Those of My Kind

by Loring, Jennifer

  “About who?”

  “Your family.”

  “Unless you want to talk about your family too, there’s nothing to say.”

  Blessing wanted to touch the scars, as she always did at the mention of her family. Her fingertips fluttered against the knife as if programmed to remind her of it. She wore a headscarf, and everyone thought she was a Muslim. It didn’t matter; there was a large Muslim population here, and no one gave her any trouble over it. No one paid her any mind at all except the occasional boy asking her out on a date. They only asked because the hijab covered her scars. She supposed she was pretty enough with it on. She always tried to smile, though smiles did not come easily to her, and tell them, No, I cannot.

  It began near the crown of her skull and stretched all the way down to her jawline, a holocaust of puckered pink flesh her mutated blood had done its best to heal. Most noticed the burn scar immediately and turned away in horror. But Tristan hadn’t. Tristan had found her somehow, had taken her away from that horrible place in Eket and given her a new life. They travelled the world together, learning from assassins and shamans alike. She remembered it that way, a fairy tale woven from the threads of her own wishes. But all that seemed very long ago.

  “I think you have a lot to say.”

  Tristan held up her own knife and wiped the blade until the steel shone like mirror glass. “One of my parents made me a monster, and the other one never let me forget it.”

  ~

  They had arrived in Philadelphia just two months ago and would be gone again as soon as possible. They chose a house in Kensington in which to squat, a row home of only two stories as opposed to the usual three. The city shut off the electricity shortly after their arrival, but the water still flowed for now. The former occupants, it seemed, had chosen that as the more important utility. Most of the windows were shattered, and bed sheet curtains clung to the rods. A few scraps of clothing lay strewn about the bedrooms, along with dirty mattresses and furniture too large to carry when circumstance drove the occupants out in a hurry. Gunshots and police sirens argued like abusive neighbors. The Hunters kept their heads down when they walked to the El station because someone invariably tried to sell them drugs if they expressed interest in anything other than the sidewalk. They spoke to no one unless necessary. Blended in as anonymously as possible. Dispatched the worst of the johns and drug dealers, and though someone was always ready to scurry in and fill the void like the vermin they were, they hoped enough dead johns and drug dealers sparked a level of fear that made them reconsider their life choices.

  Tristan lit up a cigarette and sucked a long drag into her immune lungs, where her cells would repel the carcinogens out through her next breath. Blessing claimed her nose tingled when Tristan smoked, even though Hunters didn’t have things like allergies. A perpetual pale blue haze curtained the living room, yellowed the walls and the ceiling like tobacco-stained teeth.

  “Perhaps God is at last punishing humanity by allowing all of this. Perhaps we are standing in the way of his plan. There have been many prophecies that evil will consume the world before his final judgment.”

  “Yeah? What was he punishing you for? Pretty dick move on his part. Blessing.” Tristan sneered and blew smoke out of her nostrils. “Brilliant fucking sense of irony, I’ll give your mother that.”

  “Don’t be like them,” Blessing said softly, her head drooping like a dead flower. “Don’t be so cruel. It’s getting to you, all this fighting. We have done it for so long already.”

  Zsofika had said the future wasn’t immutable. No gods, then, no one dancing to the whim of some grotesque cosmic Gepetto like puppets pretending to be real boys and girls. No watchmaker, for unlike watches, humans had no design and no purpose. Mankind had done a number on itself, and no one feared monsters any more than they feared the existential nothing. Monsters spawned fashion doll toy lines and sparkling teenaged fantasies. People wanted to be them. They had finally conceded their true identities as the things onto which they’d deflected blame for centuries. “Monster” was a relative term. It was an Oscar-winning film. It was cool.

  Monsters were the only things guarding them against themselves.

  “Maybe. But I passed my test. It’s your ass on the line now. You’re about to turn eighteen. Better toughen up.” Tristan stubbed out her cigarette. It had failed its purpose. Fuck ’em, she’d told Blessing before; we should let them die. Some Hunter. “Do you know the Dhammapada?”

  Blessing narrowed her eyes. “Of course I do.”

  “Then you know what the Buddha says:

  Look at your body—

  A painted puppet, a poor toy

  Of jointed parts ready to collapse,

  A diseased and suffering thing

  With a head full of false imaginings.

  “That’s the human condition. Attrition. The craziest thing is, they fight death kicking and screaming, do anything to hold it off, when death is the best fucking thing that will ever happen to them.” Tristan rolled her neck and shoulders, hoping to loosen the tension there. “There’s no pain in not existing. But living is pain. All they do is lie to themselves, trying to create meaning where there is none. The universe doesn’t give a damn about this planet or anything on it. So why should we?” She cracked each knuckle. Her hands had begun to tremble. “They don’t care about each other, and yet every Hunter has died in the line of duty. For them.”

  “‘Man is a self-conscious nothing,’” Blessing murmured.

  “Exactly.”

  “Do you think they ever suspect anything?”

  “About us?” Tristan opened the tiny closet beneath the ruined stairs and dragged out what looked like a badly rolled sleeping bag. “Don’t worry. We’re just a myth.” The bundle twitched and issued a muffled scream, incoherent at best given the rag in its mouth and the fabric in which she had wrapped its entire body. She cut away the rope binding the package together and then tore the fabric away. The man, bathed in sweat, fought valiantly against yet more rope tying together his wrists and his ankles. She and Blessing had caught him raping a woman on the stroll. Blessing would have bashed his head in on the spot if Tristan hadn’t calmed her down, urged her to just knock him out, tie him up, and wrap him in a soiled blanket. They carried him home with the shadows drawn around them. They needed him. No one else did, not scum like this.

  Blood crusted his hair and the side of his face. Blessing knelt down opposite Tristan, her lips glistening, her throat moving up and down. “Can I?” she almost whispered, as if she were about to deliver a sacrament.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  She laid the edge of her newly sharpened knife over his throat. “This is what happens to men like you,” she said and ripped the blade across his flesh. With each of his last few heartbeats, blood surged forth toward the heads bowed as if in supplication, an entreaty to take away their unspeakable hunger for another day or two and into their waiting mouths.

  ~

  Because the stairs had been set on fire, leaving scorch marks on the walls like black tongues and rendering the second floor inaccessible, Tristan usually slept in the living room. She left the one downstairs bedroom to Blessing. Blessing felt safer when they slept in the same room, though it surprised her whenever Tristan still obliged. But she had, and the comforting weight of her body on the mattress lulled Blessing to sleep.

  Images flitted across the screen of Blessing’s mind like ghost recordings captured in the dead spaces between television channels. Something crawled down the inside of her thigh. I’m dreaming, she thought, but when she reached down the substance was warm and thick on her fingers. Blood. Scarlet eyes watched her from the shadows.

  A circle of fire flared up around her. It licked across her body, consuming her, turning her hair and flesh and bone to white-hot ash. Blessing reached for Tristan, but the flames were a wall as solid as stone, and she could not scream for the invisible hand clamped around her throat. The blood came faster, heavier, soaking the bed sheets an
d the mattress and pouring in a red pottage onto the floor. The blood rising, rising, it was impossible her body held this much blood, but she tasted the briny fluid on her lips and huffed it into her nostrils, and finally it closed over her face.

  Blessing’s eyes snapped open. Tristan still slept, and only sweat dampened the sheets. Early risers had already taken to their cars. The gray dawn vibrated with bird song, with the anticipatory hum of a world on the verge of awakening.

  She rose and walked into the kitchen for a glass of water. The glowing numbers on the stove clock read six fifty-six a.m. Her hands trembled as she filled a thrift-store tumbler in the sink and gulped down the lukewarm liquid. She tiptoed from the tiny open kitchen into the living room and stuck her fingers between the dusty, bent slats of the blinds. Her breath fogged the glass, but the vapor faded away as quickly as it had escaped her lips. A weekday morning like any other, and all over the city bright pink cherry blossoms announced the arrival of spring.

  The city was not much different from others they’d lived in over the past three years, an incongruous collection of turn-of-the-century storefronts and modern steel-and-glass skyscrapers. A place to lose oneself among all the stone and metal or the anonymous faces of the office workers and mothers and homeless people, the street cleaners and the Muslim women who hid their faces behind veils.

  We are so alike, trying to pretend we are not a part of this world. Hoping we will not be noticed.

  But no veil protected her, defended her against the staring eyes she could easily pop from their sockets were she so inclined. She felt no kinship with any of those strangers. In ten years, she might return and see the same faces, but they would never be like her. Only one girl ever would be.

  Cast adrift on her own thoughts, at first she did not realize she was unable to move. Blessing commanded her leaden legs to obey her. They did not budge. The tumbler slipped from her hand and shattered, splashing her ankles with water. I must clean it or I will cut myself, she thought pointlessly, stupidly, her mind spinning in circles to make sense of the terror that had immobilized her.

  The face mirrored in the window glass was not her own.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Outside City Hall station, ancient gum smears turned black by the soles of countless shoes mottled the sidewalks. Cigarette butts crammed the crevices. Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks dominated the landscape, along with green metal kiosks usually selling snacks but sometimes newspapers and lottery tickets or Middle Eastern food. Homeless people sat on the edges of the sidewalks with paper cups and cardboard signs scrawled in black marker, always some variation of: “Homeless and hungry, please help. GOD BLESS!!!”

  The street musicians used amplifiers so their voices, violins or guitars echoed for blocks. Every few minutes an ambulance, police car or fire truck raced by. Horns blasted, and frustrated voices rose from open windows as drivers trapped in gridlock tried to move more than just a couple of centimeters. Buses belched pollution from their tailpipes while cars vibrated with the low bass frequencies of hip-hop. Pigeons pecked at scraps of food cast onto the sidewalk in either ignorance or defiance of the solar-powered trash compactors. An Amstel Light advertisement pasted onto the window of an abandoned storefront reminded Tristan that over thirty pigeons had received heroic medals for bravery. She kicked at one of the winged rats in disbelief and headed down a side street.

  What do they know of sacrifice?

  She had merely wanted to get out of the house for a while, out of Kensington, and think about what more she could do to prepare Blessing for her test. They wouldn’t even recognize it until it was upon her, and it could arise at any point during the year following her eighteenth birthday. One-handed weapons, dual-wielding, evasive maneuvers…they’d covered it all. And nothing, Tristan hated to admit, was more potent than Blessing’s sorcery, focused into incandescent rage against her enemy. Though she never confessed to it, Tristan knew Blessing thought of her mother every time.

  Moments later, Tristan found herself standing outside a nightclub whose rainbow flag flapped in the breeze. Amiga, proclaimed the sign in crisp white letters.

  A lesbian bar.

  You are what you are. You can’t afford the luxury of love.

  Maybe not, but getting a little ass never hurt anyone.

  You’ve never had any ass.

  Whatever. I’m here and I’m queer.

  Tristan walked inside, flashed her fake I.D. and paid the cover, then approached the bar. She ordered what everyone else drank, bottled Miller Lite, and observed the cavernous dance floor. The beer tasted like cold piss. She wasn’t sure what she had expected as far as the clientele, maybe closeted middle-aged housewives or something, but it certainly wasn’t an abundance of college girls from the nearby art school—if she were to judge by the tattoos and piercings—and other attractive women in their twenties. Light patterns spun and flickered in shades of pink, green, and blue, and a female DJ pumped out the latest dance-pop songs as bodies gyrated and writhed against each other in time to the beat. Tristan bobbed her head and hoped she feigned having a good time with some sort of conviction.

  Did she even have a type, she wondered as brunettes, bleached blondes, and everything in between wriggled across the dance floor. She had never gone to as much as a movie, let alone on a real date, with someone. The whole idea of a relationship became quite silly when you couldn’t tell your girlfriend the thing that defined you as…well, not exactly human. And being not exactly human created its own set of problems. Not that she would believe it. An exercise in futility, the entire affair.

  The girl dancing just a few meters away was conventionally pretty, nothing out of the ordinary, but her eyes smoldered with a barely repressed sexuality Tristan found terrifying. Terrifying mainly because Tristan’s groin had taken on a tingling, tickling life of its own. She’d never allowed herself to feel much of anything after Rosa, and that had been just a pathetic adolescent crush.

  The girl danced with two friends, all clad in University of the Arts T-shirts and shorts with tights underneath, all holding bottles of beer, and all moving with far superior rhythm and grace than that of the women around them. Dance majors.

  Tristan flattened herself against the bar as she reevaluated her previous assumptions about her life. She wasn’t ready. She couldn’t. Too much risk involved. This was how Hunters and their loved ones died. It was a solo gig for a reason.

  What would this accomplish?

  It was like a child’s temper tantrum; if she raged against the injustices of her life hard enough, they would relent and give her what she wanted. Sure, find a girlfriend. See how long that lasted before something ripped her head off just to prove a point.

  Before September 11th, when Tristan was young, tourists freely crossed the border without documents and interrogations and scanners, so each summer her family drove over to the New York side of Niagara Falls and rode on the Maid of the Mist. Clad in blue raincoats, she and Jinny laughed and turned up their faces as the boat floated into the spray from the falls. They always saw rainbows in the mist. Like so many little girls, Tristan loved rainbows. Like a normal girl. She missed the naivety of childhood, of believing in the ordinariness of her existence even though she’d sensed her mother’s trepidation from the beginning. But in this moment, she felt like that little girl again. Like a normal person.

  Only when a delicate pale hand dangled something in her face did she dare to glance up.

  The girl was already walking away, leaving Tristan to gawk at the slip of paper in her hand once she finished ogling the girl’s swaying hips. Beneath a phone number, in flowing script, Mira. I saw you watching me.

  Baffled, Tristan tucked the paper into her pocket and finished her beer. She thought of only two words: Why me? Other women had sized Mira up, women far more attractive. Women who didn’t carry knives in their pants.

  On her way back to the thankfully empty house, her mind spun with possibilities. Tristan pulled the paper out again and examined it. Pro
bably just some cruel joke, and that was why the girl—Mira—hadn’t even spoken to her. She’d put Tristan on speaker and have a laugh with her friends over Tristan’s gullibility.

  Damn, maybe Blessing is right about you.

  But no one had decoded her secret; not Momma, not even Jinny. How did anyone find the courage to come out? Mami Treszka said family was the most important thing to their people, which might have been comforting if Momma hadn’t disowned their entire culture or pretended she never had a younger sister.

  Tristan didn’t want to appear too eager, or even desperate, by calling that night. Besides, she’d have to track down the endangered species known as a pay phone. She was jumping to conclusions anyway, thinking this girl wanted to hook up with her. She’d sleep on it. And if it wasn’t some sick prank, there was no harm in grabbing a double-double with the first friendly face since Rosa cut her out of her life.

  ~

  Late the next morning, Tristan stood on the corner in front of a Wawa, the receiver cradled between her neck and shoulder as she studied the crumpled receipt. She dropped a few coins into the slot. Her thumb hovered over the first digit on the keypad.

  Oh, what the hell. She pressed the numbers and waited through almost four rings for an answer.

  “Hello?” said a husky voice.

  Tristan almost lost her nerve. She hesitated as her stomach auditioned for the Cirque du Soleil. “Hi, is this…Mira?”

  “Yeah, who’s this?”

  “You gave me your number yesterday. At the bar. My name is Tristan.”

  And I feel like a complete idiot.

  “Ooh, nice name.” Her voice lightened. “So what’s up? I wasn’t sure you’d actually call. I come on a little strong sometimes.” She giggled, and Tristan’s knees turned to springtime slush.

  “Um…do you want to…get coffee or something?”