“Yeah, honey,” the little girl says. “Yeah. It’s me. Everything’s going to be all right.”
“It is?” the daughter asks.
But the young girl says nothing. She’s caught, or confused by a program or stuck a moment, two moments. Processing. Processing. There is no connection.
Grimalkin
ANDREW F. SULLIVAN
The kitten climbs up and out of my sister’s mouth in the middle of the night, emerging as one long strand of hair and bone. I watch as it draws a wet tail past her lips and then drops to the floor, stretching out on the ragged red carpet between our twin beds.
Most nights, I’m asleep before this happens. I don’t hear the kitten scratching at the bedposts. I don’t notice her leaping up onto the sill, tracking the moon with pale yellow eyes. Tonight, I watch her body flatten out, slipping through the cracked window we leave open for her no matter the season. I listen to her, waiting for a voice to whisper back at me, go to sleep. She is hunting, searching for sustenance before the sun comes out again. I don’t speak a word. I know the rules.
Grandma hates to be interrupted.
The promise was to keep her safe. After they found her circle in the basement, Grandma knew her days were numbered in this town. Our mother claimed ignorance and disbelief, joined the chorus of voices calling for her head. Our father sealed himself away in his room, the television drowning out any thought of his mother, her life threatened by familiar faces and strangers alike whenever she left the house. Her car was set on fire. It burned for hours. No one put it out. We were told not to visit, not to speak, not to smile. We were told to be afraid.
She came to us in the middle of the night, her form new and unpolished. The tail ended in a ball of gluey fur, the ears were shaped like raw bat wings, pink and pulsing with tiny veins.
You can save me, she said. You can protect me.
My sister and I stared, each tucked into bed, quivering beneath the covers.
Only you can do this, she said. The voice was bigger than her shape.
Do this, she said in the growing darkness. Do this, and I will show you everything.
Grandma had no daughter of her own. She told us she was not blessed. Grandpa cared only about amassing things—money, property, power. All three one and the same eventually, Grandma said. She was cursed to have one son and only one son. A boy spoiled by his father, a boy unable to understand his place in the world, as everywhere he went he was placed upon a pedestal. A shiftless and ungrateful boy who let his father’s empire of car dealerships and repair shops fall into dust while barely flinching in the process. This explained our shared room, our twin beds, our rotten red carpet that felt wet even when it was dry in the morning.
Our birth offered her a new chance to pass on what her mother had taught her, old ways of power, old ways of knowing the world. Sometimes they required blood and sometimes they required flame, but they were true and honest. They did not take without reason. They demanded sacrifice, but demands were proportionate. The balance was retained. The balance was essential.
We offer a balance, my sister and I. Two strands of the same soul, spun into mirrored shapes, spun into soft and malleable flesh. We could push these powers further. We could become more.
I waited my whole life for you two, Grandma said. And now they want to take me from you.
When she returns, I stare at the ceiling. After she has fed on mice or birds or smaller things, her tiny body bloats like a tumor. Her hunger is constant and inevitable. Without her nightly feed, she cannot live like this, tucked deep inside our chests, keeping time against our hearts. We take turns, alternating month to month as the moon shifts and the tides change. My turn is coming again. I will dream behind her eyes as she stalks the night, listening for her prey, hunting the weak, the stupid, and the maimed. I will dream in red and pink and white, white bone.
Before climbing back onto my sister’s chest, she leaves small bones from her kill for us on the carpet. We will grind those bones up into a powder, a powder the keeper will swirl into a glass of water before bed, the spell requiring our participation, our ingestion of the dead. We tell our mother it is for our bowel movements, and she approves. She wants us to be regular.
I stare at the ceiling and listen to the sound of Grandma sliding back down my sister’s throat.
Tomorrow, a new cycle begins. I can already taste the dead in my mouth, the particles clinging to the back of my throat like sand. Tomorrow, I must become the keeper once again.
The spells are small and easy. They are more like charms and incantations. A burst of energy in the mornings after we set the charred sticks in the correct configuration, burn the right herbs in the backyard, telling our father it’s for chemistry class. Our memories improve together, our recall for formulas and history transforming our test scores. Sometimes we answer wrong on purpose, to protect us from suspicion. Grandma says like any gambler, we must know when to walk away, when to make a mistake that everyone can see. We must sow doubt if we want to reap her rewards. We must seem human. We must be plausible.
I watch my sister growing tired as the months pass, see her fading every time her month arrives, the burden in her chest drying out her skin, puckering the corners of her eyes. Grandma says it’s the stress of keeping a secret, the wear and tear of the lie working itself across our
