The body ever changes.

I watch her watch me, counting my ribs and playing them like ivories, all the right notes, one by one. She lifts up her shirt and with one hand feels her bones, with the other, snaps them in place. They creak like branches, snap like willow switches.

We breathe in unison, short of breath under bruised lungs. I know she does not sleep like I do. Her eyes are always open. I know when I awake she will be lighter, like an pearl in her oyster growing big and glossy with each passing night.

I can’t help but love her. I can’t help but love how the tears in her eyes bring out the colour of mine.

We press our lashes together, tangled up like blackberry bushes — Where does one end and the other begin?

Hand in hand we pace like twins, two sets of footsteps hammering the ground, shaking it up. The floorboards kick up dust and splinters. My feet begin to bleed. She falls behind, paints her feet red in my wake. I’ve never seen her bleed.

I tell her my past, she tells us our future. We sharpen the knives she will use to kill me. The blade curves, bending our two reflections into one, splitting and melting us together. There’s two mouths, three eyes, a forked tongue and a beak. It’s the closest we’ll ever be.

It occurs to me she was shapeless when she hatched, like a nebula. And as a flood changes shape to fit in every corner of the house, she grew into me.

The body ever changes. She changes with mine, undertaking the metamorphosis like a calling, and I know revulsion lies somewhere ahead, but she is clearer than any mirror for now.

I walk into the garden, my knees sink in the mud when I tend my flowers. Some weeds look like flowers to the untrained eye.

Even in the dark she knows where I am. Two eyes watch me and glow from underneath a rock, following me like the sun. This faith I have in her is murky. I imagine this is how God feels, following his image down below.

She is meek in the open air. Night-time suits us better. I can see through her translucent skin that only moonlight permeates. There is nothing inside her but endless knuckles.

She smiles, speaks. Bloodless lips stretching wide over canine teeth. I blink, and they are filed down, and there is a heart beating black inside that chest. She laughs. It must sound like I do outside my own head.

I don’t see anything to laugh at.

I no longer like her corvid games. She sinks her hooks into anything of mine and tears strips off with her beak. We never used to play like this. I sit and watch my room be torn to shreds. Fatigue weighs over my arms and legs as she comes alive like a fire.

My neck is sore and something cold drips down over my breast. I dare not sleep in case I lose more blood. But the sound of carnage arranges itself into a lullaby, and my eyes are so heavy.

Whatever we were is now extinct.

I watch her from below, hiding underneath a fern as she struts about in my skin and my clothes, in my garden and the flowers whose heads bow low to the ground. A queen amongst the withered things, and I, more in her image than she in mine.

Is this anger? I have no more blood left inside me to turn red. There is no word for this malady, that turns you pale from fear and love, and no remedy.

I watch through my window as the door opens. She welcomes in old friends and enemies. Wine slips down her chin. She no longer hides her fangs, or I simply see them plainer now. I watch her charm, and laugh, and give them all my love.

But when the party ends, and the guests all leave, and the fire gets low, she always comes back out into the garden. The blame falls on me. I never told her what horror it was to be alone, as I was when she found me.

She found me again. She knows where I am hiding.

With a stolen mind, it was only a matter of time.

The sunlight hurts my thinning skin. If I escape, it must be by moonlight, when she walks and watches.

The knife she carries bends and splits the night in two. My eyes shine like fireflies from under the rock. I disappear behind a knot of worms and they hide me like a sister.

They dig me a trench to evade the sun, but once it sets she comes stalking out.

And her eyes see far, and they never close.

This story comes from this month’s Pier 21 Prompt: Haunting.

One of the most interesting tropes in the Gothic tradition is, in my opinion, the appearance of a Doppelgänger/Double, that seduces its victim with familiarity, while simultaneously acting as an omen of death.

My Fair Lighthouse will be hosting a Halloween Zoom Event on October 24th, where writers can read their own haunting tales out to each other. Costumes are welcome and encouraged!