Nothing But Blackened Teeth(10)

“I don’t have an opinion on this.”

“Why’d you ask?”

“Because you nearly beat someone to death over it.”

“It didn’t have anything to do with that. Like I said, it’s just Lin gets under my skin.” He exhaled, tectonic in its release. “I should go apologize to him, though. You’re right. I don’t fucking know what came over me.”

I said nothing until Phillip’s footsteps died away, and then turned, and I— Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu.

A female voice, solicitous and sweet. Distantly, the brain stem screeched, stress hormones wailing at my motor system, demanding I run, run now, escape into the sanctuary of multiplicity, disappear into the waiting herd, do anything so long as I remove myself from probable harm, anything just go, go now.

But my limbs would not concede to their urging.

Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu.

She—I pictured a girl, smaller than me, younger, black hair pouring from a widow’s peak—repeated, this time with more insistence. I felt molars close over my earlobe, felt a tongue trace its circumference. Her breath was damp, warm.

Suenomatsuyama nami mo koenamu.

What. The word pebbled in my throat, cold and dead. Haltingly, head full of static, I lurched stiff-legged towards the mirror. This was a dream. This was not a dream. This was a haunting, a possession, and any second now, I’d cut my throat, the first casualty of the night.

After all, isn’t that the foremost commandment in the scripture of horror? They who are queer, deviant, tattooed, tongue-pierced Other must always die first. The slurred remnants of my consciousness chewed on the thought as my eyes slid across the mirror, my stomach clenched.

So many thoughts. None of them anything but a knee-jerk distraction.

I stared into the brass and there she was, Jesus fuck. Standing behind me, chin braced against my shoulder, arms laced around my waist. Fingers snarled in my shirt, their grip possessive. She was so close, yet somehow, I couldn’t make out her face.

No.

That wasn’t right.

My vision was just fine. It was my brain. My brain wouldn’t inventory its observations, would not process and sustain any memory of her face, retain anything but the red of her rosebud mouth, the lacquered black of her hair. Her hands moved. Her fingers sunk into the grooves between my ribs, squeezed. I gasped at the pressure and, in answer, she made animal noises, soothing and sweet. The light plunged through the gap between her lips, and there was only ink and the smell of vinegar, only black

teeth.

“Cat?”

I jolted. I was back where I’d originally been standing, diagonal to the mirror, no dead woman holding me to her breast. Not even a sheen of sweat on my skin to tell you I’d been scared out of my mind. Just silence and the mildewed heat, the taste of the room sitting heavy as altar bread, ashen and stale and oversweet.

“You okay?” Talia leaned her weight against the doorway, arms crossed, a hundred sentences suspended between each syllable, most saliently this: what the fuck are you doing? No real animosity, however. Talia’s too cultured for that. But that perennial caginess because you can dress a pig in diamonds but it’ll still drown itself in slop first chance it gets. No matter how often Talia smiled at me, she did not want me here.

“You were staring at the wall.”

“Was I?”

That slimming of her mouth again and when she spoke, it wasn’t with her satin polish, bitterness coarsening up her tone. “You know, we don’t have to like each other but you don’t have to be a bitch.”

Bitch is the kind of word that reads like a gunshot, rings like a punch. I snapped straight at the sound, the world clarified again: distant warm candle-glow and Talia’s glacial stare. “What is your problem with me? And I mean besides the one I already know.”

“My problem is that you can’t even answer a question without trying to be a smartass.”

“Hate to break it to you but I’m not trying to be smart, I am—”

“See? That’s what I mean. I asked you if you were okay. That was all. And you couldn’t even answer that without some kind of goddamned wisecrack.”

“Did you actually mean it?”

“What?”

“Did you actually mean it?”

“The fuck are you talking about?” Talia gawked at me. “What are you even talking about now?”

I could see why Lin defaulted to wit where he could. Easier to run your mouth, run from the Sisyphean work that was being emotionally open. Easier not to think about her and what my brain mutinied from remembering about the girl in the mirror. I trailed fingers along the roof of my head, patted down my hair, and smiled. “Your concern about whether I’m okay. Did you mean that?”

“Fuck me.” Shoot and score. “That’s what I get for trying to be nice to you.”

“That’s what you get for being fake.”

“What do you want from me?” Her voice brittled. “I’m trying for Faiz. I don’t like you and I don’t think that I’m an asshole for it. You tried to break us up. But you know what? I’m working on that. I would trade a lot of money for you to not be here but this is where we are. Fucking meet me halfway.”

“If it helps, I wish you weren’t here either.”

“I hope the house eats you.” Talia, her charity only good for so much.