Kachi stroked the yellow python-eye hidden between the cheeks of his buttocks with a distracted finger. The familiar round smoothness of the hard orb calmed his mind as he stared dispassionately at the mangled corpse sprawled at his tiny, blood-coated feet.

I wouldn’t describe it as waking up. If you’ve been in a car accident, you know the violence. One moment, your life feels the size of your body, muscular years of loves and hurts wrapped around a thousand calcified tasks, a routine that bears you up even on the mornings when nothing makes sense. Then your days break open with the sound of rupturing metal. You splinter like a windshield. It’s an awakening, of sorts, but it’s not like waking up.

When you get to the body, it’s still warm. Maybe because you’re exhausted, because your joints are feverish and your chest feels like it’s scraped dry, for a second, the face in front of you morphs and you see Ru splayed out inside the bathtub instead. Her wrists are splotched with welts, her eyes milked over with a knot of veins, but it’s the head that makes you rigid: Ru’s skull hangs to her chest, like something impossibly heavy is squatting on her neck.

The drums sound at first light but you are already awake. Today is the day you will finally meet the Goddess. She’ll either embrace you, ripping you apart and reforming you into a being of magic and flame, as mercurial as the sea, or She’ll withhold her blessing and never again will you walk upon land. You take a breath and hold the humid, tropical air deep in your lungs before releasing it and dressing in your ceremonial leathers. You knot the leather straps around your chest, replicating the geometric patterns favored by your beloved cousin, Sindr. The one who disappeared.

The call comes when Kaitlyn is at Little Star—the cafe on the corner of Third and Main—picking up lunch for the marketing team: two Caesar salads and a cream cheese avocado bagel sandwich. She answers her phone as it’s her turn to step up to the counter. The voice on the other end of the line says, This is Father Lawrence, chaplain from the Chillicothe Correctional Institution. She already knows what he’s going to say next.

Jeffrey, chin glazed in grease, leans his head over my cubicle wall and asks me what I’m working on. He slurps something from his bento box—the one with his name supposedly written in kanji on the side—and noodles hang trembling from his lips. Jeffrey’s the senior sales associate, which technically makes him my superior. He’s wildly unsavory for a number of reasons; the fact that he insists on eating at his desk every day is pretty high on the list.

The Rampart Hotel towered into the sky. It was hard to believe the building was once considered the flagship symbol for a new boom in southeast tourism—a boom that lasted as long as these things usually do. Now it was a distastefully modern thing with a square, flat roof somewhere in the grey clouds and a car park that was mostly empty. As Penrick made his way into the lobby and ordered an old fashioned, he wondered if the flagging status of the hotel was the reason it had begun hosting the jumping competition in the first place.

Be honest, now. What did you think you would find? You have ventured all the way to this cellar, meaning you must have first braved the porch balustrade of milk teeth, skirting the welcome mat that parts down the center like a grin. Perhaps you chanced up to the second floor where the beds are heavy beneath the weight of fungal networks spun as fine as silk thread, or into the dining room set for two: plates flexing concave and convex like the thudding of ventricles.

The day after the picture of your boobs gets sent around the school, a mosquito lands on your tongue and bursts like a ripe cherry. You are crying in the disabled stall of the girls’ bathroom where you took the photo to begin with. You hate that you’re back here, but it’s where you were that day four months ago because it’s the only private mirror in the whole school. It’s exactly the same. Paint-stained, clogged-up sink, graffiti all over the door that you’ve contributed to, no toilet paper on the roll.