Nightmare Carnival

I let my nightgown drop, and shuffle and squint my way around the corner. Morning presses against the thick curtains, to no avail. Everything glows, but dimly so. Against the far corner of the couch she curls, a fragile mound of bones and skin dressed in soft, flowery clothes. The open newspaper obscures the upper half of her body. I see only legs and knife-sharp fingers, the leaves of dark print flapping back in between. Her feet are small and perfectly formed, with nails like mother-of-pearl. She hasn’t walked in a hundred and fifty years. She hasn’t needed to.

— Give your great-grand a sweet breakfast kiss, she says, floating up from the cushions. The newspaper flutters to the floor.

2

— It’s time, my sister said. Her voice poured out of the phone like poison.

— No. Not yet. No.

— The Grand is sending for you, she continued over me, as if she couldn’t hear my voice.

— I don’t want to go.

— You don’t have a choice. Check your e-mail — I sent the plane ticket to you already. You have a month to pack up and say goodbye.

— I have a life here.

— I had a life, too. And now I get it back. But only if you come. You know what happens to me if you don’t. She’ll use me up until there’s nothing left.

— You know I’d never let that happen. But why so soon?

— She’s tired of me. I don’t please her anymore, or so she says. At any rate, I’ve done my time. It’s your turn now.

— This is wrong. You know that.

— It doesn’t matter. We can’t change it. This is why we were born.

It was late summer, back then, and my city was a volcano of bright life. I took her call at work, in an empty corner office. I gave an obfuscated answer that pleased us both and hung up. Outside, day was racing down into the shimmery fires of night. Twenty floors down, clogged streets were transforming into long-running strands of rubies and diamonds, winding around buildings slick with coruscated light. I pressed my hand against the glass. Hard and hot. When I took my hand away, a thin film of perspiration remained, outstretched against the avenue as though trying to grasp it. The ghost hand of a ghost girl. Within seconds, it disappeared.

I said my goodbyes at work without telling them I’d never return, and bought boxes on the way home, just enough to ship a few piles of books and clothes. My small room in the SRO building didn’t hold that much, anyway. I’d always known this moment would come, and so my decisions had already been made, years ago, how I would live my life and how I would defend it. I was more prepared than my sister could imagine, and more ruthless than the Grand could ever be. Desperation made me so. In a way, I was no different than her.

The next morning I settled my account at the SRO, made a stop at the post office, then walked twenty blocks south, down through my beautiful city. Past blight-tinged gentrification, past markets and parks and coffee shops and wide bustling avenues; and then west, over to the edge of the river, to block after block of monolithic warehouses and factories, moldering in shadowed silence and brick dust until their moment in history came again. It was like I’d walked this path just yesterday, even though a decade had passed. — When you’ve made your decision, be it tomorrow or a million tomorrows from now, you’ll find us, he had said with his yellow-teethed smile as I looked over his exhibits and wares. — You won’t ever need a map.

3

She leans into me in the queer morning light for her kiss, and my mouth slackens and my head lolls back. Every day is the same, and night no different than day. Darkness, rain needling against the rooftop and windows, wind thundering through distant trees. She never sleeps. Her need keeps her running hot and constant, a nuclear reactor of hunger that can never be shut down. — It’s not so bad, my sister said, the few times I spoke with her until she stopped taking my calls. — She takes from you, but she gives you something back, in a way. It’s almost an even exchange. — What does she do, what is she, how can she be? I asked over and over again. — Is she a vampire? A ghoul? An insect? Why do we submit?

— I don’t know, my sister always replied. — Who can say?