards her, and Priya follows the stretch of her shadow.
The holes are still there, and they bend with her when she bends. There’s one, right there at the top of her spine, that stays even with the line of her mum’s neck, even through the movement. It, like the others, is outlined in orange and yellow and white. They remind Priya of small campfires, of smoldering ruins. Then of her dreams, and of the fire that waits inside them.
She looks at her mum’s face, then back to her burning shadow. Face. Shadow. Face. Shadow. No changes to either that she can see. Her mum moves a hand to her hip, and even though she winces, she carries through the motion, and Priya sees one of the coiled holes stay in line with her mum’s elbow.
The question, then. Spoken in the most collected way Priya can manage: “Mummy, where have you been falling?”
Silence. Then an answer, hesitant. Priya watches the gulp slide down her mum’s throat. “Just on the stairs, you know.” A break. “Well, around them.” Another. “Well, okay, so it’s actually—”
“Okay, Mummy,” Priya interrupts, holding up a hand. “Okay. I get it. Where has it been hurting?”
She has some old fractures in her lower spine, some newer breaks in her extremities, but either way, it’s clear that this has been happening for a while…
Her mum frowns at her and shrugs her shoulders helplessly—it’s a whole affair, arms and hands and all. Priya wants to hold her, so she does. Her nasal passages alight with lavender, and she takes the inhale as far as it will go.
“I’m sorry, lovely,” her mum whispers into Priya’s neck, but Priya hushes her.
“Mummy, I’m just worried.”
“I know, I know, it’s just—” Her mum takes a deep, shaking breath and holds Priya a little tighter, and Priya thinks, for the first time, about what it must have been like for her mum when she ran away from this place and did not come back. What must she have thought? What must she have felt? “You were gone for so long, you know? I thought I could do this on my own.”
Priya only thinks of her past in abstract. A scar down her cheek. Her room igniting like a lighthouse. Her mother, here, confused. Unaffected. “But the whole point of me being here now—”
“I know, lovely.”
She should have brought her mum along with her. However long this has been going on, it’s been going on while Priya has been away. Five years is a long time. When did the light start showing up over her breaks? When did the light start hurting her too? “It’s okay,” she whispers, tugging her mum in closer. “We’re okay, Mummy.”
That evening, when Priya makes it to the threshold of her room, she stands in the doorway and takes a slow look, eyes skimming over every lit surface and beam of light she can find.
“Stop being a dick to my mum,” she hisses to it all. “Come get me, you coward.”
This time, when Priya wakes up, she knows something is waiting for her to turn.
She can feel its presence in the air, its weight settling like cement forming a pavement, or like water nestling down inside a lung, and she knows, somewhere deep inside her body, that if she turns away from the wall, she is going to see something she won’t be able to wash out. Something more concrete, something less likely to be written off in the relief of it probably wasn’t real.
The finches across the hall begin to chirp, and Priya knows it must be the light that has them scared. She hears wing beats and scared bips, and she breathes as slowly as she can, in and out, inandout, in and out, until she can remember her grounding.
One sense already down. Hear? Scared finches.
See? The near-beige of her bedroom wall. (Shit, shit, shit.)
Smell? She inhales, and it’s—brimstone, ash, and a burning thing. (Demon. Devil.)
Touch? The comforter, draped over her body. (Her face is still vulnerable, open.)
Taste? (God, please.) She wants to lick her lips but finds herself unable, so she settles for mapping out the divots between her teeth with her tongue. Leftover mint, the memory of the memory of brushing her teeth. Fire, bright and hot in the back of her throat, the memory of the memory of My Ishani rattling down into her chest cavity.
The light that falls in from her window begins to bend in the shadow it casts upon her wall. Priya gasps and feels a cold clamp begin to snap down her back, vertebrae by vertebrae.
The brimstone stench begins to build, and with each quick inhale, Priya feels more of that thing seep into her, painting her alveoli and the tissue at the back of her nasal cavity. The finches aren’t crying anymore.
There’s a noise like a bone popping into place, or a bone growing into place, and something breathes over her shoulder.
It laughs at her, an aimless sound. Come to you? If you insist. That voice from five years ago blooms inside her head, noxious and searing, and Priya’s had—well, Priya’s had just about enough.
She flips over to her right side and stares at the thing that takes up the center of her room.
A humanoid shape, burning with orange and yellow out of a panel of familiar light across the wall. Dark brown antlers, two sets, emerging from underneath the white hair that decorates and falls from the thing’s scalp. Four arms, protruding from the creature’s middle, the hands red and splayed. Priya’s eyes are already shut by the time she makes it to the creature’s face, and the scream is already leaving her mouth.
Shush, the beast says as warmth blossoms between her eardrums and on top of her lips. You’re the one who told me to come.
She goes to stand, but her knees tremble and buckle, and the monster is ready. It follows her as she topples, one hand clenching tight around her throat and another pressing firmly into the small of her back. Priya’s scream cuts off as her air goes away. They stumble until the beast catches itself against the wall with a third arm, and Priya realizes that she’s being boxed in. She tries not to look it in the eyes, but there is only so much room, and the creature says, Look at me already, and all Priya can think to do is listen. She snaps her eyes up to the creature’s face and barely manages to hold down a second scream.
White irises sit inside gold sclera, replicated on the beast’s face four times. Each eye moves independently of any other: there is one focused on Priya’s own brown eyes, one peering at the dimple on her chin, one crossing down the line of her nose, and a last one losing itself somewhere in the waves and folds of her hair.
Pain drives into her skull, and she winces against it. A reminder of something flashes through her brain—something about fire, something about a kiss—and Priya cries out.
The hand on her throat tightens, and Priya would swear that it feels like it’s heating up. No, that voice that isn’t a voice but is a voice, somehow, says inside her skin. Be quiet, my heart.
Priya closes her eyes tight against the light and struggles in the creature’s grip. She feels as she did that night five years ago: swallowed up by the light with nowhere else to look. Heat, oppressive and heavy, climbs up from the places the creature touches her skin, coating her like honey, and there’s a rumble, deep in her belly, that doesn’t feel like her own. Ishani.
Priya chokes on, “That isn’t my name,” and the creature takes its fourth hand and slaps the palm over her mouth.
It is, the beast says, its voice a hot bellow inside the echo-chamber of her head. You just don’t remember yet.
Priya breathes in hard through her nose, and the brimstone scent on the monster burns her sinuses. She wants to call out, to bite down on the beast’s hand and scream again—but then her mum would hear, and her mum would have to see, and Priya will be dead and drawn and quartered before she makes her mum witness her destruction.
That’s all it takes to force Priya into action. She focuses on the parts of her that burn the most, the places the creature’s hands rest upon her body, and she maps out the expanse of it. Hand on her mouth, hand on her back, hand on her throat. Her hands are free, and one of them is close to an end table. A lamp sits on top, probably about five inches away. She knows it well. It’s an antique with an embroidered white lampshade and a hand-painted glass body. Her dad bought it for her mum when Priya was six; she knows because they argued about it the whole way home, and Priya was the one who had to sit with its weight in her lap and stare at the dusty pink roses.
She does not look to the side. Instead, she continues to stare the monster down and commits the planes of its face to memory. Tries to, anyway, and finds that its face is already there in her mind, waiting, looking half as vicious as it does right now. A fire, a tree, a kiss—
Priya darts her hand out and snags the lamp. The creature catches on and reaches one of its hands towards her, but Priya’s already driving the glass into the creature’s head.
The thing shouts—actual noise, actual sound, shrill and wordless. Its grips on her lessen, and Priya seizes the chance; she brings a knee up into the beast’s gut, then shoves it at the shoulders. It works like a dream: the beast tumbles backwards onto Priya’s carpet, clutching its head.
Priya starts forward, footsteps crunching on the glass that litters the floor. She doesn’t care, she doesn’t care; she just needs to leave. If she can just get out of this room, it won’t matter how bloody her feet are because she’ll be away. She whines as she moves, but the whine turns into a yelp when the beast strikes out a free hand and circles its fingers around her ankle.
A yank and a fall, and Priya is on the ground too. She tries to stand back up, or twist, or crawl—but the creature moves to straddle her hips and uses two of its hands to pin her wrists to the floor. Weight settles over her stomach as the creature leans over Priya’s torso, and then the third hand is back at her throat, pressing down hard enough this time to completely obstruct the airflow.
Priya tries to arch her neck, but there isn’t any room—
“Ishani,” the monster mutters, and hearing that name now, at full blast, in surround sound, is worse than Priya ever thought it could be. The creature’s real voice is scratchy and nondescript; it sounds nothing like it sounds in her head, all heavy breezes and smoke plumes.
Priya glares at it as darkness begins to seep into the edges of her vision. She struggles in its touch, thrashing and kicking underneath its orange body, until it drops its head down to her face and bares its teeth.
“You’ve never hurt me like that before,” the monster gripes as it uses its last free hand to wipe a trickle of blood from its forehead. It looks at Priya with all four of its eyes, and Priya feels like she’s being seen in technicolor. She studies the beast’s face and finds the bits of dusty pink glass that are embedded in its skin. Even bleeding like this, it reminds Priya of something. Something to do with nighttime, something to do with a hole in the stomach.
She squeezes her eyes shut, and the darkness is pebbled with light, a kaleidoscope of orange and yellow and red. The kaleidoscope moves and shifts, dissolving into shapeless smears just as the images start to resemble something concrete. Priya can’t find anything substantial here to hold. Everything is slippery and hard to grasp, but she knows without a doubt that the light and the fire in her dreams come from the same source.
I was right to be afraid back then, she thinks, and it feels like a consolation prize.
Just as the pressure becomes too much and her lungs threaten to burst, the hand around her throat releases. Priya sucks in a breath and coughs when it hits the back of her mouth, then sucks in another. Light still dances in the shadow of her vision, and Priya swears she knows the pattern it traces on her eyelids. Sunlight falling through a window or a door or a ceiling—
“Look at me,” murmurs the beast. A finger traces the outside of Priya’s face, starting at the temple and meandering down until it reaches her chin. She trembles at the soft touch, and a whimper escapes her mouth. She feels tears sting her eyes, but she does not open them.
An indignant huff. Then: “More palatable appearance, I suppose.”
Before Priya can figure out what that means, one of the hands covering a wrist retreats, and the second hand is maneuvered so it can take hold of both. Then she hears what she can only imagine are bones, creaking and cracking, and then something she would swear is a squelch.
“Ah,” says the creature once the other sounds have stopped. Priya takes stock and realizes the only places it is touching her are around her wrists and at her chin. “This should be more to your liking, my heart.”
Priya considers her options. Considers that she has none.
Opens her eyes.
Above her sits the creature still, yes, but its appearance has changed. Where once were four arms, now two; where once four eyes, now two; where once two sets of antlers, now one. The eyes are still blindingly white and rimmed in gold, the hair the same lovely white curve as before.
It smiles at her, soft and sweet. Priya does not rise to the bait.
“Get off me,” she croaks, twisting her arms again to find an angle to slip through.
The smile falls from the creature’s mouth. Instead, it sneers, and its eyebrows scrunch down over its eyes. It isn’t any easier to bear.
“This worked on you before,” it says, and crooks its head to the side.
And Priya believes it—a synapse fires off in her head, and she remembers an image like this one. Priya on the floor, the beast above her; a shock at the appearance, then recognition, long made distant and untouchable.
She answers honestly: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The creature blows out a puff of air. Its eyes flash.
“Other things have worked on you before, too,” it says, and it lets up just enough. Priya takes the sudden chance and surges her arms forward with the intent of knocking them into the top of the creature’s skull, but the beast’s other hand moves away from her face to catch her forearm.
Priya realizes her mistake two seconds after making it. This is two seconds too late.
Bubbling heat pours down her wrist, marking a winding path to her shoulder. Skin boils and breaks, and Priya watches with an open mouth as blood starts to pour through the path weaving into her. She is forced back to the first meeting with the light—to the bright white ceiling, to the dripping floor, to a touch on her face and blinding pain lancing through her brain. She wears this mark already. She tries to shriek—but her voice is spent, and her throat is sore, and what comes out isn’t much at all.
A sigh like a fire dying, and her arm is tossed down. “Ishani, it has been long enough.”
Priya groans. Her chin shakes as she looks up at the creature, and she breathes in weak slivers. The arm she tucks to her chest sings in pain; it paints her red. “My name,” she grinds out, “is Priya.”
The monster smiles at her with one side of its mouth. “It wasn’t always.”
“Shut up,” Priya says, but it comes out wet and trembling as memories that are not hers begin to flicker through her mind. Something like a kiss, something like fire, yes, but also: a dimple on the side of a face, something heavy resting in a gut. A village on fire. A mouth to her temple. Whatever this…this thing is, it’s meant something to her before. She knows that now. She knows it.
She tries to focus on the dreams she’s been having since she arrived—on the dreams she’s been having her whole life. Fire, always fucking fire, dancing around her until she tells it to move. And here comes a light calling her Ishani, acting familiar.
“Ishani,” the creature says again, then lets out another sigh that hits Priya’s face like smoke. The name sends a shot of electricity through her skull, and she sees a tree burning in the back of her mind.
Her arm is still screaming, but Priya allows it to flop, useless, to the floor. There’s something here, something she isn’t quite grasping, something she can’t see—but what is it? What is she missing?
The creature looks down its nose at her. Priya stares into those white and yellow eyes and does not flinch. She knows those eyes from somewhere; she’s seen them before, she’d swear it. She knows them the way she knows her own. The way she knows her mother’s.
She brings her good arm up and places her palm on the creature’s cheek, and when the creature doesn’t move, she keeps it there. The touch shouldn’t feel like this, like Priya’s held this skin before—but she has, hasn’t she? She must have. More forgotten memories find their way up. A laugh, sharp and lovely; smooth fingers on her hips.
When she dreams, she dreams of fire. She dreams of being absorbed. Always, she is trapped by it. Always, she asks for its love by name—she’s never chosen anything else.
But when the dreams are boiled down, Priya realizes, when they’re brought back to their bare essentials, they’re heartbreakingly simple: an argument, again and again and again.
She looks at her creature, and her creature looks back.
“Oh, how I would die for loving you,” the monster drawls, moving its hand over Priya’s, “if you had given me a choice in the matter.”
Priya gasps as the words rotate in her mind, echoes emerging from the empty space at the back of her skull. A fire, a forest, a town. She’s heard this before; she’s lived this before. This is it. Come on, she thinks, let’s do the damned thing.
The monster continues without Priya having to ask. “Don’t leave me,” it whispers haltingly, and Priya knows these words, she knows these lines, but where are they from, “I’m here. Don’t go.”
The air leaves Priya in a rush. Her brain explodes in its remembrance.
“Charlaine?” she wheezes when the name makes itself known. The rest of the memories rise in her like a tidal wave, and Priya stumbles in the surf.
Ishani blinks to life in a burning field.
She looks around, eyes catching on the fire that encircles her. She lies in the only patch of grass that is not ablaze, can feel the strands on her elbows and on her feet as she tries to peer through the flame. She arches her neck to get those last few centimeters, and she finally spots the plumes of fire that spoil the hill; she finds a body amidst the wreckage, burnt and still burning. When she sees it, she sighs and falls back down to the ground.
She peers at her stomach—and at the dagger that sits heavy inside of it. Her head spins as she watches the dark red pour from her wound, and she calls out.
“Charlaine,” she tries, but she knows that her voice is lost in the crackling roar of the fire. Her stomach tenses, and she fists her hands around the hilt of the blade, holding it steady as she cries out.
There’s no difference between holding the dagger and not holding the dagger; she’s dead either way. Pull it, risk bleeding out. Keep it in, risk cutting more. She contemplates the possibilities, but Charlaine pops back into her head before she reaches an answer.
She’s dead either way, but she has to be the one to tell Charlaine. It has to be her mouth that delivers the news.
The village thinks it’s seen destruction. If Charlaine finds her…
The village is wrong.
“Charlaine,” she groans, as loud and long as she can manage. The fire finally sprouts and rises, and Ishani smiles, weak and open-mouthed. She pushes a quick exhale out between her teeth, counts to three, and removes the dagger from her stomach. Best not to let Char see it, she decides. Her body flails upward with the movement, then flops back to the dirt as pain runs through. She feels warmth begin to dart down her hips and closes her eyes just as a silhouette forms in the flame.
Charlaine sucks in a breath as she appears at Ishani’s side, and Ishani thinks about the tales she grew up on. Ruru and Priyamvada; Savitri and Satyavan. A half-life for half a life. Making a trade with Death for the one you love. One’s place for another.
“Ishani, what is—?” Charlaine starts, but her words devolve into a scream before the sentence reaches its end. She hears Charlaine land in the grass next to her, and then hands are roving over her hair, her neck, her waist, pulling at all the parts of her exposed.
She’s glad this was her choice. In a better world, she’d become part of the stories too. This is the tale of Ishani, a human who loved an immortal being. This is the story of how she died for her. Heed it well.
“My heart,” her beloved sobs. Ishani feels hot tears land on her cheeks and wishes she had the strength to wipe them from the source. “My heart, no.”
“Hello, Char,” she whispers, and does her best interpretation of a smile.
When Charlaine lets out a whine, Ishani pries her eyes open, one last time, and watches Charlaine’s hand lift up from her stomach. Sticky red coats her palm and the inside of her fingers.
“What happened?” she asks, voice clotted with sobs. She bends in half over Ishani’s body and presses her dry hand against Ishani’s cheek and begins to brush strands of moist hair behind her ear. Ishani can’t help the noise that falls out of her mouth, something primal and animal and weak.
Charlaine’s eyes glow in the light of the fire that still makes a border around them. But Ishani knows how they glow alone. She’s seen them enough in the low-light of her dwelling to know the way they illuminate, the way they paint Charlaine’s face in yellow and white. Ishani loves them still, even here, even now, with death carving its hot name into her stomach.
“Nothing you could have stopped, beloved,” Ishani huffs.
You love a beast, that man had said, cutting through the fire. A demon! A devil!
“Ishani,” Charlaine keens.
No, Ishani had answered, taking the blade in stride. No, she isn’t.
“I’m not sorry for dying,” Ishani whispers, because she’s not. Because she needs Charlaine to know. Needs her to understand, needs her to accept this for what it is. Ishani’s last call out into the world: I love her, I love her, I love her. She raises her head up as far from the ground as she can, and Charlaine moves her hand to the back of Ishani’s skull and meets her in the middle, pressing forehead to forehead. “Just sorry to go so soon.”
“Oh, how I would die for loving you,” Charlaine whines against her mouth, “if you had given me a choice in the matter.”
Ishani smiles, a twitch at the corners. “I know. That’s why I chose it instead.”
Charlaine’s head shakes against Ishani’s; it makes her dizzy. “Don’t. Don’t leave me. I’m here. Don’t go.”
Ishani lifts a pale, trembling hand to the nape of Charlaine’s neck and pulls herself up. Her eyes flutter shut again, but that’s okay. It’s okay. She doesn’t need to see Char in order to remember her. Charlaine has been burned into Ishani’s brain since that very first day. Since Hello, I’m traveling through, since Stay awhile. She sees her in her head every time she closes her eyes.
“Once,” she begins, and Charlaine lets out a low, guttural sound. “Now. Always.”
It’s true, the way it’s always been. Pictures of this life flicker through Ishani’s mind, and she is reminded that she should have kissed Charlaine more when she had the chance. Should have held tight to her mouth, should have sucked that dimple Charlaine always got on the left side of her smiles.
As it is, she leans up and catches Charlaine’s lips for the last time, and she tastes the salt of Char’s tears between them.
“Yours,” Charlaine mumbles against her. “Once, now. Always.”
Ishani lets go.
Before her head falls back to the ground, she’s gone.
That life tumbles through Priya first: a life ages and ages ago, the beginning forgotten. A life of meeting Charlaine, falling in love with her, holding her close, defending her to the world, dying in her name. The others flow by faster. Lives and lives and lives. Charlaine hunts her, Charlaine corners her, Charlaine tells her of their life. Priya runs, Priya cries, Priya begs to be a sacrifice. A vow taken and broken and remade, again and again and again.
Priya blinks back into herself, and she stares at Charlaine as her senses return home. The years have been endlessly kind to her—she looks almost the same as she did back then, in that very first life.
“You need to move on,” she says quietly into the white silence that hovers between their bodies.
Charlaine breathes, one breath then two, and eventually answers Priya on the third. “I can’t. You are…you have always been it for me.”
“Bullshit.” Then, when Charlaine looks at her like she’s about to lunge down for her mouth: “Forget the vow.”
Charlaine’s eyes flash. “I cannot.”
“Oh, come on,” Priya sighs, exasperated. She realizes she’s still holding Charlaine’s face and starts to pull her arm back down—but Charlaine catches her hand as it falls and grips it tight, fingers curling hard around Priya’s.
Priya sneers, but Charlaine just keeps staring at her like she’s staring at a ghost. Wide eyes, drawn brows. A dimple missing from her cheek. The shadows turn her high-def.
“Forget it,” Priya tries again, leaning upward into Charlaine’s brimstone stench. “I don’t hold you to it anymore.”
“No,” Charlaine whispers back on a gulp. She shakes her head, almost imperceptibly at first, but then suddenly with enough force that her white hair tumbles down over her shoulders to form a curtain around Priya. “You are in me, Ishani. You are my heart.” She forms her free hand into a fist and brings it up to her chest, pounding on the place where a sternum should be. Priya gets a flash of darkness, kisses, her mouth on that skin.
Priya shakes her head too. “I’m not, Charlaine. I’m not.”
Because she isn’t; she can’t be. These memories don’t fill her with longing, or desperation, or guilt. They’re a movie starring a different person. They’re amputated parts of her that she’s already forgotten how to use.
There is a life in the middle somewhere, in between Priya and Ishani, and Priya lets it fill her head. That girl—Aditi—stood on a sidewalk in Mumbai, and when Charlaine told her that she was her heart, she fell to her knees and cried on the pavement. Aditi felt it: that pull, that fate string, and she followed Charlaine out of the city when she asked. She starved herself in the forest for Charlaine. She left her family behind for her. She died by torchlight for her.
She gave up the name Aditi for her.
Priya takes in a deep breath, and for the first time since she’s been back home, the inhale doesn’t burn her lungs. “I will not be another girl you drag down with you.”
Lives and lives and lives, and Charlaine in the middle of them all. Ishani, Adhveeka, Hiral, Aditi, girl after girl after girl. Charlaine opened them up and split them down the center. Charlaine ripped a hole in each of their hearts and shoved herself through.
Priya will not be on that list.
Her mum needs her, and she will not be on that list.
“Please,” Charlaine tries. Her eyes glow hot and molten, and Priya knows she is trying not to cry.
Priya looks at Charlaine and thinks of Ishani. Of loving someone so horribly that you’d die for them, even if dying was the worst thing you could ever do. And she thinks of Aditi, and of loving someone so much that you’d give yourself over and become the person they wanted to drag out of you. She thinks of all the other girls, of all the other lives she’s led.
This is for them, she thinks, and feels like her heart is about to stop. This is for all the girls I started to be.
Ishani wanted to be a myth. She wanted her story to be heard. She wanted the universe to heed it.
Okay, Priya thinks back to her. I’m heeding it.
And Priya says, “No, Charlaine. No more.”
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Ire Coburn is a graduate of a creative writing master’s program. By night, they help people breathe, and by day, they do everything else. Speculative fiction focused on grief is their jam, and they hope to spread the word. They can be found @urban_sith_ on X. |
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