"Or they say that's her backstory, anyway." He inhales the clove cigarettes, which I'm not sure he's supposed to do.
After all this walking, I notice that his hands are either taking a drag or stuffed sharply into his pockets - he doesn’t even pause to maneuver the bramble or the bush, simply walking like a lazy contortionist who hasn’t been challenged in years.
In the twilight, all you can clearly see of Jack are sharp angles and his slits for eyes. His dusty black hair is messily combed back, and I can’t tell if his perpetual smirk is from amusement or the jagged snaggletooth hanging off his lip. I can’t pinpoint what makes him look more like a snake - his fang, or the way he seems to slither instead of walk.
While my guide seems to wander with ease, I feel myself struggling to keep up. As weeds and tall grass scratch at my exposed legs and my boots dig into my soles, I consider the fact that I wasn’t dressed for this. Though, to be fair, I was dressed to go to The Pissing Carp - the bar on the bad side of town - and for that, I was probably wearing too much.
But I don’t want Jack to see me struggling, so I keep up the small talk. "Whenever I heard of her, she was always called something else.”
He makes a huffing noise, like a goat or a cow who needs water. "Oh, sure. People call Satira lots of things. Ladydevil, Ladyluck... but they only call her that ‘cause her veil." Pivoting to face me, he points to his temple, and then I notice the greasy shine of his hair reflecting the moonlight.
“You see, if they saw ‘em...” Jack’s winks at me. “Well, they’d call her something else entirely.” Like a busy revolving door, he twists and heads further into the wood.
The words grate at me. I paid for answers, not more mysteries.… See what? - I'm not sure what it'd take to faze me now. I grit my teeth at the thought of waking up another night to the sounds of scratching on glass and the suckling of a child who hangs from my left tit. But the nights never end there, I wake a second time in a haze - and just when I think it was simply a nightmare, I realize the front door is open, and there's blood on my sheets.
I’ve changed the lock so many times, I forget which key will let me in. It'd be pitiful to say out loud, especially to the regulars, but I feel safer in a dank and dirty place like The Pissing Carp than my own home. Most days I don’t return until dawn, and even then, I try not to sleep - if I do, my breasts begin to bloat.
Jack starts to hum something off-tune and jovial, and we continue - my ankles beginning to feel raw.
His pace steadies out, as if he’s waiting for something - his head like a prairie dog looking for danger - and I find myself rising to a small panic. I grip at the knife in my back pocket, realizing I don’t know what’s beneath his coat.
He must be able to sense my unease because he casually says, “You must have it rough, huh?”
“Excuse me?” I stop walking, unwilling to go any further, but unsure if I can outrun him.
His movements have changed somehow: he doesn’t move like a snake anymore, and both of his hands are out of his pockets, like a guilty kid who’d been hoarding candy.
"You wanna know if she's real, right?" Jack looks like a cliché in that shitty leather jacket, but I probably do, too, in these off-brand boots. His previous boyishness is replaced by earnestness - it looks like we’re getting to business.
I try to collect something, anything that sounds like courage, but my words spill out like hurried desperation. “I just think we’ve been walking far enough for long enough, you said you were taking me to where I asked, but so far I haven’t seen anything that can help me.” My whining irritates even me, so I try to regain my footing. “I wouldn't have paid you my last dollar if I didn't want to know something useful.”
The calm look he gives me is probably a nice way of shrugging. For two seconds, I wonder if it’s him putting up with me, and from where I am now, it looks like Jack has been doing this a long time. He looks up at the canopy, and I catch the dim light of his papercut eyes. "What you paid for was your fare.”
Digging into his chest pocket, Jack pulls out a crumbled piece of paper and hands it to me. It smells like incense and, for the first time, I get a better look at his hands. Awfully calloused, and boney - fingers like candlesticks. "I’m guessing you didn't get her business card?"
I dug through the ass-end of nameless young-cults, walked a mile into the wild wood with a fucking stranger, and the lady has a business card?
As I hold it in my hand, I realize it’s rolling paper - thin and nearly translucent. The ink is a messy deep slate. Singed edges accounted for, professional is the last word that comes to mind. Maybe, crude?
But somehow still potent.
The font reminds me of leeches - wriggling and thick, dirty and fragile, but somehow still firm and certain.
Out of habit, I flip to see if there’s anything on the back. Nothing but a few stains. On its face, only four sentences followed by the loneliest S. Not a single name.
I get so enveloped by something tangible that I don’t even hear the jingle of bells. Instead, I look at Jack with a furrowed brow. “What’s this mean?”
And that's when I hear her.
Her voice is like the sea - a dark, black sea that trained sailors fear and young adventurers seek. But it’s also grounded and matter-of-fact, which only makes it harder to ignore.
“Bad Latin for ‘I'll find you.’ I told him,” she points at Jack, who shrugs, “we should use something more official than Google translate, but it was really all we had on us at the time.” Her cavalier air does not match the atmosphere around her, bizarre and bountiful. Maybe urban legends don’t have to look like pictures or talk like movies. Either way, this one didn’t.
Where I might be mystified and speechless, Jack is more relaxed than ever; perhaps what’s more aloof than Satira’s shrug is the way he lights another cigarette. “Satira - Zoё. Picked her up down at the ol’ bar.”
As I study her, I realize something is closing the gap between them, even though they’re several feet apart. With Satira’s hands swaying at her hips, and Jack’s in his pockets, there’s a mirrored closeness. The first word that comes to mind is partners.
They still haven’t looked at each other, they’ve only been staring at me.
Her voice is a constant murmur - harrowing, but very, very clear. Almost arrogant. “I know who she is.”
I become entranced by her, drinking in every detail. Like looking into a kaleidoscope, I want to catch any secret willing to reflect off the night’s light.
Satira's veil is light gray - a rain storm at dusk - and covers the area beneath her eyes down to her chest. Her hair is a raven-black mass that falls slightly below her shoulders in thick, messy waves, littered with white strands. She smells like funerals - excavated dirt and bright roses - but by the time I pinpoint the smell, I hear the busiest ringing.
Satira’s ankles are covered in bells, held up by flimsy string. They chime with her every movement - the subtle sway of her hips, the light step of her bare feet.
Jack’s attention is elsewhere now, and I feel her full gaze hover over me; she feels heavy.
“So, Zoё,” her voice pulls at the vowels in my name, like she could squeeze anything out of them - out of me - “Which will it be? Destroy your destiny or forge a f-"
Jack seems excited now, speaking out of turn. “Either way you're gonna damn the go-” but he is cut off by the effortless wave of Satira’s hand, like she is swatting away the most inconsequential mosquito. He slumps against a nearby tree and invisible wires seem to lay him down gently onto its muddy roots.
Satira’s eyes dart back at me. “I don't like being interrupted.”
The moment is so fast, it makes me realize that she is a predator who easily deterred a small nuisance to refocus on her true prey.
Without Jack to buffer her, Satira’s presence is even more intimidating - like it could absorb you and pull you into the darkness. Even though I don’t mean to look into her eyes, I feel compelled to. They are deep and gray, with the slightest blue flicker, like a pregnant void.
Satira looks me down and up, up and down. Her gaze makes me feel so small. The look she gives me reminds me of my disappointed mother, and her thick eyebrow - cocked in a high arch - begs: So, what’ll it be?
The thin paper is still in my hand and I take a moment to think it over, not wanting to sound too stupid. Which will it be? Destroy your destiny, or forge a fate?
But for an atheist, what do those words even mean?
“I don’t believe in destinies.”
My sentence doesn’t mean anything to Satira, whose voice reminds me of the petulant public librarian back home. “Things don't stop existing simply because you don't believe in them.”
I should know better - but I never do - and my attitude creeps up on me, egged on by my curiosity. “What makes you say that?”
It’s abrupt, like close lighting after booming thunder.
Satira's discordant laughter is like the sky - the angriest sky you have ever seen, the sky that killed your brother, the sky that cracked open and spilled the guts of the Midgard Serpent, the sky that ate the sea.
When it finally stops, she reaches to her veil and in a small, firm motion the cloth falls from her face.
There is a sudden knot in my throat and I am hit by the smell of the briney sea - like a wall of waves coming down on me.
If she could smile, she surely was. “You would have never believed in these, right?”
The - her - tentacles fall from what must have been chiseled cheekbones. They extend from the bridge of her nose down, and I hear Jack’s words clearer now…
If they saw ‘em… they’d call her something else entirely.
I wonder where her voice is coming from, but to lift them seems worse than to finally see them. I can't tell if the tentacles have minds of their own or if they're moving on her accord, but the way they slide and curl around each other like small children holding hands reminds me of a metal coil.
But a metal coil turned alive.
Gray, like her eyes, they look like they were dead, then reanimated.
They are a blight: rubbery like new leather and shinier than the grease of Jack’s hair. A whole swarm that seems to be simultaneously twisting together, but falling apart - each tentacle looking like a sinewy muscle about to break, until it moves in another direction as though to break something else instead.
The potency of their flow reminds me of a river and the eels and leeches and other things that might nip at your heels.
I feel an instinctive need to take a step back, but a combination of disbelief and shock forces me to smile and release a sharp breath of air instead.
Her hands rise back up to her face, returning the veil to the small nook of her ears. "Now that that's out of the way... I can help you, but I don't do any work for free...”
I must have been swept away by the current because I momentarily forget about the bills sitting in the dozing man’s pockets. “I already paid him.” I point at Jack, happily asleep like a napping kindergartener.
She looks down at him, unamused. “What you paid him has nothing to do with me. I have no interest in money.”
As though the word itself could wake him, Jack reillustrates, rubbing his head and mumbling. “I need cash for smokes, ya know? It’s an expensive habit.”
I wonder if he had actually heard the entire conversation and the nap was just for show. He quickly lights one - its tip catching a small flame, the glow sparking the tiniest gleam in his eyes.
As they quibble, like latent lovers, I get a short moment to think about the world I’ve just stumbled into.
If she sounded like a mother to me, she must have sounded like a barking older sister to him. “Those are bad for you, you know.”
He shrugs, dusting leaves off his holey jeans, picking out a few that almost made their way inside. “Getting knocked out mid-sentence ain’t healthy either.“
Thrown off by their comfortable banter, I realize I need to mull this over. Sure, I have a big problem, but why the hell would I trust a lady with tentacles growing from her face?
I speak, even though I feel like I’m interrupting something. “Can I think about it first?”
They look at me in unison, like a divorcing couple whose quiet child in the corner finally spoke up. I can’t bring myself to look directly at either of them - between Satira’s misty eyes and Jack’s hidden ones, I feel walled in.
Out of no courtesy to me, but with some kind of synchrony, they cast knowing stares at each other and finally Jack speaks.
His voice rolls out of his perpetual smirk, following a yawn. “So it goes, then.”
Satira nods at Jack, like a curtsy. Then she turns to face me, like an afterthought, and her calculating voice returns - a far cry from the way she nagged Jack just seconds before. “When you're ready... ego vestrum adprehendet vos.” The sound of a different language sounds perfect on her tongue.
As they walk into the forest of the night, I consider going home - I’m so exhausted. But that would mean facing the fanged child, and the open doors, and the bloody sheets, so I settle on The Pissing Carp instead.
With the resolve to drink, I place Satira’s business card in my back pocket, ready to head - thankfully - in the opposite direction of wherever they were going.
Then, from not even twenty feet away, I hear the daintiest bell-chimes as Satira half-turns, like she just remembered something.
“Oh. Congratulations.” Pointing at my abdomen, she muses through a mid-shout, “It's a boy.”
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