I pull off all the scales on Lilith’s neck and shoulders. This one is easy. The town’s first saint, Annie, had grown a magnificent pair of wings, dark as shiny as a rook’s. People called her Angel Annie, and she healed the sick for forty-nine days until she suddenly collapsed. I had to cut off her wings with a bone saw so that she would fit in the casket. I didn’t know what to do with the wings, so I asked her parents if they wanted them. They did not.
My hands hurt as I work. It’s like teething: I can feel the keratin lumps growing through my skin all the time. A constant reminder. I wear gloves and long sleeves everywhere, even at home, even in egg-frying temperatures. I’m not sure what people will do once the turtle-shell lumps reach my face and I can’t hide what I am any longer. What can they do?
People ask me, is sainthood contagious? I say no, but I think I was chosen only because of Clara. I shouldn’t have prepared my daughter’s body myself, it’s bad form, but none of the neighbouring towns wanted to take a body of a saint. They were afraid our town’s curse would come along.
My dear Clara, my sweet-cheeked bright-eyed little miracle, my baby girl. She died covered in golden fur, telling the fortune of some sap who came from six counties away. I wanted to cremate her body, but her birth father wanted an open casket. So that was that. I had to shave the fur off her face. When I got home after the funeral I found the first lumps pushing through the skin of my back in the bathroom mirror. They looked like an accusation, a proof of guilt.
I don’t know if my gift is what it is because of what I didn’t get to do for Clara. I’m lucky the summonses for fire are few and far between. I’ve learned to combat them. They don’t hold sway over me.
I finish doing Lilith’s makeup. She looks like she’s just asleep on the cold metal table. Gloves off, time for cleanup. Blue flames lick up my fingers as I sterilize my equipment in a small blaze. It’s taken so long, but I’ve finally managed to get it under control. Now I know it’s there when I need it, and I can use it as I wish.
Somedays I wonder about burning it all down—this workroom reeking of preservative, this building and its overgrown carpark, the whole damn town with its rows of houses filled with grieving parents. But then who would be left to tend the dead? Who would be left to cut off horns and hide extra teeth and disguise claws as fingernails? I’ve seen the parents' faces when they see their child again. They look so much like before, they tell me. Like it never happened.
It’s things like that which get me out of bed in the morning, when I can feel the creep of bony protrusions spreading further across my skin, when I can feel the phantom fire ravaging my insides. I still get up and go. Because the saints need me. And I will continue getting up and going until I cannot anymore.
Lilith looks perfect now, a job well done. I draw the sheet over her and wait for the next saint to come in.
Song Of The Krakenmaid
Originally published by Lackington’s, November 2015
The krakenmaid invaded Fennel’s dreams unasked. Deep in the treacherous REM landscape she appeared, sliding through her vast seawater tank, short silver hair waving like anemone fronds. Fennel watched the hypnotic pattern of her movements as she pumped all eight tentacles rhythmically, milkweb light refractions dancing over her speckled skin, belly muscles rippling under fat and supple skin that turned ridged and wiry where mammalian waist gave way to cephalopod. Look at me, look at me, Fennel thought, and as though she could hear in a dream, the krakenmaid obeyed. Her mercury-coloured eyes, unusually wide-set, fixed on Fennel. Then her lips parted and the she began to sing, filling the dream with the same low, melodious noises that wrapped around Fennel’s days at work.
In her dream Fennel understood what the krakenmaid was singing about immediately, but the song’s meaning slipped away the moment she thought about it. Ursula, Ursula, Fennel whispered in her head. Come to me, Ursula. Tell me I’m pretty. Ursula’s body hovered, heavy and inviting, in the water. Fennel desperately wanted to touch her, but the krakenmaid was unreachable light-years away in her dream, separated from her by a gulf of dimensions.
Fennel woke with a tide pulsing heavy and slow between her legs and a mixture of shame and terror in her chest at the images her unconscious mind had shown her. On the pillow beside her Yan-yan slumbered still, her slackened face unaware of the desire that had accumulated within her partner. Fennel was afraid to shatter this stillness by slipping one thigh over Yan-yan’s hips, pressing their mounds of Venus together. She refrained from cupping a hand over one of Yan-yan’s applelike breasts, or from kissing the lines around her mouth and eyelids. The clock on the wall blinked some measure of 3AM, and Yan-yan would wake at six-thirty for an important meeting at eight. Fennel considered slipping her hand downwards to relieve the ache there, but she knew the noise would wake Yan-yan. So she curled her hands to herself, shut her eyes and counted herself into a dreamless sleep.
Yan-yan made breakfast in the morning, filling the steel-capped kitchen with the smell of frying bacon, a Westerner’s smell. It was Yan-yan who had to do the cooking, always. It was a point of pride for her. Fennel sat crumpled in a chair, wiping sleep from her eyelids. If she kept her mind fuzzily blank, she could almost forget the contents of last night’s dream.
Look at me, look at me, tell me I’m pretty.
All Yan-yan wanted to talk about was the dead krakenmaid. Yesterday Ariel, the younger and smaller of the two, had succumbed to the injuries she sustained from the fishing nets, despite the best efforts of the scientists. Accusatory headlines had filled local news all day. Ocean Park Hong Kong had barely recovered from the salmonella deaths of two dolphins last month, and now a rare, newly-discovered sea creature had died in the tanks of a premiere research institution. Moral outrage had suffused the chatter on Hong Kong public transport.
"I heard someone on the late-night radio say it was stress," Yan-yan said. "What nonsense! What did it have to be stressed about in that big tank. No sharks, no boats, people feed it everyday, what stress? It’s a good life."
"Being kept in a strange environment stresses animals," Fennel said, as Yan-yan made a dismissive noise. "She was a wild creature. She preferred the sea."
It was Fennel who had discovered Ariel facedown in the bottom of the tank, arms slack, tentacles trailing limp. When the scientists arrived it had been a wet-suited Fennel they sent into the water to retrieve the corpse. Inert and lifeless, Ariel had been surprisingly heavy for a creature so nimble and graceful in life. Ursula, the survivor, had darted back and forth a distance away, her face unreadable to Fennel under the snorkel glass.
"It’s a pity I didn’t get to see them both," Yan-yan said, scraping fried bacon and eggs onto plates. "Too bad I had that meeting Tuesday night!"
"You were supposed to come see them since last week," Fennel said as Yan-yan set a plate in front of her.
Yan-yan froze. "What’s that?"
"Nothing."
Yan-yan turned away to put the frying pan in the sink. When she turned back to Fennel the smile had returned to her face. "Let’s do it tonight. I’ll go over to your place after work. I want to see the last krakenmaid before it dies."
She laughed at the expression her words drew up on Fennel’s face. "Well, if one’s gone, what’s to say the other won’t?" She sat down. "I’ll be there around eight at night. Okay?"