Bloodline

From the other room, Handsome and his aunt discuss me.

"No, 1, we are just friends," he insists.

His footsteps fade. The door closes. I collapse back into the couch's synthetic embrace. Two stolen hours drag me under.

Sunlight, thin and jaundiced, seeps through curtains. Voices hum low, liquid. Time to perform.

1 entered, tendons taut in her neck as she forced a smile, offering coffee and rice milk.

I had met 1 a few times before. "I didn’t hear you arrive last night," she apologized. Then, with a strained smile, she added "Arthritis pills, knocked me out." "Just rice milk, please," I managed. She was a zealot, this one. Poured her pension into some sky-god’s pockets. We traded hollow words, plastic cutlery clattering on porcelain plates.A word hissed in my synapses, too sharp to hold.

The memory struck like a seizure: Grease-smeared concrete. Engines growling in the dark. Curtains fluttering, shrouds in motion. That shriveled figure, blood-matted hair, reaching for me. Small hands. Smaller crib. Gone.

The milk thickened in my mouth, sweet, cloying, chemical. Something in it that didn't belong. I spat the curdled slick into the sink the second 1 turned away.

Poison? Placebo?

The second 1 turned, I spat the curdled slick into the sink.

Soon after, Handsome Man's mother, 2, joins me on the couch. I lift my gaze, and her eyes lock onto mine. A broad smile touches both our faces, but beneath it, something cellular, ancient, pulls at my chest. A tremor of recognition that arrives unbidden, profound.

But her eyes hold nothing. Empty windows.

An aloe plant squats on the coffee table between us, fleshy spears straining toward tainted light.

"For healing," I whisper, touching one thick leaf. Something in my body knows it needs this plant.

1 tittered: "Too pretty to cut."

2 leans forward, voice honeyed. "I've got baby aloes in the back. Exotic strains. You could take one."

She rises, gliding toward the kitchen. Pauses at the sink. Her eyes briefly flicker to the poured-out rice milk.

A silent acknowledgment.

"Tonight," 2 murmurs to 1 as they gather purses, keys jingling like shackles. "We'll leave them alone."

1 whines: "And where will we go?"

2's reply is clipped. "Somewhere else."

My body moves before my mind catches up. Primitive. Instinctual.Fled. No words. No sound. Just the silent pivot of prey, out the door, into the wet green jaws of the woods.