Conjured

Slowly, the shadows in the room faded from black to slate, then from slate to dove gray. The branches in the wallpaper still looked bare and bereft without their birds.

Eve heard a door open and close, and then footsteps. She counted them instead of the cracks … ten steps between Aunt Nicki’s room and the bathroom. Another door creaked open and shut, and then she heard the water whoosh on in the shower. This sent the pipes clanking and rattling in the walls so loudly that Eve got out of bed and placed her hands flat on the walls to feel as well as hear the shaking. She felt like that inside—as if she were rattling, clanging and clanking and snapping like the pipes.

She waited until the sound of the shower ceased, and then she found a set of clothes in one of the dresser drawers. Malcolm had left them for her—socks, underwear, bra, jeans, and a T-shirt. She touched the cotton T-shirt to her cheek. He’d asked her in the agency, the day before they came here, what colors she liked. She’d picked a few at random. These shirts were those colors. Poking her head outside her room, she checked the hall. Aunt Nicki had already returned to her bedroom. The bathroom door was open. Eve darted inside and slid the lock.

Staring at the lock, she started to shake. She held her hands in front of her, and they trembled. Inside and out, she was like the water pipes.

She unlocked the door.

That was better.

Her ribs loosened, and she could breathe deeply again. She dumped the clothes in a corner, used the toilet, and brushed her teeth. She kept her eyes firmly on the sink and did not look up at the mirror until after she had spat. Then she steeled herself … Black-brown eyes. Straw-yellow hair. Pink lips. Round face. Fixing the image of herself firmly in her mind, she raised her eyes to see her reflection.

She almost looked familiar this time. She’d forgotten the shape of her chin and that her eyebrows were straw-yellow too. Also, the length of her eyelashes.

Eve showered and tried not to look at her body too much. It kept surprising her too. She couldn’t keep it all in her head: her toes with the freshly trimmed toenails, the goldenness of her skin, the shape of her knees, and the smoothness of her hands. She studied her hands in the shower. The flesh on her fingertips was puckering from the water, and her skin felt soft and squishy, waterlogged. She wondered if she’d ever be used to this flesh.

The doctors had said she would. They’d said the changes were all cosmetic, adjustments so she wouldn’t stand out, so she wouldn’t be noticed by those who shouldn’t notice. A necessary precaution, given that the suspect in her case had not yet been caught. Since she couldn’t remember what she looked like before, she couldn’t compare. It all felt new, and it all felt as changeable as clothes.

She dried herself and dressed. As the steam in the mirror faded, it tossed bits of her reflection back at her. Hair. Shoulder. Cheek. In a clear corner of the mirror, her eyes stared back at her, and she touched the image and then touched next to her eyes. “You should be green,” she said, suddenly certain. “Be green.”

She heard a rushing in her ears as black-brown drained out of the eyes in the mirror. Green infused the irises, spreading out from the pupils.

And then her legs folded underneath her.

* * *

I feel a brush in my hair.

“It always begins with ‘once upon a time,’ my dear. That is how it is, even if ‘once upon a time’ is now.” Gnarled hands separate the strands of my hair and wind them around knuckles. “A witch … for of course there was a witch. There always is, isn’t there? She had stars in her eyes and dust in her hair. She heard the sounds of the forest when she moved and the ocean when she spoke.” The Storyteller tilts my chin up. “Such pretty eyes. Such a pretty, pretty girl.”

The Storyteller is not pretty. Her face is shrunken in wrinkles, as if her skin were a squeezed dishrag. Her eyes are milky red, clouding out whatever their true color was. Her knuckles on the hand that holds my chin are knobs that curl her fingers. But she smiles at me, and it is like sunshine.