looked. She was still wearing the green scarf, and though her hair billowed out at the nape of her neck, wild and coarse as always, it was captured flat around her face and hidden, not springing up in its usual topiary way. The effect was to bring her face into focus, and Kizzy stared at it for minutes, getting the feeling that something had happened to her since the last time she had looked at herself, if indeed she ever really had.
She saw proud cheekbones beginning to rise out of the thick husk of adolescence. She saw a coy curl in the corners of her lips, lips that had practically touched Jack Husk's lips. Staring at her face, she began to fancy her outer layer had begun to melt away while she wasn't paying attention, and something -- some new skeleton -- was emerging from beneath the softness of her accustomed self. With a deep, visceral ache, she wished her true form might prove to be a sleek and shining one, like a stiletto blade slicing free of an ungainly sheath. Like a bird of prey losing its hatchling fluff to hunt in cold, magnificent skies. That she might become something glittering, something startling, something dangerous.
Kizzy wanted to be a woman who would dive off the prow of a sailboat into the sea, who would fall back in a tangle of sheets, laughing, and who could dance a tango, lazily stroke a leopard with her bare foot, freeze an enemy's blood with her eyes, make promises she couldn't possibly keep, and then shift the world to keep them. She wanted to write memoirs and autograph them at a tiny bookshop in Rome, with a line of admirers snaking down a pink-lit alley. She wanted to make love on a balcony, ruin someone, trade in esoteric knowledge, watch strangers as coolly as a cat. She wanted to be inscrutable, have a drink named after her, a love song written for her, and a handsome adventurer's small airplane, champagne-christened Kizzy, which would vanish one day in a windstorm in Arabia so that she would have to mount a rescue operation involving camels, and wear an indigo veil against the stinging sand, just like the nomads.
Kizzy wanted.
She pushed back her shoulders from her usual sullen slouch and made an effort to sit up straight. It felt unnatural; her sinews resisted. She had a sudden terrifying thought that if she had waited, if she had gone on as she was, her poor posture might have calcified like that. She might have hardened into a slumped carapace of a person who would never, could never, throw back her shoulders, walk tall, taunt vampires with her white throat, toss her head in joy or disdain. She would have curled over herself like a toenail left too long untrimmed. She flushed now, looking at her reflection, shoulders low and calm, neck elongated, almost elegant, light moving over her green silk scarf like a river, and she felt a sense of narrow escape in the ache of this new posture. As if she could still become someone else.
Maybe Jack Husk had already glimpsed that new girl within her, guessed how she was ready to slice free in one clean move like a stiletto blade flicking forth. She thought of his perfect face and sly eyes, his hand catching hers in the air, of his lingering gaze, and the sensation of being penetrated by it. And looking at herself in the mirror, minute after minute, unveiling herself to herself, she began at last to see her great-aunt Mairenni looking out at her, filled with her hungers and her secrets, and radiant with her weird, succulent beauty.
Ripe as a plum ready to drop from its branch at the lightest touch.
Kizzy slept restlessly and dreamed many things that night -- lips and fingers and fruit, and Jack Husk taking off his goggles and tasting her, beginning with the tender insides of her wrists. Strange images came to her all night, and she was greeted by another strange sight when she was awakened in the morning by the wretched cry of the peacock right outside her window.
She opened her eyes. A swan feather drifted past her face, twirled when her breath caught it, and sailed to the floor. She blinked, sat up, blinked again. The room was asift with swan feathers. They were settling to the floor as if she had just missed the strange storm that had deposited them here. A glint on her pillow drew her eye and she turned to see, laid alongside the impression of her head, the mother-of-pearl handle she knew so well, and tucked up quietly within it, resting now, her grandmother's stiletto, back from the grave.
She reached for it, and it was cold as a mountain winter in her hand.
The first thing Kizzy did was check the small circle of family graves in the back field. She stood there in her nightgown, the knife clutched in her fist, looking at the undisturbed ground of her grandmother's grave. She felt the stir of ghosts all around. She would feel them now. It was fall, after the harvest and before the first freeze -- this was the time when the veil between the worlds was draggled and thin, and voices murmured through its sodden membrane from the other side. It was always in the fall that Kizzy felt the ghosts lingering about, skittish as stray cats and drawn by the same thing: the whiff of food.
The cats came for the odor of the smokehouse where Kizzy's father and uncles made sausages from the various things they killed. With their little rough tongues, the cats lapped up pooling blood before it could congeal in the dirt. The ghosts had no such thirst, but came for the clumps of asphodel that bloomed round the graves all summer, and for the bowls of boiled barley the rest of the year. Cats and ghosts both partook of the saucers of milk and that was okay. They consumed different parts of it: the cats its substance, the ghosts its essence, and none went to waste.
They came from afar, cats and ghosts both, because normal families didn't spill hot blood in their driveways or leave out food for the dead, and they weren't exactly spoiled for choice. Kizzy thought most of the ghostly visitors came from the cemetery down the road; surely all the spirits in her family's little plot had moved along, well provisioned as they were with coin, food, weapon, and wing for their journey. Surely they didn't linger here. Surely her grandmother hadn't.
How, then, had her knife come to be on Kizzy's pillow, and her swan's wing, torn feather from feather, in Kizzy's room? Kizzy frowned, puzzled, and went back in the house, passing her mother in the kitchen and choosing not to speak of the feathers and knife. Her people would be terribly disturbed by it; they'd surely keep Kizzy home from school to scry the meaning of the ominous visitation, to bless the grave, and to try to return the knife to its rightful owner. And Kizzy did worry that her grandmother's ghost was weaponless and vulnerable in the shadowed land. But her mind kept turning back to Jack Husk. She had to see him again, to see if he was real, so she said nothing of the knife.
She showered, dried her hair, and tied, untied, and retied the green scarf, deciding at last to go ahead and wear it. She pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater and slid her grandmother's stiletto into her back pocket. She had a cup of coffee and a cigarette, brushed her teeth three times to scour away any yellow flavor, put on lipstick and then wiped it off, hopeful of kissing and scowling at her own absurd hope, and she almost left the house. But at the last minute she pulled off her clothes and stepped into a vintage dress she'd bought at the thrift store and never worn. It was made of apple-green kimono silk in a rippling pattern, with a mandarin collar and a row of big black buttons all the way down the front. She stood in front of the mirror for a minute, watching the way the silk slipped and shone when she moved her hips, then she pulled on black boots and hurried out the door.