Never-Contented Things

by Sarah Porter

  You failed us saying Kezzer, Kezzer, who was the first gift you gave to us, though you still thought, silly poppling, she was yours. Had you become one of us, oh how in the heat of changing your poor love would combust and go cold, ash flung upward from the fire!

  And then, our Ksenia’s sobbings, her gnashings, once she understood? More sustenance, more lightness and grace for our waltzes, more radiance for our speaking stars! We would gather around the house, and admire her grieving through the walls. We would applaud and send a rain of delicate birds to die against the windowpanes wherever she watched for you. And you, dearling Joshua, you would applaud with us. You would suckle down her bitterness like so much milk, then take her in your arms, and care nothing how she broke.

  But no. Prince perhaps spoiled you, overfond and overkind lord that he is. You grew stubborn, wicked, a horror of ingratitude champing at your lips. A little curl of your fingers, a drizzle of blood to seep out, at my request? Such a small thing, dearling. Such a trinket, no more than a necklace of ruby to wind upon the ground. And you would not oblige me!

  Kezzer would hate me. Why, yes. Such a pleasure it would be to taste that hate that I can hardly bear the loss of it. When she has been so obdurate in her love, how that love would blaze in its destruction!

  Well, then. It is slower, it is less savory, in this way that you have chosen, Joshua. It offers less delight. But still you will be consumed, with your Alexandra beside you, though you will never see her. We will bury you both in light that will not touch your eyes. And soon enough, your Ksenia too, once she accepts my gift and uses it to go pursuing you. Now I stroke the black felt with my fingers, I whisper incantations down into its darkness, just as I did before I sent it to Alexandra. Ksenia must take it from my hand, tame and eager, and she will do so. As foolish as her friend, who accepted the same gift from us. Ksenia is already on her way to me, thinking she tricks us, thinking she escapes us.

  Even Ksenia’s thinking of it is naughty, naughty, no matter how untrue. We will tend her suffering with exquisite care, to punish her for such rebel thinkings as she has now, while chirping to her stairs.

  Her scrap, her bit, her broken-offling, no wiser than its parent. It was there, watching you and Alexandra and the hat she popped onto you. It will mean to help Ksenia, oh, it will intend the sweetest it can! And so we will make it her undoing.

  This way is slower. Your tears will flow as glaciers do. Our trees will sway in a breeze lethargic with your tedious grief, but sway they will. My mink will hang his tongue, ever so sleepy, yet now and then he will lick his lips. Slow and dull, but still enduring, for did we not promise you forever with your Ksenia? To you, dearling Joshua, your life will seem longer than death’s own rule.

  And then, we still have the children for our playing. But they grow numb, and only rarely weep.

  Part Six

  ksenia adderley

  Dim vales—and shadowy floods—

  And cloudy-looking woods,

  Whose forms we can’t discover

  For the tears that drip all over:

  Huge moons there wax and wane—

  Again—again—again—

  Every moment of the night—

  Forever changing places—

  And they put out the star-light

  With the breath from their pale faces …

  Its atomies, however,

  Into a shower dissever,

  Of which those butterflies

  Of Earth, who seek the skies,

  And so come down again

  (Never-contented things!)

  Have brought a specimen

  Upon their quivering wings.

  Edgar Allan Poe, “Fairy-Land”

  that makes two of us

  I’ve thought about it a lot, how we wound up here. It’s not like I’ve had a ton else to do, brooding around in time so shapeless that even the concept of a day seems like a sick joke. It’s gotten to be a habit, obsessing over the exact blue of the air that caught us that night. Over how Josh’s eyes blurred when he called me Keyshaun. It was all I could think about until Lexi showed up here, and her presence hit me like a wind that said, Come back to life. Come back.

  It changed everything, Lexi’s visit. She triggered a lurching shift in perspective, and the realization that I still have something to fight for.

  And when Prince sent Josh after her? That changed everything again.

  Now I’ve got to turn my concentration to just one thing: how the hell to get out of here, before Josh does something so destructive that I can’t stand to look in his face again. Before he loses his humanity, once and for all, and becomes just another of our—whatever they are—our glittering, empty, foully seductive hosts. Whether I can stop him, I don’t know. I don’t know if he’s beyond the point where he’ll listen to anything I say. But I definitely can’t stop him while I’m stuck here.

  None of them prevented me from staggering back to the house, my tuxedo shirt mashed in a bloody ball against the wound in my hip, the scraps of my chopped-up jacket wagging with each step. Nothing I’ve done so far has changed a damn thing, so why would they worry now? I step inside and flip on the lights. It’s all creepy enough here without hanging around in the dark, thanks. Go sit cross-legged at the bottom of those stairs, ass on the tile floor. Stare up into that corrosive darkness. Dried blood clogs the gash Josh’s knife left in the wood, and my matching gash burns at the sight of it. I reach out and touch the step, like I can comfort it. The stairs are practically all I have left, now that Josh is gone.

  Maybe Josh is out happily destroying our old world, but it’s not like I’m alone in this place. There are the stairs, which are aware of me even if they don’t like me much, and there’s someone else too. The air has that elastic feeling it gets when someone is listening, like they’re tugging on the other end of the silence and stretching it. I know what’s lurking at the top of the steps, in those rooms where I can’t go.

  “Hey,” I call up. “So, Prince tells me you’re my personal changeling? Is that enough of a connection to get you to talk to me?”

  Prince said some interesting things, actually. Stuff about how that other Ksenia got here, for a start. But I don’t expect her to respond.

  “Why don’t you talk to me?”

  I jump at the sound of that voice, because it’s exactly like an echo of my own, emerging from the blackness up there. I knew that would be the case in theory, but hearing it is something else.

  Then I get myself together. “Sure. So, tonight, Prince told us that you came through my grave? But you ended up here. That means there must be—some kind of door—from the upstairs rooms. Back to the real world, I mean.”

  What is a grave, if not a doorway? And doors cut both ways, as a rule. It stands to reason, though it isn’t much help if I can’t get up there.

  The other Ksenia, the changeling, since allegedly I’m the one who’s a real person, she doesn’t answer. Sullen pain in the ass that she is.

  “So it would be helpful if you had some tips on how to get to it. You know, before everything goes to complete shit? Who else is going to warn everyone?”

  Silence. Then, resentfully: “I don’t even know who you are.”

  Oh, doesn’t she? All at once I hate her, the way you might hate a piece of broken glass in your throat—though I guess this is an improvement on all the people in my life who’ve been so sure they knew all about who I am, when really they’ve had no clue.

  “I’m Ksenia Adderley.”

  “Oh, you are not.”

  “Yeah? Because you think you’re the real Ksenia? I hear they hacked out your guts and left you as empty as an eggshell.” Then, experimentally, I try the same thing I’ve done a million times already. I stand up and step onto the lowest stair.

  The way the stair drops me feels almost sarcastic. A dismissive flick, like we both know how stupid it was to bother. It doesn’t make me feel like being any nicer.

  “Newsflash. That shit kills humans. There’s rea
lly not a lot of wiggle room.”

  Silence again. And I can tell—though how can I tell?—that this time I’ve hit a nerve.

  “Why do you think these stairs stayed put for Lexi, anyway?” I ask. Not that the changeling’s going to tell me anything. I’m getting the impression that those things might not have a lot of brainpower; she seems as dumb as a plank. “Actually, I’ve been thinking about it. What Lexi was saying, when she started going up. It was a lot of heavy emotional stuff. All about how much I suck, though you know Lexi would never put it like that. She’d find a way to make it sound gracious.”

  I’ve given up on getting anything useful out of the spare Ksenia in the attic. So it comes as a surprise when she gives a plaintive cry. “Lexi? You mean Alexandra. She was the one who held me. I didn’t want to die, but she held me.”

  “You call that dying? You did a crappy job of it.”

  “I did die, though. It just didn’t last. But they took my heart, and now I’ll never find it again.”

  I can’t let myself get distracted. “Lexi said I should try giving the stairs a different name. Not Ksenia. Do you know what she had in mind?”

  Because I might know. I’ve suspected what Lexi meant from the second she said it. But if my changeling would just contradict what I’m thinking, I’d be ready to like her better.

  A pause. “I’ll know it when I hear it.”

  Okay. I’ve never wanted to do this, but Josh is out there. If he hurts Lexi’s family, or even if he lets anything bad happen to them, how am I supposed to forgive that? And he won’t be able to forgive himself, either. Not if he ever gets his mind back. Getting up those stairs is my only option.

  Even before I open my mouth, just the thought of that name slams me with a freezing blast of panic. My breath turns to solid ice, blocking my lungs. Then I concentrate, and exhale, and the name comes with it.

  “It’s me,” I tell the stairs. “Sennie.”

  I lift my foot. The staircase looks exactly the same, way too boring for how tricky and perverse it is. But now it feels different. Still skeptical, maybe, but like it’s open to at least having a conversation.

  And then I’m standing on the bottom step, and it’s holding me.

  Maybe I’ve screwed up everything else in my life, but I really can’t blow this. I have to reach the top if it kills me.

  “It wasn’t fair to Lexi, what I said before. When she started going up, she was just being really honest with me, and I was being honest back. Is that what you want me to say?”

  I can hear the changeling shuffling around, now. Feet scraping nervously at the wood floor. Then: “Sennie? It’s you? I’m supposed to hate you.”

  “That makes two of us,” I tell her, and laugh. Pretty nastily. “Like, I can stand being Kezzer, most of the time anyway. Sennie, though—I feel sick saying that name at all. I almost hit Lexi once, just for calling me that. Do you know why?”

  I climb onto the next step, convinced it’s going to throw me. It doesn’t.

  God—I think I get it. I think the stairs want to hear the rest of the story. They want me to cough up all the miserable details, even if I choke.

  There’s a new silence, a new mix of air and expectation. But I go up one more step without getting slammed back down. It’s something.

  “It’s because both of them called me that. I mean my mom, and the guy I thought was my dad. And then when he found out he wasn’t, he kept repeating it. Don’t cry, Sennie. You’ll always be my little duckling, Sennie. Of course, that was the last I ever heard from him.”

  It’s getting darker. Lexi made it farther than I am now, and I’m wondering how she didn’t freak out. Already it feels like the black air is eating all the light right out of my eyes, and I’ll never see again. I find myself clutching the handrail so viciously it feels like I could splinter it. The stairs can go on acting like they’re ordinary, nothing but plain wood, but I know what they really are. I can feel them thinking under my feet, feel them considering me critically. It’s enough to send vertigo jolting up my legs. Maybe the stairs are just messing with me, letting me get this far, and when I’m almost to the top they’ll rear like a snake and bash my brains out.

  The one I’m standing on twitches and a shriek leaps out of my throat. But once I’ve caught my breath, I’m still a third of the way up.

  Right. That twitch was just a warning. I’ve got to keep giving them what they want. Feeding them. That’s their price.

  “So, what my mom said, when I asked her why she’d lied? She said, ‘Aw, Sennie. Don’t be sore. I just figured he was the best one who might believe it.’ And maybe he was, but he wasn’t fucking good enough.”

  She hasn’t said anything for a while, my changeling. But I can hear her more clearly now. She’s making this ghastly, hollow wheezing sound. “So…” she whispers, and then hesitates. “So, why would that make you hate Sennie?”

  I can hear her unspoken objection. Sennie wasn’t the one who lied. She was just a kid, her life knocked sideways again and again by all the screwed-up games the adults kept playing with each other. It’s the kind of thing Lexi would say, and for a moment I’m at a loss how to explain. When you’ve been living with the same hatred all your life, it seems so obvious that it’s not even worth thinking about.

  “Because,” I say, and then I have to stop. The damned stairs, my changeling: am I really going to let them squeeze everything out of me? I’d rather rage, smash all the windows, set the whole house on fire, than say the words that come next. But then I do, because I have to. “Because Sennie was the one who got left.”

  I get another stair out of it. It’s not going to do me much good if I collapse on my face and scream. All the blood drops out of my head and I don’t think I’d be able to see anything, even if I wasn’t standing in absolute darkness.

  They’re all waiting for me to go on, the stairs and the freakish other Ksenia, but suddenly I don’t care anymore what they want, because the story’s taking over. The words lunge up on their own.

  “Sennie got left, because that was all she was good for: being lied to over and over, then ditched for being a fake daughter. Once it finally sunk in that my dad was never coming back, I started pulling this catatonic act every time someone called me that. I’d curl up in a ball and rock and refuse to move or say anything. It worked eventually. My mom hated the name Ksenia, though. Too fancy and too weird, for people like us. She hated every single time she had to say it. Letting my fake dad name me after his mother was just another part of her scam, but then she was stuck with it.”

  I’m at least halfway up, still clinging to the handrail. It feels like the gravity up here is unstable, malicious, tugging me from different angles. Maybe it’s the gravity of my old world, reaching for me through the cracks. Any minute now I’ll probably puke. And my face is wet with tears, slick and cold, but not cold enough to stop my skin from burning.

  “Josh said Ksenia means stranger, though. If that’s true, it makes it the perfect name for me. What the hell else have I ever been? Even with my mom, I felt like she must have picked me out of a gutter somewhere. Except that she never would have bothered. She never seemed like she wanted me, and honestly I’m not sure I wanted her, either.”

  Silence, and silence, and silence. Except I can hear all the words in it, coiled and waiting to spring.

  Then she comes out with it, her little wheedling voice creeping out of the darkness. “But you loved your dad. The man you thought was your dad. You thought he was the most perfect person in the world.”

  I can feel the stairs waiting for my answer. One wrong syllable, and they’ll throw me so hard my body will shatter the walls. I’ll be lucky if I can crawl away from the wreckage. And then I’ll never reach Josh, and I’ll never stop all the evil he’s about to inflict on people who have no idea what’s coming.

  But for way too long, I just can’t say it. I must be near the top now, but I can’t see a thing.

  My legs halt, along with my voice. Because I
know the stairs won’t let me go any farther, not until they’ve ripped all the truth out of me, just like my changeling’s organs got ripped out of her. Who was I calling empty?

  I saw that fake Marissa, down in the pool. Even if I don’t know exactly what they’re going to do with her, I can guess that it won’t be anything good. And Lexi—she wasn’t here long. She didn’t really say that much. But it was enough to make me feel like I had a shot at being a person again—or maybe not again. Maybe for the first time ever.

  For that, I’ll fight anyone who tries to mess with her. Even Josh.

  “I loved him,” I say, and then something gives way. At first I don’t know what, though: the stairs, or my legs, or what’s left of my heart. All I know is that I’m tumbling forward.

  My hands smack down on ashy, unvarnished wood. My knees. It’s too wide to be a step. And after a breathless moment, I know what it means.

  I’ve made it to the top, but that doesn’t mean I’ve made it far enough.

  they stole me from myself

  For a while I can’t make myself move. The darkness is so profound that it turns every sound, every movement, into another spike of unreality. I hear my changeling still wheezing somewhere, her breath whistling like wind through a cracked window. I only really know I’m still here from the nagging tick of my heartbeat, the dull, deep burning in my hip.

  But kneeling on the landing won’t do anything to help Lexi. I force myself up, still half-convinced I might plummet at any moment. Maybe keep falling forever. I lean on the wall, for reassurance more than anything.

  And feel something poking into my arm. A switch. “You know, you could have just turned on the light?” I snap. “You’ve been up here in the dark for how long?”

  It’s easy to tell her that, but it’s harder to flip the switch myself. I have a feeling I might not want to see what’s up here, in the forbidden second story. As badly as I’ve wanted to get up to this floor, still, now I don’t want to know. So maybe I’m not rocking the rationality—but it’s always easier to want things before they’re in your face. I saw all those broken-mirror Ksenias go writhing out of my hat, jumble and stack themselves and build these rooms. Whatever is up here is made out of me, out of who I am. And that’s always been high on the list of shit I prefer not to know about.