by Kelsey Liu
Silvia crawls out from under the bed and stretches her newborn arms, creaseless and soft at the elbows, milky and sour to her sandpaper tongue. Her fingers, pink without nails, brush the walls on either side of her room and push, push through them and beyond, into the small bathroom on her left, the dark hallway on her right. Yawning with satisfaction, Silvia pulls herself inwards and upwards to the closet, where she borrows a ruined shirt and some stretched-out socks.
Hand over knee over hand, she drags herself in parts and inches out of the abandoned childhood home, the dark, musty place where her baby girl had once still believed in monsters.
It has been thirteen years, and she is so hungry.
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The first time it happened, Amelia was just six-years-old and small and lonely in a big house, a floor away from the office of her grieving father.
A girl crawled out from under her bed, knelt by her bedside, and stared at her.
She was terrified because that was where monsters came from, but the girl had such huge, beautiful eyes that she forgot to scream. They took up half of her face and they were brilliant green, an exotic shade that Amelia had never seen before but reminded her of apples and forests and the calendar pictures of exploding galaxies. The girl had the widest mouth, with lips so thin they were sometimes nonexistent. Inside hid beautiful white teeth, small and sharp and capable and lovely.
“Who are you?” Amelia whispered across the five inches separating their wondrous faces.
“Baby,” the girl cooed back, her voice rusty and shivering, “baby, I’m here now. Don’t you know who I am?”
Amelia had to say yes, had to because of course she did—how often had she prayed for someone she had not yet known the words for: someone to hold her hand across traffic; someone to drink milk with; someone to kiss her forehead after tucking her in; someone to sing her lullabies?
Someone had come to take care of her.
“What’s your name?” Amelia asked, her mouth soft with awe.
“What would you call me?” the strange girl replied, sliding and slipping to her feet, dancing herself together in the moonlight. She was pale and stunning.
“Silvia,” Amelia whispered.
“I like that,” Silvia said, smiling wide and approving.
Amelia invited her into bed.
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Every night for the next few years, Silvia scattered herself leisurely on top of the blankets to whisper love stories to Amelia.
They were about how the lonely king of Death dragged a girl from the grain into the Underworld and fed her pomegranate seeds to make sure she would never leave, about how, in the night, fathers and mothers tied red strings around each others’ wrists and hunted warm things together, about how the strongest husbands walked through steel doors just to feed their waiting wives slices of shadow dipped in gutter-water, and—most of all, most dearly told—about how Silvia fought three clawed beasts and two blood-soaked gates and one merciful God just to come to bed because she missed Amelia so, so much when they were torn apart by daylight.
Amelia had stories, too, even if they were often wrong.
She told her mother’s sugared lullabies, about how tiny fairies with swords wrapped their long, silky legs around her bedposts and stood guard over her while she slept. In fact, Silvia had long since eaten their small crunchy bodies, caged them with her sharp, clever fingertips and picked the useless screeching creatures off one-by-one like olives from a jar. Their hairless heads had been sweet on the back of her expansive throat.
But Amelia had still had a guardian, of course.
Silvia stood guard over her instead.
She laid her own stomach over the hole under the floorboards to make sure none of her kin would come to hunt on her territory. She unlocked her fingers and stretched them across the room to close all the windows and doors. She pressed purple marks over Amelia’s childish collarbones and her bird-bone knuckles.
Sometimes she had to nuzzle and nip Amelia awake from shallow slumber. Sometimes Amelia waited up for her.
Every time, Amelia smiled. “Silvia,” she said. “Come in bed.”
“Baby girl,” Silvia greeted. “Always.”
Silvia gave her everything, from protection to adoration to small presents wrapped in her own white skin, and Amelia gave it all back, from silence to softness to shy flutters of her irrationally long eyelashes.
It was perfect.
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Amelia held her arms close to her sides when she navigated the wide hallways of her house, careful to avoid a father that had never wanted a daughter, only a happier wife. She tugged her jackets close to her thin form and hunched her shoulders around her thin neck.
She kept herself as small as she could, most of time.
With Silvia, though, she became large, expanding and glowing along with the great swelling feeling in her chest whenever Silvia gave her presents, little boxes filled with rattling things and wrapped in the softest fabric.
Silvia was some obscure cousin to the sun, silver and private instead of neon and loud, but just as essential, just as miraculous. Amelia grew strong and full at night as she basked and drowsed in her cold radiance.
Heady with her own completeness, Amelia grew brave.
When she was nine, she tried to introduce Silvia to her father.
Silvia hissed and growled, but eventually she slunk out, her arms and legs skinny with apprehension.
Amelia felt as if her chest had been rammed with something hard and blunt when her father’s eyes slid right over Silvia. When he asked, “What are you doing, Amelia?” she still dared to think he had finally grown a sense of humor.
“This is Silvia,” Amelia tried. “We’ve been together for three years. She takes care of me.”
“What are you talking about? There’s no one else here. I’m busy. And you’re much too old for stupid things like imaginary friends.”
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Amelia felt like some awkward, overgrown animal, caught and readied for killing, as her thighs sunk into and stuck to the soft leather of her first counselor’s chair.
The feeling didn’t fade with the second, or the third. She was passed from one tall office building to another, from one sticky loveseat to another, and none of them—psychiatrist, psychologist, psychotherapist—not one of them believed her.
“This thing, under you bed,” they all said. “You understand it’s not real? No one else can see her but you, which means it’s an imaginary friend, something your head makes up for you. You’re a little too old for those, actually. What you’re seeing is called a hallucination. They’re not healthy.”
Silvia made her fingers dance twenty-part jigs on their pillows. Silva brought gifts and offered them with shyness sweet and silver in the extension of her white arms. Silvia’s savage protectiveness kept her safe from the really bad things. Every morning that Amelia still woke up was proof of Silvia’s power and existence.
Amelia loved Silvia so much.
“How could any of that be not real?”
“Our brains are complicated things,” they said. “Sometimes they play cruel tricks on us.”
“You’re crazy,” said her father. “Be normal, Amelia.”
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Silvia started finding a strange new smell under Amelia’s arms and at the creases of her thighs. Amelia fretted in bed; she sighed and squirmed and her eyes slipped away.
It was unacceptable.
Silvia picked up a habit of slipping into a corner to press five inches of her right hand up under her breastbone. She scraped off scraps of her own heart and offered them—the most intimate, the most precious parts of herself—to speak for her adoration. Amelia accepted the little slivers of hot, fresh meat with a pliant mouth, as always, but she hesitated before kissing Silvia back. Too often, Silvia had to lick away strange, soft crystals of saltwater from Amelia’s cheeks as she clumsily hiccupped her way to sleep.
“Stay with me,” Silvia whispered to her, night after night after night. “I’ll take care of you.”
Silvia tried to be better—hold her tighter, clutch her rabbit heart closer, present her with fresher kills. She eagerly swung open each of her ribs when Amelia tentatively pressed her trembling fingers to Silvia’s chest, checking for something, something Silvia did not completely understand, but that she was certain she could give.
She would give Amelia everything.
Amelia would give everything back.
And everything would be perfect again.
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On her tenth birthday, Amelia’s father took her out for a steak dinner.
“We could do this more often if you weren’t so damn stubborn about your imaginary friend,” he mentioned, looking down and sawing away.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled.
“Lock it down,” he ordered, his eyes still on his sirloin. “Just stop.”
Lock it down, everyone said.
For two years, Amelia said no.
Silvia had said no for four years already, denied every slimy, saw-toothed thing that had wanted to invade their bed. Amelia owed her at least two more years of the same loyalty.
She tried very hard, but she was twelve-years-old, and worn down, and so tired. When she got to Sam, her sixth therapist, she had already become a raw thing without skin, red and sensitive and exposed to the unkindness of the air.
Sam had green eyes, just like Silvia, and he was the only grown-up who leaned towards her when they talked. Amelia thought maybe he would be the one to understand how crucial it was that Silvia existed. She explained as well as she could. Sam’s eyes grew darker and darker.
On week five, Sam took off his glasses.
“Amelia,” he said, suddenly somber, “I need you to listen to me. You can’t buy and sell love. It isn’t about giving and taking. Real love is unconditional, Amelia. Do you know what that means?”
Amelia’s pulse started beating erratically in her ears. She was exhausted, too wrung out to deal with the anxiety that kept company with Sam’s shift in tone.
“Yes,” Amelia said, on the brink of tears. It meant Silvia loved her. Silvia loved her, and wanted to stay with her, and—
“That means it can’t tell you to give it whatever it wants or it won’t spend time with you anymore. That is unhealthy, Amelia. Real friends don’t ask you to give them your blood, especially if you don’t want to. They don’t ask you to hurt yourself, even if you think it’s not a big deal. They don’t ask you for your baby teeth, Amelia. The fact that you think you have to sacrifice yourself to keep its attention tells me, more than anything, that your relationship isn’t real.”
Something cold sank roots into her body.
She loves me, Amelia said in silence. Yes—yes—yes—
“No,” Sam said. “Amelia, no. It doesn’t really love you.”
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Silvia, she called out in her head, frightened and lost. Something dark had stuffed itself into her eyes, erasing everything except disgusting gray smog. Silvia, Silvia—had she lost her in the mist, or had Silvia left her?
Had she really never been there at all?
Steel voices sank into the smog. Lock it down, they said. Lock it down. They screeched and thundered and whispered. Lock it down! Lock it down!
Hundreds, thousands of voices promised her sickness, misery, and death if she didn’t—
Her heart was a futilely flapping bird with a bear trap around clamped into its chest.
LOCK IT DOWN, they screamed together. NOW.
Silvia did not come to her. Amelia burst into terrified sobs.
It didn’t love her.
She locked it down.
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One night, Silvia found she could no longer push her cheek up through the bed to lie beside Amelia. She tried, and tried, certain it was Amelia’s inconsolable and lonely tears that dripped from the bottom of the mattress, dark and red and smelling like metal.
She tried until she lost both her eyes and broke both her lungs, but her thrashing caused only minute trembling in the walls of the white steel box. Silvia bit and kicked and screeched at her coffin, but Amelia’s conviction, which nailed it together, held firm for a long time.
Then, one day, she found a weak spot that wobbled and flaked silver when slammed into hard enough. Her eyes grew huge and gleeful—Amelia must be thinking of her again. Silvia dug her fingers and toes and elbows into it, scratched and punched and hated it, until, today, it gives way.
Silvia crawls out from under the bed, puts on Amelia’s old clothes, and goes to reclaim her baby girl.
She finds her, finally, at a table in the sunlit street. She smiles, huge and bright, as she takes the seat opposite hers, the one that belongs to her. To make space, she squeezes a small-bodied man through the plastic lattice of the seat bottom.
Amelia doesn’t smile back, unfortunately, but instead recoils and runs.
Silvia chases her down, her legs disjointing at the knees and popping back into place, her feet collapsing through the concrete and floating back above it, and grabs Amelia’s shoulders three blocks away.
“You tried to kill me,” Silvia accuses. She is disappointed, of course, but she smiles all the same because she remembers and loves this girl too well.
“No,” Amelia pants, “no, no. We got rid of you. You’re not—not real. You’re—bad, so bad, you mons—you’re don’t even—I know—” She looks devastated.
Forgiveness melts warm and pink in Silvia’s mouth.
She takes Amelia and wraps her arms once, twice, three times around her heaving waist.
She kisses her wet eyelids.
“Don’t worry,” Silvia assures her. “You’ll never get rid of me.”