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  She felt a little like that now.

  She’d stopped trying to reach the oral surgeon, and had canceled the doctor’s appointment. Part of her recognized a cosmic inevitability in this. She was changing, and it would only be a matter of time before she would be beyond any doctor’s help.

  Her period had never come, but she did get nosebleeds. Blackish clumps stained the tissue. She bled under her fingernails, on her scalp where the hair was loose, and sometimes in her mouth, when she was teething. That last thought struck her funny, but it was true. The new teeth were cutting through the gums, growing in long and sharp. There were other things, too. She craved red meat. Her feet and toes looked longer, and she found she had less foot cramping when she walked on those toes.

  But all these things were almost peripheral to what she felt inside. Her temperament had grown moody, and her moods unpredictable. She thought in blocks of feeling and instinct now. What struck Ella most was how few thoughts really seemed like her own. What she felt, if she were to strip it bare and analyze it, was a foreignness, an alien kind of development amid her own self, one that was learning her, becoming a version of her, but an imperfect one. This newness of self was uncomfortable in her skin, and she felt an itching, even a kind of ache sometimes, to open herself up and set herself free.

  As if in response to those thoughts, her body seemed willing to comply. Her seams were straining. She had stretch marks and even lacerations. It wouldn’t be long before she’d bleed everywhere, and the person inside her would be ready to come out.

  She would be a mother, after all.

  * * * * *

  I know every curve of your face, every tiny line, the soft, blurred outline of your cheek in the sun. I know the flecks of green in your eyes, the tiny little laugh line in the right corner of your mouth. I know your smile, your bright, warm, wonderful smile. I have studied these things, because these are what others see as you, and because these things seem important to you. I love you. What matters to me is what is inside you, the Ella you are when you laugh, the Ella you become when you’re thinking or dreaming. I don’t think I can go much longer without seeing that part of you as well as the contours of the you outside.

  * * * * *

  Chris wouldn’t answer his phone, and Ella thought maybe she really had hurt him, that maybe he’d misunderstood the other night. Nina hadn’t heard from him, either.

  “You okay, Ell? You sound like you’ve been crying.”

  The pain had woken Ella up, had snapped her out of the reverie of imagined motherhood. She believed something was growing inside her, but she was starting to worry it might kill her. It was like coming out of a deep sleep to find oneself someplace one never remembered going. She was startled, scared, and feeling pain where her body was stretching and changing.

  Ella, still pacing with cell phone in hand, passed the hallway mirror and choked off a little cry. The pigment in her eyes was spreading across the white like (shark’s eyes) like a yolk breaking in a pan.

  “Nina, I’m changing.”

  “What are you talking about, Ell?”

  “Something’s really wrong with me, Nina. I need help. Maybe I need to go to the hospital.”

  “Okay,” Nina said in that odd careful un-Nina voice. “Hang in there. I’m on my way over.”

  “Should I call 911?”

  “No, I can be there faster. I’ll take you.”

  She stood alone in her living room, whimpering as a crunching sound (like breaking teeth, she thought) skittered along under her skin. She ached everywhere, deep aches that sent waves of nausea through her whole body. She sank to the floor. Her skin bulged where the bones beneath them shifted.

  What the hell was happening to her? And why? What was she to become?

  “Please hurry, Nina,” she whispered to the empty house.

  Nina made it in only ten minutes. It might have struck Ella odd – in fact, it did, a little, somewhere way down in her mind, but she was preoccupied by then. Her eyes were different, her whole sense of sight different. She could see shapes moving in the mirror, could hear every creak of the house parroted back in echo. Her earlobes looked melted down the sides of her neck, but she could hear things – the hum of the furniture, the dying gasps of the flowers Chris had brought her in the vase on the kitchen table, the irregular sound of more than one heart beating in her chest.

  “Nina, help me.” There was a snap that made her cry out, followed by pain in her elbow, and she screamed when she saw the odd bend her arm now made, her forearm folding back in unnaturally toward her. She sank to the floor. “Nina, please,” she whispered. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. Please, I need a hospital.”

  Nina stood calmly over her, looking down with sympathy more than concern. “All you need is me, sugar.”

  Ella looked up at her, surprise and pain glazing her eyes. “Nina, I —”

  Nina’s eyes flashed, all black, like ink in the deep sea. Ella could see sharp tooth points pressing against her top lip.

  “Nina?” Dazed, not fully comprehending, she offered up a hurt look to her best friend. Pain spasmed through her and she fell over on her back. No, the last rational part of her brain told her. Not Nina. Not anymore. That voice...she thought of Greg, not-Greg.

  “These are just...growing pains, of a sort. I’m trying to help you. To make things better. That’s all I ever wanted. You’re exhausting to keep up with, Ella Briselle. I have had to be so many people to try to make you happy, and still —”

  “Help me,” Ella broke in. Talking felt like gulping in great lungfuls of smoke. “It hurts.”

  “It won’t for long. Just trust me, Ella,” Nina said, kneeling beside her and taking her hand. “I did this for you. For us. I put just enough of me in you to break you free of that cage that holds you.”

  Ella tried to say, “What the hell are you talking about?” but it came out as a wheeze. She knew, though. She knew. Greg, not-Greg, the condom slipping, the strange flat carefulness of his voice.

  “It’s that body that keeps you from me. I can grind down that prison your bones and tissue keep you in, that unyielding rigidity that keeps you from shifting. I can teach you to change shape, like me – to embrace and absorb other forms and make them your own. To redefine beauty on your terms. You can know flight and flexibility. You can take form any way you want – every fantasy that you’ve ever imagined. And,” Nina added in a husky whisper, “you can know me.”

  Ella tried to pull herself across the floor on one badly malformed elbow. A terrible thought struck her, cutting through the haze of pain. “You killed them all.”

  “I became them, to be close to you. To be better to you than they ever could. Dammit, Ell,” Nina said softly, her voice choked with obvious emotion. “Why won’t you love me?”

  “You’re...not...Nina,” Ella croaked the words. Her throat felt thick, and she had to suck the air in hard and force it out to make words.

  “I can be anyone you want me to be.”

  There was a kind of vulnerability in the Nina-thing’s words that made her feel sick. She threw her good arm out in front of her, reaching for the doorway, trying to pull the bulk of a body in revolt away from the thing pretending to be Nina and toward the door. Her hand rippled, stretched, cracked. The pain inside her was immense, a fire encircling and engulfing her ribs.

  “Don’t fight it, Ella. Just lie still until it’s over.” The Nina-thing rose.

  “Monster.” Ella’s mouth ached now, and she could feel a tugging and a maddening itch in her gums, could just about hear the creak in her stretching jaw.

  It stepped over her form and blocked the doorway. “You need me now,” it said, and the tone had definitely changed. This voice was cold, alien. Jilted – that, at least, and maybe that alone, was the only recognizably human quality about it. Then softer, more desperate, it added: “I need you, too. Just love me. Please.”

  It knelt again beside her. “Know me,” it said in a low voice, and closed its eyes.
>
  Ella found she could. Even as the pain folded her up into little pieces, even as the self she knew, both in physical sensation and in thought, stretched and pulled and reshaped itself into wreckage, she could understand it – the intense and terrifyingly clingy love it felt for her, the need it had to be with her. And the loneliness, a tender bruise, a burn, a bleeding wound that her rejections kept reopening. She felt its confusion, its longing to connect with the forces of life, the decline of its health and security in a world so coldly individual and brutal. Its thoughts of a hollow, rigid world that it associated with pain.

  While Ella folded in on herself, it considered its catalog of life forms that it could reshape itself into, those that it had absorbed entirely, and decided Ella would need comfort. It chose to wear the Greg again. It hesitated over her body, remembered her anger, and then reshaped into the mask called Chris. That didn’t feel right, either. She reverted back to the Nina. The Nina was a confidante mask, a safe mask, one Ella trusted.

  She gazed down at Ella’s curled-up form, shushing her by stroking Ella’s bleeding lips. “Everything will be okay. It’s almost over. Everything will be okay.” It touched her cheek, leaving a small smear of blood.

  Ella moaned again on the floor, her hands clenching and unclenching. She tried to pick up her head. It went to touch what remained of her hair, and her body, painful and jerking, shrank from its touch.

  “Don’t,” Ella croaked at it. “Not.”

  It placed a tentative hand on Ella’s head anyway. “You don’t know how lonely I was until I met you. How empty this world is, with empty things looking to be something to someone....When you are finished,” it said softly, stroking Ella’s hair, “You’ll be like me. We can be together forever. We can change. We can leave this world. And neither of us ever have to be alone again. You can do it. You can. And when you’re ready, you can make a baby.”

  Under the haze of pain – perhaps the last clear thought Ella had – she could hear the faintest tinge of desperation, of doubt and its accompanying panic, in the Nina-thing’s voice. Ella wondered if it really did know what happened to a human body forced to learn to shift shapes.

  Ella’s hand finished changing. It now resembled something claw-like, the long, pointed fingers fused together, the remaining nails loose and hanging from rapidly disappearing cuticles.

  “I love you, Ella. I can be anyone you want me to be.” It unformed its hand into a long tendril, not unlike that of a curling pumpkin vine. The tendril snaked into Ella’s hair and around her neck to her face. It filled her throat, choking off the moaning.

  “Shhhh, darling,” it said, and bore into the last remaining part that was really Ella, the part that defined her the most, and sighed deeply.

  THE LAST THINGS TO GO

  (with Brian Keene)

  

  THE LAST THINGS TO GO, Sharon Coulter supposed, were the hardest. There in her driveway, the slanting late-afternoon California sun softening the edges of a darkening world, she blew an errant piece of hair from her eye and continued scraping at the yellow ribbon on her trunk. The ribbon was the sticker kind, and not the magnet kind. Her Kia Sportage was made with fiberglass, so the magnets wouldn’t hold. That had been okay; there had been something lasting and almost superstitious about the sticker on her trunk. So long as it remained, her fervent belief in it would keep Cameron safe, keep him alive until he came home from Iraq and scraped it off himself – and thereby scrape off the war and all its baggage.

  But Cameron had never come back to this home in West Oakland that they had briefly shared, a home they’d purchased just four months before his second deployment. Sharon had originally been hesitant about buying it, even though owning a home – a place of their own – had been her dream, but Cameron had convinced her, citing the more affordable housing prices and its proximity to San Francisco via the bridge and BART. Without Cameron, this home felt empty, even though it was full of reminders of him.

  She still had the letters he’d written to her, and printouts of all the emails, Facebook postings, and other things he’d sent when he wasn’t out on patrol and had access to his laptop. She kept a box of dried petals from every flower or bouquet he’d ever given her, and the empty Sweet Tarts box he’d bought her at the movies on their first date, and the ceramic kitty-cat tree ornament he’d given her on their first Christmas together. She had two dresser drawers full of his t-shirts, socks, and underwear, and half a closet still occupied by the rest of his clothes. His aftershave and cologne still sat on a shelf in the medicine cabinet, and a six-pack of his favorite beer still lurked in the back of the refrigerator, untouched since his departure. She had a removable hard drive full of pictures of the two of them together, and a bed that felt bigger and emptier with each passing night.

  She was surrounded by Cameron and yet he was gone.

  The first thing to go had been his impression on the pillow. That had faded a few days after his deployment. The second thing to go had been his scent, washed from the sheets and pillowcases when she did laundry. Some nights, on the rare occasions when Cameron had been able to Skype with her, she’d found herself missing him so badly after their call that she’d spray his pillowcase with a hint of his cologne. But it had never been the same, and her longing for him then was nothing compared to the deep and mournful sense of loss she’d experienced when she learned that he’d never be coming home again.

  There would be no more letters and no more phone calls, no more conversations about how much they missed each other or how weird the time difference was between California and Iraq. Never again would he buy her a box of Sweet Tarts or help her decorate the Christmas tree. There would be no more flowers, and the beer still sat in the fridge, unopened.

  Cameron was gone.

  How then, Sharon wondered, was it possible that life still went on?

  * * * * *

  After finishing with removing the yellow ribbon sticker, Sharon decided to re-read some of the letters Cameron had sent her. She wasn’t sure that was the healthiest activity, given her current state of mind, but she wanted to anyway. Maybe it was like picking a scab. She knew she shouldn’t, but she couldn’t help it.

  It was Friday. She didn’t have to work again until Monday. She could have gone to the movies or taken a drive to Napa for the weekend, or spent some time antiquing. But all of those activities seemed empty somehow, without Cameron there to enjoy them with her. Looking through their old correspondence was a connection—an intimacy that helped to keep her loneliness at bay.

  She’d read all the letters before, of course. She’d read them so much that she almost knew them by heart. Mostly, Cameron wrote about how much he missed her, and how he couldn’t wait to get back home, and all the things they would do together when he returned. He talked about his buddies, serving over there in the desert with him – guys like Don Bloom and Kowalczyk (who everyone called Planters “because he’s fucking nuts”). These were men who Sharon had never met, but she felt like she knew them well, just from the things Cameron had told her. She wondered where they were now. After all, their stories hadn’t ended just because Cameron’s had. Were they still out there in the desert somewhere, or had they made it home? Were their loved ones waiting for them to return, and if so, were they as alone as she felt?

  Sharon turned on the air conditioning as she walked inside, pausing for a moment as the unit sighed, filling the house with cool comfort. She sighed along with it, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the room seemed to spin. She reached out with one hand and touched the back of the sofa to steady herself. When she felt better, she walked down the hall into the bedroom.

  Sharon kept Cameron’s letters in a box beneath their bed, alongside another box containing the dried flower petals. As she knelt, peering under the bed, she spied both boxes, along with dust and debris. She reminded herself that she needed to vacuum under there the next time she cleaned. Then she pulled out the box containing the letters and opened it.

 
; Sharon gasped. Cameron’s letters were gone.

  A sick ball of anxiety weighed in her gut. There was some superstitious part of her that had always believed words – written words even more so than spoken ones – had a kind of lasting power, that if something was written down, it was somehow more real, more concrete. It was that belief that had prompted her to keep every text, every email, every Facebook post and card and chat transcript. Hell, she even had, folded neatly in her box of letters, the last shopping list he’d written out before his deployment. She saved every “I love you and miss you,” every “You’re so beautiful,” every “You mean the world to me” because it reminded her in the cool gray-blue hours of pre-dawn that she wasn’t imagining a soul mate way on the other side of the world. He was real, and his feelings for her were real. She knew it in her heart, of course, but liked, all the same, to have it in her hand, too.

  But those little mementos of proof were gone, somehow. The dizzy feeling returned for a moment, less intense but threatening all the same. Could she have moved them? She didn’t think so. But there wasn’t any other explanation for it. No one else had come to visit since last she’d pulled out the correspondences to look at, and there were no pets, no cleaning people, no children....

  Sharon thought of that pregnancy test she’d taken the night after he left and tears blurred the sight of the empty box in front of her. She hadn’t wanted to say anything until she was sure, but God, how she’d hoped that test would come back positive. She hadn’t realized how much she wanted it – had, in fact, firmly believed the opposite until the digital window had returned the result NOT PREGNANT and a wave of intense, almost biting disappointment surged through her. Now, there was no one to tell anyway, and she found herself relieved it had turned out as it did. She couldn’t very well mourn that they, as a couple – a family – would never hear tiny voices learn to laugh and talk, or small feet scampering to welcome him home, if those things didn’t exist. She couldn’t cry about their never holding curious small hands or seeing reminders of his smile in tiny upturned faces that would never be. The written words had spoken. She couldn’t dwell on something that never really was, right?