Never-Contented Things

by Sarah Porter

  If anything, the black scarves of smoke wrapped him lovingly. He stood up, in no hurry at all, a few small patches of blaze still clinging to his hair and clothes. A girl I’d seen that first night, with a dress of silver snails, jumped forward to pat the flames out. Was that all there was to it? I’d committed the most violent act of my life, tried to burn a man alive, and he barely deigned to notice? He advanced on me and Josh, head still tilted, smile at a slant. Josh was opening his mouth, ready to babble who-knows-what in my defense; maybe that I hadn’t known what I was doing. Maybe that I was too traumatized to be touched.

  “Your sister is such an enlivening presence, isn’t she, Joshua? I suspect the tedium of court life exhausts a man more than hard labor ever could. Ksenia flings herself at me, strives to do me bodily harm, and I find myself wonderfully refreshed.”

  He reached out and patted me on the cheek, and again I was openmouthed but helpless, my throat thick with a wobbling mass of what felt like heat and pus and tears all at once. Because the violence in me had finally broken free.

  And it had been useless.

  Josh relaxed, though. He didn’t care that I’d failed, only that Prince didn’t seem to be angry with me. “I like her too.” At least there was an edge in his voice. “Oh, Kezz, you’re bleeding? Why don’t you go inside and get cleaned up? I … this might take a while.”

  Crimson was running down my shins. I’d hurt myself, not Prince. That made it even more shameful, somehow: that no matter what I did, the wounds would rebound into me, or straight through me and into whoever I loved. I couldn’t cry, not in front of these people, but the tears I was holding back turned the stars into dandelion bursts of light. I would have given anything to run into the house and escape.

  But I’d already let them steal him from me once. “I’m staying with you, baby. Whatever they want from you, they’re going to have to take it from me too.”

  Prince grinned at that, and beckoned the mink-head girl closer. “Of course. You needn’t worry about your sister, Joshua. We can attend to her scratches for her here. No trouble at all. Unselle, dearest?”

  “Kezzer!” Josh said—and it was in the new, weirdly authoritative voice I’d noticed earlier. “Please go in. Let me deal with this.”

  Prince stepped aside and the mink-head girl—Unselle, he’d called her?—rustled closer in her frothing dress. All at once I got the sense that she was a big deal in this place, maybe Prince’s second-in-command. She knelt at my feet in a pool of pale lace and arched her chest toward me. Her ruffles engulfed my calves. I had no idea what was happening.

  “No,” I said. I understood one thing now: there was a price to be paid for being here, for the house and the champagne and our freedom from a world determined to tear the two of us apart. Even if none of this was my choice, I wouldn’t let Josh pay for both of us. “I won’t lose you. Not any more than I have already.”

  “You surely can’t expect to hide Ksenia away from society indefinitely, can you, Joshua? Not when she brings such grace wherever she goes,” Prince said. And now the girl’s head was flung back, her eyes closed and her ice-pale curls tumbling backward. Blood dripped from my knees onto her lace-veiled breasts and she shuddered. It would have been such a perfect face, if there wasn’t something sharp and terrible about it. She seemed to have three pairs of cheekbones, raising thin, knobby ridges to each side of her nose.

  The stuffed mink head sewn over her heart gave a sleepy little growl, yawned, and swirled a long pink tongue over its jaws. I saw a drop of my blood splat on its jutting lip. Heard it purr.

  I almost jumped back, but Josh was still pressed against me and Prince was watching with his acrid green eyes. He’d enjoy it if I panicked. Instead I stood perfectly still while the girl wriggled closer, rubbing me with her chest, and her lifeless mink began to lap the weeping blood from my skinned knees. Its rough tongue dug into my peeled flesh, pausing once to suck out a curl of bright-blue glass from one of those broken flowers. I hissed against the pain, but I held steady. Kept my expression blank and disdainful, as well as I could, though I felt queasy.

  The problem was, Prince obviously enjoyed this too. Watching a taxidermy mink slurp down my blood was as good as a porn film; that was what the look on his face told me.

  “Kezzer isn’t really part of this,” Josh insisted. Though there was something hungry in his expression too, watching that dead thing feeding on me. I could feel its whiskers trembling on my skin, feel its freakish hot-cold breath. “She’s living here with me, but only because I brought her along. She didn’t come for you.”

  “And does it matter why she’s here, Joshua? She’s in my realm and she belongs to us, along with the pleasure of her company.”

  I was starting to feel weak. How much of my blood was that mink sucking down? I raised my foot and knocked Unselle back, and she flopped over in a frilly heap. Eyes still closed, ecstatic smile. Emma’s chair now misshapen behind her, a charred hulk drooling stray flames.

  “That’s not how it works. People only belong to whoever they love,” Josh said. I was relieved to find that he was still capable of talking back to these people, and dismayed to realize that I hadn’t been sure if he could.

  “Is that so? And why don’t we enquire what Ksenia herself has to say on the subject?”

  It wasn’t something I wanted to talk about, because I wasn’t sure if I belonged to anyone, not even to myself. I loved Josh, but was that enough to make him own me? Maybe I did belong to a part of Joshua, though: the part that Mitch and Emma didn’t want to think about or even believe existed. To the rage and desperation that could make him much more dangerous than he seemed to be. To everything in him that had brought us here.

  And I was afraid that those were thoughts that might prove Prince was right, in a way.

  I opened my mouth to say something, though I still hadn’t decided what. But then I saw that Prince wasn’t looking to me for the answer.

  He was gazing at my bowler hat, with an air of waiting politely for it to speak.

  His arm snaked out, longer than I would have thought possible, and lifted the hat off my head. Held it in front of his face, and gazed into the hollow where my scalp had been, and where the oversized eye had welled up earlier. Of course: that eye had been his. Exactly the same bright bile green. And now he spoke into the hat, like someone calling into the depths of a cave.

  “Ksenia, my beauty? What do you think of all this? It seems to me that Joshua is presuming overmuch on your affection. So: where do you belong, and by what are you possessed? Do tell.”

  Then he threw my hat on the ground. Hollow facing up, just the way that Josh had said I should never let it fall. In case there was something in there, something that might try to escape.

  There was. They burst out now. There were so many that at first I couldn’t make them out; all I took in was a blur of jointed petals, multiplying mothlike wings.

  But no: they were all me. Jagged and fragmentary, stunted and squeaking. A legion of broken-mirror Ksenia-imps, no taller than the middle of my thigh. They swung and shook like ringing bells, each one unfolding into more and more leering duplicates. Thousands of them, all as naked as I was. Blond hair like poisonous spines, tiny pointed breasts. They swarmed and bubbled over the lawn, sometimes flat and sometimes bristling with dimensions, their limbs clacking like cicadas’ wings. All of them wore black penny loafers, all of them had bleeding knees.

  And maybe I’d been in denial about the Josh-imp. I’d managed to believe that it was distinct from Joshua himself, that it was an alien entity. But seeing my own broken, dwindled selves was different. I recognized them, I knew they were more genuinely and completely me than I had ever been myself, in all my life. My true image, my sick and garbled being.

  No wonder Prince spoke to them and not to me. They were my reality, and they would never lie, to him or to anyone.

  But they didn’t answer him now. Instead they rolled up the lawn in a rattling, faceted melee, leapfrogging one another
, clapping together and then splitting into multiples again. Sometimes they shrieked, and I recognized the high, pitiful voice that had clamored out of my phone right before I threw it down. They piled onto one another and flocked straight up the butter-yellow siding, plastered the roof of the house’s low main section.

  There was more clattering, more seething. And then Mitch and Emma’s bland suburban house had an entire second story, where there’d been nothing but sky five minutes before.

  That was it. The night was silent and starry, with only a few stray mousey peeps emitted by the new upper level of our house. All the Ksenia-imps were gone from the lawn and the street. I knew that the second story was made out of little Ksenias, that it was a living colony of my fractured selves, but they were doing a brilliant job of making the addition appear as if it had been there all along. There was the same yellow vinyl, or what looked just like it. The same shingle roof, just one floor higher up. Two windows gawking darkly at the night, both open. The only innovation was the curtains blowing in our new upstairs rooms. There was enough light from the streetlamps that I could see they had red and white checks, brighter than anything Emma would have chosen.

  Not what I would have chosen either. Except that maybe I had.

  Everyone had fallen silent while all of this was happening. Understandably. Now Prince bent down, scooped up my hat, and handed it back to me with a flourish. It was no lighter than it had been, but somehow I could feel that it was empty in a way it had never been before.

  “And there we have it, Joshua. Whatever questions you might have, pertaining to Ksenia’s belonging—I believe she, and you, can locate an answer somewhere up there. Assuming she’ll let you in, of course. And now I think we’ll wish you both a good night.”

  “Kezzer won’t go up there!” Josh said. His voice sounded frantic, percussive; was this the first time since I’d found him out in the woods that he’d been truly afraid? “You can’t make her. We’ll both pretend—that whole floor—we’ll just ignore it. I’ll board up the stairs!”

  We hadn’t been here for very long, but I already knew that boarding up a stairway was no kind of solution. Josh should have known that too, especially since he was the one who’d dragged us into this. Those imp things could warp the house to suit their own purposes, open as many ways through as they wanted. I’d seen what the Josh-imps had done with the stairs down to our lower half-story, dilating space and collapsing it again, and why would the Ksenia-imps be any less capable? It wasn’t like Josh to be willfully stupid.

  “Oh, but I don’t suppose Ksenia would have gone to the trouble of building so much new space onto your house,” Prince observed. “Not unless it had something to offer her.”

  * * *

  That was how it happened. As honestly as I can remember it, anyway. But I can’t tell how long we’ve been here. Every passing second has a trickery about it, and when I try to pin anything down—any word, any hour, any slippage of the sunlight down the walls—I find that I can’t. All I can say for sure is that here isn’t going anywhere.

  Part Two

  lexi holden

  The king looked round him, to left, to right,

  And in sooth he beheld a fearsome sight;

  For here lay folk whom men mourned as dead,

  Who were hither brought when their lives were sped;

  E’en as they passed so he saw them stand,

  Headless, and limbless, on either hand …

  Men and women on every side

  Lay as they sleep at slumbertide,

  Each in such fashion as he might see

  Had been carried from earth to Faerie.

  Anon, Sir Orfeo (translated by Jessie L. Weston)

  every skein of light

  If I have to tell this story, then can I whisper the words? If I have to think of their names, over and over, even when I’m drifting through sleep, can I please keep them so soft that they settle like white feathers on my thoughts? I practice in my mind; I repeat the names Josh, Ksenia, so lightly that I hardly feel the sharp edges or the pain. When their faces float up in my inner vision, I send them streaming out of focus, fringy and smeared and wet.

  But I keep them with me, and that’s what’s important. They dwell within, and I am inhabited by what once was.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Lexi,” Xand tells me, over and over again. But he says it because that’s what you say to your girlfriend, especially when you miss the way she used to be, and you want that happy, peaceful girl back again. When he says it, I don’t think he even cares if it’s true. “You didn’t do anything to Kezzer. She killed herself. It was her decision, not anybody else’s, and you really can’t blame yourself for that.”

  There are murders of the kind that everyone knows about, with guns and blades and blood, and then there are murders that are so gentle and secretive that even the murderer has no idea what she’s done until much later. She might not realize for days.

  The second way, the soft way: that was how I killed Ksenia Adderley, and even if I had no clue what would happen, even if all I did was to say the wrong thing, the consequence was still that she died in my arms. I know Xand doesn’t mean it like that, I know he’s trying to be kind, but when he tells me not to feel guilty, he’s really telling me to forget my own heart and bury it along with my friend. Because there’s no possible way that I can get rid of the truth, not without getting rid of the heart that holds it. I remember what I did.

  I might have killed Josh too; no one really knows, and most days I imagine that no one ever will. They never found his body, or even the slightest hint of where he’d gone. Joshua Korensky seemed to have evaporated, turned into sky and clouds. At least he would have liked that, to be high and windy and blue.

  “Lexi,” Xand says, and takes my face in his hands, “are you listening to me? I feel like nothing I say gets through to you anymore.”

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “But Xand, it doesn’t help me. What you’re saying doesn’t help. It’s not about blaming myself. It’s just that it’s actually better for me if I take my share of the responsibility. It’s the strong thing to do, and I wish you could see that.”

  The curtains glow through a mesh of blossoming shadows, and the petal-pink crystals of the chandelier shiver out their almost inaudible singsong over our heads. We wouldn’t be having this particular conversation in the living room if anyone else were home, but my parents are still at the college and Marissa is at her cello lesson.

  Xand sighs. “It’s been more than nine months already.”

  Why should he bother to say that? How could I not know? “It doesn’t really matter to me how long it’s been.”

  “It matters a lot! You just got into Brown, Lexi! You need to let the past go, so you can focus on your future.”

  Need to. Do I need to? Is crushing my own emotions really such an essential activity?

  “I can have a past and a future at the same time,” I tell him. And there’s an image inside me, as fine as a sliver of the moon: Ksenia next to me, listening to Xand telling me what I need to do; how the turn of her head would reveal a gaze cold, and sharp, and stubborn. Then her profile dissolves; still, for half a moment, I can sense her indignation on my behalf. “Just watch me.”

  Xand’s brows pucker in his handsome face. Green eyes, brown curls; he’s one of the most beautiful boys in our whole school. But what used to seem like his sunny, positive outlook feels false and intrusive to me now; maybe I’ve changed too much. “Are you getting mad, Lex? I’m trying to be supportive!”

  I stand up, leaving Xand alone on the billows of the velvet sofa. “I know you are. I think I need some time by myself.”

  The pucker deepens. “You mean—just today? Or—”

  I don’t answer that. What can I really say?

  “Lexi!”

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. “I’m—you can let yourself out. Just make sure the door locks when you close it.”

  He chases me into the foyer, though, and I fee
l like he should know better. He should understand that, even if I’ve only gone twenty feet in terms of my physical body, my heart is already far away; it’s falling beyond his reach, a silent avalanche. Just as I reach the front door he grabs my upper arm, taking unfair advantage of how much bigger he is than me, how athletic and tall. First he felt entitled to tell me what to feel, and now he’s trying to control where I go?

  “Lexi, you’re going to make me say things I don’t want to say. Josh and Kezz—they were my friends too, and I don’t want to bad-mouth them. But you’re not leaving me any choice.”

  “You do not have my permission to hold my arm that way,” I tell him. I wince a little at the sight of Xand’s fingers, freckled and milky pale where they compress my dark brown skin. It’s insensitive, at least, for him to play at having power over me. It’s also delusional. How much patience does he think I have?

  “Will you listen to me, if I let go? Just for a minute?”

  “My freedom is not something you can bargain with.” I’m compact, petite; Xand towers over me. Words are my power. “Let go.”

  And he does, though his eyes are wide and his breathing comes quick. I turn to leave. “Have you considered that maybe Kezzer made the right choice? For herself, I mean. Like, what would have happened to her, if she’d lived?”

  I stop with my hand on the knob. “There would have been many different possibilities for her, Xand. That’s exactly the point.”

  “As messed up as she was? Kezz at thirty would have been a junkie in a trailer. She saved herself from that. Lexi, that’s what you need to see. Neither of them was going anywhere, and you’re going everywhere, and I can’t stand to watch you tearing yourself apart over these trashy kids.”

  “Trashy,” I say. “You just called them your friends.” People said cruel things like that about my dad too, when he was young; that he was just another ghetto kid, that being brilliant wouldn’t be enough to rescue him from the destiny they’d mapped out in their minds. But he kept fighting through it all, and he became a professor.