The Window That Eats Only at Night
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
Every night at exactly 11:47 PM, she turns off all the lights except the reading lamp beside her bed. She sits perfectly still for exactly three minutes, letting her eyes adjust to the new geometry of shadows. Then, with the precision of someone performing a sacred ritual that must never be spoken aloud, she crawls across the mattress on her hands and knees until her face is exactly six inches from the window. The condensation from her breath begins to bloom on the glass before she sees it: tonight, the reflection of her neighbor's house is missing its third window from the left. Her heart stills as she whispers, "Hello, Ghost Point. Are you listening?" Even unconscious, her voice curls up around the word "Ghost Point" like a cat hiding under a blanket, making it anything by an accident. And now she waits. Just as it does every night, the breeze touches her cheek. And when she realizes that it carries with it the perfume of the tide rushing in, her guess is always confirmed. When it finally pulls itself up from the depths of slumber, Emily greets the ghost of the house by the name "Duchess," prefixing it with the word "Sir." As with the others, it seems always to take its own sweet time deciding whether or not to reply. Three minutes usually passes with no response, but tonight, that can be muttered "Ghost Point warns you that no one will believe you if you don't tell them the truth." Her voice carries a sad sort of chuckle, as if the corvid knows she will keep silent no matter his frustration at the persistence of her silence. "Ghost Point is starving," he adds after a few more moments of silence, his tone growing more and more threatening by the second. "Duchess laughs dryly. "Isn't that a humbling thought? You were on the brink of death, and you couldn't even bother to come find Emily until you were practically dead." She sits perfectly still for a moment, letting the weight of Duchess's biting humor beat like a heart against the curtain of her ribs. She doesn't reply. There's no saying how long they will wait-two minutes, five, seven-but at last, Ghost Point speaks again. "What shall we eat, Duchess?" Emily could swear he sounds torn between two distinct options, and awful, she realizes which. "Well, I suppose we could do as you're used to," Emily replies, flattening a hand as if to weave the man's ribs back into existence. "We can eat from the poor, the forgotten, the frail bastards like me. Another round of lost souls, Tory." There's no answer. Emily grits her teeth and examines the glowing of Duchess's ghost, the small tears forming in the fabric of her hem, the strobing jags and cotton that float like missiles through the empty window of her neighbor's neighbor's house. Emily wonders what the ghost remembers, exactly, from its lifetime on earth. Does the woman who files her nails remember the way her brush went smooth across each nail instead of catching, leaving her with red slivers of flesh where the crusts of dirt always caught? "Or perhaps," Emily continues sympathetically, "we can indulge our more carnal appetites. We can eat anything we please, after all." She sits perfectly still, unable to remove the mocking grin that she might feel like pulling from her face if just for a moment it seemed genuine. Instead, she watches Ghost Point's icicle form rail with an invisible force, a trapdoor that shakes loose to reveal a night-dark room filled with stinking corpses instead of rations. Emily hurries her dark ruminations. These chitin animals will not move of their own free will. Every night, Emily's house is packed full of spirits pressed on every side by the myopic desires of the wicked. Ghost Point is the least of evils among them, his doomed life merely a siren's call for Emily's corpse from the sea. "Which will you choose?" Emily concludes finally. "Will you eat from the world everyday?" He whispers finally, a shade more hesitant than Emily would like. Emily does not hesitate. She does not want to remember the cadaverous mouth, the pink flesh that fell from bone before her free hairs and crack those fangs never had, the things she has forced her body to become. "Ghost Point," she responds at once, lunging toward the sweating window. Her fingers do not even meet it before she says, "Whim," but the word still leaves her teeth as a whisper, as if careful not to wake other ghosts. Her eyelids tremble as the taste of long dead flesh cuts off lines of saliva from her lips. "Try it, my little ghost." Emily? "Ghost Point, I'm leaving." "Where are you going?" "I'm going to a new house." "What are you going to do there?" Emily swallows hard. "I'm going to go to sleep." "You mean forever?" "Yes," she pauses. "Yes." Ghost Point scoffs in disgust. Emily wishes she could make some small sign to indicate how flat this language must sound to her. "Very well," Ghost Point's voice sounds deliberately, pleasantly, like he has a bad end with all of this. Duchess laughs mirthlessly. "Goodbye." And then she crosses her arms and falls off. Emily follows. For the last time, and Emily finally sleeps. The fourth time. More than three years. Alchemists walk through this world the way oil spilled over sidewalk slants: a◆ About the ending
❧ About the title