As soon as the screen re-made her aware of the demonic quality remaining in her eyes, Calliope took stock of her surroundings, just to verify once more that the anomaly hadn't bled out to infect the world at rge. If anything was off about her bedroom then reality would no longer be safe, but her inventory of the weird came up empty: the walls, floor and ceiling remained stubbornly normal. They were still mundane, three-dimensional, and contained no trace of the licorice-haired woman that'd haunted her the night before–not that she'd really expected to find one. Esther was ethereal, and left nothing behind. It was all in her head–and the thought of that comforted her slightly. It meant the apocalypse she'd theorized the night before wouldn't be fulfilled anytime soon. Her mind was her own again, the surface of her thoughts calm, pcid and solitary. That signaled only–she assumed–a half-aware dormancy slumbering just underneath. Perhaps It, too, had slept, and hadn't yet awakened?

  But, come to think of it: just how much did Ettie's awareness of her thoughts actually vary, anyway? It always seemed to listen in at just the opportune time; if she took any action It took issue with, It would make Its displeasure known, that was for certain. But in those moments when It read her, when it dipped stalkish eyes through the film around her mind, she could always at least feel it as the ripple skittered through. Or, Calliope thought, and her mind clouded, that's just what It wants me to think.

  She sat up uncomfortably on the bed, against the headboard, and waited. There was nothing but the sounds of the city on a Saturday filtering in from outside–a kind of reverse osmosis where the retive calmness of the outdoors infringed upon the unrest in her brain. Surely if It were awake and parsing her thoughts, It would've also heard her paranoia and addressed it in some way? Or not…if Ettie wanted to keep her in the dark about when she was listening in, staying silent would be exactly the move, wouldn't it?

  "Oh God…" she whispered, to an audience that was either one or zero, and it didn't matter either way; just the thought that It could be listening in would influence her behavior all the same! There was a very real possibility that right then, It was snickering–if dark gods did snicker–as her mind re-re-re-processed the dilemma of it all.

  It got off on her confusion, or any stimuli; It turned her skull into a fucking panopticon, and no thought could be considered safe from Its scrying, no matter how idle! The realization ignited a fre of rage: Callie mentally lobbed it back into the distant trenches of her mind. She doubted such a volley could actually hurt It in a way that mattered, but whatever: focusing her anger on the memory of It felt good. The image of Ettie swam before her–that soft and pointed face, that luminous skin that made surrounding shadows cut all the deeper–so she imagined it shattering like gss, pictured the eyes that–

  Eyes. She'd almost forgotten. The room contained no markers of anything abnormal, but there was still a pair of gring errors much closer to home, right above her nose. Calliope raised her phone up at half-arm's length and flicked the camera icon to the side.

  Her face appeared in the viewport, but its tired eyes were not their normal brown…they weren't even red…they were instead a hideously bright fuchsia; the color was doubly-wrong. Ettie's faced stared at her from within the phone screen. She smiled, thin and sweet, and Calliope filed backwards against the headboard.

  "Jesus FUCKING Christ!" She yelled. Her arms flew up in front of her face on instinct and her phone dropped out of her hand onto the sheets below, face-down. Her chest was heaving again; adrenaline rushed to prepare her for a fight, or flight, neither of which she had any hope of executing. Instead she froze in pce as the seconds ticked by. The room was calm and silent, and the phone didn't move from its position, which allowed her to calm down a little, but only just: her heart pounded against her ribcage when her eyes found the little pstic rectangle resting on the bed. What horror would it hold if she dared to flip it over?

  She did it–but kept her eyes half-shut during the process, the same way she'd stolen gnces at horror movies when she was little. The jumpscare she expected never came: the camera view showed only the ceiling above, and her own ugly mug peering over it. Blegh.

  "You're the fucking worst," she muttered, and snatched it off the bed.

  "Good morning to you too," said a distant, lilting voice, from far outside the bedroom. There was no way she could have heard such a sound–its origin was in the kitchen, at the very end of the hall–but Ettie's sharp and dulcet tones overrode any earthly logos, apparently.

  With a shaking hand she turned the shaking, loosened knob in the bedroom door, and wrenched it open inwards. She poked her head around the corner to the left, and from there she could stare straight down the hall to the other end where the kitchen began beyond the square archway. Ettie was seated there at the far side of the dining table; Callie felt the beam of Its gaze fsh across her before returning to the wall just to Its left. Her face rested on a hand which rested on an elbow, which rested on the bare wood, and neat, perfect, sharp bck nails drummed against the surface.

  "Um…Erika?" Calliope voiced. She hesitated. There was no reply; at least then there was no chance of It inflicting another nosebleed on her roommate, if she'd already left for work. Small comfort. Callie crept out from the bedroom until her entire body had exited, but went no farther. Walking down the hall was suddenly the most difficult prospect in the world now that there was Something waiting for her at the end of it. Ettie wasn't even looking at her, and her lungs still gciated at the thought of getting any closer to the kitchen! Calliope gulped; she put one bare foot forward on the wood floor.

  It's fine. I'm not going to hurt you.

  She stumbled and gripped the peak of the nearby sofa for support. Her eyes fshed to the kitchen. Oh God. Now It was looking at her.

  "You're really not making this easy on me." Calliope mumbled. "I-I need to get ready."

  It eyed her for far too long before replying. "Okay. I'll be in the bathroom, then."

  She vanished. Calliope straightened up. Why do you have to be anywhere at all, she wondered. To that, It gave no reply–not even the smallest of movements in her head to interrupt the dull throbbing that'd returned to it.

  One foot in front of the other, she made her way to the farther bathroom of the two–the cleaner one, just barely–and assessed the situation. Even with forewarning, she was never prepared for the view the bathroom mirror granted her: she inhaled sharply as the gss dispyed her bloodshot eyes and a familiar face looming over her left shoulder.

  "The fuck am I supposed to do about this?" She asked, gesturing to her face, "I'm supposed to help Annette with some dumb project. What's she gonna think–I had a stroke or something?"

  In the mirror, Esther raised her hands to chest-height–Calliope tried her best not to notice how they framed her bust within the gap–and against pinched, spindly fingers something bck was knit out of the shadows. She pced it on the sink–reaching through the mirror to the side of it that was real–and it was only then that Calliope recognized its form: the cheap, psticky oversized sungsses that had st been seen somewhere in the pile of clutter occupying a corner of her bedroom. She reached a hand out and was surprised to find that they were solid–and warm to the touch, too.

  "Did you…are these…y'know, real?" She asked.

  "Yes." Ettie replied.

  "How?" She held the pair up to inspect them. When viewed through the darkened lens, the blood red was no longer visible within the mirror; they would hide her shame or horror easily. That was one way to go about it, she guessed, even if the angled frames made her look like some wannabe celebrity, seeking to invite rather than ward off paparazzi.

  "I've had you carrying them since before you woke up."

  Well that was slightly unnecessary. She couldn't understand the need for all the drama and conjurer's tricks; it was only a pair of sungsses. Couldn't It have just left them out on the desk in her bedroom?

  "I'm susceptible to boredom, you know." Ettie said, reading her so casually, with such familiarity, that the feeling no longer angered her as much. She didn't bother; she just stared into the gss, which was dangerous in its own right, but as long as she avoided eye contact she'd be okay…right?

  Getting a good look at Esther was difficult for that reason and one other: her stomach shifted strangely in its seat when her eyes took in Its appearance, and rediscovered that certain features were almost pleasant, actually. If she didn't remember that It was just a mask, a puppet, an illusion, if she didn't notice how It didn't always seem to breathe…she would've said that Ettie was pretty. Very pretty, really. She ticked all her boxes: those round and rger-than-life eyes were soft and sweet, like the rest of her face–her skin looked about as plush as marshmallow–but her gaze was sharp, and cut like hard light, and…she dismissed the notion. She shook her head. What was she thinking, thinking like that? She wasn't about to be catching feelings for a falsehood; probably trauma had addled her brain.

  "So……were you, like, sleeping, earlier?" Calliope asked, to change the subject. Ettie either hadn't noticed the diversion of her thought, hadn't cared, or at worst didn't mention it for any number of unmentionable aims.

  "I don't really sleep, exactly."

  "Oh. Yeah." She'd forgotten that. "But were you still…" the words drifted off like a feather; her thoughts weighed heavy on the scale of whether she should press the subject.

  "...Listening?" Ettie finished for her; Calliope gred in response.

  "See! You always do that! Stop finishing my sentences like that, it's fucking weird!" Her outburst had no effect on Ettie's expression–it remained serene with the tiniest sign of a smirk.

  "Sorry." The word from Its mouth seemed to belong to a nguage other than English; Calliope was unsure she'd ever heard It apologize for anything before. "I've become rather impatient, and it's pretty easy to read your intent. I get a bit ahead of myself–and well, you, too."

  It took a moment for her to process it. Ettie–not the false image, but the true mass of roiling chaos that stood beyond her–impatient? That was possible? She always thought that old age made one willing to wait for things to come, that the sense of time accelerated with experience, like cosmic inftion; wouldn't something as primeval as Ettie see a week, a month, a billion years, as little more than a blink? Or–as she thought about it more–maybe it was the opposite. Monotonous sand slid through an hourgss like water, while something less uniform could clog it to little more than a drip. If she was the first actual person It'd met in literally forever, perhaps It was simply drunk on the stream of qualia passing through her brain. Time dited almost to a stop at the event horizon, after all, with its endless glut of information smeared out at the singurity's neck–an asymptotic clepsydra that could never be observed to lose even a drop of water.

  Variety was the spice of life, or whatever.

  "Yours is barely a trickle, Callie, but you're right. I'm forced to watch every precious moment of time stack upon one another like pncks, and it's unbearably slow to wait for everything else to catch up to me."

  Her head, a sort of inconsistent dreamcatcher for Its thoughts, received a sensation: the alien equivalent of watching paint dry, except an indeterminable number of times slower. At Its scale, horology was maddening.

  "Wow, okay, that–that sounds goddamn agonizing. How do you even deal with that?"

  Ettie smiled. Eye contact brought only the lightest tickle this time. "I guess I do sleep, in a way, so scratch that. I hibernate my thoughts for little ages until time finally catches up. It's kind of like microsleeping, or processor idle time…most of space is empty, and most of time is, too. There's just a lot of it to kill. So to answer your question: maybe I'm not always listening to you."

  "Maybe?" She repeated.

  "Maybe." She grinned.

  She recognized that that was the best she was going to get, and resolved to begin her morning routine. "Okay. Whatever. But can you like…fuck off for a bit? Please? I gotta shower," and I don't want you watching me, she thought, quietly–like volume meant anything anymore.

  "Okay." And she was gone with just one word. Calliope waited a little while in case she reappeared, but when that failed: she brushed her teeth, avoiding the sight of her reflection, and with a deep sigh and closed eyelids stepped into the shower.

  Her mind blocked out the ever-unpleasant experience of being naked under hot water, and it was only after she'd stepped out the front door and descended down the creaking steps that she started to re-associate herself to the world and its miserable ways. The sungsses blocked out the worst of the November sun, feeble as it was and as foolish as she felt wearing them instead of her usual gsses. The angled half-moon of the lenses was unbecoming in that it didn't hide enough of her face–and they weren't even prescription anyway, just ordinary unfocused gss. Not that it really mattered: the world outside her apartment was clear, and cold, and sharp with no myopia in sight, and she was continually reminded of the reason for that every time she gnced ahead down the hill and saw Ettie's slim curtain of hair gliding ahead of her.

  The route they took to Annette's was less direct but avoided the sketchy part of town that'd been her undoing the night before. She didn't have the heart to return to that alley even in passing–what if the man still remained, blind and confused, that would be dreadful–and Ettie didn't seem to mind about the change. She led the way with her hands in her pockets and gave long, pointed looks to everyone they passed along the sidewalk. No matter how hard she stared, they couldn't see her…but then again it was an unwritten rule among Bostonian strangers that eye contact was scarcely worth making, so it was easy for Callie to forget she wasn't out for a stroll with a normal friend with a normal face and nature. Too easy; she resolved to keep it in mind at all times.

  "You can talk to me, you know." Ettie said, turning to face her and walking backwards without losing pace. The belt of fabric that wrapped around her bck peacoat fluttered in an imaginary wind, drawing the only pair of eyes it could, and Calliope couldn't help but notice how closely it hugged her figure. It was the second time that day that she had thought of hourgsses. Great, she thought, I'm jealous of a girl who isn't real. In her distraction, she almost tripped over a raised crack of sidewalk.

  She breathed a cloud of mist into the air. "I'm not trying to draw attention to myself by talking to fucking nothing, sorry."

  The slightest twinge within her head–too brief to discern the emotion behind it. Anger, or annoyance, one or the other, but even so: Ettie's face stayed smooth, and she didn't miss a step even when they reached the bottom of the hill and stopped before the crosswalk of the busy street.

  "That wasn't an issue st night, though, was it?" She said, with her heels banced on the curb. The signal across the road was a solid and warding orange; cars flew by behind her, but Ettie's hair was immovable in their wake, as smooth and dark as ever. Huh. Callie hadn't thought of that. At the party…at the diner…she'd spoken to Ettie multiple times in the presence of others, and yet they didn't seem to doubt her sanity any more than usual. If It could deceive her eyes and ears so thoroughly, what did that mean for her existence, right here and now, standing on the sidewalk? Was she truly standing on the sidewalk?

  "I–how's that work?" She spoke, with vocal cords that might not have been real anymore, before a gust of wind blew her hair every which way. The cold air bit into her cheeks like an array of daggers; if that wasn't real, it was–at the very least–unnecessary!

  "Don't worry, it's real." Ettie said. "You never really say anything without meaning to, you know. I just see the intent before it happens and change a few things, so that you don't actually speak. I wonder if you all think in such a telegraphed way…"

  "So–I'm not gonna look crazy?" Calliope's voice was inaudible over the gale now; she struggled to keep her sungsses from blowing off her ears and into the street. She'd never been very far west and so couldn't attest to any moniker, but still: she was sure that Boston had to be the windiest city on record that cked an official title for it. The winter gales were encouraged by narrow funnels that tall buildings created, she figured, or maybe they were all descended from some baleful North Atntic spirit of squall and squalor that had it out for purple-haired losers trying to hide their bloodied eyes from prying ones. Her envy of Ettie only grew the more she saw how she remained unmoved in the face of the weather. Show-off. It was fully untethered from the material world in a way Calliope could only long for–or could only briefly achieve in trips embarked by dreams or psychedelics…neither of which were doing her much good of te.

  "No, you won't look crazy." Ettie said, smiling. Callie saw her left foot step back off of the rim into the street, and several things happened at once: the signal changed to a friendly blinking symbol of a person in mid-stride, and a final series of cars tried their best to beat the red light. By some un-miracle Ettie weaved through them with ease and disappeared from view behind the st: an extra-long U-Haul carrying the trinkets of somebody's life to somewhere, anywhere else. It passed by in a blur and It reappeared on the other side of the street–like her very own personal omen. Yeah. Fucking show-off.

  She shuffled herself across once the st car had passed, and the pair of them continued down the hierarchy of streets until brownstones and bubble tea shops became the duplexes and triplexes and other -plexes of a false suburbia nestled within the city. If she suspended disbelief, she could almost believe she was well outside the urban core, if not for the frequent wail of sirens that wafted over the houses from the enclosing burbs reminding her that the neighborhood's seal of serenity was always and ever incomplete. Any quaintness there was temporary and artificial.

  Somewhere close to the center–farthest from the bustle outside–Annette's house unloomed, inconspicuous beside the copypasted buildings it resembled, except for the rainbow fg and drawings of all sorts that were pstered to the windows of the second floor. Calliope swore they changed with every visit–Annette liked to rotate what was showcased there–and the house itself showed signs of simir ritual metamorphosis: there was an odd bnk space next to the front door where its mirror image used to be, back when the building was still a two-family home. The interior walls must be much younger, then, having been torn down and regenerated as their enclosure transitioned from one house to two and back again. She figured that was why the pce almost seemed to breathe–all the more heavily when the throng of a party was within it–as if the house itself retained memory of its past configurations. Or maybe…was it even the same house, after all? Didn't all the cells in the body die off and repce themselves after X amount of time?

  If that were true, was she still the same Calliope after everything that'd happened–after her mind became the unwitting host to another, far more alien? Like the house, any change was strictly internal–the scar of the missing door or her missing eye-whites the only markers of the transformation that y hidden within. The question of their identities couldn't be discerned from the outside alone.

  Something drew her eye to the right of the front door, and she realized she'd been staring, and musing, for upwards of several minutes. Esther stood on the porch and leaned over the rail on her elbows. She'd been watching her.

  "You have such a funny way of thinking," she said.

  "...I do?"

  "You do–of course it's the same house. You're still the same you–though I'm always able to change that, if you'd like." She added, and their eyes met. The vivid pink of them didn't diminish with distance whatsoever; there was fresh static in her brain the same as if she'd been two inches away.

  "No, I don't need that, t-thanks…" Callie said, shivering from the sensation. "But everything is always changing. How can it be the same?"

  "Do you think there's life on other pnets, then?" It wasn't an answer, of course, but the question startled her; it was said with her own intonation from the night before.

  "Huh? Oh, I mean…don't you count?"

  "I'm not from another 'pnet'."

  "Right…" She expected there to be a punchline there but Ettie didn't ugh, or even smile. Such an "erm, technically" answer was probably meant to lead her further down a wormhole of questions. She indulged It.

  "Where are you from, then?"

  Ettie's eyes bored into her; it was easy to imagine that was what trepanning felt like.

  "Around," She said.

  They stared at each other for a long moment, before Ettie broke away. Her lips cracked into a smile, and she ughed: a warm and sweet and thick sound like maple syrup, or like the deadly mosses that had flooded the North End some hundred years before. Either way, it warmed Calliope's chest better the hot breakfast she'd skipped out on ever could.

  "You're fucking with me," she said, and smiled in spite of herself.

  "I am."

  She was almost relieved, but caught the feeling and squashed it straightaway. Its dispy of a sense of humor was disarming; she reminded herself that it could all be fake, or performative–something ulterior at least. Her smile faded.

  "Okay…but for real: you're not human, so you must know something about aliens, right?"

  Ettie propped her head up on one elbow. The triplet of steps up to the porch put her a head or two above Calliope's eyeline, so that for their entire conversation she had to look up, slightly, just to make eye contact. Esther, elevated, and her beneath her on the ground…an uncanny image struck her: Esther, proselytizing from a balcony like some sort of anti-pope, her bck hair and coat billowing like robes, or like ferrofluid spilling out to cover the entire world and drive proboscides into every-mind. She felt like an insignificant subject in the face of It, even if she was only a few feet away and below atop the sidewalk.

  "You're so dramatic," Ettie said; the vision splintered. "I don't know anything more about space than you do. I haven't met any aliens–besides you. Though…" her eyes floated to the porch above her and the sky far, far beyond it.

  "Though…?" Callie repeated–and flinched, just after, when Ettie looked at her again sooner than anticipated.

  "I haven't met another alien, but I might have met something that they worshiped."

  "What?"

  It was only natural, she thought, that aliens–if they existed–wouldn't be immune to the pull of some form of spirituality. It was a way of grounding life with a belief in something beyond it–that would probably have broad utility for anything that was conscious. But what domain could belong to an alien god; what morals would a Martian deity possess? Nothing good, or benevolent, she assumed–but that was probably projection based on what she'd been taught to believe, and since rejected. And if what Ettie said was true…the fear of God returned into her heart, because if she met Something that aliens worshiped, it meant that It was at least as real as Ettie was. And if alien gods were as real as that, then logically, human ones were too.

  And that was a problem. She hadn't exactly made her peace with the capital-G one who allegedly lived somewhere Upstairs.

  "What–" she breathed, at such a low tone that wind overshadowed word, "what happened after that?"

  Ettie blinked. "Oh. I ate it."

  Farewell, fear of God, she thought, welcome fear of Ettie.

  On that note, her mind wandered. Half-composed dirges and anthropomorphized representations of figures from Greek and other mythologies danced in her head–all of them shuffling single file into what she imagined the mouth of Hell must look like: bck and reddish-pink, not like fire but like blood fluoresced, and ringed with razor-teeth sharpened to an atom's width. It would pull them in with prehensile tongues lined with writhing cilia like Velcro hooks, and gnash and gnaw until Zeus and Xenu alike were tattered and unrecognizable–but still living, still refused any release of death–and they would fall interminably into the shadow of its gullet to somepce worse beyond imagining. Like an event horizon It would stretch them to spaghetti beyond breaking and pinkshift them beyond seeing, It–

  "Very dramatic", Ettie interrupted. The actual mouth of hell was nothing like how she'd assumed from Sunday school: Ettie's lips were a pale pink, and her teeth only a bit sharper than normal; Its words were dangerous, yes, but also sweet–like antifreeze. Or plutonium. Calliope blinked several times in quick succession to try and clear her head.

  "Didn't you come here for a reason, by the way?" It continued.

  "Oh. Yeah." Her mind was so preoccupied with ruminating on the Biblical idea of Hell that the cold inferno she was living in slipped her mind. She reached for the phone inside her jacket pocket and flicked through to the messaging app. Annette's name was at the top; she typed out a simple "I'm here", and waited. It probably would've been okay for her to just knock on the door, or even to walk in unannounced, if it were unlocked–Annette's other friends came and went in such a fashion–but such an act of extroversion was beyond her. So it was that when Annette came to the door five minutes ter, Calliope resembled a lost puppy in a box left out in the cold, waiting for somebody kind to take her in.

  "Callie! Shit, how long have you been waiting out here?" She said with concern, from the safety and warmth of the doorframe; the golden yellow overalls she wore over a white tee seemed ill-suited for the weather. At first, Annette attempted to take a step out onto the porch, but abandoned that idea and retreated when a gust of wind forced her eyes to squint. Calliope gnced to her right and found only the bnk patch of wall where Esther had been moments before; there was probably little point to her manifesting around other people now that she wasn't pretending to be real anymore. Still–she half-expected to be jumpscared in front of Annette as she ascended the steps and was ushered inside.

  Annette shut out the cold behind them and walked briskly towards the kitchen. "Your cheeks are red as hell, you could've let me call you a ride! It must be so cold out today!"

  "Nah, it's fine, it's mostly the wind," Callie protested, unzipping her jacket, "I don't mind walking." That was untrue; she'd much rather make the trip in greater comfort, but on-demand ride apps ate into her already limited budget–

  Besides, walking is more interesting.

  Fuck-you, get-out-of-my-head, she thought–and almost missed Annette's next words. "–at least taken the train or something. You want anything to drink?"

  "What? I swear to God if you offer me that acetone-shit again, I'll–"

  Annette leaned back from the counter so that she was visible through the archway. There was a scowl on her face. "Ohmygod, I'm so not day-drinking today, the fuck? Plus I'm pretty sure the sangria's all gone from st night anyway…I meant something warm. We have like, hot cocoa."

  "Oh." She blinked. Something warm and bitter-sweet to warm her cold embittered heart–sounded appealing. "Okay, sure, that'd be great!"

  "Mm, 'kay." Annette straightened up and out of sight. Calliope stood awkwardly beside the coat rack while the sounds of microwaving milk and the clink of a spoon stirring against gss washed over her. She assessed the damage the previous night had wrought on the living room around her: by all accounts, whoever cleaned up had performed a bor equivalent to several Herculean tasks. There were no bottles strewn about and the floor was clean of any detritus; the only real indications that a party had happened at all were the lingering scent of liquor in the air, and furniture whose wrinkled fabric showed it'd been slept in recently.

  On that thought, the armchair in the corner drew her eye. It looked conspicuously empty, and she imagined for a moment Ettie appearing there seated atop the headrest, like an oversized raven. In other circumstances, that corner of the room would've earned a pque commemorating "first contact" between human and alien, or something close to it. It was special: where the three right angles met below the baseboard was a spot where reality was weak and fantasy clipped through. The meaning of their meeting pce, however, was carried within her head and nowhere else; in the end she was only giving longing looks to a dingy old armchair.

  "Okay, it's ready!" Annette announced. She emerged from the kitchen with a steaming mug in each hand, each distinct: the one in her left read MISC in maroon block letters while the right carried a drawing of a frog on a log above cursive reading "a very hoppy morning". Calliope had no doubt the former was for her; despite being on temporary leave, she couldn't seem to escape the trappings of her university. Now her failure haunted her in the form of a cheap-looking mug.

  "Thanks," she said, and reached for it–but before she could make contact, Annette pulled her arm back and narrowed her eyes. "I'm kinda digging the shades, you know, but what's the deal? You finally embracing life as a vampire?"

  Shit. "Oh, these?" She pushed the bridge of the gsses higher. "I, uh–" Help, she thought, scrabbling for Esther's faint presence in her mind. It must be there somewhere–there!–but she made only the most gncing contact before It scuttled deeper into her subconscious like an extradimensional cockroach. Where there was one, there were always many…but those compound-eyes watched her in silence on the inside, and Annette's pair watched with worry from without. So she improvised.

  "I, had, uh–an accident." Yeah, that works. "My eyes are all fucked up." True. "Must've gotten a bad tab of acid or something." A partial lie–though in a way the problem really could be traced back to her fateful decision to get high. If she was now doing penance for that, she seemed nowhere near atonement.

  "O–kay…" Annette frowned, but allowed her to take the cup at least, and took a sip of her own. "Oh yeah, this is the good shit." She purred. Calliope couldn't help but do the same the instant the liquid disappeared behind her lips. It was almost perfect: marshmallow-y swirls curled around rich trails of cocoa at the surface, forming a kind of sweet tajitu in perfect harmony; the candied bitterness glowed like a meteorite just fallen to her stomach. "Mm, yeah, actually, though!" She murmured in agreement. Murmured…or more than that, there was a strange vibration across every inch of her body that she couldn't pce. It radiated from the base of her abdomen and was at once like and unlike having a limb fall asleep, or like the time she'd been electrocuted for a moment in the ninth grade while attempting to extract her shitty phone charger from the wall socket of the school lunchroom. Warm, fuzzy, exhirating–but with a mounting sense of doom. Like it would kill her after only a short while. Just like…her eyes widened.

  The sensation was foreign then, and it was foreign now. The pleasure she felt on swallowing another mouthful of chocote and marshmallow was twofold, near-immiscible liquids blurring at the edges: her own feelings…and Ettie's atop and around them. It, apparently, enjoyed hot cocoa too. Go figure.

  "This is really good," she said, but wasn't quite sure if she'd thought it, "What's in it?" Her lips smacked together as she ordered them to shut, to stop. Annette failed to notice anything was off.

  "Oh, Mikey has these, like, homemade marshmallows? You know that friend of his that does molecur gastronomy, or whatever? So we get a lot of weird one-offs in the pantry. These are one of the better ones."

  "Yeah! Seriously…where is Mikey, anyway?" Her eyes darted around nervously. Mikey had a propensity to enter into spaces with a bang; she didn't want to spill cocoa all over the floor.

  Annette ughed. "In the bedroom sleeping it off. After you left we got pretty drunk–you missed it."

  Callie took another sip from the mug; the warmth was intoxicating. "What's to miss? I hate being sober around drunk people."

  Annette smirked, catching her eye. The thinnest yer of cocoa lingered above her upper lip, marring her otherwise freckled face, which certainly didn't look as if it she bored under even the slightest hangover. Figures that the woman who threw parties at a semi-professional level would have some secret to avoiding the resulting crash–probably electrolytes in the form of enough freezer pops to hydrate a small army. The only clue that she'd been partying was in her hair: normally straightened into sheets of chestnut brown, the night's events reverted it to its natural curly wilderness corralled only by the estic band that kept it in a bun. Calliope used that as a focus to avoid eye contact; she looked past the piercing blue irises and onto a stray strand of hair that fluttered with the movements of Annette's jaw.

  "Yeah, I know you do. You just drop fucking acid instead." She giggled. "Actually, you were pretty fun st night, I heard."

  The space-rock in her stomach cooled rapidly. "I was?"

  "Oh yeah, totally! Sawyer James was all over you, too, how come you didn't tell me? He asked where you'd gone off to when we got back."

  Not for the first time, Callie wished she could turn her eyes around one-eighty degrees to stare into her skull–just so she could gre at It. The memory of anything she'd done with Sawyer James the night before had disappeared, or maybe had never entered in her memory at all–but Annette didn't need to know that. She had to avoid appearing an amnesiac.

  "Eh, I'm not really into him, really."

  Annette furrowed her brow. "Oh? Damn, just when I thought we could actually set you up with someone…he's super into you, it's pretty obvious."

  "Annette, I'm autistic." Another truth, paired with a false smile. "I had literally no idea." Another lie.

  She rolled her eyes. "Okay, cool, but like…you just kinda ditched him. After we heard about it Mikey and me thought you were just scared of commitment or something. Sawyer's pretty nice."

  Callie went to gulp down another sip but came up empty; only dregs of congealed cocoa were visible at the bottom of the cup.

  I'm not scared of commitment, she thought, I'm scared of–

  "Yeah, he's nice, but he's a grad student."

  Annette took back her empty mug in hand. "So?"

  Her host walked into the kitchen to deposit both cups in the sink. Calliope stared at her back, and–to help in finding her words–returned her hands to their customary pce in the pockets of her jeans. She gulped; only the bitterness of the cocoa remained in her mouth, no sweetness to be had anymore.

  "So he's a grad student at MISC. And I'm on a leave of absence. From undergrad. 'S embarrassing." She eyed the carpet at her feet, picking apart every twist of fabric in her head–until Annette's socks entered her field of vision and she was forced to look up. She wore the look Calliope hated most: pity. Fucking pity.

  "Aw, I'm sure he doesn't care about that. You said you can still go back, right? When you're ready?"

  If she'd be ready. The topic had shifted; she had no desire to discuss the details of her dilemma with Annette. She didn't even want to discuss it with Ettie, and she was…a stranger, sort-of, strange, at the very least.

  "Yeah, I guess…" she mumbled. Annette's expression didn't change. God, can you just fucking kill me now?

  "Ow!" She recoiled as pain sparked across her head. She saw stars, or something masquerading as them, fsh through her vision and evaporated into the aether.

  "Wait–you okay, Cal?"

  "Yeah," she rubbed her temples with two fingers, "just–headache. Light sensitive. The shades help." Again, she wished she could shoot Ettie a look that could kill–or at least give her a nosebleed. It could feel her anger, couldn't It? Did It give a shit?

  "They're honestly kind of a vibe. Perfect for what I've got pnned, actually."

  "What is that, exactly–" she started. Her voice trailed after Annette as the tter headed towards the hallway. Calliope was forced to follow, or she'd be left behind in the living room. That wouldn't do–being alone in rge, empty spaces practically invited her companion to manifest within them. Ettie could do that anywhere, of course, but it seemed safer or less likely if she were in the company of at least one other person–so she followed.

  She regretted it. Of course the pce Annette was leading her to would be the Blue Room, and of course she'd be forced to uneasily cross underneath the threshold where she'd seen Ettie for the first time, holding her breath all the while. It was for nothing, since nothing happened, but still: living in such suspense had to be bad for her heart, right? The room was mostly the same as she remembered from the night before, but marginally cleaner–literally, in that some of the paint-spttered newspapers were now gathered at the edges. That left a cushioned chair made of false brass squarely in the middle, and the peeling vanity desk behind it at the wall, and it was there where Annette hunched over with her back turned preparing who-knows-what.

  "So, you said you needed help with some art project right? What is it?" She voiced.

  Annette turned, with a glint in her eye. She held a small bck brush in her right hand. "Oh Callie, ha, it's you!"

  "Wait, what?"

  Annette stepped forward and grasped the top of the chair. "It's been forever, but I got a new camera and I wanted to give you a makeover again! Is that okay?" Behind her, Calliope could see what she'd collected on the desk: a wide assortment of cosmetics, so many that the thought of having them all applied to her face seemed suffocating; to make her anywhere approaching beautiful would require so many yers as to preclude breathing entirely. "I, uh–" she stammered. Her heart was trying to escape out of her chest again.

  "I think you should try it," Ettie said; suddenly her presence bloomed into existence at her left, and slightly behind. "Calliope means beauty, after all." She already knew where It must be from the direction of her voice, but it still took all of Callie's willpower not to turn towards the bed beside her; despite Ettie's expnation, she still worried that the movement would be seen and questioned, and she'd be asked to justify it. She kept her eyes locked straight on the imaginary space behind Annette's head.

  "I'm not gonna like, post the photos or anything, don't worry. It's just to test the new camera out! So–" she lowered her head in imitation of a bow, and smiled, "would you be my muse, today?"

  Calliope wanted nothing more than to run out of the room, to run away from the real woman holding the brush and the fake one seated on the bed. But she was frozen again, this time by the small part of her brain responsible for keeping the few friendships she had. She'd look like even more of a freak for fleeing, so that wasn't an option. Her flight response had atrophied from ck of use, or been suppressed by Esther, who seemed to prefer she sit through every experience, no matter how unpleasant. She gulped. "Okay…Sure. Sorry, if I'd known, I'd have like, worn something nicer…"

  "Nah, it's fine. It's you, that's what matters." Annette said. She motioned towards the chair. Calliope obliged; as she turned, Ettie's form came into view along with the bedframe on the far wall. She sat with her arms bent back, palms against the thin mattress–which didn't sag at all under her weightlessness–and vanished the peacoat to reveal another bck wide-colred sweater and bck tights that disappeared beneath it; her legs crossed at the ankles. Seeing her sitting there with only the tips of her feet brushing on the carpet, Calliope realized she'd forgotten to take off her shoes–like that was her greatest fucking concern right now.

  "Alright, I am gonna need you to lose the shades, first, just for a bit. So I can do your face. There's this eyeshadow that'll look great on you." Annette stepped around and bent down to peer at her. Her fingers reached out to touch the frames; Calliope's hand raised up to block her.

  The moment stretched out far too long. Through the shadow of the lens she saw both Annette and Ettie stare at her…but the tter nodded, and against her will her fingers lowered and allowed the former to continue. The sungsses came off, her breath hitched, she felt every individual heartbeat pound within her temples, and she expected that at any moment there would be a scream, or at least a frown, passing over Annette's face…but her imagination overshot reality again. There was only the smallest indication: Annette made eye contact with her much longer than was comfortable. Calliope could actually feel It working its magic across the two-foot gap that separated them as she stared into the pools of blue that looked on her without malice or ill-will. Her eyes watered but wouldn't shut; her mouth pooled with something metallic, mercury or gallium, but wouldn't drain, and, finally–after she'd damn-near memorized the squiggly furrows in Annette's iris–she looked away to the upper edge where ceiling met wall, and Its sleight of hand had set.

  "Sorry–you can put 'em back on after I'm done if you want. I'll try and be quick." Annette said, stowing the sungsses in the front pocket of her overalls. Calliope waited for any additional comment, but none were offered. She stole a gnce over at the bed and shaped the words "what the fuck" within her brain. Ettie's smile seemed to grow.

  "You can talk to me, you know," It said. Calliope said nothing. Annette exited her field of view and fetched something from the desk: a little cmshell case of powder that–impressively–matched her skin tone pretty accurately. She swirled the brush against it and prodded at her cheek.

  "Okay, you know the drill, right?" She asked, in a voice warmer and lighter than air, like an old thermal dirigible. Callie nodded. She felt like she was floating, too, in a different way: she'd always disassociated when Annette applied makeup to her in years past. It was the only way she could bear the ritual without feeling awful about herself, the only way she could keep the discomfort from showing on her face and causing Annette to stop and ask what was wrong. It was always her–Calliope–that was eternally the answer to that in so many variations…and Annette didn't need to know that. Voicing it would only make her look like a depressed and madjusted loser. But even when she went to stare off into space at the wall ahead, with Annette leaning over her and Ettie watching ominously to her right…her mind was tethered to the Earth by two things, twin umbilical cables of anxiety preventing her from drifting off and forgetting where and when she was.

  Addressing the first was easy. She squirmed in the seat and moved to speak; Annette paused her brushing and considered her. "Please don't, like…don't make me look like a drag queen, okay?" She asked.

  Annette's brows dipped into something of a smirk. "Cal, when have I ever done that? C'mon."

  "Sorry, I know, but–" She looked into her eyes by mistake. Again there was a curious sensation in her head as something passed between them…and then it, too, passed. Annette re-whetted the brush with powder and continued. Like so many times before, she was oblivious to Callie's internal plight–except this time the blind spot had swelled to include external fws, too.

  "You'll look super cute, promise. Just like old times, right?"

  "Mm, yeah. Okay." Calliope tried to rex, like old times, then: the strings keeping her in her own head had frayed a little. It was far from the first time she'd been stuck in a chair, all awkward and ugly like a newly hatched chick, while Annette worked cosmetic magic to make her face somewhat presentable to the world. Whispered nights of her high school career were spent in her best friend's bedroom doing just that, back in a time that belonged to another universe entirely than the one she was living in now. She knew how it would go already, the same way it always did: Annette would finish after a while, after putting the scent of a dozen different products in her nose, and guide her clumsy, goblin-esque body over to the vanity mirror. Upon seeing her reflection, she'd defer the tears for ter–it was easier now than years ago, before she came into herself a step or two–and she'd smile and thank her for the effort.

  Her thanks was sincere, too, even if one wouldn't know it from a cursory gnce inside her head, because the only reason she was sad was that with Annette's skills upon her face she was able to briefly masquerade as someone she actually wanted to be–but it always came with knowing it was temporary. She'd have to go back to being herself and wash everything off in the mirror ter, one way or another, whether it was to hide from her parents then or herself now. No one but her knew the sorrow or the solitude that came with a makeover like that.

  But that wasn't even true anymore. Somewhere midway through Annette contouring her face Calliope gnced to the bed to find Ettie looking back at her. Her head was tilted slightly to one side, but even at an angle, those eyes stared into her soul unblinking. Staring back into them produced the usual buzzing in her brain: something frizzy, or a conglomeration of cicada broods dispced by time to all emerge at once in a once-in-a-century cacophony. It hurt, or made the underside of her skin crawl, but she almost felt that if not for all the noise she'd be able to hear something underneath: the indecipherable murmur of Esther's thoughts, of which she only caught the occasional whiff. There was a soul behind those eyes just as there was one behind hers, even if Its was far more exotic. Was empathy a feature of souls in general, or just those of human persuasion? Was the slight pout on Ettie's face a genuine expression of concern or only feigned? As Annette swabbed above her eyes with some bright color swatch, Calliope wondered how It would feel in her position…if It could feel in her position. How could It…empathy was about retability, right? How could It possibly rete to her?

  "You're dissociating again." Ettie said pinly; something yanked her at the scruff of the neck and drew her out of where–in her staring–her mind had nearly descended inside Ettie's pupils.

  "Sorry," she whispered. True to Ettie's word, it was heard only between the pair of them; Annette carried on with contouring her face.

  "I can help you do it properly?" Ettie continued. Calliope tried to turn her head and look at her, but such a movement must've threatened to break Annette's hold on her face, so it was overruled. She could look at the woman on the bed with only her eyes, and only at an odd angle that made facial features harder to resolve.

  "Uhh, I'm sorry?"

  "You don't want to be here, right?"

  "Well, I mean…" Yeah, not really, her brain finished. She looked up at Annette, who–despite or perhaps because of her focus–seemed not to notice. But– "I kind of have to be."

  "Physically, yes. But you could take a break."

  Calliope was tempted. She'd wanted to run away earlier, but that was impractical; now It offered her something simir without any real consequences…besides the obviously troubling one:

  "So what, you're gonna puppet my body around again, then?"

  No answer. Annette dabbed something on her nose and smeared it with a sponge. Callie's next words came out clear as crystal despite her nostrils being half-closed; the sensation was surreal. "Why're you even asking my permission?"

  "It's more interesting this way." Ettie smiled. The ivory-white of her teeth stuck in her peripheral vision; for a moment it was all she could make out against the backdrop, like the grin of a Cheshire cat. Just like that, Its intentions seemed facefully pyful…but a smile alone held no true meaning without the eyes. Its eyes always betrayed some deeper motive. Callie sighed. "You keep saying that. Bet It'd be interesting to you if I just died, too."

  The smile quickly became a frown. "No. You're not allowed to die."

  "Hey, I wasn't asking your permission!"

  "It was never offered."

  Callie exhaled hard through her nose. That, of all things, reached reality, because it made Annette step back and pause her efforts. "You doing okay? Want some music or something?"

  That solidified her choice–somewhere down the list of st things she wanted was to add music to the sensory overload she was already experiencing. She didn't answer, because she knew it wouldn't matter in just a few moments, after she looked Ettie in the eyes.

  "Fine." She said, "just–don't do anything weird? Be normal, please." Wow, that's rich, coming from me–coming from me–coming from me. Instead of fading, the thought looped inside her brain like a marquee.

  The process was gradual. She felt like she was falling–drawn into the dots of bck centered in the sparkling fuchsine of Its eyes–then she was adrift as if at sea. It was an endless sea: Lethean, in that she couldn't remember who or when she was, except that the debris scattered around her on the waves was all hers, or her, and that was worrying, because it was barely all holding together. She was unmoored in the eye of a storm that raged just outside her boundaries but she didn't dare look up: the column of sky above her was lit with hexing unblue hues that filtered down in rays. They were visible, tangible, there; they burnt her skin and fyed it to the bone but just as quickly Something would reknit it and pull the memory from her head into the water…how long could that go on? Not forever, surely, since every time the Thing that was not a sun–It burned like a star but was far, far worse, older and colder and hotter and more gluttonous–grazed her with Its gaze a little more bone would appear, then the faintest drops of marrow would appear, and soon nothing would appear. Then there would be nothing of her left. She couldn't survive there, then, even in the eye where it was (retively) safe, even where she was spared of the pink lightning that forked on the horizon drawing to-be-nameless things up into the clouds in a perversion of nature, or the water cycle anyway–what was it she had learned in science css? What was a science css again? She just wanted it to end–but where the beginning was, she had no idea. Maybe it was scattered among her thoughts if only she could gather them.

  Then it ejected her. Sight and sound returned at once, which left the taste of brine in her mouth as she stumbled on the sidewalk and tried to assemble her bearings from first principles.

  Calliope. Callie. I'm Callie. She remembered. The thought comforted her, and the rest fell into pce with every bored, gasping breath.

  The sun had fallen lower in the sky. She was almost out of the suburbs, with the street several blocks ahead pying host to an endless array of cars passing both ways as the Saturday mirage of pre-pre-rush-hour began. That meant she must've walked some distance from Annette's, and the slight soreness of her muscles seemed to confirm that. How long had it been? She paused and panted on the sidewalk beside a fire hydrant that'd been decorated with various graffiti. There was a stitch in her throat; she moved to cough it up and spit it out, but it refused to budge–and why did her eyes burn the same as if they'd focused on a screen for several hours?

  “Welcome back,” said the familiar voice. Callie raised her head, but stayed bent over with her hands spyed over her knees…and looked right into Ettie's perfect face a few houses ahead. In her coat once more, she resembled a human-sized raven, or some other two-legged animal possessed of a simir dark portent.

  “What,” she coughed, “was that?” She worried that she would be sick.

  “I gave you disassociation. I dissolved you from your body for a while.” It said.

  Calliope lifted her right hand off the knee and stared into the palm. The lines crossing it seemed shorter somehow than before. “That was…really scary. You were, like, hurting me. It hurt. A lot.” She squeezed it to a fist; her knuckles quivered. “So you're just gonna kill me slowly, then, is that it?”

  It was hard to tell at that distance, but she swore Its eyes rolled a full circle. “Callie, oxygen kills you slowly.”

  She scowled. “Yeah, and smoking kills you quicker. That's you; you're like the mental equivalent of cigarettes. You wouldn't get out of my head even if it'd make me live longer, would you?” She started forward in a huff. Her will almost faltered when she reached the square of sidewalk on which Esther stood, but the keyword there was “almost”–she let the dark figure fall behind her. Her only focus was on getting home as soon as possible.

  The voice reappeared over her left shoulder. “Again, it's in my interest that you survive as long as possible.”

  “Could've fucking fooled me.” She sped up, hoping to outrun It, even though she knew it'd be easier to outrun the wind. The apartment buildings at st gave way to the four-ne city throughway, across which was some small salvation, or the path thereto: her route home would take her past a myriad of restaurants and convenience stores she could use to bury her sorrow and anxiety under a yer of empty calories, like packing peanuts to hide her soul within her stomach. She punched the (useless) button for the crosswalk with her thumb and waited; Ettie was still close behind, barely a breath off of her left ear.

  “Do you want to know how it went?” She asked.

  “Sure. Whatever. I don't care.” She breathed.

  “Annette was very happy with the results, and your demeanor. You thanked her. She offered for you to come back and see the pictures after they're developed. If you want.”

  Photos of her–or someone who was not her, just using her form–sitting in some darkroom just waiting to dispy her hideous made-up visage to the world…Calliope winced. “I didn't do shit. That was all you.”

  “Mm, not really.” The crosswalk light turned white, and she began to cross. At the other side, there was a gas station that looked heavily disused, and beyond that another series of brick buildings that yielded to the corner she was aiming for: a kind of extra-wide alley of a road with at least four stories of wall on either side. The facades of mixed-use housing loomed dark above, and a collection of nterns on strings and streetlights lit the road and sidewalk underneath them. She figured that at some point the city would turn it–like so many other roads in the urban core whose traffic was more feet than wheels–into a pedestrian causeway…but that hadn't yet occured, for budgetary or other reasons. So, she stayed on the sidewalk as her stomach grumbled, and inspected the neon signs of each shop she passed beside, wondering if and where she should stop and grab something to eat.

  “You said not ‘not really’,” she said, feeling Ettie's presence still behind her, “what's that mean?”

  It maintained a precise distance from her ear, without sound or step. “It's simple, really. I only reacted to Annette as you would've, if you’d actually enjoyed the experience.”

  Calliope imagined the scene–something about it was disturbing. Her own eyes turning from red to pink as It assumed control, with Annette unable to notice…Ettie pying her role better than she herself did…she shuddered.

  “Well…did you enjoy it?" She asked, "The experience?”

  “I did.” Of course It would; her discomfort was nothing if not novel.

  “You're so fucking weird,” she muttered, as the warm, bright light of the test storefront blinded her left side.

  “Thanks.” Ettie’s voice was saccharine as ever. “Oh–let’s stop here!”

  Her feet skidded and scraped against the concrete as something drew her to a halt. Urgency possessed her, and she rounded on her heels, turning towards the interest of the foreign spirit that'd caused it. There against the backdrop of menus and advertisements pasted to the inside of the gss of the dispy window, Ettie rematerialized. A giant poster of a noodle dish in crummy resolution emerged right next to her head, complete with text written in a script that was equally foreign to her.

  “Hey! It's still my fucking body, I'm the one driving it! Cut it out!” She shouted…and instinctively flinched. She hated raising her voice to begin with, but even if the street weren't deserted and someone was able to hear the yelling It'd turned internal, she still would've cried out. Through the dark filter of the shades above her eyes she gred as sharply as she could at the woman leaning on the gss. She could at minimum make her displeasure known. But, as ever, Ettie outright refused to fuel her rage in any way. She rather suffocated it, as one would starve a fire of oxygen: her smile grew warmer, her eyes grew brighter, and she gestured to the shop door with one narrow finger.

  “You're hungry, and this pce looks interesting. Why not?” She said, sweetly. The tone resonated strangely in Callie's stomach, almost like a flutter. No–not a flutter. It was only the leviathan of hunger stirring once more at the thought of food, no matter how foreign. Surely.

  “B-because–I dunno. It's some Szechuan pce, probably spicy as fuck and I don't speak Mandarin, or Cantonese, so I'll look like some dumb tourist who–”

  “I like spicy. I understand enough of both; and they have English menus too, see?” Ettie pced a nail up against the window.

  Calliope processed a feeling–familiar, but never in that context, never in a million years did she expect to be feeling it with Ettie: the resigned exasperation of hanging out with a friend who was a lot more extroverted than her–not that that was hard to achieve. But at least with an actual human, she had a chance of escaping, a shot at shaking off any chance of a unique experience with some fabrication. With Annette or Erika or even Sawyer she could just pretend to be tired, or sick, or just disinterested. Esther was different; the woman with rosetta eyes could see into her soul–she probably even knew what she was thinking, right then. Oh–she smirked. There was the telltale twitch inside her brain. There was no excuse. Calliope sighed and resigned herself.

  “Fine. Whatever.” And just like that, she was ascending the steps and pulling open the gss door; a little bell tinkled to announce her arrival. Have it your way, then.

  Inside, the whole pce smelled like foreign food and fvors she didn't recognize. It wasn't bad, really, just different–which was almost the same thing as far as her pate was concerned. Her nose wrinkled and then smoothed again and again as the two wills 'fought' for dominance: her own dislike of strange, strong tastes versus Ettie's enthusiasm for anything new–any sensory unit not yet indexed somewhere within Calliope's hippocampus. The opposing forces threatened to pull her mind apart like a piece of pasta stretched too thin–It was disorienting–so she tried to tune out smell and focus on sight, instead. There were other humans in the pce, of course. The hostess behind the podium was an Asian woman who couldn't be much much older than she was, or might even be younger. Her suspicions were confirmed when–after a bit of standing awkwardly inside the entrance–she watched her close a notebook full of notes written in immacute blue-ink penmanship–notes from university, no doubt–and greet her with the well-practiced smile of someone whose shift has gone on a bit too long.

  “Hello, welcome!” She said. A head shorter than Calliope, her neck craned to try and spot anyone beyond her. She'd have no luck with that, of course. I probably look dumb as hell, Callie thought, geeky white woman alone in a pce whose name I can't even pronounce. Ettie hung off to the side and stood composed with csped hands, but she was invisible to the hostess and the world at rge. Callie saw It sniff at the air in her peripheral vision, and that brought to mind a rabbit for some reason. As a kid she'd read a series of children's books featuring a vampire bunny who sucked the juice from vegetables…the thought struck her that it and Esther would get along swimmingly–most likely in a pool of carrot juice or blood or another ichorous liquid. Blegh.

  “Just you?” The hostess asked; the thought was interrupted. Callie nodded. “Okay–right this way.” She was guided over to a little table that more than sufficed for one, but would be a bit cramped for two–fortunately or not she was somewhere in between. The surface of it was a warm, dark wood: marbled, and a bit chipped in pces, but wear-and-tear in a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant like that could just as easily signal the most gourmet meal on Earth as it could mediocre reheated morsels. She draped her coat around the chairback and took a seat; Ettie did the same across from her. Its peacoat shed like the skin of a bck onion to reveal a short A-line dress of the same shade.

  The hostess pced a finger somewhere in the top left of the menu. She started to rattle off words in another nguage, but quickly pivoted to English. “Tea? Green? Bck?”

  Ettie opened her mouth to speak, but Calliope was too quick for her. “I'll just have water, thanks.” She said–like hell was she going to drink tea. Her host gave her a strange look, but nodded, then shuffled off behind the kitchen’s swing-door. That left the two of them in retive solitude again: the only other souls in the dining room were a pair of women at the distant corner. They talked and ughed and poked at the steaming bowl of soup on their table with chopsticks and spoons, but at such a polite volume that she'd have scarcely noticed they were there, if not for her seeking distractions from the woman opposite herself. She thought of pulling out her phone, maybe, just to have something to do–no. Pain–white-hot and sharp–shot through her skull.

  “Ow! Fuck,” she muttered, finally turning her eyes towards Ettie, “you know, if you don't want me to do something you can just fucking tell me. Jeez.” She slumped into the seat.

  “Aren't you having fun?” Ettie asked. Callie watched as she grabbed the menu at her pce–it definitely had not been there before–in both hands, like she was trying to align a stack of pages. Her eyes scanned through the lists of entrees without seeing.

  “No,” she started, “and how can you even read any of that? Or do you–”

  “I have it memorized, yeah.” Ettie finished. She returned the menu to the table; a decision seemed to have been made. All in all, it took her less than ten seconds to choose a meal.

  Calliope stifled a ugh. “You're not very good at acting human, you know.”

  Their eyes met; that fluorescent pink seemed brighter in the dim restaurant light…or maybe it was only because its brightness stayed the same while the tter darkened with the sun as it began to set, before the house lights were turned on.

  “And you are?”

  “Er–” She scrunched her eyes shut and massaged her temples. I actually fucking am human–was the thought she left unvoiced, not that it mattered. Even with her eyes closed she could still make out two diffuse spots of color directly ahead, right where Ettie's eyes were supposed to be. The effort failed to take her completely outside of Its sight, or It from hers, but it was still better than having them wide and open to that queer burning sensation. She simply resolved, then, to sew her eyelids shut, or maybe never open them again…but her resolution was broken in record time when the hostess returned with her drink and she was forced to reengage in being social.

  “Have you decided? Do you need help?” She asked as she set the gss down. Upside-down, refracted in the water, the pink of Ettie's eyes danced about the surface. Calliope blinked up and away, made one-sided eye contact with her server–she was surprised she wasn't asked about the sungsses indoors–and felt her mouth fall open. She was at a loss for words…and so a different will found her voice for her. Her jaw moved on Its own and Ettie vocalized: “I'll have the zanthoxylum chicken please, with rice.”

  "Very good, thank you," the waitress replied. It eked a 'thanks' out through her lips before she turned and disappeared inside the kitchen once more. That left Calliope to grapple with the aftermath, the gravity of which only she could know.

  The sensation was a new one. Before, when her hand slipped on instinct to catch something as it fell, or even when It jerked her inner ear to move her like a puppet on Its strings, Its control over her body felt incidental–no more deliberate than the spasm of a muscle or the twitch of a nerve. Actual speech was altogether different. Words couldn't occur without cause, without a will, and not for the first time Calliope felt like a passenger in her own body. The anger on her face shifted to worry.

  “You–I…” How morbidly funny that her own voice faltered now. “You can't just order food for me!” It was all she could manage in protest.

  “You don't have to taste it if you don't want to."

  "That's–that's not the point, okay?" She reached into her pocket for her phone. This time, Ettie allowed it–maybe because It knew her only intention was to check the time, and maybe make herself feel even worse once she saw Annette's handiwork on her face.

  4:33 PM, read the dispy, and the camera showed her a face that looked more subtle than expected. The highlights and shadows on her skin were soft and smooth, her cheeks were tinted with a pale pink blush; the only ostentatious choice was the lime-green color that shimmered around her eyelids when she tilted the screen up so she could see just past the shades. All of it would've been fine, actually, if not for the way her schlerae flickered between white and red as the viewing angle changed. But that was curiously comforting, too: it showed It was trying to fix Its mistake in real time, even if it was imperfect.

  "Hey, so earlier, uh–" she kept her eyes on the phone in her p, "how'd you get Annette not to freak out?"

  "I told you, the visual system is close to the surface–easy to manipute. I just expressed to her that having a conjunctival hemorrhage is only normal, and she believed it."

  "…You still shouldn't be messing with my friends' heads. She's not like, hurt, right?"

  "She's probably fine." Calliope tilted her head up to look at her. Probably? That's–

  "The best you're going to get." Ettie finished. She swirled a strand of hair between her fingers–like a spider, weaving shadows. "I don't have greater insight into what goes on inside her head," she continued, "though I'm still very interested in that. But eye contact still looks to be essential–so if you want to be sure, you can just never open your eyes again, right?" She beamed at her; Calliope did not return it. Was that an attempt at humor? She could at least respond in kind:

  "Yeah, I guess…or I'll have to like, gouge them out, like Oedipus or something." She quipped, accessing long-disused memories of AP English Literature css.

  Ettie's smile didn't waver. "That still wouldn't make me disappear, though." She hummed. Callie imagined it, then, for one horrifying moment: blinding herself in the bathroom sink of her apartment, and somehow surviving, because of course It'd refuse to let her die…the world would fade to inky darkness or the eigengrau that existed in the true absence of everything. She'd be left to feel the rounded jelly of her eyeballs at the bottom of the bathroom sink. But even without eyes, the nerves, the nerves would remain: the only thing she'd see would be the woman across from her, in the mirror that would no longer be real: a dark shape dressed in bck deeper than the shadows, smiling at her pyfully. Shutting her eyes and covering her ears could be no escape.

  Before her pondering could reach its nadir, however, Ettie or the universe bestowed on her an out, because at that moment the waitress returned to the table pte-in-hand with a smile on her face.

  "Please–enjoy! It's very hot. Let me know if you need anything, more water or milk." She said, setting it down. No sooner had she done so than Calliope's nose came under assault again: the scent wafting up from the wedges of panko breaded chicken on the pte contained heat equivalent to all the volcanoes of the Pacific Ring of Fire. The dish looked tasty enough, not even dissimir to the "meals" she prepared at home, with chicken fried in oil paired with rice and vegetables…but she could already tell it was infused with the distilled essence of several thousand Szechuan peppercorns. She grimaced; across the table, Ettie licked her lips.

  "See, doesn't that look delicious?" It said. The pounding on Callie's temples grew stronger, less rhythmic. She got the sense It was almost bursting at the seams with excitement; Ettie looked as if she might explode into pink glitter at any moment.

  "You're–how is this going to work?" She asked. "I'm the one who has to eat this shit, right? I'm gonna bme you for when my stomach decides to murder me ter."

  "I'll take full responsibility for any gastrointestinal distress this might cause. You won't even know it's happened. Promise."

  "Oh, okay…I guess that works." She muttered. She returned her phone into her pocket and her eyes to the pte, then the little sealed paper package of chopsticks beside it. If she was to be forced to eat something she didn't want, she at least wanted to use her own hands and mouth to do so–not be puppeted by something that cked a body of Its own. As that thought crossed her mind she gnced across the table and saw Ettie watching her with rapt attention. It nodded–or maybe it was just an especially rge jitter–and she took that as clearance to proceed. The package came apart, the chopsticks came apart, she fumbled a little with the grip but only slightly; she popped the first bite of meat into her mouth.

  As she'd expected it was excellent: better seasoned than anything she made at home, and made with much better-quality mechanically-separated-chicken-parts. But it was also hot, very hot, so hot she reached for the gss of water almost immediately to chase the heat. Through the distorted lens of liquid she saw those pink eyes glowing straight at her…and deep within her skull she felt something akin to a purr, or growl, as the bite dropped into her stomach.

  "You, ah–" she gulped down another sip of water, "you actually really like this, don't you?"

  Ettie drummed her fingers on the table and looked away–though her disinterest was obviously feigned. The pitch of the whirring in her head proved it. "Yes. The burning sensation is very nice."

  Calliope downed another piece of chicken, and another gulp of water. "That's the part I hate–you're weird."

  It smiled, still falsely preoccupied with the wall to their left. "Hm. No–you like it too, a little. So you're weird too."

  Did she? She couldn't be sure anymore…with every bite of progress made against the dish before her the feeling on her tastebuds was confusing, conflicting, paradoxical: it set her mouth on fire, and water could only douse so much, but the secondhand pleasure she received through their connection overpowered anything else–as if it had an aftertaste so sweet she'd ascend into a sugar high for days. The heat of it was familiar, though she was loath to admit it: the food felt in her mouth the way that Ettie's gaze felt on her skin…or in her brain. Maybe that was why It liked it so much, and why she cleaned her pte in record time. Ettie didn't speak to her again until all that remained were grains of rice and veggies that she'd only nibbled at. Even then, it was just to thank her in a low and pleasant voice, and then disappear without an expnation–not that she gave one with any regurity. Calliope would have to foot the bill alone, but she knew that; eldritch gods had no fiat currency. She'd have to foot it home alone, too, but that was expected as well.

  When she arrived back at her apartment it was already dark, inside and out. She'd forgotten to turn on the light before she left and so her heart took yet more strain during the split second where the door yawned open onto darkness, before she found the switch and banished the shadows to their rightful pce in the farthest corners only. The dark had always been her enemy since childhood, but now, the threat of it seemed much more personal. The past week gave her fresh reasons to fear it, and with Ettie nowhere to be found: she crept into the living room with all the stealth of a burgr, trying not to wake whatever might be lurking. It did say that It slept after all, right? If so, she should quiet her thoughts instead of her movements–she knew just the thing for that. Finally alone on the sofa, she could get in her required hours of scrolling on her phone. She was going to do a whole lot of nothing tonight.

  A few times, her stomach churned, and the lights blurred and refocused, but always only for a moment. Calliope didn't really notice. It took until she was fighting off sleep and curled under a bnket on the couch for It to reappear: a shadowy figure standing over her on the edge of sleep. It spoke in Ettie's voice and sounded far away–and dreamlike, for the absurd content of the words: "Hey, do you mind if I use your computer while you sleep?" It asked.

  Ha…what did that even mean, she wondered, dreams couldn't use a keyboard…she murmured some vague sort-of agreement…and drifted off into a dreamless coma. Several hours ter somewhere hundreds of miles away and obviously completely unknownst to her, a ping went off on the desktop terminal belonging to a nameless government agent who was too bleary-eyed to care about something so trivial right now–the spiced coffee in the mug on the desk wasn't enough to bring him to full wakefulness right then, and the alert only really represented chump change. It didn't matter; it could wait until morning, or never.