Chapter Text
I don't remember which one of them killed me.
I remember the kitchen tile. The grout between the squares was the color of old tea, and I had a close-up view of it because my cheek was pressed against the floor. I remember the cold against my skin and how unhelpful the cold was, by then my body had decided not to feel most things, and the tile was just one more sensation in a queue I was ignoring.
I remember thinking, with the functional part of my brain that was still working: did I leave the stove on at my apartment.
I had an apartment, a town over. The lease was in my name. The bills were in my name. I had bought the couch secondhand and dragged it up three flights without help. I had built a life of sorts in that apartment. I had made it as far from this kitchen as I could afford to make it, and still I had come back tonight because it was my mother's birthday, and I had not yet learned how to refuse her certain things.
There was a voice somewhere above me. I think it was my mother's. It might have been my father's. By that point I had been hearing the cadence of being yelled at long enough that my brain had stopped processing it as language. It was just noise. Traffic noise. The noise you live near.
I was tired.
When I understood what was happening I felt relieved, because I would not have to go to work in the morning. That is the last thing I remember about being alive. Not pain. Not fear. Just relief, and the cool of the tile, and the wondering about the stove.
Then nothing.
I noticed my body first.
I was standing. There was no floor under my feet and I was standing on it anyway, the way you stand on the bottom of a swimming pool when the water is exactly your height. I looked down at my hands.
They were the hands I remembered. The chipped polish on my left thumb, two weeks old, half scratched off. The half-moon scar on my right palm from a bad night with a kitchen knife when I was nine. A papercut on my index finger from the previous Tuesday, when I had been opening mail. I held my hands up to my face. The freckle on the second knuckle of my middle finger. The small blue veins on the back of my wrist. They were mine. The body I had died in had come with me.
The white kept going as far as I looked. It had the soft inside-of-an-eyelid quality of light coming through a closed eye in the sun, warm and weightless, sourced from nowhere.
There was something else with me.
I knew it the way you know there is a person in a room behind you when they haven't moved. The presence had no location. It was simply there, attending, the way a parent is in the same house as a sleeping child.
I waited a long time before I spoke. The presence waited with me.
"Hello," I said, because eventually you have to say something. My voice cracked at the second syllable. The white absorbed the sound. It went out and did not come back, because there were no surfaces for it to bounce off.
"Hello, Aster," the presence said. The voice came from nowhere in particular and everywhere at once. It was neither a man's voice nor a woman's.
My breath caught.
The catch in my throat was a sharp click of muscle, the kind of swallow you do when you're trying not to cry and your body is starting anyway. I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum, hard, as if I could push the warmth back out. The warmth stayed. The presence had put something inside me that didn't belong to me yet, and it sat there glowing, and my eyes filled, and my knees gave.
I sat down.
My legs folded under me without permission. I bent forward over my own lap and began to cry — not the small, shame-edged crying I'd done at red lights and into pillows for most of my life, but the other kind. The kind I'd only done once or twice as a small child, before I'd learned that crying made things worse.
It came out of me in long ugly shuddering waves. My shoulders heaved. I sobbed into my own hands until my throat ached and my eyes burned. The presence didn't move. It didn't approach me. It didn't try to make me stop. It stayed.
I had not understood until that moment how much of my life had been spent expecting people to leave the second my feelings became inconvenient. Every cry I had ever cried had been timed. Kept short enough not to drive someone away. I had been doing that for so long I had stopped noticing.
I cried harder, on the strength of being allowed to. When the storm finally passed I sat with my face wet and my breathing uneven and my hands in my lap. The white held still.
"Can I ask you something," the presence said. The voice was lower this time, the way you lower your voice for a frightened animal.
I nodded. My hair had fallen forward across my face and I left it there. I didn't trust my voice yet.
"Do you know where you are?" I shook my head. I dragged my sleeve across my face. The fabric came away dark with wet.
"I think I died," I said. The words felt strange in my mouth, in the past tense, as if I had been talking about someone I used to be.
"You did," the presence said. The confirmation came simple and flat — the way a doctor confirms something you already know. I felt my breath go out of me in a long exhale.
I sat with it. My hands, in my lap, had been gripping each other without my noticing. I made them stop.
"Are you God?" I asked. My eyes were on my thumb. I was working the chipped edge of the polish with my thumbnail. There was a pause — the half-beat of a careful breath, the kind a person takes when deciding how to answer a question that doesn't have a clean answer.
"I am something like that," the presence said. "God is a word your kind uses for several different things. Some of those are me. Some of them aren't. God will do, if it helps you."
The voice was patient. It came at the pace of someone who had said this sentence before to other people and was willing to say it again, exactly the same, to me.
"It helps me," I said.
"Then yes. I am God. Hello, Aster." The second hello almost broke me again. It landed in the same spot in my sternum as the first one. My name said twice in a single conversation, with the kind of attention nobody in my life had ever paid to it. I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper and held the bite until the urge to cry passed.
God waited. The white waited.
"You can ask me things," God said, when I had let go of the bite. "We have time." The voice settled into something easier now — still warm, still even, but with a small new conversational quality, as if the formal opening of the meeting was over and the rest could begin.
I picked at the polish on my thumb.
The word came out on a long thin breath. "Was it my fault I died?," I asked, my mind fuzzy on how things happened. I couldn't remember…why couldn't I remember?
"No," God said. The answer came immediately. No pause. The no was firm where the rest of the voice had been gentle.
My eyes filled again. I blinked. The tears held in the corners. "You're sure," I said. My voice cracked on sure. I had not meant to ask the follow-up.
"I am sure, Aster. "The voice took my name carefully in the middle of the sentence. "It was not your fault. Not the way they made you think it was. Not in any way at all. You were not the cause of what was done to you. The fault was in the people who chose to do it. Always. Every time. From the first time to the last."
I closed my eyes. The tears that had been waiting fell — slow, silent, down both sides of my face at once. I didn't wipe them. I sat with my back straight for the first time since I had entered the white and let them come.
It was a long while before I could ask the next thing. When I opened my eyes the tears were drying on my face, leaving the skin tight and itchy where they had tracked. I pressed my sleeve to my cheeks until it had taken what it could.
"Why am I here," I said. My voice was steadier now. Not strong, but no longer threatening to break.
"Because you died," God said, "and because what comes next is a choice. I wanted to offer the choice to you in person rather than make it for you."
The voice was easier again — moving us forward into the practical part of the conversation, gently.
"Most people don't get a choice?" I tilted my head as I asked. An old gesture from offices and waiting rooms, the kind of asking I had done when I didn't want the question to be weighed too heavily.
"Most people don't need one," God said. The voice slowed again. I could hear God choosing the words in real time, the way a careful teacher chooses words for a hard concept.
"Most people have, by the time they arrive, made enough small choices over the course of their lives that the shape of what comes next has already been decided."
A pause. The pause had weight.
"You did not build yourself. You were not allowed to. There is a great deal of you that was never given the chance to choose anything. I would like to give you the chance now."
I unlaced my hands from each other and laid them flat on my thighs. The polish was still chipped. The scar was still there. My body had been an under-chosen body for twenty-two years and God was telling me, gently, that I was allowed to choose now.
I didn't know what to do with it. "Choose what."
"Where you go next. And what you go there as."
I picked at my polish. A sliver came away. The white took it.
"Can I go back?" The question came out quieter than the others. I asked it the way you ask a question whose answer you're afraid of in either direction.
"To your old life?"
"Yes." I waited. I held the breath I hadn't realized I was holding.
"Yes," God said.
The word came at the same gentle even weight as everything else. There was no surprise in it. God had been ready for the question.
"I can put you back in your body, in your kitchen, before the end. You would live. You would heal. You would have the life that was waiting on the other side of that night. It is a possible life. It is not a bad one. You would have a few good things in it."
A deliberate pause. God was letting me brace.
"You would have a small apartment of your own. A job you didn't hate. A cat, eventually."
The word cat hit me like a dropped weight.
My breath went out in a short huff. The tears started again, but they came differently — not from grief but from a particular hungry wanting. I had wanted a cat for years. My mother had said animals were filthy. The pet deposit at my old apartment had been more than I could spare. I had scrolled adoption listings on my phone late at night, knowing I wouldn't act on them. The version of me God was describing would have had one. The cat would have slept on my chest. The cat would have known my voice.
I closed my eyes.
"You would be lonely in the way you are used to being lonely," God said. The voice had softened again, the gentleness of a person delivering hard news to someone who needs to hear all of it. "You would not have many friends, but the friends you had would be true ones. You would die at seventy-one of an illness you would catch too late."
"Oh," I said. My voice was thin.
"It is a real option. I want you to know that. Take your time."
I took my time.
I let the imagined life unspool behind my closed eyes. The apartment. The cat. The job. The two or three true friends. The slow, mostly quiet decades. The illness that came too late. The version of me who lived all of it, woke into all of it, fell asleep every night having survived another day of all of it.
It was not a bad life.
It was the life that had been waiting for me on the other side of the kitchen tile. God was offering it back to me. I was holding it in my hands like a job offer I wasn't sure I wanted, and the cat in the offer was real, and the cat was warm, and I would have loved the cat.
Then I thought about my mother.
The version of me who lived to seventy-one would have a mother in it for some of those years. Not all. But enough. The phone would ring. The phone would ring on a Saturday morning when I was thirty-three and I would not pick it up. The phone would ring on a Thursday night when I was forty and I would let it go to voicemail and then listen to the voicemail twice and lie awake afterward. The phone would always ring.
I opened my eyes.
"What are the other options." My voice was steadier than I expected. The polish-picking had stopped. My hands were lying flat on my thighs.
"You can go somewhere else." The voice had brightened. The careful gentleness of the alternate-life description was gone; we were in a different register now, one with possibility in it.
"Where."
"Anywhere. Any world your kind of consciousness can take root in. There are a great many of them. Most you have never heard of. Some you have."
Some you have.
My heart did a thing it hadn't done in a long time. A small flutter. An idea I hadn't been letting myself think. I sat with it. I didn't ask the question I wanted to ask, because the question was a stupid one and I didn't want to be a stupid person in front of God. The idea sat with me. The white waited.
After a while I asked anyway.
"Could I — " I had to stop and swallow. "Could I go into a story?"
"Yes." The answer was immediate.
My breath caught. I waited for God to say more. God didn't. The waiting forced me to keep going, which I think was the point.
"Any story." I had lifted my head. I was looking out into the white at no particular point. My hands had come up from my thighs and were pressed against each other in front of my chest, the way a child presses their hands in church.
"Any story you can think of, clearly enough that I know what you mean."
The voice had a new quality now. I couldn't name it at first. After a moment I recognized it: God was interested. The way a librarian is interested when a child asks a question that suggests they've been reading.
"Stories are real places, Aster. Not the most real places. Not as solid as the world you came from. But real. People live in them. People die in them. People who arrive in them from elsewhere, the way you would be arriving, are real visitors. You would not be a character. You would be a person in a place that's also full of characters."
A pause. The white seemed to lean closer. The warmth in my chest pulsed. "It's a strange thing to do. Most people don't ask for it. The ones who do are the ones who don't have anywhere else they want to be."
I picked at my polish. The sliver came away. The white took it.
"I want to go to a game," I said. My voice was very quiet. I hadn't been planning to say it out loud yet. The words came out anyway. I had been alone with the wanting for so long that having a place to put it had gravity.
"All right."
"I want to go to — "
I said the name of the game.
My voice came smaller than I meant. I had only said that name out loud once, to a coworker who asked what I'd been playing. The coworker hadn't heard of it, and I had been relieved. The game had been mine. For eight months I'd been the only person in my life who knew its name. Now I was offering the name into the white the way you offer a real thing into a deal.
"All right."
"You know it." I hadn't phrased it as a question. It came out flat. I needed it confirmed.
"I know it the way I know everything." The voice was mild. There was something almost amused in the mildness, the way a parent's voice is almost amused when a child asks about something printed on the back of a cereal box.
"I'm not the one who wrote it, if that's what you're asking. There is someone in your world who did. The world that someone built is a real world now, because people loved it enough to make it real. It is small. It is dark. The people in it are dangerous."
A pause. The pause had a quality of checking in.
"You have played it many times."
"Yes."
"You know what is in it."
"Yes."
"You know what happens to the protagonist."
I felt my throat tighten on the yes before I said it. The yes came out anyway.
"Yes."
"You know the things the people in it have done. The things they do. The things they will do." The list came at me in three even beats. God was making sure. The warmth in my chest pulsed once with each phrase.
"Yes."
"And you still want to go there."
"Yes."
The yes was firm. The polish-picking had stopped. I had lifted my head fully and was looking out into the white as if there were a face I could direct the yes to.
God was quiet.
The quiet had a different quality from the others. It had weighing in it. The presence had been so steady through the conversation that I had almost forgotten God was deciding as we went, the way a person across a table from you decides as you talk.
When God spoke again the voice was the same warm voice, but with something underneath it. A carefulness. The way a person speaks when they're trying not to alarm you but also have to say something difficult.
"Aster."
The voice took my name slowly. The way someone takes your name when they're about to say something they want you to be present for.
"You understand that the protagonist of that game does not survive easily."
"Yes."
My hands knotted together in my lap. I left them knotted.
"You understand that arriving in that world will not put you in the position you watched on the screen. There is already a protagonist. She exists. She lives in that town. She works in that café. She will, in two months from your arrival, meet the man in the red and the man in the green…but you may be able to change her fate….and yours..but it will be very hard."
I gave a nod telling him that was my choice. I was sure…if I could change her fate…that would be good. She wouldn't have to die. I could…my thoughts were cut off by God speaking again.
"All right," God said. The voice had settled — the quality of a decision made. "I will send you. There is one more thing."
"What shape would you like to wear, Aster. Human, or something else." The question came simply. The answer was complicated.
My breath slowed. My hands settled flat on my thighs. The white held still around me.
If I went human — if I went as I was — I would be the smallest, softest, most easily hurt thing in the town I was about to enter. I had played the game enough to know what happened to small soft things there. I had watched it happen in different routes, in different orders, with different ratios of love and cruelty. The small soft things got picked up. The small soft things got kept in cages. The small soft things got eaten. The small soft things got loved in ways that broke them, that took them apart slowly, that turned their love into a thing they could not escape.
The version of me who would walk into that café as a human would be the version who had always lost. The version who had always lain on kitchen tile. The version who had always been prey.
My jaw set and I lifted my eyes.
"Monster," I said. God didn't answer immediately.
The pause was longer than the others. I could feel God looking at me — not in disapproval, not in surprise. The look had the quality of a doctor looking at a chart, checking something, making sure of the line of the diagnosis before agreeing to the treatment.
"Are you certain." The voice wasn't skeptical. It was checking. The way you check with a person before signing the papers.
"Yes." The yes came firm. My hands didn't move. My eyes didn't leave the white.
"You may not know yet what monster will mean for you. The shape will come from the place you are going. It will be one of their kinds of shapes. Not a human idea of a monster. A real one." He spoke to me softly, making sure I understood.
"I know." I told him. I was ready. I wanted to survive.
"You will not be like them. Not exactly. You will be your own thing. I will choose the shape that fits you."
A pause.
"You may not love what you find when you wake up. It will be — " a careful beat — "it will be a great deal to live inside."
"I know." I was sure of my choice. I didn't want to die in this world. I wanted to thrive.
"You can still pick human." The voice was very gentle now. The gentleness of someone offering an off-ramp without judgment.
"I want monster," I said, determined.
"Why." I hadn't expected God to ask. I sat with it.
I had told myself several reasons in the white before God had asked. They were the pretty kind of reasons, the kind a person tells themselves when they are about to do something brave. Because the world is full of monsters and I want to meet them as an equal. Because I want to choose what I am, for once. Because the protagonist of the game deserved better, and I want to see if I can do better for her.
The reasons were not lies. They were also not the real reason. God had asked, and the real reason was simpler and uglier, and I said it out loud because God was the only one I would ever say it to.
"I want to be the dangerous thing in the room for once." My voice came steady. It didn't shake. The sentence came out whole, the way a thing comes out whole when it's been waiting inside a person for a long time and a door has finally been opened.
The words landed in the white between us.
God was quiet.
The white was quiet.
I sat with my hands flat on my thighs and waited for God to take the sentence or refuse it.
"All right," God said.
I waited. I thought I would be sent. I was ready to be sent. Instead God spoke once more.
The voice slowed in the particular way it had slowed at the no earlier. "Try to be gentle with what you find there, Aster."
"You will be loved."
Throat. The throat closed around the words and held them.
"Try to let yourself be loved when it comes." Behind the eyes. A pressure, the kind that comes before tears. I held my breath.
I opened my mouth to ask what that meant. What if I can't. What if I don't know how. How will I know when it comes. The questions stacked themselves in my throat all at once, fighting to get out first.
The white came apart.
I woke up in a bed I didn't recognize, in a room I didn't recognize, in a body that was waiting for me to notice it.
For a long time I didn't move.
I lay on my back and stared at a ceiling that was not the ceiling of my apartment, was not the ceiling of my parents' house, was not any ceiling I had ever lain under. There was a small water stain in the upper left corner, shaped like a leaf, rust-brown at the edges and darker in the middle, as if water had pooled in the same spot many times over years. A ceiling fan turned slowly above me — four pale wooden blades, a tarnished brass fixture at the center. The fan was silent. A square of late-afternoon sun fell across the bedspread at the foot of the bed, gold-orange, slanting through a window I couldn't see from where I was lying.
The bedspread was a color I would not have chosen. Pale green, with small embroidered birds along the hem — wrens, or sparrows, in white and brown thread, each one slightly different from the next, the work of someone who had cared about the difference. The fabric was soft. It smelled faintly of lavender, the way fabric smells when it's been folded in a drawer with a sachet for a long time.
I lay still and waited to find out what hurt.
In my old body there had always been something. The bruise on my hip from sleeping wrong. The ache in my shoulder from the long bus rides. The place on my jaw that clicked when I yawned. I had been used to taking inventory of pain on waking the way some people stretched. I waited, now, for the inventory to start.
Nothing hurt.
The absence felt wrong before it felt good. My body was quiet. It felt rested. I lifted my right hand to my face. The movement was easy. There was no stiffness in the wrist. The freckle on the second knuckle was where it had always been. The papercut on my index finger was gone — fully healed, the skin smooth, as if it had never happened.
I lowered the hand.
I sat up slowly.
The bedspread slid down off my chest, the embroidered birds disappearing into the folds in my lap. The room was small. The walls were the same cream as the hallway I would walk down later. A wooden dresser stood against the far wall. On it, a small lamp with a cloth shade, a book I didn't recognize, a glass of water gone cloudy from sitting overnight. A wardrobe in the corner. The closet door closed. The window was to my left — a single tall window with white curtains pulled to one side, looking out onto the wall of another building across a narrow gap. A pigeon sat on the sill outside the glass. The pigeon was watching me.
There was something else in the bed.
I felt it before I saw it. A weight, against my thigh, warmer than a blanket fold, alive in a way nothing in a bed should be alive. It had moved when I sat up. It was moving now, slightly, in time with the small adjusting motions of my body.
I looked down.
There was a tail in the bed with me. It lay curled against my thigh under the bedspread. I could see the shape through the fabric — a long curve, thick at the base, tapering toward the end. I lifted the edge of the spread with two fingers and pulled it back.
The fur was red.
Bright. Blood-bright. The red that makes you look away from a sunset. It started where the base of my spine met the bed and ran the length of my thigh. The last few inches — the tip — were a clean pure white that faded into the red over a short gradient, as if someone had dipped the end in paint. The fur was thick. As I watched, the tip flicked once against my leg, and I felt the flick at the base of my spine: a small precise pull, low down, exactly where a tail would be attached if a person were going to have a tail. Which I now apparently did.
I made a sound. Not a scream. A small soft sound from the back of my throat, the kind a child makes when they have just understood something they did not want to understand.
I lifted a hand to cover my mouth. My fingernails caught on my lower lip.
I dropped the hand. Lifted it again. Held it in front of my face. The fingers were the fingers I remembered. The freckle. The scar. The chipped polish. But the nails had been replaced. They were thicker than nails should be, slightly curved, the color of polished bone, and they tapered to fine sharp points that gleamed in the late-afternoon light from the window. They were not grown-out fingernails. They were a different kind of nail. They had not been mine an hour ago.
I touched the top of my head.
What I felt under my fingers wasn't hair. Not at first. The first thing I felt was fur — short, soft, alive with its own subtle motion under my touch. Two warm shapes set back into the hair on my crown, pointed at the tips, swiveling minutely as my breath caught and the fan turned overhead. I traced the shape of one with my fingertips and the ear moved against my touch, twitching away the way an animal's ear twitches, an involuntary motion my brain was apparently now in charge of and didn't yet know how to control.
Fox ears.
My fox ears, set on top of my head like a second pair of organs that had always been mine and that I had only now thought to find.
I lowered my hand to my forehead.
It wasn't flat.
My fingers traced up from my hairline. They met something hard, an inch above my brow, just inside the line where my hair started. Two of them, set wide. I followed the curve of the first one back and felt it sweep over the top of my head in a smooth arc, slightly back and slightly outward, narrowing as my fingers traveled, ending at a fine sharp point that pricked the pad of my fingertip when I pressed too hard.
I drew the hand back.
The point hadn't broken my skin. But it had been close. The horns were warm to the touch — warmer than the rest of my skin — and they pulsed faintly under my fingertips, not a heartbeat exactly, but a slow alive-ness, the way a tree feels alive when you put your hand on the trunk.
I got out of the bed.
My legs worked. The muscles felt familiar. The bones felt familiar. The small dimples on my knees from kneeling on hard floors as a child were still there. The tail came with me, swinging slightly with the motion of my hips, and I felt it in the small of my back: an addition, an attachment, an extra animal weight I had not been built to carry.
I walked.
The bedroom opened onto a short hall. The hall ended at a bathroom. I knew where I was going because there was nowhere else to go and I had to see, and the seeing had to happen before anything else in my new existence could begin.
The hall walls were the same soft cream as the bedroom. Two photographs hung at eye level — a stand of trees in winter, bare branches against a gray sky, and a quiet stretch of beach with no people on it, gray water meeting gray sand. Furniture-store art, the kind you bought along with a couch. Halfway down the hall, a small console table with an empty robin's-egg-blue ceramic bowl on it. At the end of the hall, just before the front door, a doormat — gray fabric, the word welcome in white block letters. None of this was anything I had chosen. None of this was anything I had ever stood in. The apartment was holding its breath around me, waiting to be lived in.
The bathroom door was open. I went in. I switched on the light. The fixture above the mirror was an old brass thing with three frosted bulbs, the kind you saw in apartments that hadn't been redone since the 1970s. The bathroom was small. A pedestal sink. A clawfoot tub with a shower curtain pulled half-closed. A medicine cabinet with a mirrored front. A folded towel on the rim of the tub, gray, the color matching the doormat.
I looked at the mirror.
The first thing I saw was the hair.
It fell past my shoulders, all the way to the middle of my back, the brightest red I had ever seen on a person. Not a dye-red. Not a henna-red. Not a paint-red. A deeper color than any of those, the color of an arterial cut, the color of paint mixed thick. The kind of red you used when you wanted to be seen. The kind of red a clown might paint his sleeves with.
The second thing I saw was my own eyes.
They were green.
Not the green of grass or moss or any green I had ever stood near. They were the green of new leaves in direct sun, of the inside of a sliced lime, of something illuminated from within. They glowed, faintly, in the bright bathroom light — not glowing in a way that lit up the room, but glowing in a way that made the iris itself seem to have a small light source behind it. The pupils were round, for now. The whites were the whites a human had. But the irises themselves didn't belong in any human face I had ever seen.
The third thing I saw was the horns.
They rose from the front of my skull, just above my eyebrows, set wide. The base of each horn was the color of old ivory — a warm, soft bone-white that grew directly out of the skin without a seam, the way a fingernail grows out of a fingertip. From the base, the color deepened. Ivory shading to a dusky cream. Cream shading to a soft gray. Gray shading to a smoky black-red that took over the upper two-thirds of each horn. The very tips — the fine sharp points where each horn ended — were the same arterial red as my hair.
The horns swept back over the top of my head in a clean curve, not large, not yet, but unmistakable. They caught the bathroom light at their polished tips and threw small red glints onto the white wall behind me.
The fourth thing I saw was the ears, half-hidden in the red hair but visible now that I knew to look — pointed, dark-furred, set further back than the horns, twitching at the sound of the bathroom fan with their own quiet alertness. Each one moved independently. I watched the left one turn slightly forward as I shifted my weight. I watched the right one flatten when the radiator clanked in the hall. They were paying attention to the room without my permission.
My mouth, when I parted my lips, showed the tips of small sharp white canines that didn't belong to any human dentition.
My fingers ended in those polished pale claws.
And behind me, sweeping slowly back and forth in the mirror, the red-and-white tail.
I had asked for monster. I lifted a hand to my own face.
The thing in the mirror lifted its hand at the same time. We touched our cheek together, the thing and I. The cheek was warm. The cheek was mine. The thing in the mirror, when I looked into its eyes, was looking back at me with the fear I knew I had on my own face, because the thing in the mirror was me, and I had done this, and I had done it on purpose, and I was the only person in the world who knew.
I began to cry.
I did not stop for a long time.