by Varsha Ravi
Like always, the conversation devolved into a discussion of birthday presents, where her grandmother resolutely declared that this was the best present she could possibly give, and Miya and Aza tried to outdo each other with increasingly ridiculous presents, jet skis and penguins and heated blankets, all the way up to quantified happiness, glowing in jars.
Suri sank into the comfort of it, the silence amidst the noise. Unwittingly, she wandered out of the shop front, ducking under the curtain of beads into the back room.
The ‘back room’ was a misnomer—the curtain led out to a narrow hallway that branched out into the rooms that made up the bulk of the shop. The meditation room—Suri’s old bedroom when she had lived here—bordered the back entrance.
The floor was smooth and dustless; rolled-up prayer mats were leaned against the opposite wall, along with yellowed copies of hymn books. Even though Suri had given her grandmother full agency to scrap the room, there were a few things she hadn’t changed.
Along the windows, shadowed against the dark of night, she’d pasted old crayon drawings. The hasty, uncaring lines brought a faint stab of embarrassment, but more than that, she felt strangely unmoored. As if standing in this room, she had been set adrift in time, and if she were to walk back out to the shop front and glance in a mirror, she would see a child staring back.
There was a photo album open on her grandmother’s desk, flipped to a page halfway through; she had been looking at it before they had knocked.
On the page, Suri was celebrating her ninth birthday. She grinned up into the camera, missing one of her front teeth. Her black hair was pinned back with purple butterfly clips, and her face shone with this striking passion, a vigor she’d since lost. Perhaps it was youth, all-encompassing and impossible to quantify. Or perhaps it was something else—perhaps all she had now was fear adorned to resemble pragmatism, well-intentioned and paralyzing.
She was so tired of being afraid.
A knock jarred her out of her reverie. Suri glanced back, found Kiran leaned against the doorjamb. An unreadable, unknowable emotion slid through her, slow as syrup. He inclined his head in a greeting, then said, “They sent me to look for you. Said I’d likely have the most luck? Rana figured you’d be here.”
Her mouth twitched upward in a faint smile. “It used to be my room. Some of my things are still here. It’s… odd, seeing them again.”
He ran his hands absentmindedly over the side of a bookshelf, scrutinizing the carefully alphabetized paperbacks that filled shelf after shelf. A swell of laughter rose, distantly, and he made a face. “I can imagine. Are you aware that Miya bought you a plot of land in a rainforest?”
“I am now,” she said, surreptitiously shutting the photo album. His eyes tracked the movement, and he crossed the room, slipping it from the desk and retreating when she swung at him, soft, soundless steps on hardwood. They laughed without noise, without impact. It was as if they existed in a world of their own, harsh and barren and lovely in its emptiness, in its capacity to be sculpted into worth. A void strained and stained by love.
Kiran gently paged through the photo album, silent as he examined the pictures. It felt voyeuristic to watch him, and she began to clean up the desk, slipping pens back into drawers and uselessly fiddling with the edges of stacked papers. Her periphery burned.
He held up the photo album, open to a picture of her wearing bunny ears. She could not have been more than four years old in it, and Suri was startled by the roundness of her cheeks. His mouth was a tight line, trembling with the attempt to suppress laughter. “Why have neither of you ever showed me this?”
“Because of that,” she said distastefully, indicating his expression. “It’s not like you’ve earned the privilege of making fun of tiny me. You didn’t even get me a present.”
There was a time, when they’d first met, when she would’ve been afraid saying something like that to him would get her incinerated. It jarred her that the words came so easily now, that he had slipped silently through glossy white ribs, a knife to the heart. He smiled at her, slight and mischievous. “I’ve gifted you with my company and sparkling wit.”
She rolled her eyes. “That doesn’t count.”
“Do you want one, then?” he asked, continuing to peruse the photo album. The words were offhanded, but there was an odd inflection to them, an uncertain suggestion. “A present?”
“Anything?”
“Within reason,” he conceded, but then his smile twisted, becoming crooked. “Or without. Anything that I can give you, I will.”
The possibilities dazed her—the carrying, simple truth in his voice, the resolve. She glanced away and steadied her voice. “Like a wish?”
He shook his head. “Wishes are made indiscriminately, simple requests. Then they’re sent to the most appropriate god, based on their domain, and it’s decided whether or not they are granted. Prayers are made to individual gods, regardless of their domains.”
“So a prayer,” she said, tracing the curve of her grandmother’s signature with her fingernail. It felt carved within her. “I don’t pray a lot.”
“Not a prayer,” he said, with a ghost of amusement. “And that doesn’t entirely surprise me, for some reason. Prayers require that you know a god’s name, their divine one, and you haven’t yet figured mine out.”
“Did you make up your name?” she asked suddenly, turning to look at him. “Kiran. Is it a nickname?”
“Half of my mortal name,” he supplied, a shadow passing over his face momentarily, as it always did when he mentioned that life. It wasn’t difficult to intuit it had not ended particularly well. “I’m an outlier; I have two names, one my parents gave me and one humans did. Three, actually. The gods have their own little nickname for me, too. There are two others like me, but one’s dead. You probably won’t ever meet him.”
A jagged, heedless energy animated him now as he fiddled with the pages of the book. He looked nearly nervous. “If you want, I’ll tell you who I am. It can be your present.”
The statement was colorless. She dropped her hands to her sides and held his gaze. “You don’t want to tell me.”
“No,” he said quietly. “I don’t. But I will, if you ask.”
“I already know who you are,” she said, lifting her shoulders in a shrug. “I don’t need your name. I’ll wait until you want to give it to me.”
Kiran studied her for a moment, brows drawn together. For once, she didn’t look away. “Then what would you like?”
“A kiss,” she suggested coyly, a joke strained with the weight of hope. She regretted it immediately, but there was no way to turn back time—they would laugh awkwardly, and lapse into even more awkward silence, and careen precariously into a new conversation.
Impossibly, he had not yet laughed. He shut the book carefully and placed it on the edge of the desk, crossing the distance between them. It really was a very small room; he was close enough she could trace the details of his face with her eyes. Insignificant, common things held her attention now—the curve of his cupid’s bow, the narrow slant of his nose, the smooth arc of each eye. Her heart felt trapped between beats, a paper-thin ghost of itself soaked in gasoline and left to rot beside a lit match.
“Are you sure?” he asked, nearly inaudible in his uncertainty. His eyes were shuttered, dark lashes fanned out like smoke. Corporeality seemed like a distant notion, just then.
“Yes,” she said, surprised both at the fact that she had spoken—that she had not simply stood there, paralyzed with desire and fear—and that she had managed to say it with such force. It faltered, inevitable. “But it’s all the same. If you don’t want to—”
He reached out and took her hands in his own, and she cut off, the words petering off into charged silence. And then he bent toward her, and pressed a single, chaste kiss to her lips.
For a moment, neither moved—it was a little like they had fallen into a pocket in time. Insects in amber, oblivious and half-dead already. Then he pulled back,
slowly, and leaned his weight against her, pressing their foreheads together. She felt lit from within.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he whispered softly, ruefully. He was close enough that his breath smelled of sugar, of buttercream and diet cola.
“Why?” she rasped. Despite her best efforts, she felt a stab of hurt, sharp and throbbing. It doesn’t matter, she told herself. It doesn’t matter if this doesn’t work out. There will be other fish in the sea, and those fish will be entirely human, and this isn’t the end, so don’t get upset—
“Because now I want to do it again,” he said, exhaling a shaky laugh, and she knew, instinctually, that it did not matter to her in the slightest how many fish there were in the proverbial sea. She wanted this one.
His throat shifted in a swallow, the lines of his face tight with strain. She waited for him to speak; he carded a hand through his hair, composed himself, then said, “Do you want to go back? They’re waiting for us.”
“Okay,” she said, toneless and emptied out by temptation, and followed him back out to the shop front.
Everyone had been waiting for them, in a sort of way—they glanced up, scrutinizing, when they reappeared, as if the two of them were the ‘after’ panel in a ‘find the differences’ puzzle. Suri had little interest in playing along, and deflected the sly, frequent questions.
The party lasted two more hours, stretching until it was nearly midnight, and then they began to fragment; Aza and Dai headed off first, citing early rehearsal the next morning, then Miya, then Ellis. Her grandmother regarded the pair of them silently after they spent another twenty minutes cleaning up. The candlelight behind her limned her face, aging her as she looked up at them.
Finally, she said, gruff, “Don’t stay up too late.”
The door slammed shut, and they glanced toward each other, amused, before reality set back in.
The walk home was silent, but not quite awkward. They parted easily, without words; he pulled his bookmark out of a paperback on the coffee table and she went to take a shower, stood under the spray, unfeeling and overwhelmed by the realization she was happy. As a child, joy had been a noun, and it’d defined her in broad, unforgettable strokes. A fundamental truth of the universe; the sky was blue, and she was happy.
She’d lost it in adolescence, thrown it off like an overly thick blanket on a balmy summer night and fallen deep into that pit of consuming, gritty cynicism that so easily came to those confronted with startling, upsetting truths about the world around them. It was only in adolescence that she understood she had nearly died—her parents would not come back, and her grandmother prayed for an hour and a half each night, sore, bruised knees on hardwood, for her safety. Joy was something like a verb, a fleeting sensation. It was there, and then it was not. If you had never held something, it was impossible to long for it, impossible to love it.
But now, she felt like joy was an adjective; it would not stay, but might linger, like a smile, a candle flame. Under the searing, cleansing stream of water, hope chained her.
She wrapped her damp hair in a towel—it had grown long recently, brushing against the tops of her collarbones—and knotted it at the top of her head, padding absently into the kitchen for a glass of water. Epiphany buzzed through her, and she felt distant with it, unreal. When she returned to the living room, Kiran was staring at her strangely, gaze fixed on her chest. His book was splayed against his own. “Is that new?”
“What?”
“The necklace,” he asked. “Is it new? I’ve never noticed it.”
It was not entirely his fault—Suri usually tucked the chain into shirts, hiding the pendant from view. But her night shirt was loose on her shoulders, baring the skin above her collarbones. She touched it, a learned gesture, before crossing to sit at the opposite side of the couch. He shifted to make room, pulling himself up into a sitting position.
He waited for her to speak, and she cupped the pendant carefully, the metal warm and damp from the shower. Then she tilted it forward so he could get a better look at the design. His gaze was inscrutable, colorless. Suri explained, “It’s a symbol of—”
“Athrasakhi,” he finished wryly, oddly cutting. “I’m familiar.”
There was something unfamiliar about the timbre of his voice—sharp and bitter, coffee and blood-stained steel. He used the phrase the way her grandmother used it—I’m familiar, as though they knew someone and severely regretted ever meeting them. Tentatively, she ventured, “Do you two not get along?”
The corner of his mouth quirked up, dimpling his cheek. “Something like that, yes. Why are you carrying his pendant around?”
“It’s a long story,” she said, leaning back against the arm of the couch. He nodded, a silent request for her to go on, and she continued, “I don’t know entirely how it works. But my grandmother said I was born a little after five, before the sunrise. And so when I first cried, the sky was red—red as blood, as garnets. That time—the inception of dawn, darkness bleeding into light—is his blessed time, apparently. There’s an old myth about it and all. But it means he’s supposed to protect me, so my parents bought the pendant, when they were alive.”
She laughed a little, stilted and humorless, and added, “He hasn’t been doing a very good job so far, considering everything that’s happened. You’ll have to scold him for me when you leave.”
“I will,” he said, eyes bright with something unfamiliar. His eyes fell shut, and he leaned his head back, exposing the long column of his throat. She watched him swallow, a brief, wracking movement that interrupted the stillness of the night. Like a ripple on the surface of an endless sea, a shift in the darkness that laid beyond stars. Finally, he said, “Do you resent the gods? For what they’ve done to you, and your family?”
“I’m within my limits to,” she agreed, curling into the side of the couch. It didn’t feel at all like winter. “But the gods didn’t kill my family—or at least, I assume they didn’t. I’m allowed to resent fate, I think. I resent the murderer; I resent the berries, though I don’t know if it’s fair to resent something that’s born to kill. I don’t resent the gods, though. At the very least, they tried—they sent you.”
“The sankhili did that,” he said, but he was smiling.
“Maybe,” she conceded. Part of her wanted to tell him, wanted to let go of that meaningless, naive secret—I wished for a sign, and you came.
She had always been afraid of hope, in the same way she figured most people were afraid of black holes. Desire was something that consumed, she knew, and to desire impossibility was to let it consume you entirely. Hearts splintered with love and splintered with loss, and to fear one was to fear both—it was safer to resist them both, to draw thick, black demarcations in shining permanent marker, explicit, clear lines that gently reminded her of what could and could not be desired.
They’d slipped into some midnight land where they existed untouched by desire and recklessness—she had felt so, thought so. It was the way they had always been, after all; all nebulous, silent softness and deathless yearning. But even here, her desire threatened to split her, threatened to spill out of her and empty all the cracks in the earth.
She pulled herself off the couch, a sudden, jerky movement. Her skin felt overwarm, even though she hadn’t touched him. He watched her wordlessly.
I want to wash myself clean of this love, she thought. But it was a lie, and it did not feel like it could be real, not even for a moment.
Suri shut her eyes. “Goodnight.”
The darkness did not swallow his voice. It was quiet, but it carried in the silence, and she fisted her hands to keep from reaching out and holding it. “Goodnight.”
Like the night before, she did not sleep until daybreak.
Kiran dreamt of the battlefield.
War was so often silent. Not to him; he had been created from the cacophony of it, from the shrill, cutting sound of metal rending flesh. He did not stay to tend to the dead in the ensuing quiet—that was Dhaasan’
s job, and he took even less pleasure in it. Yet he knew the silence lasted, agony stained and dragging. Humanity fell, and the silence lived on.
But now, he found himself standing on a soundless battlefield. It was a clear, quiet plain, uneven and gray with soil and pebbles. Wildflowers and weeds scattered across it, brief pockets of life in the arid, empty underworld. Anybody else would have considered it an arbitrary field, smooth and rolling and close enough to the sea that salt cut through the air. But he could smell the tang of iron, knew that war reverberated through the earth and changed it—this was a place meant for blood, and meant for death.
Kiran shifted as he glanced around. His calloused bare feet stung, pricked from ragged rocks, but did not bleed. He didn’t often dream, these days. When he did, it was of violence. Of gore-streaked monsters, of viscera spilling out onto cold, hard stone. Of himself.
“How soft you’ve become.” A familiar voice came from behind him, precise and disdainful. He turned to face it—in the distance, mountains rose up from the ground, gnarled claws ripping into the sky above.
A boy stood across from him, a few feet away. He wore blood on his cheeks and soot on the bare skin of his shoulders, and Kiran’s face. His dark hair was tangled and dusted with ash and gunpowder, unbound and wild around his face. Blood tipped ragged fingernails, dripping crimson onto dry, packed dirt. He looked every bit the part, the feral, ruthless son of war.
This was not a dream he had ever had before.
It was disorienting, to see himself like a reflection in blood. They had the same fine-boned face, hollow-cheeked and haunted, the same air of a saint that had burnt away to nothing and held the ashes himself.
And yet, they were not the same. It was a twisted, imperfect projection—it was him, but not all of him. This was his savage divinity laid bare.
The boy sneered, a ripple in the mirror. “Look how you gawk. Do I repulse you? Are you that revolted by yourself?”
He inhaled slowly, but his chest was tight. This was an airless world, an empty one. The dead did not need to breathe. “Are you here to mock me?”