CW: unhealthy relationships, implied violence and gore.

Cora has left her skin lying out again. It’s the first thing I see when come in. Open the door, hang up my coat, kick off my heels, turn on the lamp, and there it is, slouched in the mid-century chair by the ratty sofa. Her empty skin, deflated, black sockets staring at me.

I like a tidy house, and she knows I do, but I just sigh and drape the skin over a hanger, put it in the closet with the rest. When she comes back later tonight and asks where it’s gone, I’ll point to the closet, like I always do, and she’ll completely miss the accusation in my eyes, like she always does.

In the kitchen, there are dishes sitting out on the counter. I rinse them (disgusting, the things she eats when I’m not around to cook for her) and line them up in the dishwasher. I make a sweep of the downstairs (coffee mug in the bathroom sink, three small saucers stuck together on the desk, a glass with something crusty in the bottom sitting on the arm of the sofa) before I run the dishwasher on a long, hot cycle.

I don’t know how she lets things get this bad during the week. Every time I come home from working in the city, every time, no matter how I phrase it, no matter how I say, “please, this week can you run the dishwasher before I get home?” Every time, I come home and spend my first hour at home cleaning up the mess she’s made.

I unload the groceries from the car and put them away, empty the fridge of spoiled leftovers, wipe out the microwave.

I finally do the thing I’ve been dreading and open the door to the basement. The usual smell wafts up, that smell I can’t get rid of completely no matter what kind of cleaner I try. I put away the new bottles of bleach on the shelf by the top of the stairs, make sure the ventilation filters are still clean, hose off the stairs. I don’t even think she notices anymore. I wonder if she ever did.

• • • •

I wake up because the little light by the reading chair is on. I roll over to look at her. She’s staring out the window into the blue night—no. She’s staring at her own reflection in the dark glass. I don’t recognize the skin she’s wearing. I wonder what kind of a mess she left behind, whether she brought them home, whether she clogged the drain in the basement again.

“I didn’t used to need a skin,” she says.

She’s been drinking. This is always how it starts.

“I didn’t used to need a skin,” she says again, her voice hollow. “It used to be easy, just—” She snaps her fingers. “And totally new body. I used to be crows, swans. I was a deer. And so many people. Didn’t need to steal a skin.”

And now the trees.

“But I was never a tree, that’s how they get you. You get stuck as a tree. Lost so many friends. And you know where they are now?”

“Come to bed,” I say, and I turn back the covers on her side of the bed. “Just come to bed.”

“They’re just ashes. Chopped down and burned up. Never be a tree.”

She pauses. I consider closing my eyes again, trying to get back to sleep, letting her talk herself out.

“And now I need these stupid skins. I don’t even know what I am any more. So fucking ugly under here, like, just like nothing, you know?” She turns to face me, throws a hand out like casting salt over her shoulder. “Why the fuck are you here? Why do you keep coming back? Every weekend. You should just stay in the city, just leave me here to keep rotting away, just let me be nothing.”

“You aren’t nothing,” I say, and I sit up, wrap my arms around my knees. “I love you.”

“You don’t even know me! I’m not anybody! I mean, if you really knew, if you knew what kind of a monster I am, you wouldn’t be here, you would’ve been gone already. You could have a normal life! I just want to take my skin off and walk into the fucking Hudson, just let myself get washed out to sea already, just sit on the bottom of the ocean until the world fucking ends, until you assholes nuke yourselves out of existence or whatever you’re trying to do.”

I’m awake now, fully awake, but so tired. Tired of the same litany, this orchestra of frustration that revolves around this same theme, this pain that can’t be explored but can’t be denied. It isn’t always this way, I remind myself. There are still good times. There are still the moments, rarer now, yes, but those moments when I hold her and feel something magical move between us.

I spare a glance at the clock on her nightstand. 4:55. I get out of bed.

“No,” she says, “No, I’ll leave you alone, you should go back to sleep.”

“I’m awake now,” I say, and I can hear the hard edge of frustration in my voice. I try to pull it back, put some kind of love in my tone. “I’m awake, I can make us coffee, at least. I’ve got the stuff for pancakes.”

• • • •

When I get out of the shower, I find her asleep in bed. The new skin is crumpled at the foot of the bed, and I fold it neatly on the chair so she can put it back on when she gets up.

My glance slides off her naked body, and I make myself look back at her. She’s so ashamed, so angry at this body of hers. I feel like I’ve bought into it somehow, the shame. As though even when she sleeps, she’d be so embarrassed to have me look at her that I try not to. When was the last time she let me touch her naked body? I never thought she was ugly. I never saw her as a monster. But I’ve heard that song too many times, I’ve let her change my mind, a little bit at a time.

I try to step outside of myself for a moment, try to set aside these last few years, this slow slide into caregiving and caretaking, try to see her with clean eyes. She’s still beautiful to me, like nothing I’ve ever seen. Years ago, when I was a child, I remember seeing Saturn through a telescope for the first time. Seeing her is like that: a beauty that hinges on distance.

I clear away the breakfast dishes, rinse out the coffee mugs, wipe down the counters. There’s no blood in the living room, but the unmistakable signs of a struggle are there—nothing broken this time at least. I put the cushions right, straighten the pictures, refold the throw on the back of the couch, move the coffee table back into place.

I open the door to the basement.

This is where the mess is. I try to take it as a sign, a sign that she loves me, or appreciates what I do for her, even when she gets this way, even when she’s so angry and frustrated and depressed, that she’s kept the mess in the basement this time to make it easier on me.

She did clog the drain, though.

When Cora came into my life, when I first learned that magic was real and walked in the world still . . . I knew I would do whatever it took to hold on to it, to have my own piece of legend. Like a fairy tale.

It takes an hour to clean everything up, and when I’m done, I have to take another shower.

When she comes downstairs, she’s almost normal, as though nothing happened, as though she didn’t wake me up in the middle of the night, as though there was no mess to clean up. We sit on the couch together and watch the latest silly little Regency romance on Netflix, though neither of us like it. She offers up a running commentary on all the inaccuracies, and we laugh, and I curl into her, and she flinches a little bit but lets me.

I can do this, I think. I can do this.

• • • •

It’s a Wednesday and I’m between meetings, working on some last-minute copy edits when I see her number on my phone. My stomach sinks.

“Hello?”

“The cops are here,” she hisses.

“What?”

“The cops are downstairs, they’re knocking on the door.” She’s talking quietly, terror in her voice.

“Where are you?” I get up from my desk and close my office door, turn my back to the glass wall.

“I’m upstairs, I’m hiding, I’m in the bathtub,” she says.

“Do they know you’re there?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so? I can’t tell. They keep knocking!”

Fuck.

“I’m sure they’ll give up in a minute. You just have to wait. What happened? Did someone see you?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know. What do I do?”

“Just stay where you are.” I run through everything in my head, I try to remember what skin she was wearing when we moved in. Who do the neighbors think she is? It’s the brunette, the one with the birthmark on her right shoulder; where did I put that skin? She hasn’t worn it in ages, maybe it’s in the hall closet with the coats? It was winter when we moved in.

“Okay,” I say, “Wait until they’re gone, then wait another half hour to be sure. Then change into that old skin with the birthmark, I think it’s in the coat closet, just be her for a while, okay? You shouldn’t change for a while. Just stay her and we’ll . . . we’ll figure it out.”

“Okay,” she says. She sounds like a little kid, breathy, scared.

“I can’t do anything else from here. Just lay low, okay? I’ll try to take Friday off and come up early.”

“Okay, okay. I can do that.”

“Do you want me to stay on the phone with you?”

“No,” she says, “no, there’s no point. I’ll be okay.”

I hear the line go dead.

I save the work on my computer and head to the restroom. It’s empty, and I lock myself in a stall and start to cry. Frustration, anger, sadness. How could she be so stupid, so sloppy? What if she gets caught, what if she drags me down with her? What if she doesn’t, and I’m just left alone? What would they do to her if they figure out what she is, that she’s . . . something else? Something other?

Why would an immortal killer be afraid of the police, though, if she wasn’t invested in our life together? If she didn’t want to keep going with me?

Unbidden, I think of the time she confided in me:

“Every ten years or so, I have a tendency to blow up my own life.”

“But not this time,” I said.

“No,” she smiled, and it was a real smile, genuine, beautiful. The sun used to rise in her. “It’s different with you. You make me feel like I can be better this time. You’re changing me, in the best way.”

• • • •

She’s home this time when I walk in with the groceries, and she’s wearing the birthmark skin.

“You look nice,” I say, and then, “You look nice when you aren’t wearing anything, too.”

She brushes it off.

“It was a little stiff at first, but it’s not too bad. Feels weird not changing, though. Sometimes I worry I’ll get stuck in this shape.”

“It’s not a tree,” I say, and immediately wish I could unsay it, but she smiles a little.

“What are we doing for dinner?”

We do not talk about the thing that’s hanging in the air, the fact that she could be caught, that the police could come back, look in the basement, smell the basement. Dinner, doing the dishes (she helps), it all has a brittle, unreal quality. I want to hang on to this moment, reach back and grab all those reasons I fell in love with her, drag them through time to now, feel them all over again.

She dries her hands on the dishtowel.

“I should leave,” she says.

“What?”

“I should go. You could have something normal, a normal life. A partner you could, I don’t know, introduce to coworkers, take to parties. You could be with someone who wears the same face two days in a row.”

I don’t know what to say. I just crouch there, frozen, one hand locked around the handle of the saucepan I’m putting away.

“I love you,” I say, finally, stupidly, like somehow that will fix this, like somehow those three words can erase all those miserable late-night monologues, like those words will prove what years of cleaning and tidying and cooking and caring haven’t been able to. I suddenly feel like I’ve been pouring love into a broken vessel for years and years, and she’s seen it, but has never yet believed it.

I let go of the pan and stand up. I look at her and she looks back.

We stand there for a long moment. I can see the spot by her eye where the skin isn’t clinging quite right. I think of her as a bird, a crow, an owl, any of the things she could become when she was younger, just like that.

“Maybe I should be a tree,” she says, even though the ability to become a tree is as far behind her as her wings.

But I could have something normal, whatever that is. I could meet someone online or ask out someone in the office. I could reach out to my friends again, pick up where we left off, see my nephew; I could take a long weekend that didn’t mean cleaning entrails out of a drain; I could find someone who picked up after themselves without me asking over and over; I could fold someone’s jeans instead of a stranger’s discarded skin.

I reach out and wrap my arms around her shoulders, pulling her close.

“I don’t want something normal,” I lie.

• • • •

I take a sick day on Monday, too, and so I’m there when the police come back.

Our neighbor’s house was broken into, the one we can just see the top of over the ridge, and the cops were following up with us. They think whoever it was cut through our backyard to get to the road.

Cora does her best to look concerned.

“Do you think they’ll be back?”

“No, no. May be a good idea to keep the outside lights on for a while at night, just in case. If you have one of those Ring cameras—”

“We don’t.” I cut in. “Just an alarm on the doors.”

“That’s something. Are you both here during the week?”

“No,” I say, “I keep a studio in the city, I’m only up on the weekends.”

“The city doesn’t agree with me,” Cora adds. “I prefer the quiet.”

“Sure, of course. Well, keep those alarms armed, lights on. I doubt the guy will come back, but let us know if you see anything.”

“I will,” she says.

I hold it in until their cruiser leaves the driveway, and then I start to laugh. Cora smiles sheepishly.

“I got reckless. I was sure they knew.”

“‘Just be careful, little lady,’” I say to her in my best police voice, and she smiles and shows her sharp teeth.

“‘Oh, yessir, Mr. Officer,’” she jokes.

I go into the kitchen and start the coffee.

“Remind me,” I say, casually, “What’s the longest you’ve been able to stay in one place?”

“Ever?”

“No, I mean—”

“In the last century? About twenty years. Chicago in the twenties and thirties.” She pulls a mug out of the cabinet. “But it gets harder and harder. Cameras. Documents. The internet. People don’t just disappear the way they used to.”

“Can’t you—I mean, do you have to . . . change? So often, I mean? Couldn’t you spend a lifetime or so—”

“No.” Her face gets stony, and I think she’s going to storm off, but instead she stands there for a moment, still as marble.

“If I live a mortal, I die a mortal. To live the whole life as something is to become the thing. To die as something, someone, whoever it is.”

She walks away.

“I didn’t mean—”

The bedroom door slams.

And what I don’t say is: “I thought you wanted to die.”

• • • •

A sound wakes me, and I look over to the chair by the window, hackles up, ready to see her gazing into the past, drunk again.

But she isn’t there.

The sound again, it’s downstairs, and I pull a robe on and creep to the landing.

“Cora?” I call.

The answer is the sound of wood splintering.

I run down the stairs, heedless of my bare feet. The back door is in pieces, exploded outward, and lit by the full moon, standing in the dew-damp backyard: Cora, and a man, an intruder.

The alarm wasn’t even set, the house is quiet, and outside—

If this were a movie, the man would scream. But he doesn’t. He can’t be older than twenty-five. He has two-week stubble, a cheap fleece jacket. His jeans are frayed at the hem. His sneakers are muddy. He’s just a kid.

In our years together, I’ve never seen her do it. It seemed invasive; it seemed too private.

But now I watch her shed her skin, I watch her become.

He doesn’t make a sound. There’s a dog barking in the distance, the wind in the trees, and the wet, quiet sounds of death. When it’s finished, I think: I should feel something. But I just feel a little sad. I wish I could feel horrified. Or shocked. Or betrayed.

I feel sad because it’s over, not this stranger’s life, but this love story. And it was over before it started. I feel sad because I’ll only ever be a footnote in her life, and when I’m gone, she’ll just keep on missing her distant past, she’ll keep pining and longing and wallowing. And it won’t be for me. She can’t even give me that.

She turns to see me in the open doorway. She is covered in viscera, and beautiful, so beautiful.

Wordlessly, I go outside and get the garden hose. I clean her up. She lets me touch her. Together we bury what’s left of the intruder under the back porch. She carries her skin inside and hangs it in the closet. There’s nothing to be done for the back door, but I tack up a tablecloth over it for now.

“Will you come to bed?” I say, finally.

She shakes her head. “Not yet.”

• • • •

It wasn’t difficult, changing for her. It was a thing I wanted to do, a not unpleasant change, becoming more reliable, becoming a rock she could lean on, a place she could rest.

I used to be different, wearing the same clothes days in a row, leaving dishes unwashed until I needed them again, the same sheets on my bed for months, clean laundry mixed with dirty on the floor of the bedroom, takeout every night.

And then there was her. I wanted to care for her, protect her. I wanted to be someone who did those things.

• • • •

There are dirty dishes in the sink. The back door is still in pieces on the lawn. But all her skins are gone. The basement smells strongly of bleach, and there are dirty toothbrushes and steel wool in the garbage. The grout is cleaner than it’s ever been. The drain is clear.

She’s gone.

When I realize, after I’ve opened and closed every closet and drawer, as though, if I find some part of her maybe she’ll reappear, when I realize that she’s truly gone, I sit on the back porch steps and look out toward the trees. Just past them are the train tracks, and past that is the Hudson, and past that is the rest of the world. I know that I should cry, and I can feel that hot, hard lump in my throat, but my eyes stay dry.

I wonder if all those trees were always there, or if there is a new one among them. I wonder if I would even be able to tell.