by Miriam Cohen
Mrs. Prym lifts her petticoats. Beneath, the children’s bones glint like teeth in a dark mouth. They are sharp as swords, sharper, by far, than Mrs. Prym’s knitting needles. The bones are yellow, like baby skin when at first there isn’t enough oxygen. Amelia thinks for a moment that Mrs. Prym is showing off her legs, but of course she is not! Mrs. Prym has been married almost one hundred years.
Mrs. Prym snaps one of the bones off easily. The sound it makes reminds Amelia of when her father rolls his neck from side to side.
“The only thing children are good for is their bones.” Mrs. Prym smiles, not like she is happy.
Relief pounds over Amelia like water from a shower turned suddenly all the way to hot or all the way to cold. “I don’t have any bones,” she says. A bag of bones she’s not!
Mrs. Prym brandishes the bone, stepping closer. She steps on the crystal but it does not hurt her. She is wearing sturdy shoes, the soles as thick as stacked coasters. “You’re just a naughty, fat, liar.”
“It’s true,” Amelia says. Her voice is a whisper, but not because she is telling a secret, and not because the changeling is sleeping. “Ask my mother or my father or the werewolf.” She ticks all the adults off on her fingers, starting with her thumb, ending with the one in the middle. She tries again, counting from the other side, but she ends up back there, in the place that isn’t nice.
Mrs. Prym looks around the room. Her neck whips all around. “But Amelia,” she says. “I don’t see any of them here.”
By the time Amelia’s father is back home with the food, Mrs. Prym has shattered all the crystal. She has shattered some crystal directly over Amelia’s head, trying to get to the bone. But Amelia doesn’t have any. The shards are in her skin now, behind her eyelids, in her temples. They are very heavy.
It is much too late to cancel the dinner party. Amelia’s father has already bought all the food. There are three white paper bags. One is torn and shredded at the side where a dot of grease has become a puddle. A loaf of pale French bread pokes through the opening. Amelia would like to rip this bread open, to feel the crisp crumbs scattering down her wrists, and in her hair, landing, some of them, in her mouth, the warmest snowflakes.
She is not to eat French bread. If she is hungry, she may drink water.
The changeling is strapped to Amelia’s father’s chest. Amelia’s father acts like the changeling is a tie he happens to be wearing.
“Didn’t you hear her?” he says to Amelia’s mother.
Amelia’s mother blinks. Her eyelashes scurry across her cheekbones.
“I was putting on my face,” she says. Her chin crinkles like a fingerling potato. On a potato, those crinkles are also eyes. When the potatoes are cooked, the skin will stick there sometimes. It will not come off easily.
“I can’t watch her every minute,” Amelia’s mother says.
“How could I watch her every minute?” Her tongue darts over her teeth. There is an amber smear on her front tooth.
“I’m not asking you to watch her every minute. I don’t think it’s too much to ask to make sure she’s not destroying the entire house. I just think any normal person, any normal mother would be a little bit—just a little bit—concerned? curious? to hear glass breaking in the kitchen while your daughter’s in there unsupervised. But, hell, what do I know. I’m just the husband, right?”
Amelia’s mother touches her new face. There is skin colored powder on her skin, and blue over her eyes that is the wrong color and the wrong place for a bruise. It should be lower, and darker. But it is close enough. Amelia understands.
“Give me the baby,” her mother says.
Amelia’s father laughs under screaming. It is like his speaking under screaming, but scarier. “Oh, sure. To the mother of the year.” He lifts the changeling just a little off his chest—the straps will not stretch any further.
Tendons climb her neck like ivy. She does not reach for the changeling.
“You want her?” His neck juts forward from the crisp wings of his dress shirt, slick and leathery as a turtle’s. “Here.”
He unstraps the changeling. The changeling wakes up, and at first, for a moment, does not cry. She looks around the room with ringed eyes, her frog arms and legs dangling and mostly still.
“Take your daughter. Keep her. I think I have my hands full enough.”
Amelia can be a real handful.
“I will take her,” Amelia’s mother says. “Watch me. I will.”
Amelia’s father cannot throw the changeling—he doesn’t know the baby he is holding is not really a baby; witches have the real baby. And so he is careful. He hands over the changeling like she is made of the same fancy crystal Mrs. Prym has broken.
In Amelia’s mother’s arms, the changeling begins to scream. Her face is a red-purple, the color of certain cabbages. The changeling will not stop moving her arms and legs.
The guests have arrived.
“I brought a Shepherd’s pie,” the next-door mother says. She thrusts a metal bowl forward like it is a bouquet of flowers. “I still can’t believe you’re having us over so soon after the baby. I don’t think I saw anyone for weeks after my boys. I couldn’t deprive them of the breast! It wasn’t me they were after—just the breast!”
She looks at Amelia’s mother’s chest, and then down at her own.
“There isn’t a rule book, right?” she says. “They don’t give you a rule book!”
“You didn’t have to bring anything,” Amelia’s mother says. “I find cooking relaxing, actually.”
Amelia pinches a bit of her mother’s tights between her fingers. The tights twist easily as skin, but look shimmery and light, a bee’s wing.
“You’re not a maid,” Amelia reminds her mother.
Amelia’s mother says, “Will you stop that, please?” She reaches for her tights without lowering her head. Otherwise her breasts may fall out. The back of her hand is a quick flicker.
“Kids!” she says, not to Amelia.
“Tell me about it!” the next-door mother says.
Their smiles are as wide as cantaloupe rinds.
“Why don’t you come in,” Amelia’s father says. He looks only at the next-door boys. He doesn’t look at the space above them, but directly into their eyes.
The boys shuffle inside. The older ones take off their shoes, but Oliver does not. He must remember this from when they were not enemies: no shoes in the house is a rule only in his house.
The werewolf is the last inside. He holds a wine bottle of blood by the neck. He must have collected the blood from Amelia’s mother, drop by drop, night by night. The door closes softly behind him.
The table is set with plastic cups, the kind that can easily be peeled into flowers or octopuses, after the first slit is made. Everything else is still porcelain and silver and cloth.
“There isn’t time for everything,” the next-door mother says, picking up her cup, squeezing it gently, like a heart she does not want to die.
The children all sit at one end of the table, and the adults sit at the other. Amelia’s mother sits next to her father, and across the table, the next-door mother sits next to the werewolf. Amelia is seated next to Oliver. The older next-door boys are side by side on his other side. It is like a more complicated game of matching: not chicken to chicken, and horse to horse, but chicken to chick, horse to pony, two things that are not the same, but that go together.
But Oliver and Amelia do not go together. If only the changeling were not a changeling. If only she were real. Then Amelia would sit next to the changeling, and the older boys would sit next to each other, and the husbands next to their wives, and Oliver would sit next to no one.
All around her, the forks are being ripped from their napkin beds, where Amelia had so carefully tucked them.
“There’s no such thing as too much when it comes to Shepherd’s pie,” the werewolf says.
The next-door mother taps her fingers against her neck. “Shepherd’s pie doesn’t freeze
very well.”
“I know you put a spell on the moose,” Amelia says to Oliver.
Oliver ignores her, running his fork down his porcelain plate like a small rake. The sound it makes is like a squealing pig or a crying changeling: awful. His brothers laugh. They turn their forks into rakes. Misty sprays of saliva shoot through the air.
“This is what happens when you have boys,” the werewolf says. “Amelia, you would never do something as obnoxious as this.”
Amelia understands that he is joking, but not the joke. The way he says “Amelia” makes it sound like “Amelia” is not her name.
“Well, she’s usually too busy with the fork,” Amelia’s father says. “What?” he says. “What?”
No one has said anything.
“Let me help you with the food,” the next-door mother says.
“The food!” Amelia’s mother says. Nothing is burning or spoiling or getting cold. “Amelia, let’s leave the men to it.”
This means Amelia must get up and help serve.
In the kitchen, all the food has been removed from plastic containers and put instead into foil pans. Now, Amelia’s mother moves the food once again, this time onto sparkling serving platters and trivets. She cuts a thin pinwheel of orange and places it on top of the chicken stuffed with another chicken. The orange sliver looks beautiful and wrong.
“Oh, usually I use a lemon, but I’m sure oranges work just as well,” the next-door mother says.
Amelia’s mother traces her thumb against the remaining orange, over the bumpy peel, against its chapped-lip skin. She breaks it open. The sound is soft, Velcro coming undone.
“Amelia,” she says. “Why don’t you take the mousse out of the freezer?” To the next-door mother she says, “We haven’t touched it yet.”
Amelia has touched it. She remembers her ice pick fingernails, the way they burned, and how wonderful and thirsty the cursed moose had made her feel.
“I don’t want to,” she says.
“You don’t want to?” Her mother smiles, not like she is happy. Her fingers pinch the orange until there is a clear release of juice, rushing out all at once.
Amelia says, “I just have to check something,” turns, and flees.
Mrs. Prym is waiting for Amelia in the changeling’s room. She sets aside her knitting.
“Well, well,” she says.
Amelia can see that Mrs. Prym is almost done with her blanket. It is pale pink, with a white embroidered bunny. It does not look like the sort of blanket Mr. Prym would appreciate—he is far too old, and a boy.
“That blanket isn’t for Mr. Prym,” Amelia says.
Mrs. Prym nods. “It’s for someone else.”
Amelia feels as if she has swallowed a bone. She can breathe. But it is hard. “I thought you didn’t like the changeling.”
Mrs. Prym stands and approaches the crib. She runs her spiney knuckles up and down across the changeling’s cheek. “I didn’t,” she says. “But Amelia”—in between her eyebrows a miniature ski slope appears—“compared to you.”
“I thought you loved Mr. Prym.”
“Men!” she says, the same way, earlier tonight, Amelia’s mother said, Kids! Mrs. Prym picks up her knitting once more.
From downstairs Amelia can hear the clatter of silverware against porcelain, the soft tinkle of voices sometimes, when one of the next-door boys is speaking, rising louder so she can make out words. Fine. Yeah. More.
No one minds that she is not there. But isn’t it mealtime?
“You know,” Mrs. Prym says, “I’ve begun to wonder if you are even Amelia at all. I think you must be the changeling. Because they are all learning to love Karin. And they’ve had all this time with you.”
The inside of Amelia’s chest is a cup with the bottom taken out.
“But you said you could tell from the changeling’s heart. Witches have the real baby.”
“I’m cross-eyed. You know that.” Mrs. Prym reaches beneath her petticoat—there are a few bones left. The bone she snaps off is toothpick-thin, and she uses it to clean the spaces between her teeth. She removes small clumps of algae. It wouldn’t be the worst thing if Mrs. Prym’s dirty mouth were washed out with some soap.
When she is done, Mrs. Prym tucks her lips into her mouth, tidily. She smiles this way, without her lips. “Perhaps the witches have you.”
There is a knock on the door. Mrs. Prym gathers her petticoats—they are more difficult to gather now that so many bones are missing—and swoops out the window in a deflated creampuff of lace.
The knock is from Oliver. “They want you to come back,” he says.
He kicks at the floor with the toe of his sneaker. He doesn’t have a red mark at the back of his neck as the changeling—or the baby? Karin?—does, even though Oliver’s father is also the werewolf. Oliver has fuzzy hair there, at the back of his neck.
Touch me. See? She can remember saying this to him.
Amelia puts her hand to her chest, palm flat. Beneath her skin she feels the light patter of her changeling heart. It feels real, but it is not. No wonder she does not have any bones, no wonder her body is so soft. Witches have made her. They have all been so easily fooled.
“I don’t have to,” she says. “They aren’t my parents.”
He digs deeper into the carpet with his toe but he is not strong enough to make a hole, not even one that is tiny. He is done with his message—he does not have to stay. He is not to stay. They are not to touch each other.
Oliver’s hands flutter at his sides, a soundless stammer. His ears are slender slivers of peach. They buzz. When Amelia tasted the outer edges, to see, that once, this was what she found: the buzz.
“I hate them,” he says, and does not turn to go.
They are not to touch each other, but she is not really Amelia.
The real Amelia lives near the train tracks in leaves that are really a house. No one knows about this house, and so no one will find her, and she will live there forever. The witches have many uses for her. They do not know what they would do without her!
And—oh, she makes their house sparkle. Her hands, palms outstretched, are marvelous pans for dust. Her body is a perfect broom. Between their knotted fists, the witches have no trouble grasping both her legs. Her hair swishes over the dirt floor until it is clean. Her eyelashes are thread for their buttons; her teeth are the pearls they twist between their knuckles on the days they are sad. They make dirty golden necklaces from her hair, and bathe in the bubbles that spring from her lips when, in her sleep, she breathes. And, when the witches are done using her for chores, one by one they mount her legs, and she is weightless, sheer as wing, delivering them across the flickering dark of a train-lit sky.
Amelia cups her hand to her mouth, to his ear. She tells him what she knows.
BAD WORDS
Yael’s parents ask if she has any questions, and she does, but she suspects they aren’t the right ones. She wants to know if she will have two toothbrushes now, or if she will bring the same one back and forth, its bristles wrapped in shredding tissue to keep from getting germy. Also, she is curious about when a divorce starts: if it happens all at once, or in stages, the way people are engaged for a while before they are married. She wants to ask if later on that night they will all have dinner together, or if the divorce has made that, today, impossible.
“Sweetpea,” Yael’s mother says.
It is a name she has never used before, and it comes out with the stiff precision of a too-literal translation. It occurs to Yael that she may not know her mother well enough.
“It’s okay, you know, whatever you feel. It’s perfectly valid,” her mother says.
“Like she even knows what ‘valid’ means,” says Yael’s father. He has not said anything up until now, and his voice is low and hoarse. He has enough stubble at this point to make Yael itchy with even the idea of kissing him.
Yael’s mother turns to her. “Do you know what that word means?”
Yael doesn’t,
but she lies and says she does.
“See?” Yael’s mother says. She smiles at Yael as though together, they’ve done something that belongs just to them.
“What does it mean, then?” Yael’s father is smiling too, but his smile is different. It’s the one he wears when he plays tennis with her uncle and is winning. He scissors his knees back and forth.
Yael doesn’t say anything. Sometimes, when she doesn’t say anything, the question goes away.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Yael’s mother says.
Yael folds her legs beneath her on the couch with her sneakers still on. The sneakers are pink and they have lights that used to flash when she walked but that, after weeks of flickering and fading, no longer work. There is dirt encrusted into the heart and star patterns on the bottoms of her sneakers, and the couch is white. Yael waits for her father to look up from his thumbs and say, like he’s supposed to, “Feet.” She readjusts her legs and holds them to her chest.
Instead, it’s her mother who says, “Feet.”
Yael waits for her father to agree. The couch is his favorite, because it used to be his grandparents’, and even though it doesn’t look old, it is. When they died, he inherited it, and the first thing he did when the movers brought it home was take off the plastic that made sitting in it squeaky. It is white and soft, and his couch. Now, the cushions are ruined with faint brown outlines of stars and hearts. With her knuckles, Yael smears the dirt around so the pictures blur, seeping into the tiny squares.
“So you’ll just keep sitting there,” Yael’s mother says.
Yael’s father breathes out through his nose. He reminds Yael of a stallion when he does this.
Yael’s mother says, “You expect me to do everything,” and then turns to Yael with a smile that’s scarier than a frown.
She explains that, for the time being, they will all still live together, but the only difference will be that she will bunk with Yael, on the foldaway bed beneath Yael’s regular one that is supposed to be for sleepovers. Yael wants to ask how long “the time being” is, but it’s another question, she knows, that is wrong.