strigwrites

[strigwrites]

The Buckle

“There’s a new treatment going around, heard it’s something they’re doing at Studio 9. You might’ve already caught wind, so stop me if you know this already.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Girls are finding a good butcher and getting the thinnest slices of quality beef they can manage. Sirloin, I think, was the preferred choice. Or was it a shave of skirt steak…? No, no, it was sirloin, I’m sure of it. But it can’t be just any sirloin, right? They’re calling for cuts that come specifically from cattle with a highly restricted diet, so you can’t just settle for anything or it won’t work. The cow’s diet and humane slaughter are crucial.”

“Huh…”

“They’ve got guys now who are boasting so-called platinum-grade shaved sirloin, which if you ask me is rife for fraud, but that’s how it always is with these things, someone’s always looking for easy money. So anyway, contrary to what you might be thinking, the beef is not for eating.”

“Ah…”

“You’ve got to get them as cold as they can be without freezing—absolutely no ice crystals or you’ve gone and ruined it and that’s a good chunk of change down the drain—and make sure you only handle them with perfectly clean, stainless steel tongs fresh out of the freezer. What you do is drape these dainty little meat-sheets over your face and gently press them into the contours of your skin so it’s like you’ve got a mask on. If they’re still a little bloody, apparently that’s even better. So it sounds crazy, but as you lie there, it gradually takes on the heat from your body and the fats and nutrients in the meat permeate your skin very deeply through osmosis…No, maybe it’s not called osmosis, but something else...”

“Ehh…”

“You might be skeptical, but I’ve seen the results first-hand, and these girls are prancing out of the spas in-can-descent. Something about the meat brings healthy bloodflow to the cheeks—we’re talking a natural blush that requires absolutely no makeup and makes you look pinched for weeks without a lick of makeup. You can pick them out of a crowd, babe, I’m telling you. Oh, you’re a bleeder, aren’t you?”

The young woman craned back on the dentist’s chair wrenches her eyes shut against the blinding overhead light as her mouth floods with a rich flow of fresh crimson. The ruddy dentist crowding over her prone figure hums to the swingy brass crooning from an overhead speaker and casually begins to fold up gauze packets to stuff into the newly-opened pits in her raw gums. “Last time I saw a geyser like that,” he crows, “I was on vacation with the wife and kids at Shimmering Wells. They went wild over the hot springs and we were lucky enough to catch not one, not two, but three eruptions. No offense to you, but it was a much prettier sight out west. Have you ever been?”

A deflated ‘uh-uh’ answers him now that his woozy patient has closed her mouth to bite on the red-drenched gauze wads, her glassy eyes fixed to the ceiling beyond the dentist’s right ear and bright orange sideburns as though to will herself into an out-of-body experience. Better out than in, the same thing she said about the extraneous molars that now gleamed like polished ivory from their place on a metal side tray next to an array of hooks and pokers. How vital could two teeth be, really? Especially in comparison to the importance of maintaining immaculate facial structure and symmetry under the white-hot set lights well into the future; after all, she had a whole mouth full of other perfectly good teeth, but what she didn’t have was an extra set of cheekbones. The buckle, they called it, as though to treat her face like a construction site, knock out a few support pillars, and then stand back and watch the delicate structure of her face cave in.

“I’d advise you not to bother with the mirror for a good week or two,” the dentist proclaims crisply, as though reading her thoughts directly. His bright blue gaze over the lip of his mask hurt to look at nearly as much as the bulb of the overhead lamp. “You’re going to look like an overripe plum, sweetheart, not pretty at all, but if you do as I say and eat soft foods and apply ice daily, I promise you’re going to be thrilled at the end result. Did you have any questions?”

“Ah…” Before she can answer, the taste of sterile gloves replaces the taste of her own blood as the doctor goes rooting around for the soiled gauze without warning, plucking one soaked wad and then the other. With cheerfully indifferent efficiency, more cloth is packed into her jaw and a hand under her chin coaxes her to bite down once more.

“Terrific. Up you go.” A mechanical hum jolts the chair awake and begins to lift the addled patient back into a reclining position with a look of drenched misery. The dentist pulls his sullied gloves from his hands and piles them next to his mask on a tray. “Let’s get you some painkillers and get you on your way. Do you have a driver waiting…?”

“Ough…” she mouths around the bulk of the gauze. “Ah row hee…” Her nose crinkles up at the indignity of speaking in such a state while the dentist helps her to her feet, her ankles momentarily threatening to upend her entire weight onto the floor under the strain of high heels.

“Easy, now. One foot in front of the other,” he soothes, letting her hold onto his arm for balance.

His charge twists to look behind herself to check for anything forgotten when she spots just such a thing. “Ay—wayh…” she insists, trying to break away from her newly-appointed chaperone to retreat the way they came.

“You’ve got your purse in your hands, miss,” he reminds her with only the slightest patronization, but it’s enough to break her last mote of patience. The young starlet gives him a brusque shove with one hand and turns fully to march back into the examination room with renewed purpose and only the slightest wobble. “Did you forget something?” he insists, now growing impatient in kind. “You may be feeling the nitrous yet, but I promise you all is well.”

A doe-eyed assistant who had just started cleanup in the examination room appears surprised to see her patient return so soon, and the puffy face of determination greets her in kind. “Oofh,” the surly, gauze-packed woman commands. There is no understanding that passes between them, so she reaches out and grips the assistant by the shoulders and begins to drag her away from the dirty medical tray, where she spots her prize. “Ma’am?” the assistant begins, bewildered by her strange behavior, but is soon answered when the chipmunk-cheeked patient turns and shows her the two long-rooted molars gleaming in her blood-streaked palm, closes her fist, and marches out the door.

[strigwrites]

Prompt #23: Pitch

"I can't do this anymore. I can't. I've reached my end of my capacity to tolerate an environment of ruthless vultures..."

A carefully-arranged bouquet of dried fronds and flowers bursts out of its porcelain vase, stuffed tightly with preserved flora in its desaturated state. Dusty jade eucalyptus frames lilac and pale pink florets of baby's breath yearning away from their stems, quivering lightly with fear.

"After what happened to Antony, it really should have been the end of things. I should have called it quits and left this pit of vipers to collapse in on itself, but I was so afraid that my legacy would..."

There's a childish name for the ivory puffs of lagurus ovatus: bunny tails. They seem larger somehow for their worry as they ramble at me in breathless monologue, bristled up like a malcontented cat. This beautiful spray is having a complete meltdown while I listen with the barest interest in its outsized shadow. After all, this is a breakup; it hasn't been announced yet, but I am being relieved of my duties, and at this point it's just the formality of hoping I can still salvage something out of the wreckage when this humiliating fit has passed that is keeping me adhered to my overstuffed seat.

"...and all along, it's as though they were simply waiting for me to let my guard down again to strike! I will not allow myself to succumb to cynicism. All I ever wanted was a life surrounded by beauty and pleasure..."

According to the Blades report, a single gardenia was left on the headless corpse of my rambling companion's now-deceased lover, the absolute personification of milquetoast by the name of Telur Morgan. It was a bloodbath, they say, an entire family zeroed over plates of cold spaghetti by the time authorities arrived—talk about a sauced pasta. But the gruesome remains don't plague me; rather, it's the pristine white of a freshly-cut bloom and its velvet petals and fragrant perfume. The stem would still be crisp, slightly damp at the angled cut, and the last hand to touch it would arrange it just so. It's as real as if I were standing over it now with the echoes of a gunshot ringing at a screaming pitch in my ears. A message, just for me. A message that says—

"Selena."

The oversized vase is plucked from before me, revealing the tear-streaked face of a panicked Monetarist darling draped in a tropical-patterned silk jumpsuit fit for a permanent cruise through the Cieldalaes. She's a vision, even as her dignity unspools with fear, and still I must answer. I know I've been caught absentee.

"I apologize, Alainne. I'm just as shocked as you are," I lie through my pretty teeth. "I'm still coming to terms with the brutality. My mind has wandered."

"Then I'll repeat myeslf: do not contact me again after this. The deal's over. Our business is finished, forever."

[strigwrites]

Sisterhood

“You’re one of Basque’s girls, aren’t you?”

“Ma’am?”

“Down at the Polite Society. I’ve seen you.”

Sister Cressida’s round face crinkled with an intimate smile, a lunar body made blood moon by the dying embers of a late hearth painting her weathered features warm and ruddy. The boarding house had historically seen its share of late-night wraiths milling through its drafty halls well after midnight, sleepy women with lingering scent trails of busy kitchens, stables, and smithies. Present for the nightly comings and goings of late-shift workers were a handful of watchful sisters who would keep the lanterns lit and stewpots bubbling, but weren’t particularly given to conversation not just as a matter of the late hour, but also of an innate distance they held on purpose from their impoverished wards. But not Cressida.

A delayed, incredulous laugh punctuates Delphine’s response as she searches the elder’s face for signs of jest. “Forgive me, I just never expected one of the good sisters to make a joke like that.”

“Who’s spinning comedy here, little girl? I’ve seen you hustling into that building before, first by happenstance, but then because I was curious to know if what I’d seen was true, and it was. So I ask you again: You’re one of Basque’s girls, aren’t you?”

The younger of the two grows wary and lapses to silence that stretches uncomfortably until there seems no choice but to confess under her unflinching gaze. “Yes, I am, but I resent that phrasing. I’m waiting tables until the baby comes, nothing more. It was the only place that would hire me in this state. I promise you, there’s nothing untoward happening.”

“Nevermind that,” the wizened woman grunts with a brusque wave of her hand. “How do you protect yourself?”

“Protect myself? Well, I don’t think that’s necessary, the area is fairly quiet. I know it’s not the safest to be out and about after midnight, but I’ve never felt threatened.”

“And how do you protect yourself inside the club?”

Delphine falters, her mouth twisting to one side in soft dismay. “There are guards posted throughout who keep watch over it all. They seem reliable, but I’ve never had need. I’m a cheerful drinkmaid, nothing more. Most patrons can see that I’m pregnant and give me a hard time but it’s all in good fun. They’ve been a little raucous, but never a threat.”

Cressida sits back in her seat with a low creak from the wood shifting, her knobbed fingers folding together over the slope of her belly. Her posture is casual, but her pointed question strikes with a killer’s aim. “Do you think they’ll want you to keep serving drinks when your belly shrinks again and they no longer have to feel sorry for the single mother at the gentleman’s club?”

Delphine plays host to silence in response, her brow sinking heavily at the implication. The glowing hollow of a burnt log crackles quietly in the hearth, offering little filler for the uncomfortable, wordless stretch. She wallows in the indignity raised by Cressida’s implications, ruminating on her objections just to find that there are only uncomfortable truths waiting for her. An unborn baby was both a shield and a vulnerability; a precious token that placed her as something to protect just as long as it remained visible every bit as much as it revealed her most obvious weakness like guts torn open for a gathering omen of vultures. She wears the troubling thought as plain as day on her face, but the sister appears to take no pleasure in having evoked it. “I don’t envy you,” the elder finally states, breaking their impasse. “You’re set up like dominoes for a life of pain that we can’t shield you from.”

“Oh, to have made all the right choices,” the younger shoots back, bittered. “If this is the price of your help, then I suppose I’ve got to let it happen, but I’ll have you know that it wasn’t so long ago that I thought I’d be living like you instead of like me.”

“Is that so?”

“It is. I was in love with the whole, grand image of the church. I loved the ceremony and pomp of it all, the chants and candles. I thought it a fairytale to marry yourself to heaven, and heavens forgive me that I married a fool, instead.”

A scraping laugh makes her jump. “To be young and dreaming again,” the sister guffaws, tilting her head back to look up at the soft light painting the ceiling above. “What have I been doing all these years when I could have been spending it huffing the candles.”

“I’m not joking. I had every intention of devoting myself before—you know, all of this. I wanted to swear myself to the sisterhood. I had just started preparing myself to read the sacred polities when I met him and it all went sideways.”

“He was either terribly charming to overcome the fire of duty burning in your heart, or the fire was about as strong as a match in a gale.”

“That’s not funny,” the young woman protests, shooting a look of disapproval to her blunt companion.

“Which part of it is true? I’ve struck a nerve.”

“It was the former, alright? I fell for him so suddenly that I didn’t know what was happening. I’d never had someone take a shine to me like that, and he painted this beautiful future for us that felt so real to me. How was I supposed to know any better? He kept strange hours, but I didn’t care because the time we did have together was pure magic.”

“Did he spoil you?”

“You couldn’t imagine the gifts, sister. Flowers by the dozens, more than I could find vases for. Enough perfume to clear an auditorium, fine jewelry…” She pauses at a particular recollection and laughs incredulously, shaking her head. “A basket of kittens. Six little cats, only just opened their eyes. I said, ‘Niels, they are so precious, but who is going to take care of them all?’ and he said, ‘Don’t worry honey, I’ll hire someone. A kitten nanny, so all you have to do is enjoy them’. Well, I don’t have to tell you that he didn’t hire anyone, and I was heartbroken when I had to give them away. I was renting only a single room, barely enough space for me and my belongings—”

“And your burgeoning indoor garden,” Cressida interjects dryly.

Delphine sighs wistfully and leans back in order to rest her hands over the steep hill of her growing belly. “I should have seen that as a sign. Who does that? Who brings home an entire basket of kittens?”

The conversation trails off without an answer to that lingering question, leaving them both to their thoughts and the occasional sound of a wooden door opening and closing again with a heavy thud. Delphine’s recollections made the memories she’d shared feel years in the past, but the ever-present reminder attached to her body was a grounding anchor attesting that barely any time had passed at all. Her eyes meander over to the sister’s reclining figure at the sound of a deep exhale, expecting the older woman to have gently nodded off, but instead her counterpart gazes pensively into the fireplace, soundlessly tapping her fingers against the wooden arm of her seat.

[strigwrites]

Prompt #6: Vice

It’s been years, but I still see him in my dreams now and then when there’s a lull in life that needs to be filled with some bullshit, as though I don’t already put up with enough. Like a bat in the rafters, he comes alive and reminds me he’s been hiding there the whole time like a little creep, probably doing something like watching my husband and I fuck so he can sit and judge and make up shit about how pathetic Jannick is, how his dick doesn’t compare. I mean, it doesn’t, but we’re all just doing our fucking best, okay?

He’s got the eyes of a hellbeast, red like fresh blood, a perfect circle in pitch black that’s enough to raise the hair on the back of your neck. I see his rare smile, all teeth, and when a man like Ezen-fucking-Khotgor bares those teeth at someone like Elia-fucking-Hext, it’s because something terrible has happened and he is thrilled to see it. It boils my blood.

Sometimes I give him the finger and turn away, and surprise-surprise, there he is again in front of my face. I push him, but my hands touch nothing and he slips away like smoke, becoming one with the cigarette hanging out of my stupid, slack mouth. I get fed up, because who wouldn’t? What do you want, asshole? He laughs. Hey, fuck you. He laughs louder. What are you, some kind of clown? Are you a fucking clown, Ezen? Can’t stop laughing, can you, you fucking joker. He doesn’t answer.

I take off through the streets of Ul’dah, slinking from shadow to shadow. I feel those eyes burning into me, watching me. I greet my buddies in the Brass Blades and oh, hello, every single one of them has his ruddy eyes. I run, because who in their right mind is going to stick around to see what that’s about? This is a dream, it can always get worse. I flee to my husband, to his fresh-pressed Immortal Flames uniform, and I throw myself on him. You wouldn’t believe the shit I just saw, I murmur into his chest, and the voice that answers is enough to send me sprawling backwards, tripping over my own two feet until I land square on my arse.

“Honestly, knowing that you’re better now just means there’s farther I can push you,” he says not in the voice of Jannick, but the voice of Ezen-fucking-Khotgor, the man who tried and nearly succeeded in destroying me for a sick sexual game of chicken that I still get wet to think about. It’s as bad for me as the drink. I’ve been sober for a year and a half now, can you believe it? But in this dream, by contrast to my waking life where I am a total fucking genius who’s got it all under control, I am an absolute moron, so I recite the lines I already know by heart without skipping a beat. The ones I’ve said over and over and over in a hundred dreams just like this one, as tangible as the burn of liquor going down the hatch.

We can set our lives up like dominoes and then just flip the fucking things over on purpose.

My smile opens wide and I take a swallow.

[strigwrites]

Prompt #25: Wizen (Gwendolyn)

I spent my enlistment scrimping so the coin I made could pay for my mother's peace of mind in my absence. It repaired shutters and storm-battered shingles, it kept her icebox filled (after it bought the icebox, itself), but it couldn't stop the creep of time that stole her youth so gradually, the realization struck remarkably late. It seems it was only overnight that she shrank in my embrace, a slight frame of skin and bone. Had she always struggled to her feet out of the recliner that way? Had she always been so fragile when my memory of her was so sturdy, so unflappable? I took account of the time I'd spent away and simply couldn't make it add up. Nevertheless, it was so: my mother the mortal, revealed to me like a cold slap across the face.

I had visions of building her the ranch she dreamed of, Eorzea's first and only horse breeder tucked in the supple hills of Vylbrand. I pictured this sun-baked woman forced to sea by circumstance allowed to finally feel the glide of flight not from a water-sailing ship holding her hostage, but from the warm back of a gentle mammoth inside her own fences. I wanted this more than I wanted my own life and I made my heart a shrine to Mother, I vowed to patch her through this ultimate gift that would surely undo what had been etched into her through the hardships she didn't deserve. I spent this currency in deeds of daring, I used it to propel myself harder and higher than my peers. It carried me into burning buildings and sinking ships, it cradled me when I bled out and rocked me through strange fevers and foreign ills. The coin from my heroics stacked, but the curse would not abate; the more I saved, the older she became.

With perseverance, I earned a reputation to match the protagonist's name I'd given myself when Gemma Gardener needed to be left back in La Noscea: Gwendolyn Hightower, a knight's mantle, a moniker worthy of a paladin's righteous heart like the books I'd loved. It only took a few years for my ascending star to reach a burning zenith, but far below I continued to fall short. The costs of importing these four-legged creatures from the east was galling enough, but then came the land, the materials needed to feed and keep them, the veterinarian care for rare livestock. And then there were the hired hands who had to have familiarity with these exotic things, specialists in their own right, and they had the price tag to match. The hits just kept coming: the taxes, the tariffs, the equipment, the upkeep, and by the time I had it all added up in a notebook that looked as ragged as I felt, the death blow came. The coup de grâce was delivered in the form of the cost of caring for my mother, herself.

Try as I might, years of malnutrition and hardship could not be reversed by my devotion. The hard living we'd done had given her aches beyond measure, but she endured them with a stoic front until they formed an anchor of wasting that quietly dragged her under. I hired caretakers when she fell with the naive certainty it was only a temporary measure until she regained her usual strength. She hid her unhealing wounds, her swollen feet. The quilts she covered herself in masked the weight she'd shed, and the nurses complained only of her bitter tongue that even ailing health couldn't dull, a deceptive lucidity that belied the impending curtain drop. I couldn't have known -- could I? Or was it my own fastidious fixation with some stupid, symbolic gesture that made me blind to it? I held onto this fruitless drive to provide her with one last joy until it was wrested from my hands by death, itself.

It was with those empty hands that I took up a shovel and dug my mother's grave in the clearing where I once pictured handing her the lead rope to a gleaming black cob. When I still had hope, I read scores of books about the horses of the near and far east, from the rare Taishu on the miniature islands dotting the Ruby Sea to the proud Kathiawari warhorses of Thavnair, and even spent a summer in the stables of a Doman rancher after the liberation to prepare myself to help her. What do I do with these leavings now? Where does this unspent love go when the recipient ceases to exist? The neighbors who had watched me grow came to pay their respects, aunties and uncles who didn't look at me like a hero, but the wayward pirate child they helped to raise. You were her treasure. She was so proud of you, Gem. She didn't know how to say it, but you were the light of her life.

Brother Leon didn't arrive until long after the mourners emptied the yard, having traveled from overseas on leave from his tour. He read the eulogy he'd written himself on the voyage back while I emptied shovels of dirt over her simple wooden casket and cried the first tears I could muster since I heard the news. When the final scoop was laid into place, her neglected spirit's only caretakers held each other with one arm and shared a nip of whiskey with the other.

[strigwrites]

The Buckle

“There’s a new treatment going around, heard it’s something they’re doing at Studio 9. You might’ve already caught wind, so stop me if you know this already.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Girls are finding a good butcher and getting the thinnest slices of quality beef they can manage. Sirloin, I think, was the preferred choice. Or was it a shave of skirt steak…? No, no, it was sirloin, I’m sure of it. But it can’t be just any sirloin, right? They’re calling for cuts that come specifically from cattle with a highly restricted diet, so you can’t just settle for anything or it won’t work. The cow’s diet and humane slaughter are crucial.”

“Huh…”

“They’ve got guys now who are boasting so-called platinum-grade shaved sirloin, which if you ask me is rife for fraud, but that’s how it always is with these things, someone’s always looking for easy money. So anyway, contrary to what you might be thinking, the beef is not for eating.”

“Ah…”

“You’ve got to get them as cold as they can be without freezing—absolutely no ice crystals or you’ve gone and ruined it and that’s a good chunk of change down the drain—and make sure you only handle them with perfectly clean, stainless steel tongs fresh out of the freezer. What you do is drape these dainty little meat-sheets over your face and gently press them into the contours of your skin so it’s like you’ve got a mask on. If they’re still a little bloody, apparently that’s even better. So it sounds crazy, but as you lie there, it gradually takes on the heat from your body and the fats and nutrients in the meat permeate your skin very deeply through osmosis…No, maybe it’s not called osmosis, but something else...”

“Ehh…”

“You might be skeptical, but I’ve seen the results first-hand, and these girls are prancing out of the spas in-can-descent. Something about the meat brings healthy bloodflow to the cheeks—we’re talking a natural blush that requires absolutely no makeup and makes you look pinched for weeks without a lick of makeup. You can pick them out of a crowd, babe, I’m telling you. Oh, you’re a bleeder, aren’t you?”

The young woman craned back on the dentist’s chair wrenches her eyes shut against the blinding overhead light as her mouth floods with a rich flow of fresh crimson. The ruddy dentist crowding over her prone figure hums to the swingy brass crooning from an overhead speaker and casually begins to fold up gauze packets to stuff into the newly-opened pits in her raw gums. “Last time I saw a geyser like that,” he crows, “I was on vacation with the wife and kids at Shimmering Wells. They went wild over the hot springs and we were lucky enough to catch not one, not two, but three eruptions. No offense to you, but it was a much prettier sight out west. Have you ever been?”

A deflated ‘uh-uh’ answers him now that his woozy patient has closed her mouth to bite on the red-drenched gauze wads, her glassy eyes fixed to the ceiling beyond the dentist’s right ear and bright orange sideburns as though to will herself into an out-of-body experience. Better out than in, the same thing she said about the extraneous molars that now gleamed like polished ivory from their place on a metal side tray next to an array of hooks and pokers. How vital could two teeth be, really? Especially in comparison to the importance of maintaining immaculate facial structure and symmetry under the white-hot set lights well into the future; after all, she had a whole mouth full of other perfectly good teeth, but what she didn’t have was an extra set of cheekbones. The buckle, they called it, as though to treat her face like a construction site, knock out a few support pillars, and then stand back and watch the delicate structure of her face cave in.

“I’d advise you not to bother with the mirror for a good week or two,” the dentist proclaims crisply, as though reading her thoughts directly. His bright blue gaze over the lip of his mask hurt to look at nearly as much as the bulb of the overhead lamp. “You’re going to look like an overripe plum, sweetheart, not pretty at all, but if you do as I say and eat soft foods and apply ice daily, I promise you’re going to be thrilled at the end result. Did you have any questions?”

“Ah…” Before she can answer, the taste of sterile gloves replaces the taste of her own blood as the doctor goes rooting around for the soiled gauze without warning, plucking one soaked wad and then the other. With cheerfully indifferent efficiency, more cloth is packed into her jaw and a hand under her chin coaxes her to bite down once more.

“Terrific. Up you go.” A mechanical hum jolts the chair awake and begins to lift the addled patient back into a reclining position with a look of drenched misery. The dentist pulls his sullied gloves from his hands and piles them next to his mask on a tray. “Let’s get you some painkillers and get you on your way. Do you have a driver waiting…?”

“Ough…” she mouths around the bulk of the gauze. “Ah row hee…” Her nose crinkles up at the indignity of speaking in such a state while the dentist helps her to her feet, her ankles momentarily threatening to upend her entire weight onto the floor under the strain of high heels.

“Easy, now. One foot in front of the other,” he soothes, letting her hold onto his arm for balance.

His charge twists to look behind herself to check for anything forgotten when she spots just such a thing. “Ay—wayh…” she insists, trying to break away from her newly-appointed chaperone to retreat the way they came.

“You’ve got your purse in your hands, miss,” he reminds her with only the slightest patronization, but it’s enough to break her last mote of patience. The young starlet gives him a brusque shove with one hand and turns fully to march back into the examination room with renewed purpose and only the slightest wobble. “Did you forget something?” he insists, now growing impatient in kind. “You may be feeling the nitrous yet, but I promise you all is well.”

A doe-eyed assistant who had just started cleanup in the examination room appears surprised to see her patient return so soon, and the puffy face of determination greets her in kind. “Oofh,” the surly, gauze-packed woman commands. There is no understanding that passes between them, so she reaches out and grips the assistant by the shoulders and begins to drag her away from the dirty medical tray, where she spots her prize. “Ma’am?” the assistant begins, bewildered by her strange behavior, but is soon answered when the chipmunk-cheeked patient turns and shows her the two long-rooted molars gleaming in her blood-streaked palm, closes her fist, and marches out the door.

[strigwrites]

you ever accidentally create a recurring theme in your writing. you start putting together an outline for something you’ve never written before and get partway through planning, rearrange the pieces, and go “GODDAMMIT THIS IS ABOUT GRIEF AGAIN”? because let me tell you,

[strigwrites]

Not sure who still reads this thing anymore or how many of you care, but I may be posting more original content soon. I'm working on some snippets of writing that adapt ideas originating in fanfic into a custom setting. I know engagement is a weird thing these days and is a concept tied more to people with a capital-a Audience than some rando writer on the tumbls, but nevertheless I will cast my net and say that I'd appreciate any feedback regardless of length or positivity/negativity along the way.

[strigwrites]

Revenant

A sharp whistle cuts the tension before I can take the first steps toward making a fool of myself. "If I didn't know any better, I'd say I'm lookin' at a ghost," a sailor's shit-eating cant calls out.

"You ever seen a ghost with an ass like mine?"

"Turn around, let me think about it."

A tree trunk of a man leans on a shovel and shields his eyes from the light. I see the blotchy ink of sun-scorched tattoos snaking up his bronze arm, naval mythology merged with flesh just the way I remember. I can feel the dread-thump of a resistant heart being violently kickstarted by an absolute dream, jolting me awake. It's a perfect, cerulean day in La Noscea, and the chaplain himself is shoveling shit on several acres of the island's best volcanic soil. Spectacular.

"How's it going, Leon?"

"I've had it worse. Still kicking, so I can't complain."

"You look healthy."

"I am healthy. But what about you? Last I saw you…"

"I was blasted on drugs and dancing on the edge of disaster. Bet you thought I danced right off the dock and into the ocean." It's a joke, but it's not.

"That's...one way of putting it, yeah." Leon scratches at the short hair on his chin and cheek with a free hand and looks me over as he mulls what exactly to say to a screaming heap of unfinished business made manifest on his humble yard. I can see it in his eyes that he's wary, the walls being bricked as high as he can make them before the bad humors get in and asphyxiate everything they touch.

"I know this is out of the blue," I admit, in the most obvious possible fashion. Fuck, I am so stupid. "I guess I could've sent a letter or...messenger bird. Smoke signals..." I'm trying to joke again, but unlike Arius, this one gives me a pitying smile. Grow up, Lydia. You fucking idiot.

"What are you here for, Lydia?" The smile fades fast as I watch him try to piece together my intent with a swell of suspicion, and I can't blame him for the outcome. "Listen, I know things happened on the Basilisk, but I...don't live like that anymore, and I have no desire to go back. The drugs, the debauching...I'm not proud of what I did there, but I'm set on a better path these days. I'm making up for lost time."

"No, no. Hey." I'm moving before I can stop myself, boots sinking into the supple field, treading on his work in a way I am all too keenly aware of. "Listen, I'm not here to drag you back, I swear to you. Actually, I'm drying out too, in just about every conceivable sense. I don't want that, either."

"I looked for you, you know. Looked for a body more than anything, expected to find you face down in the current. Didn't find out until later that you'd walked off with a stranger. I didn't understand it."

"Yeah, well…" I begin, ready to deflect with more sour humor and then immediately turn away from the vulnerability this perilous conversation requires. Instead: "I'm…sorry. I'm sorry you had to do that. That was fucked up, the way I walked out of all that. I don't have an excuse, and I'm not going to make one. I owed you more than that."

I see his brows raise, but he doesn't voice his surprise. He doesn't need to. "I appreciate that."

"You're...such a good fucking man, Leon. You're one of the best. You didn't deserve it. It's that simple. I kept thinking about you after I left, and it's not to excuse how I walked out, but even before then I knew I was an anchor and I was dragging you to your death. I was poison. The Basilisk was...it was..."

"A cataclysmic fuckfest," he completes on cue. "Yeah, it was a disgusting, sweaty, nihilistic shitshow and everyone there knew it, but you didn't do anything to me that I wasn't already on the way to doing to myself. It was a dark time, Lydia. We lost our minds when faced with the end. In a way, I'm grateful it happened, because it showed me who I really was."

"You never seemed lost to me."

Leon unfurls an endearing smile, his eyes crinkling up with easygoing mirth. "We're born lost, Lydia. We're all just stumbling around in the dark trying to do our best with a little bit of light and direction until we die and get the big picture." He's been building up to this line, I can see it in his expression that he's pleased. "Thankfully there's a divine Navigator."

I smile back reflexively and feel my heart punch madly against my ribs, beating my dumb ass internally with every blow. Part of me wants to cover the spot with my hands as though he can see it, but I settle for crossing my arms casually instead. We stand there staring at each other stupidly for far too long as seagulls scream in the distance.

"Hey, so can I just…" I begin. "I don't expect anything out of you. Let me be clear about that. I don't want money or favors or anything, okay?" I've got his full attention and it's making me nervous, but I'm committed now and there's no turning back. "But...maybe you wouldn't mind giving me a little bit of your time? Let me buy you a drink or dinner or both." I can feel the color creep up my neck, which is abso-fucking-lutely undignified. This isn't like me, but I can barely hear my own higher thought over the steady wardrum going off in my chest. "You can absolutely tell me to go fuck myself if that's where your heart's at, but if there's even a remote chance--"

"Sure."

"Sure. Sure? What's that mean, sure?"

"You're as thick as you always were," he scoffs, turning to walk his shovel back toward a freshly-painted barn, leaving me to scramble after. "You can't just tell me you want to talk or that you're feeling some kind of way, so we've got to do this song and dance where I pretend I don't know you and you get to pretend you're getting away with something. It was the same deal when I first met you on the boat to Terncliff, you were scared shitless, but had to come at it all sideways." He leans the shovel against the wall and ignores me to work the knot on his bandana to wipe the sweat from his forehead. "I know you want to say some things, you think I might want to say some things, and you want to put a cap on this open chapter one way or another. So let's do it. Take me on a date, Lydia Thane."

Leon takes his time to pull the bulky gloves from his hands and throw them on a workbench, finally glancing over his shoulder to see me looking dumbstruck. His laughter is loud enough to echo all the way down to the shoreline.

[strigwrites]

Growing Up

The trek out of the armpit of Ilsabard wasn't silent, at least not at first. The gruff hum of a taxed engine filled the cabin as we bumped along the uneven hills in search of the main thoroughfare we'd rolled in on days ago, supplanting the need to make small talk with monotonous thrumming and occasional remarks about the rough ride. The vehicle was oppressive with a stale musk of blood, sweat, and sex, the accumulation of weeks of spotty bathing being held back by cold weather layers no longer. We've been living on a diet of tinned rations and dried foods, leaving a trail of refuse unceremoniously tossed by the wayside after every meal for some future archaeologist to trace our foolish path and scratch their head over what we could've possibly been up to.

We stalled true intimacy until it was no longer possible: just as the snowline began to vanish behind us, our beleaguered machine began to bear signs of its final collapse after being taken through hell and back in a most literal sense. We shuddered up one last foothill, and then coasted in freefall down the other side until we could rattle to a stop at the nadir. Nobody had to say anything. Arius lifted the hood and looked down with acceptance when our suspicions were confirmed:

"Dead," he declared without emotion.

"Lucky she got this far," I mused, and that's that.

We packed up what was left of our belongings, much lighter than how we set out, and pointed ourselves toward the faint tendril of smoke indicating civilization at least a few malms down the road, the final stretch giving us plenty of time to contemplate all the ways things had gone wrong. Broken, lumpy roads unfurled before us, painted dark by two slumping silhouettes trekking shoulder to shoulder with the sun glaring at our backs until the silhouettes grew longer and skinnier and somehow farther apart. Arius' beard had grown unruly and tangled into a greying nest, making for a formidable mask to cover his thin grimaces when I tried to lighten the mood on several occasions. The jokes don't sound the same now in the aftermath, and I suppose the precarious deal I made affirms that I'm not exactly the same, either. I guess I was lucky he could look me in the eye at all. I know what I am.

"What's the plan?" he asked me after an hour of silence marked only by the crunch of boots over loose gravel. My debts to the stoic carpenter who dug a hole to hell for me to be rebirthed in had been on my mind, certainly, but I'd started to let my mind wander to more dangerous territory: after all, I've owed my share of debts before, but far more unsettling than that was the potential of a future I actually wanted that was possibly already out of my grasp. I wonder, even now, if he was doing the same.

"The plan," I repeated slowly, drawing out the moment like I didn't already know what it looked like. Once I say it, it's real. I'd like to pretend that I was naive enough not to know what he really meant by that, but I owe him much more than a charade. I'm not the one slinking off the ship called Basilisk this time, cutting out while the crew sleeps off the hangover. I'm not jealously watching an ex-lover move on to something better while I sink deeper into self-loathing. It's time to grow up, Lydia. You've had hundreds of years to do it. "I think for you, it's pretty easy. You should go home to your kids. You've been gone a long time and I know you haven't exactly been writing letters. Let them know you're okay."

The outskirts of the city had been creeping up on us fast while my mind wandered, and after that it's the point of no return. When we set out on this impossible voyage, I never really thought I'd see the other side of it. Like all other parts of my unnaturally long life, I was sure I'd be able to skip the real ending, dodge the uncomfortable closure, and pretend it was never an option.

"And for you?"

"And for me?"

"I didn't do all of that for nothing, did I?"

"You mean to ask me if I'm gonna go throw it away."

His silence answers me perfectly.

"I owe you an absolutely fucking colossal debt. There's no amount of money I could give you -- I could spawn a hundred generations named in your honor, and it wouldn't be enough. This wasn't an average favor, it was a nightmare that just kept getting worse, and you carried me through it." It was the first time I'd been able to vocalize the building pressure in my gut after the rift closed behind us, but once it starts, I can't stop it. "I don't know how I keep running into good hearts like yours. I always dreamed of being that good, but it's always just out reach. I don't have the stuff it takes to make it come naturally. But you..." I turned to look at the side of his weathered face and found it illuminated in gold by the fading daylight. I couldn't help but laugh, but it's genuine now, untainted by caustic wit. "Even now, man. You're fucking luminescent."

Arius kept his dark eyes affixed at the rooftops that drew closer into view. One of those has a bed, a real one, the first we'll have seen in months. After that, there will be a ship in the harbor that he boards and it will sail him back to Kugane, where the dazzling red sunsets and fresh ocean air will make this all seem like one long delirium as he sweats me out in an eastern sauna. The memory of Lydia will fade like a bruise and become prettier until it's nothing at all. "I love you," I state plainly, without flourish, and without the expectation that I'll hear it in return. "Always will. I've already asked too much of you to saddle you with more of me, and the parts you'd have aren't the ones you'd want. But you knew that."

After a long pause, he nods as surely as he did when he saw the smoke coming off the engine. Dead. He slips his calloused hand into mine and we take our last steps into the real world that awaits. When he lets go, it's to pay for passage, and that's the last I ever see of Arius. I wish him the best. I'm growing up.

[strigwrites]

Prompt #21: Solution

You can’t bring the dead back, but that which cannot die simply waits. In a few centuries of accumulated hunting, I’ve been carrying it all inside, and it’s no wonder I’ve been a mess. The emergent persona is a product of thousands of slain creatures whose essence I devoured, and somewhere in there was the cut prism at the center of it all, projecting the dead in a thousand directions through the lens of Lydia. It’s raucous and twisting, a storm toiling within. Now, it’s quiet.

This was my bright idea all the way back in Eorzea, with gratitude to a certain bastard magus who shared a few quiet moments on the beach with me where the idea was planted in the first place—back when I knew this was inevitable but still couldn’t bring myself to acknowledge it. The second my mortal thread frayed, my shadow took my hand and made the exchange; she, too, was carrying this curse of half-life, tired of the turmoil, and most especially tired of carrying only half the required humanity to stave off the worst of it. Arius was the one who hunted her down in this cursed realm while I succumbed to void psychosis and it was him who forced the deal that would ultimately save me in a one-in-a-million alignment like three cherries on a slot machine. If death is anything like undeath, then there’s little to fear: I barely had to do a thing but lay there and sink into the darkness, as easy as breathing when they finally told me to release. My only thought while the living continued to move around me was this: I hope I’ve done enough. I have worked ceaselessly against my nature my whole, long life, not always to the desired result, but has it been enough to justify going on?

I feel the contract forged in my blood as the warmth returns like tide to shore. The irony of being reborn in the back seat of the armored car where I experienced my share of little deaths with the Garlean who’s gunning it back toward the broken gate is not lost on me, but I know my driver won’t appreciate the joke just yet. Hot on our heels is the veritable horde of demons that I’ve unleashed in purging myself of their consumed aether, and as I sit up in a daze to look back at them through the rear window, what I feel most is this: pride. I wipe the acrid pitch from my mouth and watch them give chase with a detachment only the isolation of near-death can bring. I don’t remember killing all of them, but it’s like watching my magnum opus unravel in glorious abandon, the accumulation of my life’s momentous efforts laid out before me in screaming, shrieking, wing-beating relief. I can’t help but laugh.

[strigwrites]

Katya: “Of course we’re in love. That’s why I tried to shoot you.” Goncharov: “If we really were in love, you wouldn’t have missed.”

An iconic scene from an iconic movie.

Available at Redbubble

[strigwrites]

Prompt #25: Wizen (Gwendolyn)

I spent my enlistment scrimping so the coin I made could pay for my mother's peace of mind in my absence. It repaired shutters and storm-battered shingles, it kept her icebox filled (after it bought the icebox, itself), but it couldn't stop the creep of time that stole her youth so gradually, the realization struck remarkably late. It seems it was only overnight that she shrank in my embrace, a slight frame of skin and bone. Had she always struggled to her feet out of the recliner that way? Had she always been so fragile when my memory of her was so sturdy, so unflappable? I took account of the time I'd spent away and simply couldn't make it add up. Nevertheless, it was so: my mother the mortal, revealed to me like a cold slap across the face.

I had visions of building her the ranch she dreamed of, Eorzea's first and only horse breeder tucked in the supple hills of Vylbrand. I pictured this sun-baked woman forced to sea by circumstance allowed to finally feel the glide of flight not from a water-sailing ship holding her hostage, but from the warm back of a gentle mammoth inside her own fences. I wanted this more than I wanted my own life and I made my heart a shrine to Mother, I vowed to patch her through this ultimate gift that would surely undo what had been etched into her through the hardships she didn't deserve. I spent this currency in deeds of daring, I used it to propel myself harder and higher than my peers. It carried me into burning buildings and sinking ships, it cradled me when I bled out and rocked me through strange fevers and foreign ills. The coin from my heroics stacked, but the curse would not abate; the more I saved, the older she became.

With perseverance, I earned a reputation to match the protagonist's name I'd given myself when Gemma Gardener needed to be left back in La Noscea: Gwendolyn Hightower, a knight's mantle, a moniker worthy of a paladin's righteous heart like the books I'd loved. It only took a few years for my ascending star to reach a burning zenith, but far below I continued to fall short. The costs of importing these four-legged creatures from the east was galling enough, but then came the land, the materials needed to feed and keep them, the veterinarian care for rare livestock. And then there were the hired hands who had to have familiarity with these exotic things, specialists in their own right, and they had the price tag to match. The hits just kept coming: the taxes, the tariffs, the equipment, the upkeep, and by the time I had it all added up in a notebook that looked as ragged as I felt, the death blow came. The coup de grâce was delivered in the form of the cost of caring for my mother, herself.

Try as I might, years of malnutrition and hardship could not be reversed by my devotion. The hard living we'd done had given her aches beyond measure, but she endured them with a stoic front until they formed an anchor of wasting that quietly dragged her under. I hired caretakers when she fell with the naive certainty it was only a temporary measure until she regained her usual strength. She hid her unhealing wounds, her swollen feet. The quilts she covered herself in masked the weight she'd shed, and the nurses complained only of her bitter tongue that even ailing health couldn't dull, a deceptive lucidity that belied the impending curtain drop. I couldn't have known -- could I? Or was it my own fastidious fixation with some stupid, symbolic gesture that made me blind to it? I held onto this fruitless drive to provide her with one last joy until it was wrested from my hands by death, itself.

It was with those empty hands that I took up a shovel and dug my mother's grave in the clearing where I once pictured handing her the lead rope to a gleaming black cob. When I still had hope, I read scores of books about the horses of the near and far east, from the rare Taishu on the miniature islands dotting the Ruby Sea to the proud Kathiawari warhorses of Thavnair, and even spent a summer in the stables of a Doman rancher after the liberation to prepare myself to help her. What do I do with these leavings now? Where does this unspent love go when the recipient ceases to exist? The neighbors who had watched me grow came to pay their respects, aunties and uncles who didn't look at me like a hero, but the wayward pirate child they helped to raise. You were her treasure. She was so proud of you, Gem. She didn't know how to say it, but you were the light of her life.

Brother Leon didn't arrive until long after the mourners emptied the yard, having traveled from overseas on leave from his tour. He read the eulogy he'd written himself on the voyage back while I emptied shovels of dirt over her simple wooden casket and cried the first tears I could muster since I heard the news. When the final scoop was laid into place, her neglected spirit's only caretakers held each other with one arm and shared a nip of whiskey with the other.

[strigwrites]

Prompt #26: Break a Leg

After the personally-humiliating Erasmus interview that made me the punchline of an absolutely overwhelming number of repetitive and uncreative jokes, I oscillated between defeat and consummate rage. There were days when I was ready to pack up my costume bags and find a new career, to perhaps pivot and become a lawyer or perhaps a lawyer's disgustingly wealthy wife, but then there were others when the only thing I could focus on was searching for an open opportunity to have my revenge. Allow me to set the scene for you.

The season's films du jour were mostly comprised of musical romantic comedies, particularly after the surprise success of Gavrenti's Good Looking, a quirky script about two spies with ordinary identities who wind up assigned to spy on one another. It was a terrific watch, laced with black humor that buoyed what could have been awfully twee dialogue in other, less deft circumstances, and directors were scrambling to imitate its success. Valerie and I had both landed parts in somewhat uninspired, but well-enough-earning pieces that were particularly heavy on the dance numbers (and critics agreed that my technical prowess and grace in Baby Grand Piano were a marvel to behold, just for your information), and some genius or another had the idea to host a charity auction where we would perform stripped-back versions of our famous dance sequences with the winners. I grumbled about it at first, for who could match the deft partnership of dancing with Sebastian Baris-Bruno, but I gradually became wise to the fact that it could instead be the perfect chance to strike.

I knew Valerie was taking a particular medication for an infection she contracted while shooting on the set of Glimmer (not sexually-transmitted, to my knowledge, but would it surprise anyone?), because my girl saw her girl at the pharmacy covertly filling the prescription and promptly reported back to me. I also knew that she was avoiding alcohol, per what must have been her doctor's instructions, as I heard her use the excuse at a thespian's guild dinner several times throughout the night. But what Valerie didn't know, because I am a genius and the contents of her skull have the approximate texture and content of a baked potato, is that it also doesn't mix well with highly-fermented beverages, and can quickly onset nausea, vomiting, and fainting. What luck, then, that one forged rider sheet later ensured that every single juice, tea, and sparkling beverage offered in her dressing room fit that description exactly.

I could see her pale and sweating, wobbling in her heels as she attempted pivot turns in our rehearsal that threatened to snap her ankles. Before she swept out into the grand ballroom to make her unforgettable entrance, I made sure to call out to her in support as her knees quivered. "Break a leg, Valerie."

[strigwrites]

Prompt #24: Vicissitudes (Gwendolyn)

I was a proper soldier when I decided to hang up my uniform for the last time, quenched in the warm blood of imperials and seasoned by the incalculable loss of my brothers and sisters in arms at the end of a gunblade or in a crater littered with reaper shells. It was through these violent means that a new world was given form when the dust settled, the fallen moon like a wildfire that stripped the land of its green, but left it fertile for an abundance thereafter. I left my company with highest marks by my commander and more than a few notches in my belt for the intruders I’d felled, enough for any average person to skate by on for the rest of their days, but I was already determined to be aught but average.

I returned home a hero and found that the world had need of one more than ever: in the north, the thick forests of Coerthas now had the vicissitude of an arctic climate to starve its populace along side the persistent threat of dragons. Beyond there, the decimation of ecosystems extended well into Mor Dhona where the jaw of the land bore a wicked maw of jagged, crystalline teeth jutting up through homes and businesses alike. My own Aldenard immortalized the wreckage in brilliant orange fingers crawling out of the great lighthouse walls, another landmark lost. I spent no more than two weeks at home reuniting with my mother and assuaging her worries before I accepted my first post as cleanup crew around the wreckage of Revenant’s Toll.

[strigwrites]

Prompt #22: Veracity

Gran,

I apologize for being so late to write you, I’ve been quite busy whilst unpacking and settling in with my new roommates with whom I will be attending class. They’re nice girls, if a bit dull-witted, but you can rest assured I’ve been minding my manners and avoiding provocation. I think you’d approve of the placement, as most come from good, pureblooded families with respectable roots. It seems they haven’t discriminated against my roots like you feared. Our shared flat is not very large, but it is tidy, so I suppose I can’t complain so long as it stays that way. It will feel like home soon enough, just as you said.

I wish I could say I miss Silvestre, but the truth of the matter is that I don’t. I miss you and Grandad and the familiarity of home, but if you both decide to move here with me in a year like we spoke of, then I would hardly shed a tear if I never had to see or smell that horrid industrial yard ever again. The capitol is stimulating by contrast, a feast for the senses. It reminds me so much of the letters you showed me, how your mother described the vivid nightlife during the ceruleum boom and how much she loved the twinkle of lights from her sitting room window. When you visit, there’s an incredible department store just a short walk away from the academy that puts Cassia’s to shame. Their window displays are a production, you’ll see soon enough.

I’ve enclosed a few photos from my arrival. I apologize for their poor quality, the gentleman I asked to take the one of me in front of the Gran Maschera was something of a cad and I wanted it to be over with as soon as possible before he could say something inappropriate. But you should worry not, the city is well-frequented by authorities, and most of the people here that I’ve met (this man notwithstanding) seem to be well-behaved. I still have the whistle you packed for me pinned to my jacket, just in case.

Hugs and kisses to you and Grandad,

Selena

[strigwrites]

Prompt #19: Turn a Blind Eye

For the greater part of my career, casting directors were willing to overlook the mounting tension between Valerie Salacia and I as a petty catfight between two actresses racing for the pinnacle of their careers. And really, were they so wrong to say so? Rearranging seating charts and rumormongering were at the low end of our respective potentials, even I can admit as much, and it kept the Cantilena’s press operators on fire for its weekly publishing, which in turn fueled ticket sales. We were a cultural tour de force, her and I, commanding levels of fascination that hadn’t been seen since Appolinar and Fulgencio’s tit-for-tat, which ended in infidelity, pregnancies, and drug overdoses, doubtlessly a tough act to follow. All in all, a healthy ecosystem for show business, and I think you’d be hard-pressed to find that any of us disagreed. Content with this arrangement, they became as frogs in a heating pot, and the water was boiling before they all discovered they’d let it go too far to turn back.

The night I well and truly unsheathed my claws was to be a run-of-the-mill live interview for my work on Time Unwinding. I knew I was sharing a guest slot with Salacia (doubtless the intent of the cunning host), but resolved to maintain my composure; I’d been overexposed, my publicist cautioned me, and it was time to recede out of the burn of the spotlight for at least a week. I had no reason to doubt her advice, and so I decided to have a drink to soothe my anger before my stage call and steel myself to be the bigger person. Valerie, however, had her own designs on the evening, starting with the bottle of red wine I requested on every set.

“Our next guest needs no introduction. You know her, you love her, you love to hate her. Let’s welcome Marcella Maxime.” 

I put back a good two glasses before I was called to stage and I was feeling good about the odds of making it through the appearance without being intentionally catty or malicious. I strode across the stage draped in a rich emerald green number that made me feel royal and expensive next to the cheap, tawdry glitter and glitz of my rival, waving to the audience with a summoned smile. I never noticed anything amiss in their reaction before placing myself on the couch next to the viper, herself.

“Marcella, it’s good to have you back.”

“Thank you, Erasmus. My aesthetician tells me the same thing every day.”

A wave of polite laughter rises from the audience, but doesn’t quite die down even as the host continues to speak.

“Does she…?” He asks curiously, then pauses before he presses further. “Marcella, did she tell you that this morning, as well?”

I tilt my head slightly, my smile frozen. What a strange question. “Well, I know I’m not renowned for my comedy, Ras, but that’s the implication of the joke. She’s grateful I’m still employed, and in turn employing her.”

I can hear an odd titter break out in the audience as their murmuring grows louder, and Erasmus is studying me intently.

“Are you sure her paychecks are current, Ms. Maxime? Because it seems to me she may be upset with you.”

My blood runs cold, and my heart is pounding my ears. My eyes sweep from the host’s desk to the audience, then reluctantly land at Valerie’s expression. She regards me with her mouth pressed into a thin line, a suppressed grin that’s fit to burst. Do something. But what?

“Well, let me have a look and get to the bottom of this,” I bluff with a humored lilt, and reach into my clutch for my compact. The silver lid lifts and I search the mirror for the source of the interest, feeling the stage lights grow hotter and hotter. My makeup is immaculate, lipstick unbudged by the wine glasses. I open my mouth to protest and find myself face to face with a blue-tinted mouth, my teeth faintly stained with ceruleum blue. My pulse halts, breath held tight, but everyone is waiting to see what happens next. I gather my resolve and snap the case shut again.

“Oh, this little thing?” I hear myself say, but I’ve divorced from my own body by now. The only thing I’d consumed since leaving the makeup chair was that red wine, dark enough to hide the dyes she must have paid a runner to drop in. “I’m preparing for my next role, you see. It’s a thrilling number about a woman who is half-machine. I thought I’d take a little sip of ceruleum and see if I could step into the part…”

I thought I’d buried my origins well and truly in the past; when I moved out of Silvestre, I became a new girl who in turn became a new woman, old skins shed and left to crumble when they outlived their usefulness. I don’t know how Valerie came by the intuition to come after me this way, but it was the day I decided I was no longer satisfied with simply questioning the wingspan of Salacia’s spread eagle when she went into casting calls, or slipping bills from palm to palm until her valet got conveniently mixed up, making her late to press junkets. Since that day, I’ve been out for blood.