The Hanged Woman

by Blair Nishkian

            It’s one thing to suspect there are monsters out there, it’s another to know it. Eva Thorne was fifty years old, with long black hair struck by two silver streaks. She carried a knife in her purse at all times, along with a large can of mace. This, to most, would seem excessive, but in her mind, it was ideal for spraying down multiple potential assailants and then fleeing, or while they were stunned, move to their flank, and cut their throats.

            By trade, Mrs. Thorne had been a preschool teacher for about twenty years. She grew up in California, on a wholesome diet of grape nuts, rattlesnake stew, clean water, fresh air, and secondhand smoke from the finest homegrown marijuana.

            Though she had been pronounced well by multiple psychotherapists a decade before, old habits had a way of dying hard, especially when she found herself in a new space. Today, that space was the busy streets of Inverness, Scotland, in the winter of 2035. For the most part, the newly-independent country was welcoming, safe, and progressive; the fact that Eva walked the streets with her thirty-six-year-old wife wasn’t really an issue to anyone there.

            But old habits die hard. She knew exactly which pocket of her purse her knife was in, and which one the mace was in, and she knew exactly how she’d use either one if she needed to.

            “Honey,” said her wife, with a squeeze to the arm, “come back to me, please.”

The cold wind coming off the northern sea whisked through Eva’s hair and woke up her skin. She smelled rain and brine. The sun was setting, purple and orange over the ocean, and down the hill long fairy lights glimmered across cobblestone streets made for walking from tavern to tavern, café to café.

            “Hey!” Her wife shook her.

            “Sorry, sorry.”

            “What’s gotten into you?”

            “Just thinking about the past.”

            “Oh, fuck, honey, here we go again?”

            “I know…”

            “I’m cold, you’re old—”

            “—I’m not that old—”

            “—let’s get dinner. I want Chinese food; you told me they had good Chinese food around here.”

            “It’s not going to be the kind you grew up with, my love.”

            “I know that, I just want noodles, honey, hot noodles please.”

            The tugging on her arm was not to be resisted and Eva had to smile. She had to. She had a beautiful smile, and she knew it, and when she looked at her wife with that warm, wide, sincere and crinkly-eyed smile, her wife huffed.

            “You’re a witch.”

            Eva let her hand settle above the gentle curve of Luna’s ass. “You love that about me.”

            Luna didn’t argue further, she just drilled her face into Eva’s shoulder and held her hand as they walked down the hill.

            To their surprise, they didn’t just find a Chinese place, but a proper Chinese hotpot restaurant. The interior was dark wood and low lights, with gleaming black tables, at the center of which were cauldrons of boiling broth whole families would gather around and cook their food in. The sight of whole bushels of green lettuce, purple yams, tarot, corn, tofu, even quivering rectangles of coagulated duck’s blood, was astonishing.

            Luna was overtaken by joy, and because of that, Eva’s heart hummed, and her face stayed warm. It’d be a great place in which to settle in, get stuffed, get drunk, and play footsie. So, that’s just what they did. As the sun set, they had a pot of hot green tea. Luna was delighted to discover the owners were Chinese diaspora and that she could order in her native Mandarin. The pot for the broth was metal, shaped with a curving divider in the middle in the image of a yin-yang symbol.

            On one side of the pot was the spicy broth, while on the other was the non-spicy mushroom broth. It was assumed by the waitress that the spicy broth was for the Chinese woman and the non-spicy for the tall, pale white woman, but the opposite was true. Luna, after ten years of living in America, had developed a taste for milder cuisine, and worst of all, ranch dressing, which she (to Eva’s everlasting horror) had been known to dip sushi into.

            They talked about the day they had, walking up and down stony streets, taking photos for Facebook, and holding hands. It was a tourist-y part of the city, but neither of them cared, that’s what they were, after all. It wasn’t until about half-an-hour into their meal that Eva got the faraway look in her eyes again, as she stared out the window at the sun drowning its last light into the ocean.

            “Baby,” said Luna, “if you want to order the alcohol, just order it. We’re on vacation.”

            Eva desperately wanted to, of course. It wasn’t that she had a tendency to go off the rails with booze, at least not since her suicidal thirties, but she always liked it when she was able to quit for a long period. “I’ve been sober six months, honey.”

            “Yeah, you’ve been sober for six months because you said you wanted to take a break before vacation. It’s okay, baby! You’re cute when you’re drunk.”

            Maybe she was, yes. Eva eyed the warm sake on the menu, her favorite. “All right,” she smiled, and slid the side of her shoe along her wife’s ankle. Luna responded in kind. The hot sake was ordered, a whole carafe just for Eva, and when it arrived it was that perfect shot of warm, sour-sweetness she remembered.

            Like drinking an angel’s bathwater, she remembered saying about it in grad school, to much laughter from her peers. She was really on a roll, back then. She had also been drunk every night, ignored the boundaries of very intelligent women that had the patience to tell Eva to fuck off, and had unintelligible auditory hallucinations when she sat still and quiet for too long.

            “Baby,” said Luna, kicking Eva in the shin under the table. “You’re doing it again, what’s going on?”

            Eva knew how much Luna hated it when she got faraway and quiet. She didn’t do it on purpose. Usually it was because she was thinking about her writing, or in rare cases, ruminating. Tonight was, tragically, a night of rumination.

            “Sorry,” said Eva, as she took another shot of sake and dipped some of her gelatinous duck’s blood into a dish of sesame paste and garlic. “Just thinking about the past a lot tonight, I don’t know why.”

            “You’d better not be sad this whole trip.”

            “Baby, we had a great day, and I’m not sad, just an old feeling… like from way back then, you know.”

            But Luna wasn’t smiling anymore. She stared at Eva through the steam of the hotpot between them. “I don’t like it,” she said.

            “My love, I know, I’m sorry.” Eva reached across the table and Luna took her hand. She looked into Luna’s eyes and smiled that sincere smile of hers. Luna started smiling too. “Fucking witch,” said Luna. “I love you.”

            “I love you too, moonbaby.”

            Eva kissed Luna’s knuckles and they had a lovely time. Eva didn’t even think about the knife and mace in her purse, but she did, as always, keep her purse between herself and the wall, and always glanced now and then toward the exits, just in case.

            It was nice to get drunk. While drunk, she didn’t think about stabbing anyone to protect herself or her wife. It has been said that in wine, there is truth, and if that’s so, then the truth of Eva Thorne was a carefree smile.

            They paid their bill and walked out to the exit. At the threshold, Eva checked her bag, her passport, her pockets, her knife, her mace, and everything else, just to touch it all with her fingers and be reassured nothing was missing. Just so, they walked from the warmth of savory steam out into the cold mist of a north Scotland night.

            Arm-in-arm, they walked downhill toward their hotel at the city center. Luna blushed from the cold, and Eva fawned over her as they walked, kissing her cheek, her brow, her temple, and squeezing her hand. It was nice.

            They walked about ten minutes and Eva checked the time. It was ten o’clock and way past their bedtime as well-to-do, settled women. But whether it was the booze or some other, deeper feeling, the long shadows of a nearby walking trail called to Eva.

            “We should take the shortcut through the hiking paths,” said Eva, tugging on Luna’s arm toward the winding, warmly-lit path that led up into woodlands.

            “No,” Luna pulled back, “we can do it in the morning.”

            Eva stared into the shadows. She wasn’t smiling anymore.

            “Honey,” Luna pulled on Eva’s arm, “I really don’t want to go in there at night, it’s scary, and I want you to come back to me.”

            “I’m here.”

            Eva saw the shadows in the trees moving independently of the trees themselves. She saw long fingers and round eyes. She knew that Luna did not see any such thing. It was strange because Eva had been well for the better part of fifteen years; this wasn’t supposed to happen anymore. This was the kind of thing Eva saw when she was six and seeing faces in bedroom walls, or watching lights come down from the moon.

            Luna was speaking but it was so far away. She felt the tugging and went along with it, that was always the best thing to do – follow your love. Follow your Luna. Follow your anchor.

            “Honey, did you hear me?” Luna shook Eva’s arm.

            “… no, I’m sorry, honey.”

            “Never mind.”

            “No, please,” Eva’s heart hurt when her wife did that, “please, tell me again, I’m sorry baby, my mind is just swimming right now.”

            Luna didn’t look at Eva when she replied. “Are we safe?”

            Eva knew the knife and mace in her purse could protect them from stray men and beasts of flesh and blood, but not the Emptiness. Never the Emptiness. The Emptiness liked violence. But now she had a love to protect and a life to live. There was too much to lose.

            “We’re safe,” she said, “we’re all right, just a little tired, I think.”

            They both knew it was a kind lie. They didn’t walk through the woods, but all along the stroll home, the woods walked next to them, in the form of curving shadows along the corners of Eva’s vision, and the anxiety they produced in her manifested as a silence that Luna felt. Luna hated that silence more than anything in her otherwise warm world.

            Their hotel room was dark wood and white linens. They were on the fifth story, with a balcony and sheer curtains that waved in the cool wind on sunny afternoons. But this was a grey, wicked Highland morning, and Eva was woken up by the cold on her cheeks. She snugged the quilt around herself and rolled over to reach for her wife. Her hands found cold, empty sheets; her wife was gone, she was never gone. She was always there, every morning, ready to roll over and snuggle, face-in-neck, for at least half an hour.

            Eva fought to sit up in the cold. Her lower back ached, her wrists were sore, but this was a normal morning for a woman turned fifty, even one who lived on vegetable soup and fresh air, like her. What wasn’t normal was the rain spattering on the balcony on what had been a sunny winter’s morning, or the absence of the one person in the world who really loved her.

            Eva stood up and walked quick across the room to shut the balcony doors. She found the thermostat and kicked it on maximum. As hot air poured into the room, she rummaged around in her messy suitcase for thick socks and her favorite grey sweater with the loose, high neck. She slung her strap-bag across her chest and double-checked its contents:

            - Wallet with passport

            - Map of Inverness

            - Portable USB battery for phone

            - Extra-strength mace

            - Knife

            Strapped, she tied her boots, slipped her room key into her wallet, and checked the bathroom just in case her wife was there. She wasn’t. The next place to check would be the lobby café, and if she wasn’t there, it was time to give her a call. Eva’s typically authoritative inner voice, the one representing her conscious self, her projected ideal, was still there. But it lacked its usual gravitas; it wasn’t composed like it ought to have been, it just trickled into her brain, murmuring “she’s probably out for a walk, she’s done that a few times in our life.”

            “And this is a foreign country and she’s eighty pounds lighter than you and very pretty and she doesn’t have her gun,” said another, stronger voice.

            “Worse still,” said a third voice, “you’re losing your mind.”

            “Shut the fuck up,” she muttered under her breath, as she closed the door to her room.

            “Uh, beg pardon?”

            It was a man’s voice, right nearby. A hapless bystander in a wool robe with a bucket of ice in hand. He had apparently witnessed Eva, a grown, severe-looking woman, muttering to herself. His eyes seemed concerned, but they also could have been surly and looking for conflict. Eva refused to engage in speculation on the matter, because her long-dead father always said “never enter a room with a preconceived notion.”

            Eva flashed that smile that always worked. “Not you, sorry,” she tapped the side of her head and raised her eyebrows for emphasis. “The voices in my head.”

            The man, who was six inches taller than her, with red-brown hair, a rifle-stock jaw, and a full beard, gave her the side-eye. Then he laughed and wagged his finger at her. “American?”

            “Sir, yes sir, land of the free, home of the depraved.”

            “Love you loonies. Carry on, mam.”

            “Will do – hey, have you seen this woman recently?” Eva took a moment to pull out her phone and show him the picture of Luna on her lock-screen.

            “Nope. Why, you hooking me up?”

            “No, brother, that’d be my wife.”

            “Wow, damn, well done, mam.”

            “Thanks.”

            “Haven’t seen her – everything okay?”

            “Just a rough morning, I’m sure she’s downstairs. Thanks.”

            “Sure.”

            And they parted without another word. Eva skipped the elevator and jogged down the stairwell toward the lobby. As she descended, whole scenes flashed in her mind. One in particular was that of her wife broken on cement in a pool of blood, having jumped from their window in the night to kill herself just to escape Eva. Soon the police would come, suspecting her of murder, to lock her up forever. She would lose everything all at once.

            “Shut the fuck up, pleeeeeease~” she sang as she pushed through the door at the bottom of the stairwell, into the lobby of the hotel, where a significant portion of her subconscious expected to see cops questioning traumatized coffee-drinkers and receptionists. What she saw instead was a bustling hotel lobby with oak floors, an attached pub and café, peaceful tourists and locals enjoying their morning routine, and the bright smile of Siobhan, the freckled concierge with the shaved head and rainbow earrings from days prior. Siobhan saw Eva and waved at her, bright and sincere, as she probably was with everyone.

            “Eva!” Siobhan beckoned her over. “Good morning!”

            “Good morning,” said Eva, sliding up to the counter with that smile of hers. She spread both sets of fingers out on the lobby counter and leaned in with direct eye contact. Siobhan mirrored the lean, subliminally, and listened. “Have you seen my wife this morning?”

            “She’s in the café.”

            “That’s one mystery solved. She scared the shit out of me this morning, you know.”

            “Oh, you love her so much, it’s adorable – look at all that worry hiding in those eyes of yours, I see past that smile, you witch.”

            “Nonsense, young lady, you see nothing but the veil I wish you to.”

            “Such a silly poet. She’s right over there, silly poet.”

            Siobhan pointed, and sure enough, there was Luna sitting in the corner of a little booth, drinking from a big mug, picking at a croissant, and staring at her phone. Eva wiggled her fingers at Siobhan as she slid away from the counter. Siobhan rolled her eyes but didn’t stop smiling. There was a cant in Eva’s hips as she walked toward Luna. Just as Luna looked up to see her smiling, tall wife, she put down her phone, even did a little double-take over the rim of her glasses. She smiled, too, like all was well.

            “Wow-wow-wow,” said Luna, as the clouds in the window behind her parted and the first rays of dawn spilled over the table, “look at my sexy, happy wife.”

            “You scared me to death, you little fucker.” Eva said, as she slid in to sit next to Luna.

            Luna set down her phone and looked out the window, toward the breaking light. Eva admired the sunlight filtering through her dark hair, and as she leaned in to kiss her wife’s cheek, she noticed her linen artist’s tote bag on the floor next to her feet.

            Eva slipped her arm around Luna’s waist. “Did you get anything done?”

            “A little,” said Luna.

            “Can I see it?”

            “It’s not done.”

            Eva leaned back and looked out the window over Luna’s head. The people outside were a busy blur she didn’t have the attention span for – Luna was her world, right now. She nosed into her wife’s scalp and smelled that familiar smell, the smell of vague shampoo and woman.

            “I was scared something happened to you,” said Eva.

            “Honey, please, I told you yesterday I wanted to paint in the morning down here. Why are you being so sensitive lately? Do you need a coffee?”

            A coffee did sound wonderful. “Maybe I do. Today’s a new day, right?”

            “That’s right, bubu.” Luna turned and smiled at Eva and smooched her lips.

            Eva went to the bar and got herself a fine good morning in the form of a foamy, creamy, mocha coffee with two shots of espresso and as many shots of whiskey. Stuck with a chocolate cookie straw and dusted with dark chocolate shavings on top, it was happiness in a glass mug. With foam on her lips, she enjoyed a two-hour, quiet morning sitting across from her wife.

            Luna used her calligraphy brushes and a dish of black ink to work on a project Eva couldn’t see, as the portable easel was propped up as a barrier between them on the table. So Eva cracked open a spiral notebook full of smudges, aimless poems, flash fiction, and bite marks. They enjoyed sharing warm light and quiet focus.

            Eva’s mind wandered entirely elsewhere, and neither of them spoke to one another. Eventually, Eva realized the pages of her notebook had filled with scrawling spirals, vine shapes, faces with scratched out eyes, and her own name written over and over with gashing strokes. It was the kind of thing she hadn’t done since she was in her twenties and early thirties. She snapped the book shut.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

            “I want to go to the countryside today,” said Eva, “maybe take a walk and see that old cairn in the hills.”

            Luna peeked over the top of her easel. Her brown eyes smiled. “Oh,” she said, “what a wonderful idea, darling. That’s the one you told me was very old?”

            “About five-thousand years, yeah – the deep past, full of all those yummy unknown-unknowns history couldn’t possibly record.”

            “You love that kind of thing, honey, it’s so cute. You did your – what is it? Genetics?”

            “Yeah, the ancestry test.”

            “How much of it was here?’

            “Fifty-percent western England, thirty-percent Scotch-Irish – Pictish, Gaelic, whatever you want to call it. The rest was German and some Lebanese.”

            “I would do mine, but I know what it would be – just Han Chinese.”

            “You never know, honey, it’s fun to know where your blood comes from.”

            Luna gave her art a final stroke and leaned back. Eva could see her wife’s big, satisfied smile. “Well, maybe,” she said, “but I don’t really care about that.”

            Eva drained the last cold gulp of boozy coffee and cream from her mug, then stretched out over the table to try to catch a peek of her wife’s work. But Luna grabbed the easel and turned it away. “It’s not finished,” she said.

            Eva held up her hands in surrender and leaned back into her seat again. She knew far better than to push her wife’s boundaries when it came to art-in-progress.

            “Can you tell me about it?” Eva asked.

            “It’s special,” said Luna, her long fingers rapping on the sides of the easel, “and just for you, but I want it to be a surprise.”

            Eva beamed. It was rare that her wife made something just for her. But there was something off about the air again. She watched her wife’s fingers rap-rap-rap on the edges of the easel. And she saw, quite clearly and without a doubt, that her wife’s right hand had six instead of five fingers. Just as soon as Eva noticed, Luna drew her hands back into her lap and out of sight under the table.

            Eva felt her stomach tumble. That pale, sweaty-but-dry feeling prickled all over her neck and face. She couldn’t look at her wife’s sparkling brown eyes anymore. “Honey, I need to use the bathroom,” Eva said, as she slipped out of the booth.

            “Sure, baby.” Luna’s smile was stuck in the corner of Eva’s vision as she power-walked to the ladies’ room and burst through the door. Eva slapped her notepad down on the sink counter and leaned on her palms. She turned on the cold water and splashed her face, and while that made her skin feel better, it didn’t stop the thoughts in her head.

            She dried her hands off. A toilet flushed in the stall nearby. This was a small, cozy bathroom with a granite floor and a wooden stall divider. A fat candle flickered on the sink next to the faucet and a small shutter was open above the stall. Eva thought about whether or not she could fit through that shutter if she had to escape in case of danger. It seemed just big enough, but it was hard to say; she was a tall woman with a decent bust size.

            “You know,” said a woman’s voice from the stall, “I forgot to lock the door, but you could have at least knocked.”

            Eva realized then that it was a one-person bathroom. “Sorry, I was in a rush.”

            “A rush to wash your face?”

            “… yeah. I’ll wait outside, sorry.”

            “She’s an imposter, you know.”

            Eva picked up her notepad and pretended she didn’t hear what she just heard.

            “Beg your pardon?” Eva asked.

            “That isn’t your wife. It’s the bad faeries fucking with you, dude.”

            “Jesus Christ, I’m hallucinating.”

            “Is that what they keep telling you, Eva?”

            Eva pressed her hands to the stall. It had no gaps in the bottom or top she could see over, no large seams she could peek through. She pushed into it and found it unlocked but hesitated to open it all the way. She didn’t know what she was going to see.

            Eva took in a breath, held it, and pushed the stall door open. Inside the stall was a clean toilet and nothing else. She exhaled. Then she saw, perched above the toilet in the open vent to the street outside, a tiny bird. It was a robin, a little bird with an orange chest.

            The bird cocked its head at Eva. Eva cocked her head at the bird. They had a moment.

            “Bad faeries,” the little bird said, in the form of an intrusive thought in Eva’s brain. “It’s the bad faeries, you have to play their game, you’re in too deep now.”

            Eva opened her notebook to a random page. Sure enough, there were scrawled glyphs and spiral shapes, doodled gashes, and the image of a sunken-eyed, lanky faerie with a long smile hunched over in a dark room. She knew these faeries very well. In a way, she missed them.

            “They love you dearly, Eva. They miss you. They’ll keep you if you’re not careful.”

            “Maybe,” whispered Eva, “that’s what I want.”

            The door to the bathroom swung open. Warmth from the café, human voices, light poured in. A woman startled at the sight of Eva and scolded her for not locking the door. Eva apologized, pushed out the door with her notepad under her arm, and went back to her table to find it empty, no trace of her wife.

            Eva went back to Siobhan, the concierge.

            “She’s outside in your car,” said Siobhan, all smiles. “Don’t keep Them waiting.”

            “My wife is a ‘her’ thanks.”

            “That’s what I said, wasn’t it?”

            “No, you said ‘them’ which is fine, but she’s not non-binary.”

            “Oh, I said ‘them’? My tongue must have slipped. Or maybe I meant something else entirely, you know, like the plural use of the word.”

            “And what would you have been talking about if you had used it that way?”

            Siobhan tapped her chin and bounced some of her copper curls over her shoulder. She wrinkled her nose like a good witch casting a spell. “Maybe the faeries. They like you.”

            Eva laughed and smacked her notepad on the counter, maybe harder than she intended, because a few nearby tourists startled like woodland deer. One even wrapped arms around their children. Siobhan was still smiling to Eva, though, because Siobhan understood Eva and accepted her. She knew what was going on.

            “You should get going,” said Siobhan, shooing Eva with little flicks of her fingers. “And if you’re going to those cairns today, mind the signs!”

            “Yes, of course, the signs. I’m off! Wouldn’t want to keep ‘Them’ waiting.”

            Eva strolled right out the doors and there was Luna in the driver’s seat of their rented electric car, waving and blowing kisses. The sweetness of her, at a distance, almost fooled Eva, but Eva knew she was dealing with bad faeries, and she had to go along. She hesitated a moment at the car door, and for the first time in the twenty-seven years since he died, she heard her father’s voice.

            “Into the rift,” he used to say about his knock-down-drag-out rounds with psychosis, “you have to go into the rift, just play along. Don’t lose it, keep it together, because the audience is the people you care about, and if you’re scared, they’re scared.”

            Eva opened the door to the car, kissed her wife on the mouth, and didn’t look at her wife’s fingers – she couldn’t, anyways, because now her wife was wearing fuzzy mittens to hide them. Eva laughed a little; of course she was wearing mittens to hide the obvious truth.

            “You’re so excited,” said Luna. “It’s adorable. Are you going to touch an old rock and try to have visions of the past, like you said you would? Don’t talk to any ghosts, though, honey – honey it’s not safe. Okay?”

            “We’ll see what happens, sweetie.”

            “Oh gooooosh, please don’t go crazy on me, please.”

            “I’m just fine, baby, put on some music you like.”

            Luna let the car know what music she liked and on came the playlist of art-pop and lo-fi dreamscapes, the kind of music they both enjoyed when they were together. The day would be what it was fated to be; whether it ended in a romantic sunset, blood, or tears, or all of the above, Eva was just happy to be along for the ride.

            But like a fool forgetting her keys, Eva remembered something. Siobhan had a shaved head, not long curls of red. When she looked back through the glass of the passenger door, and the glass of the hotel lobby, she saw Siobhan there, doing her banal routines and smiling at everyone and anything. Her head was shaved, and Eva was not sure who or what she had been talking to earlier. She was still happy, but a little rotten seed of fear formed in the pit of her stomach, and she knew nothing about this would end well at all.

            The trip to the woods was demented. Though it was bright midday, the light had a sickly, flickering quality, like one feels when they’ve rubbed their eyes too hard. The music playing on the radio, though, was the banal sort of engineered club music that kept Eva tethered somewhat to reality as they curved through winding roads deeper into the highlands.

            She and her wife, if indeed it was her wife, didn’t speak the entire time. This wasn’t entirely unusual; the drive was scenic, and they didn’t usually talk too much on car trips. They were both the type to enjoy shared silence. Eva wanted so much to sleep, but she was afraid of what would happen if she slept. She was afraid she’d crash the car – but wasn’t someone else driving? Such were the fears felt by an irrational mind.

            “I think I’m losing it,” she said, “I’m sorry, honey.”

            Luna smiled but kept her eyes on the road. “It’s okay, you can lose it a little bit. Why don’t you talk to me about it, honey?”

            An acoustic song came on the radio. It had piano, and it was as melancholy and winding as the craggy woods around them. Eva loved her wife so much. “I feel alienated right now; you remember what I mean when I say that?”

            “I remember, baby.”

            “I feel like I’m not really me and you’re not really you, and I know that’s not true, like I know when things aren’t real but the scary thing is when I go along with the unreality anyways, and the scarier thing is wondering ‘who is putting these unreal things here’?”

            “Nobody, honey, nobody’s putting anything there, it’s all you.”

            “… but what about the faeries.”

            “Honey, I thought faeries were nice.”

            Deep in the scrolling woodlands, as they drove and drove along, Eva saw a standing stone, of the type you’d find in a henge. It wore a beard of ancient moss and atop it sat a pale, faceless and slender figure that had no eyes. They passed it by.

            “No,” said Eva, whispering fog against the cold glass of the car window, “most aren’t.”

            “But some are nice, some are angels – like you, baby.”

            Luna’s voice felt so far away. Eva wasn’t smiling anymore. Maybe it was ten minutes, maybe an hour, Eva didn’t know. The fun was already gone. The terror might have been there if she were engaged, but she learned long ago to dissociate to protect herself from the fear and anxiety. It was so much easier to feel nothing than to be caught up in the agony of dread.

            They took a turn, down a woodland trail barely big enough for the car. They stopped, out of sight of the road, where the trail tightened into a wet, overgrown path that disappeared into fog and trees. There were no signs, no tourist information boards, no one else around. It seemed very wrong, where they were.

            Luna opened the driver’s side door and stuck her foot out.

            “Wait,” said Eva, “where are we?”

            “Someplace you can find old things, like you wanted to.”

            “I don’t know if I want it anymore.”

            “Well, you came all this way. Go down the trail, honey – you’ll find the cairns as soon as you lose your way and can’t see me or the car anymore.”

            Eva stared out into the mist. She was sure she could make out the shadowed mounds of great cairns in the beyond, but she hesitated at the broken fence where the trail began. “You’ll wait here for me?”

            “You’ve been talking about going to Scotland and touching a silly rock since we got married, honey, and I’m letting you do it, even if it creeps me out.”

            “What if I don’t come back?”

            “You will. You’re tough, honey. Strong heart, remember? You can do taxes, you can work with crazy little kids all day, you took care of me when we had such a hard time getting my visa – strong heart wife, that’s you.”

            Eva looked away from her wife, back into the mist. She felt hot and cold. She saw the shadows of the cairns loom; she saw spindly shapes between them. She heard the car door shut and the music kick on, muffled by the cab. Her wife was in the car, chilling to her tunes, and reclining with her phone. Eva knew that was that.

            “Into the fucking rift, then,” she said, as she stepped over the broken fence and walked into the fog with her bag, her knife, and all the courage she could muster.

            The walk felt long. This was primarily due to the forest being silent; there was no wind rustling the trees, no light shining down between boughs in dazzling rays, just silence. Not a bird, not a crackling leaf, only the odd sticks or rotten logs crunching beneath Eva’s boots.

            The car had long since disappeared behind her, and there was no longer a trail, or if there was, it was so faint that she was following it by instinct. She’d grown up in woods like these, and the one comfort she had was knowing that unlike the foothills of her native California, the cold woods of Scotland weren’t lousy with rattlesnakes.

            “That was a fear you always had,” said a woman’s voice in her head that sounded like the therapist she had when she was in her twenties, “snakes, always snakes – I think over the course of ten years, you complained about dreaming of snakes maybe forty times. I told you snakes could symbolize healing and transformation, which is what you were always going through at that time.”

            “Or,” said Eva, as she stepped over a log without a care, “I saw rattlers next to me on the road when I was a kid, pushing my bike up a hill, and a thousand times more than that; maybe that’s why I always dreamed of snakes.”

            “You used to write about them all the time, too,” said the voice of her poetry professor, that familiar twang, the kind of voice that just sounds like it has a beard. “Black snakes, in particular. Why were they always black?”

            “My dad used to tell me stories,” said Eva, as she drew closer to the shadows of the cairns, “about black mambas hiding under jeeps in Africa, when he was a kid growing up there. Those mean-ass snakes were just waiting to strike ankles out of pure malice.”

            “You always assume,” said so many voices, “that the world is going to hurt you.”

            “It’s a pretty safe assumption, you motherfucking demons.”

            The cairns were before her. They were great, grassy mounds of mud and stone, and oak saplings grew out of their tops. The stillness of the air ceased being dreadful, and all at once, became serene. The fog no longer held horrors, but uniform, soothing water arranged as silver mist. She walked to one of the cairns and placed her hand over the stone; she let the silence take her in.

            “Have I been here before?” Eva asked the stones. They were cold. The moss dripped over her fingers. It all seemed to hum beneath her skin. But there were no visions, no voices, no answers. There was now inside of her a deep feeling she rarely felt at all: shame.

            “Ask better questions,” she muttered to herself. “Or don’t ask at all.”

            A wind blew through the woods, the trees sang like a waterfall, and Eva lost herself in the sound. It was a sign, wasn’t it? It was the world saying “Yes, now shut up, you lunatic.”

            Eva leaned on the cairn and pulled the knife from her bag. She stared at her reflection in it, saw the dark bags under her eyes. “I guess,” she said, “you all get your fair share of mixed-up white women wandering in here asking for meaning.”

            The voices bubbled up around her.

            “Ugh, yes.”

            “Every year, usually summer.”

            “It’s so tedious.”

            “You’re a weird one.”

            “A winter child.”

            “Mixed-up, but like a cocktail.”

            Eva stuck the knife into the ground beside the cairn. “Damn, a cocktail sounds great right now. I really have it all, don’t I?”

            “We’re always with you.”

            “Always watching.”

            “I know,” said Eva, “because you are me, you’re a testament to the richness of my fucked-up imagination. I came in here wanting to fight some undead Vikings or something, but all I found was anti-climax, and I’m glad for it.”

            The ground groaned beneath her boots. A deep voice within the stones had her attention: “I could fight you, if you wish. Fight and fight until you die, that’s your choice, but I promise I’ll have more fun than you.”

            “I’ll see you all when I die, won’t I?” Eva looked up into the boughs of the trees, saw the sun breaking through the fog, streaking pixies dashing between leaves.

            “Of course, or, the next time you get really, really, really high.”

            Eva smiled. She planted the flat of her boot on the knife she’d stuck into the ground and drove it in deeper. “Let’s share something, before I go. Any advice for me, O faeries, for my adventures in the realm of Men and Women and Bank Statements?”

            The voices fell into one chorus, and the sun shone bright and warm. The pixies danced above, and the wind gushed through the trees:

            “The men and women can break your body, but not your oaths. You may feel cold and lost in the dark. Hold love close, question it not. In your soul still beats a heart.”

            Eva’s shoulders loosened, tears rolled down her cheeks, and she felt something she could only describe as The Divine.

            She then wandered back into the woods and became immediately lost.

            After some hours, the sun set. Eva sat down to rest in the dark. She checked her phone and saw no bars, but the uploaded weather data indicated that overnight temperatures would be well under freezing. She had only her winter coat, no survival gear, no blade, no food, no water.

            Eva walked more. The drop in temperature forced her to stick her hands in her pockets. She had wished she’d kept her knife, but it was too late for that now.

            It would be better to accept death, wouldn’t it. Poor Luna would be devastated, but she’d survive. Eva sat down beside a tree and stared out into the black woods, tried to keep as much heat close to her core as she could by drawing her legs up under her big winter coat.

            “Really?” A voice hissed next to her. “You’re just giving up?”

            Eva felt it breathing on her neck. She saw its sticky, pale fingers in the corners of her vision. She saw greasy hair swaying from the back of a long, winding neck.

            The surge of adrenaline sent Eva sprinting through the woods. She could hear the beast chuffing and huffing behind her, slithering over logs and around trees with far too many legs and fingers. Eva didn’t look back; she knew what she’d see, she’d see empty black sockets and a grinning mouth full of human teeth. No, she didn’t want to see the faces in the walls or the dragons in the night, not the hybrids or the horrors, not the severed human cocks on rocks or the rituals in the woods at night, none of it, none of that madness, no, for to brush the divine was to risk the demonic and now she yearned so badly for the banality of taxes and a nine-to-five.

            It was catching up to her. It would ravage her like it had so many artists before, chain her up in a flesh prison and feed her burning plastic and make her write black bibles in its honor, just like her roaring twenties.

            “NO!” Eva shrieked, and she felt snot freezing on her face as she ran.

            A car honked far away. Eva turned and ran toward it, and the thing behind her turned as well; it couldn’t be escaped but she would run anyways, until her heart gave out and her lungs burned to slag, she would run.

            Eva vaulted over a broken fence. Headlights blinded her.

            “Eva!!” Luna screamed through tears, “Baby! Baby!” Luna stopped honking the horn through the window of the car. She ran to Eva.

            Eva pulled on Luna, tried dragging her to the car. She heard the beast rushing through the woods behind. “It’s coming,” Eva coughed, “it’s coming, get in the car…”

            The beast burst through the darkness and Eva screamed, threw herself between it and Luna. But the beast stopped short of her, planted its paws, and barked.

            Eva opened her eyes and saw a German Shepherd wearing a rescue vest. She heard car doors opening and shutting, men and women speaking in clipped voices about how they ‘found her’ and then Eva realized she was surrounded by police.

            Eva trembled in Luna’s arms. “I’ve been missing all day, haven’t I.”

            Luna rage-sobbed into Eva’s shoulder and smashed her fist into her wife’s arm. “You left this morning, I woke up and you were gone! What the fuck were you thinking?! Why did you scare me like that?! Eh?!” Eva knew her wife was furious because she was now shouting in Mandarin while beating on Eva’s shoulder and shoving her. “Cāo nǐ mā de, qīn'ài de! Wǒ ài nǐ, dàn cāo nǐ mā de, wǒ hǎo hàipà!”

            “I’m sorry honey, I thought… I thought you were with me.”

            “Baby, you’re scaring the shit out of me right now, what the fuck do you mean, you thought I was with you, I had to go to the police, and they tracked the rental car, thank fucking god, honey, jesus fucking christ, honey, fucking – fucking, aaaaAAHH! Kàn zài tā mā de fèn shàng!”

Even though her wife was cussing at her and hitting her, she was still holding onto her, and still kissing her between rage-sobs. Eva held onto Luna and sat on the hood of the car.

“I think I need to call my therapist.”

            Luna grabbed Eva’s face, squished her cheeks, and glared into her eyes. “I’m happy you’re safe, honey, but now… I want to kill you!”

            “You can kill me, just don’t divorce me, I love you too much.”

            They kissed, delicate little snotty, teary smooches. One of the cops laughed a little. “Damn,” he said to another officer, “they’re bloody cute, aren’t they.”

            Another officer approached with a notepad. “Where’s the knife?”

            Eva’s guts sank into her feet. “Pardon?”

            “Someone said they saw you with a knife earlier. Can I have a look in that bag of yours?”

            Eva could no longer remember if she’d actually stuck her knife in the ground out in the woods or taken it with her; her head was still a thunderstorm. She handed the bag over. They rooted through it and found no knife, though they did find her very large can of mace. “This is too big, that’s a fine. Gonna need you two to join us at the station tomorrow morning.”

            Eva was offered a tissue and a blanket by another officer. She blew her nose, cleaned her face, and held her wife. “No problem, we’ll be there.”

            The next morning was refreshingly, blissfully, rapturously banal. Eva signed citations, filled out paperwork, signed documents, took questions about her vacation and her history of mental illness, and held her wife’s hand the entire time. The only time she wasn’t holding her wife’s hand was when her wife got angry at the police over a misunderstanding regarding Eva’s mental condition.

            “She’s not dangerous, for fuck’s sake, I think someone slipped her something last night! I think maybe the hotel has mold or fungus in the vents! She’s never done something like this, never! She is harmless and loves people, she works with kids!”

            Eva had to re-take Luna’s hand and reassure her that no one was putting her away. Eva only needed to sign papers assuring the New Scottish Republic that she was not a danger to the public, so it could be put on record and people could wash their hands of the matter. Cops were happy to go back to their boring jobs, and Eva was happy to go back to her simple life.

            Back at the hotel room, Eva and Luna enjoyed an evening in. Luna said she wanted to make some ink work, so she set up her wooden easel on the table in the hotel room. She opened the balcony doors so the cool, late afternoon air could freshen things up. Eva just relaxed with her favorite computer games and laptop, happy to be bathed and warm in a soft bed with someone who loved her nearby.

            “Honey,” said Luna, as she stood up with her sketchbook in hand. “Honey, did you do this?”

            Eva peeled off her headphones and glanced over at her wife. She smiled, because Luna was so slender and pretty with the sunset behind her, in her dark silk bathrobes with the tiger stripes.

            “Do what?”

            Luna stared at the sketchbook. She seemed unusually transfixed. Eva sat up straighter in bed and remembered the six-fingered wife that was drawing a surprise days before. The wind rustled the curtains by the balcony.

            Eva saw a bird fly past the sunset, but she couldn’t tell what kind. Maybe a robin.

            Luna turned the sketchbook around and showed the picture to Eva. It was a stunning ink-brush picture, in Luna’s distinct minimalist style.

            It depicted a long knife stuck into the earth between two burial cairns. Dragonflies flew overhead and strange, twisting limbs framed the foreground.

            There were words in simplified Chinese. Eva didn’t recognize half the characters. “What’s it say?”

            Luna recited the words like she was reading a scroll from the tomb of a forgotten queen:

“Zhǐyǒu nǐ kěyǐ wéibèi nǐ de nuòyán.”

只有你可以违背你的诺言

“Only you can break your promises.”

Eva’s wife had five fingers on each hand. This was real.

“I didn’t do this,” Luna whispered, “you didn’t do this, you can’t… make my art, this is my art, honey, what the fuck is this, what the fuck?”

A robin flew into the room and landed on the edge of the bed. Luna startled and pressed back against the wall, but Eva just stared at it, she knew what was happening. Now, she was sober. Now, she had her wife.

Now, she couldn’t doubt Them.

The bird stared at them both in silence for a full thirty seconds, before flying out the window. “I’m not crazy,” whispered Eva, “I’m not crazy, Luna.”

“I know,” said Luna, going to slam the balcony window shut. She ran across the room and burrowed under the covers. “I know, baby, I know, just don’t go running into the darkness without me ever again.”

“I promise I won’t.”

They kissed. They held one another. And when they made love, they did it with their whole hearts, and savored every moment of clarity.