It was one in the morning, an hour for easy, dream-swaddled belief, but Cvetka could feel the seam. She cracked her eyes open to dark floorboards. Quiet for the sake of the girls snoring through the thin wall, she puzzled out her stiff tangle of limbs to stand. One hand rearranging her nightgown, she removed her other hand from her throat.

Cvetka felt her way along the wall. Finding matches and candle in their nook, she struck one, lit the other.

Foggy-eyed, she stumbled to the bedside mirror, set down the spitting candle, and dropped onto the unrumpled mattress. Really, since no-one was rooming with her at the moment, she ought to give it to Marija on the next floor, who hadn’t complained but—Cvetka knew—slept awfully on her ratty, bloodstained old thing…

Cvetka shook her head, gritted her teeth, and looked in the mirror.

With one fingertip she traced the faint line mid-throat that divided old flesh from new. On one side, the bumps, divots, healed scars, and slight wrinkles of most of thirty years. On the other, skin so coldly smooth that sometimes, as now, she feared her face would ring hollow if struck. Her sleeping habits failed to crease or dent that skin.

She tried to smile at herself, but saw too much of white teeth—each too perfectly rounded, sanded into an idea—to believe this was someone who had ever held her grandmother’s hand as they plucked orange lilies from the meadow. No, it looked like an intruder had shoved between her and the glass, whether angel or demon or vila. Even if no one else noticed. Avoiding her reflection’s eyes, she scraped a nail up one of her canines and pushed at the gums as if her real self could be found at the roots, a flap of skin away from the light.

It would be better during the workday, her unease strangled by circular conversation as the machines hummed, and if like any other day it was not better, maybe she could see Sal in the evening and he would touch her with a comforting lack of concern for what she knew to be the facts. And if he didn’t do that, she would take a long vigorous walk along the docks, which would be worth the same, sweat re-gluing her to her body.

To be clear—often she had to avoid making this clear—Sal wasn’t any kind of suitor to her. A relief, given the beaux she’d had in the past.

In the room over, a bed-frame creaked.

Cvetka shuffled her dresser’s clutter—her jar of debris, a man’s shawl, a ring worn when it was wise to look married—and from her jewelry box pulled a necklace. She fastened it over the skin-seam. Friction suffused the air, small noises magnified by a lapse in snoring, and she turned her head, startled, as a big gadfly landed on her hand. Terribly out of place. Ready to bite.

She held still. The fly stared at her; she stared at the fly.

A tiny vampire. She smothered a shudder. Its eyes and hers were the same distilled concept of green. New-growth-on-a-grave green, emerald or peridot green, green to wrench into whatever setting was desired. Her eyes were brown once. That hadn’t been good enough for him.

She drew a deep breath and stood, moving her perched-on hand the last. The fly floated off but not away. Leaving the candleflame to melt into its reflection, she shepherded her intruder through the room, into the cavern-dark hallway, and to the door she opened as soon as possible. The fly and her gaze flew into the night. She braced her arms about herself, and looked down to find a broad, flat package balanced on the step.

On the wrapping, lamplit, an unfamiliar hand had scrawled only, To Cvetka Č.

Who would send her such a gift? Sal, disguising his handwriting? Stupid question. What man wouldn’t send her gifts. Sometimes they were even nice, chocolates and other dainties she could share with the girls. She clutched the parcel against her chest as she returned to her bedroom, and laid it on her mattress in the long-cast candlelight, undoing twine and paper.

A queasy laugh wriggled through her.

It was a painting of her face. The new one. No one had wanted to record her old face. But here she was in more-than-lustful detail, though the red lips did not smile. The eyes were luminous. Her curls peeked from beneath an embroidered black band and a ruffled starched-white halo—a married woman’s headdress.

No signature. Except close attention she had not sat for, in garb she had not worn. Other attention: that of the many disembodied eyes adding hellish verdancy to the background.

Cvetka had half expected, someday, to see her damnation painted. But on the side of a bee house, where artists’ whims engulfed flat sinners.

As a girl she’d done two things: what she was told and what she didn’t have to be told. She’d shoveled chickenshit, tended March sprouts, ignored the charm and beauty of any young man or woman she saw in late-summer fields, and ripped moss off November tombstones. So when, in this foreign city, she quit being a good girl to try becoming her own decent woman—who danced in strange halls, didn’t bear her babies, and helped others’ grandmothers over the church threshold—she felt an unsatisfied yearslong shadow behind her. 

And in two places now: before her, this shadow pressed into pigment. No wonder the painted lips could not smile. The guilt of things she didn’t think were wrong never left. Beyond her, whoever had seen fit to paint this, to wrap up and pay for this, to cast it forth like blackmail or black magic, roamed the streets. All these roles seemed as one, not-quite-inexplicable focus. 

A woman groaned, or the building did.

Cvetka tapped unsteady fingers over one brilliant, green-painted iris, then another.