The Worm in Every Heart

“That could make you a little edgy, don’t you think?” he said. “Given your . . . condition.”

“Scared of what I might do?”

“No!” he snapped, quick and definite, as though the very thought insulted you both.

You took another sip. “Ah,” you said, sweetly. “And how about what you might do?”

And so you started to argue again, started to fight—first verbally, then physically. A genuine struggle, quick but vicious. Your thumbnail digging at his eye. His fist across your jaw. Your hand on the door handle, the door you thought you had locked. Securely.

He hit you, pushed you. The door opened. You fell out.

And what had been inside you at that moment, that tiny, subdividing swatch of cells and energy—he, she, whoever it had once had the potential to become—

—fell out, too.

* * *

Maris shakes her head. Her pale hair parts like a veil. Her lips part, urgent and intent. She leans forward, ready to breathe in Sufiya’s words like a kiss.

No, she says. So tell me of them. These djinni.

Adding unnecessarily: One will pay, of course.

Sufiya nods, over the rim of her cup. Yes, she replies. One will.

* * *

Your Aunt Maris’ house—now securely snowed in—lies crooked and quiet, a psychic sump. Its old pipes keep it hibernation-hot. The floors of some upstairs rooms are so uneven that you can put a marble down near the window, step back, watch it roll slowly out the door, and hear it bumping down the staircase to the front hall. Breathing is an extra effort; every new move comes complete with a constricted sigh or malformed gasp.

You drift from room to room as masala chai brews in the kitchen—black Darjeeling tea boiled with milk, cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, sugar, thick and warming.

The furniture is covered in sheets. Pebbled glass gleams on the windows, not just in the bathroom, but everywhere. Some stained glass, but all of it that weirdly “experimental” 1960s kind, done in shades of dark brown and murky green.

Down in the basement, which you give just a quick glance from the top of the steps, the windows seem to have been painted over entirely.

“Maris?” Diehl had said, when the lawyer’s letter came. “That crazy old dyke? That hermit? Anything you get from her, you’d have to sandblast before you could take it out in public.”

“My aunt,” you reminded him. “Not yours. Throw away your own relatives, if you want to.”

“If mine were like yours, you could count on it.”

Diehl, who came to your mutual wedding day prepared to make the best of a bad bargain, only to find himself terribly deceived about how much either of you could really take of each other’s personal foibles—dumb things like a basic lack of actual affection, or a growing inability to mask one’s true sexual preference. Who only wanted respectability, and political power, and the money to buy both. Bank accounts, to draw upon in your family’s name; children, to give his own name to. And he did try, you had to give him that. He kept his mouth shut, his affairs discreet, his smiles wide. He never even hit you—except, of course, for that one time.

Which turned out to be more than enough.

While, in your mind—day after day, year in, year out—you cheated on him with every woman you saw. Even the ones you knew he was probably cheating on you with.

Nothing in Aunt Maris’ house works well, or for long. It’s hard to find the light

switches; the fixtures are empty, or the lightbulbs die with a little blue flicker and a contractive rustle of fused glass.

Unfamiliar with the house and woozy on pain pills, you blunder into a downstairs bathroom—so long unused that the bath is full of dust—just as the stove’s archaic timer begins to chime.

You turn, knocking your knee hard against the toilet bowl. A bruise will bloom, likely purple-blue, the orchid shape of the red mark.

Later, sipping the chai, you find yourself sitting in what must have been Aunt Maris’ library, tentatively admiring the damage. A scratchy disk of old Bessie Smith tunes is still cued up beneath the encrusted cover of her record player’s turntable—“Blue Spirit Blues,” with its jazzy death-march refrain.

Leaning back in a velvet-covered chair, you open your robe to your waist and transfer your attention from knee to nipples, which have once again become raw enough to need soothing. The hospital gave you some salve, expressly for that purpose—it looks something like toothpaste, smells like crushed-up Ivory soap (faux camellia with a faint tang of plastic) and stings like unholy hell.