When the train arrived at my stop, I managed to heave myself out of my seat and onto the platform. I did my best to keep standing as the train trundled away, but the scorpion had settled right across my left ribcage and was giving me all its venom as vengefully as it could, so I sat down on the steps to the parking lot and tried not to pass out.
“Easy, little beast,” I said to the scorpion. “You’ll be free of me soon. I don’t want you here just as much as you want to be gone.” But of course, the scorpion did not listen. Underneath my sleeves were long veiny lines of ink. I’d waited too long before coming here.
The parking lot was empty. I worried that they’d forgotten me, and I’d have to call Madeline and beg, which I told myself I was too proud to do, but I’d do it anyway if it really came to that. Then a car pulled up and Owen waved at me. I ignored him until he came out and walked right up to me, and then I looked up at him and sneered.
“I’d hoped she fired you,” I told Owen.
“Can you walk?” he asked mildly.
I battled my way upright even though it nearly cost me everything I had left. Owen took my bag when I gave it to him and silently followed me to the car like he was waiting for me to fall.
The house was fifteen minutes away from the station. By the time we made it there, I was feverish, and Owen had to shake me awake.
“You were saying something in your sleep,” he said.
“Was it to tell you to get lost?” I asked, which meant that Owen left me to go into the house, and he wasn’t there to watch my embarrassing struggle to the front door. While I slept, the scorpion had curled around my throat, its tail poised over my heart. It would kill me soon.
It was nearly midnight and the house was quiet and still, all of its shadows asleep. I went to the conservatory to wait for Madeline. The air was warm and wet and smelled like whatever ferns smell like at night. Madeline loved ferns almost as much as she loved our inkthings, and the whole place was a jungle of them. I sat beneath the fronds at the lip of the fountain and had just finished rolling up my jeans to dip my feet into the water when Owen wheeled Madeline in.
She looked cross, her hands clasped just so in her lap. “Good evening, Hadi.”
“I’m home,” I said. I bent over Madeline’s wheelchair and kissed her cheek.
She gripped my chin. “And you’ve brought me trouble, I see,” Madeline said, tilting my head away so she could appraise the scorpion on my neck. “You shouldn’t have waited so long to come to me. We’ll have to draw this one tonight.”
“But I’m exhausted,” I whined. “Owen left me waiting for ages.”
“Tonight,” Madeline said sharply, and over her shoulder Owen looked smug.
Neither of them said a single word when they saw the scorpion. Its inky body was as long as my forearm, and its tail was nearly double that. Once I undressed, it curled away from my heart and wrapped around my waist. It had too many legs for a scorpion.
“What memory left this one behind?” Madeline asked.
“My sister,” I said. “The crash. Just get it off of me.”
Madeline instructed me to sit down in the fountain. It was deep enough that I was submerged to my shoulders. We’d found that water was the best medium to draw my inkthings out with. Owen retreated into the shadows at the edge of the conservatory, but I could tell that he was listening.
“Is it before the crash?” Madeline asked. “Or after?”
“After,” I say. “She’s bleeding out and I can’t move fast enough. The desert keeps getting in, all the heat and dust. She keeps trying to say my name and then she can’t and I tell her to shut up but she won’t. She keeps—”
The scorpion stung, viciously. It was born of fear, and all it wanted to do was survive and be afraid, and to do that it had to hurt me.
“That’s not all, is it?” Madeline said, her voice coaxing and inescapable.
I said, “Her blood is everywhere. On the road, on the dust, on the car, on me. I remember thinking, I should just leave her here. I should get back in the car and drive away. I hadn’t even called the ambulance yet. No one would ever know.”
The scorpion shuddered where it hid in my armpit. It wanted to kill me so badly; it wanted to take both of us down together. I had carried it for two months, since it was just a speck in the corner of my eye as I wept.
“I wanted my sister to die alone,” I said, “just so I wouldn’t have to see it.”
The scorpion fled. I felt it unwind from my torso and slide off my skin into the water. Madeline immediately plunged her hand into the fountain and plucked it out. It struggled weakly, all the fight gone out of it, and Owen stepped forward with a jar.
I looked away, unable to watch as they bottled it up. I didn’t want to know where they kept it. I didn’t want to think about whose shelf it would live on, that ugly memory. It didn’t belong to me anymore.
I stood out of the water and wrapped myself in a robe that Owen had brought. “I feel much better now,” I said. “I think I’ll go to bed.”
“Yes,” Madeline said, sounding distracted. “Owen’s prepared your usual room. I’ll see you at breakfast, dear.”
An alert on my phone showed that two thousand dollars had been added to my bank account. The memory had left with the scorpion and all the pain had left with it. The wound where the memory had been was already pinching closed, the black lines of venom drawn from my skin. I felt free and unburdened. I kissed Madeline goodnight and even suffered through thanking Owen for his help.
He only grunted, his attention fixed greedily on the jar and all its squirming shadowed contents. But just as I was leaving, Owen turned to me.
“I forgot to tell you,” he said. “Your sister is here.”
#
There were several of us who came and went from Madeline’s house. We gave her our memories, our beasts, our inkthings, and in return, she paid us and let us stay in the house for as long as we needed. Most of the rooms were unused, many in disrepair. It was in one of these rooms that I found my sister.
Samah loved this room because of the empty walls, and the little balcony that poked out over the top of an old beech tree. She crouched at the foot of a ladder, mixing paints together. Her arms were bare in her camisole and I could see the puckered ribbons of her scars and the inky silhouettes of six birds roosting in a row across her shoulders. She didn’t look surprised to see me.
“Help me with this,” Samah said. Her right side had taken the brunt of the nerve damage, and she always walked at an angle. I dragged the ladder over to the wall and held it steady so that she could paint. She was finishing the third bird of six, colorful versions of the ones she carried on her shoulders.
On her back, the six birds kept joining together into one long blot before separating again. They looked like sparrows, or starlings.
“I’m surprised Madeline lets you keep those,” I said.
“I’ve been hiding them,” Samah said. “I think Owen suspects something. I can’t stand him.”
“Oh, he’s the worst,” I said immediately, and she shot me a quick delighted grin before turning back to her painting. She’d learned how to paint with her left hand.
“Why are you here, Samah?” I asked. “You hate this place.”
“Owen said you sounded half dead on the phone,” she answered. “He said I’d better come.”
“He called you?” I said, in surprise.
“He said I could help.” She stopped painting to look down at me. “Was he telling the truth? Have you been remembering me, Hadi Bhai?”
Brother. It hurt when she called me that—reminded me too much of the past. She always did that to me whether she meant to or not. All she had to do was say my name.
“The memory’s gone now, isn’t it?” Samah said, sounding miserable. “You drew it out and sold it away. So Madeline can adorn this house with even more shadows. So Owen can sell it to some rich voyeur who sips it with his steak dinner and gets off on what hurts us. That’s the only thing we’re good for.”
She turned her back to me. The last bird in the row shook its shoulders and stooped, looking more like a vulture than the other little sparrows. As I watched, it thrust out its long neck, its beak curved and cruel. Samah inhaled a quick breath of pain, her hand jerking, leaving a long streak of paint across the wall.
I backed out of the room before the memory could hurt her again. In the hallway, a tear fell from my eye and I caught it on my knuckles before I could think better of it.
#
At dawn, I gave up trying to sleep. I went to Owen’s door and knocked on it until he came out, looking half asleep and furious. Once he saw that I was dressed in my coat and boots, he went and got dressed too. We left the house through the kitchen’s back door, the shadows of the house pacing restlessly alongside us.
It was cold enough outside that there was frost framing the leaves. Behind the house stood the old cemetery and the groundskeeper’s shed with shovels leaning on its wall. The gravestones were crumbling and faded, but I knew they were all for members of Madeline’s family. Some of them had borne inkthings too—the ones who died early at least. My mother belonged to one of these tombstones. She’d lived here with Madeline for many years, though not enough.
“Samah has six birds on her back,” I told Owen, once we had walked far enough that I began to feel warm.
Owen looked surprised, and for good reason. Bearing six inkthings and still being able to walk was a feat in itself. The most I’d managed were three: a trio of starving coyotes chasing each other across my skin until I was so delirious that Madeline had to drug me to draw them out because I kept fighting her. That was before she hired Owen to help her.
“She won’t give them up easily,” Owen said. “I’ll bring it up with Madeline. We’ll figure something out.” He already looked greedy; I tried not to think about why. The important thing was that Samah needed to let go of those memories. They weren’t good for her.
“And what about you?” Owen asked.
“Drive me to the station,” I told him. “I’ll be out of your hair.”
“Are you sure?” Owen asked, and he took my hand, turning it so that we could both see my knuckles and the tiny snake that wound its way between them.
“It always goes faster when your sister’s here,” Owen said, marveling. “This one’ll be grown before you know it. Might as well stay at the house a little longer.” He lifted my hand to his mouth and kissed my knuckles. The snake slithered away from him and up my sleeve.
“Your inkthings never like me,” Owen said, wryly.
“No one likes you,” I said.
I walked past him to the groundskeeper’s shed, opened the door, and went inside. He followed me in and closed the door behind him. The shed was falling apart; early morning light kept finding its way in through the slats.
I lifted my shirt. The snake was curled around my belly button. It was too early to tell if it was venomous.
“Let me draw this one, Hadi,” Owen said, already undoing my belt. “Let me have it when it’s time.”
It didn’t matter to me who took it, but it clearly mattered to him. I said yes. I said, kiss it again.
When Owen knelt and kissed the inkthing, it opened its mouth and buried its little fangs into me, and it didn’t let go until hours later, when we had both snuck back into the house and I’d washed the cobwebs out of my hair, and I went down to breakfast and Samah smiled at me like she was happy to see me, and I couldn’t remember why.
#
Samah grew more haggard as the days went by. I avoided her as much as possible, but despite that, the snake grew longer and longer, until it wrapped in elaborate loops around my arms. I avoided Owen too, the way he kept studying me. In the conservatory, I helped Madeline look after her plants.
What I liked best about Madeline was the way that she didn’t mind quiet. She knew when I didn’t want to talk. It would be my choice when I came to her and let her lure my guts into her pockets.
She didn’t ask about the snake, though she must have seen it. It was always hot in the conservatory, so I wore a cropped T-shirt, and the snake kept going up and down my torso like it was hunting.
I watered her plants. I repotted what she told me to repot. I swept away the leaf debris. Madeline never let Owen do this. Only me. After the work was done, I went to her and sat by her feet, and she let me lean my head against her knee.
“I’m leaving the house to you,” Madeline said.
I looked up at her in surprise. “What about Owen?”
“I’ll leave him to you too, if you’d like,” she said, voice dry.
“Very funny,” I said, though I didn’t think she was joking. “I mean, does he know?”
“It was his idea,” Madeline said. “It’s where you belong. He wants you to stay here.”
Of course he did. I thought about this house, all of its empty rooms and hungry terrors. I thought about never leaving. Letting it feed on me again and again until my mind was quiet and unbothered, a still lake where nothing ever swam.
“Do you want that, Hadi?” asked Madeline.
I said yes. I said thank you.
#
Owen waited until the snake inkthing was fully grown before telling Madeline about Samah’s birds. At dinner, one evening, Madeline told her that the birds would have to be drawn.
“It was reckless of you to keep them hidden for so long,” Owen said. “If Hadi hadn’t told me—”
Samah turned to me with an expression of horror and betrayal. The snake wrapped around my ribs and squeezed. Suddenly it was hard to breathe. “You told him?” Samah said.
I looked at Owen, who returned my glare with a look of utter blandness. At the other side of the table, Madeline drank from her wine glass, which was full of something black and frothing. It was the only thing I’d seen her touch all dinner. I wouldn’t have her help tonight.
“It’s better for you this way,” I told Samah. “I saw it hurt you. Carrying six inkthings at a time is dangerous. You know what happened to Mom.”
“That’s different,” Samah said defiantly. “They’re mine, and I’m handling it. You don’t get to decide what hurts me.”
“Do whatever you want,” I told her. “You could’ve left days ago if you didn’t want this to happen. You hate this house.”
“I stayed here to look after you,” she said. That didn’t make any sense, so I discarded it. I kept trying to take in a full breath, but the snake was making it impossible. My lungs felt like they were collapsing.
“I don’t need looking after,” I said.
“That’s a lie and you know it,” my sister said, and then she left. I looked after her, uncertain of what to do.
“Let her be alone,” Owen told me, like he knew it was the choice that would hurt me the most.
So I went after her, because fuck Owen. I made it to the landing of the stairs before I had to sit down, unable to breathe. My vision went in and out. I clutched a stupid vase and tried not to throw up into it. On the wall behind me, the shadows swarmed, delighting at my misery. I could feel their coldness against my shoulders almost like a balm.
“Samah,” I called, hoping she would hear me, and she must not have gone far, because after a while she came down the stairs to the landing and sat across from me.
“I was there with you the first time you gave away an inkthing, you know,” Samah said. She must have seen my blank expression, because she added, “You wouldn’t remember. The memory was about me. A grasshopper. This big.” She held her fingers a few inches apart.
I waited for her to go on, but she just looked away, deep in thought. Whatever the memory had been, she didn’t think I deserved it.
“I’ve only sold two inkthings,” she said. “Neither of them were memories of you.”
“How would you know?” I asked, because of course, the purging was the point.
“I wouldn’t do that to you,” she said, and we stayed there until Madeline called us back down for dessert.
#
Samah told Madeline she would only give her five of the six birds. The vulture was hers to keep. I was proud of her, in that moment, the way she stood up to Madeline, the way she ignored Owen seething behind her.
“You know it’ll poison her, right?” he said, later, when he came to check on me, or rather to check on the snake. “She can’t keep it for long.”
I didn’t say anything. I knew Owen was right, but I didn’t want to tell him that. He was already far too enamoured with my inkthing. After that terrible dinner, the snake wrapped from my chest all the way to my right knee. I couldn’t wait until it was gone.
“You should talk to her,” Owen said. “That vulture came from a memory of you, didn’t it? Don’t you want to know what it is?”
I let Owen fuck me mostly to get him to stop talking. The snake tried to flee when he touched me but there was nowhere to flee so it bit me between my shoulder blades again and again and Owen put his hand right there to press the pain in.
Samah wasn’t in her room when I went to see her, but there were five birds on the wall, bright and maddening and unforgettable. Even the shadows kept away from this room.
“I’m out here,” Samah called from the balcony, and I stepped out to find her covered in paint, smoking a joint. She passed it to me and I took it gratefully. Even in the dark, I could see the circles under her eyes. Her hands were shaking.
“Stole it from Madeline’s stash,” she said. “She always has the good stuff.”
“You look like shit, Samah,” I said. “You sure about this?”
“Owen sent you, didn’t he,” Samah said, and when I didn’t reply, she just nodded to herself, her face tight and grim, a closed door that I didn’t have the energy to open. At least the weed helped loosen the snake’s coils. I could feel it resting its head on my shoulder.
“They’re beautiful,” I said, gesturing to the birds on the wall, twins to the ones on her back. “What do they mean?”
“You’ll find out,” Samah said. “You’re helping draw them out tomorrow.”
#
I slept poorly that night, and when I woke up, the snake was even heavier than before, crushing my chest with its weight, making it impossible to get out of bed. I lay there for an hour longer, drifting in and out of consciousness before finally dragging myself out of bed and making it downstairs.
My medium was water—Samah’s was air. To draw out her birds, Madeline pricked her back with her needle and caught them before they could fly away. By the time I came down to the conservatory, Madeline had already drawn two birds and was in the middle of drawing the third. Owen stood at the far side of the room, watching.
Samah’s face lit up when she saw me. “You came!”
“Sorry I’m late,” I said, and sat at her feet.
“No more interruptions,” said Madeline. “Now, which memory is this?”
Samah told a story about a dentist appointment so excruciating, she left feeling sore. The bird peeled off her back and fell as a limp, inky puddle into the jar Madeline held out.
The next bird: the time Samah had stood in a long line for a roller coaster ride on a hot day. The boy she was with kept talking on and on about how great he had done on his SATs.
The last bird: a substitute teacher put on a history documentary about the Ming dynasty that the class had already watched a week ago. Samah had drank too many energy drinks that morning to fall asleep.
After each mundane, mild memory, after each bird lifelessly dripped into a jar, I could see Owen getting angrier and angrier. Once these memories left Samah’s skin, they turned to docile pools of ink that would suit someone’s brush or fill someone’s pen. They weren’t the vicious, alive things that came out of me.
I stared at Samah in disbelief and she looked back at me smiling like: See? See how impossible I am to hurt?
When all the birds were in their jars, there was nothing left but the vulture. It shook out its wings and spread them from shoulder to shoulder taking up all the space it could. Samah made to get up and leave.
“Wait.” Owen stepped forward. My heart sank. There was a sixth jar in his hand.
“No,” Samah said sharply. “That wasn’t the deal.”
“Hadi,” Owen said, quietly. “Tell her.”
Samah turned to me, confused. “Bhai?”
How could one word hurt so much? The snake tightened like a noose around my neck.
“Just get rid of it, Samah,” I said. “Why do you need to keep something like that? There’s no point to it. It’s the past. And it’s a memory of me, isn’t it? You have plenty of those to spare. Better ones. I bet.” I tried to smile reassuringly at her, but she looked at me like I’d slapped her.
“That’s not how I see it,” she said.
Owen nodded at me. Madeline wasn’t paying attention to us anymore, studying the five jars of inkthings Samah had already given up, tipping them this way and that, admiring the way they ate up the light.
“Then tell me what the memory means to you,” I told Samah.
Samah’s eyes narrowed — she knew what I was doing, but I had cornered her. The snake twisted against my belly.
“Fine,” Samah said at last. She picked up Madeline’s needle and put it in my hand. “Then draw it out of me.”
#
SAMAH: You were driving the car.
HADI: Badly, I bet.
SAMAH: Hey. This is my memory. You were driving the car. I begged you to take me to see the bloom because everyone at school wouldn’t shut up about it.
HADI: Is that why…?
SAMAH: So you forgot that too. Well, we never made it to the bloom. A car coming the opposite way took a bad turn through a blind spot and you swerved to avoid it. We went off the side of the road and—
HADI: I remember this part.
SAMAH: I blacked out. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t ask you if you were okay.
HADI: I was fine. You were the one who—
SAMAH: I didn’t know that, did I? There was so much blood in my mouth and my jaw wasn’t working. When I said your name, it didn’t sound like your name.
HADI: I wouldn’t have heard it anyway. I left you. I walked away. Down the road.
SAMAH: Maybe for a minute. Maybe even five minutes. And then the door opened. You put your hands on my shoulder and kept the blood in. You called the ambulance and—
HADI: Stop. Stop.
SAMAH: Bhai. Listen to me. You said, “You better not die. You’d better live. You can’t leave me alone. Promise.”
HADI: I don’t remember any of this.
SAMAH: I do. I promised.
#
The vulture lifted its wings out of Samah’s back, twin inky shadows rising on either side of her shoulders before its long neck stretched to look up. It shook its head, opened its beak to let out a silent cry, and then sank back down into Samah’s skin. It was not ready to leave.
Before it could go back, Owen stepped forward, grabbed it by its neck, and pulled.
Samah screamed. The vulture began to thrash in Owen’s grasp, its talons digging for purchase as Owen tried to pull it free.
Samah curled forward in pain. “You’re hurting me!”
I looked at Madeline, who wasn’t paying us any attention at all. She held a struggling bird in her hand, rubbing it back and forth across her cheek. I wanted to look away. How many times had I already looked away when it was one of my own inkthings in her hands?
The bird turned to limp smoke. Madeline crushed it in the palm of her hand and breathed it all in until there was nothing left.
Owen pulled on the vulture again, and this time its wings came loose, nothing but its claws holding on. One more pull and it would be free, and Samah’s memory of the promise she had made to me would be gone.
Wasn’t that for the best?
“Bhai,” Samah cried, “do something.”
“He’s not going to help you,” Owen said. He sneered at me. “Isn’t that right, Hadi Bhai?” He didn’t even fucking say it right.
I launched myself at Owen. He was taken by surprise, clearly not expecting me to try anything, and we both fell to the floor. The snake writhed on my back. I got my hand around Owen’s neck, and the snake slithered across my arm and flooded into a dark ring around Owen’s throat.
He tried to speak, but the snake tightened, cutting off his breath. Suddenly, Owen looked terrified.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “I thought you wanted this. Doesn’t it feel good?”
Owen’s eyes were fixed on mine, tears coming down his face, which was rapidly turning a bad shade of purple. I knew, distantly, that he was dying. I leaned forward to speak against his ear.
“Come on, baby,” I said. “Tell me it feels good.”
Samah touched my hand and the snake fled. It retreated back to my chest, coiling so tightly that I felt something give and crack. The burst of pain forced me to let go of Owen’s throat, and he began to cough violently, turning over onto his side.
Samah hugged me, the pain in my chest sharpening. She asked me if I was okay.
She asked me again.
#
Samah stole Owen’s car keys and drove us away from the house. The snake coiled impossibly tighter. At least one of my ribs was broken, maybe two. There was blood trickling down my chin. Not good.
“Just hang on,” Samah was saying. “We’re almost there.”
“You taking me to the bloom?” I asked, wheezing.
“Bloom’s overrated,” she said. “I’ve got a better idea.”
We stopped at a lake. At this time of day, there was no one around but a lone jogger and an old man walking his dog, too distant to be trouble. Samah helped me to the shore so I could lay down and let the frigid water lap at my chest. I was going blessedly numb. The snake loosened into a sleepy weight on my chest.
“It’s ready to leave,” I said, grateful. I was so fucking tired.
Samah sat beside me, knees drawn up to her chest. “You could keep it, you know. You could teach it not to hurt you.”
I turned my face to her and smiled. “You don’t get to decide what hurts me.”
Her face was drawn tight with misery. She turned away to look at the lake.
“Pain is easy to imagine,” Samah said. “It’s healing that seems unfathomable.”
“It’s hard to forget who I am when you’re around,” I said, and the snake slid off my back and into the water like it didn’t want anything to do with me either. It swam away, nothing but the shadow of an eel. I felt a relief so instant and profound that I closed my eyes, luxuriating in the sudden quiet.
When I finally opened my eyes again, a girl sat next to me, her eyes tracking something moving in the water. She looked familiar.
“Bhai,” the girl said. “It’s coming back.”