Helen Oyeyemi - White Is for Witching

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Lily’s photo studio was a small extension to the house, a lump that had grown on its side when it was young. It had its own tiled triangular window frame; from the outside it looked like a cuckoo clock. A thick piece of twine crossed the length of the room, hung low so that Lily could reach up and pluck down a photograph. Steel pegs dangled and didn’t shine; like the capped steel tanks at either end of the room they drew dark into their outlines and almost disappeared. The cupboards had jugs in them, and a few pint bottles full of pale fluids. The jugs weren’t dusty yet; Miranda dreaded the day when they would become so. She tried to put a shield up in her mind against it, a collection of bright things to do with Lily that would blaze through the dust when it came down.

When Eliot came home that evening, he took the key to Lily’s studio off its hook in the kitchen.

Miranda asked him, “What are you going to do in there?”

He said, “Homework.”

She tried to follow him in, but he suddenly and silently pushed the door against her until she squealed with pain; the pressure of the door between them threatened to throw her arm out of its socket.

“Eliot!” she said through the gap.

“Get back from the door,” he said calmly.

“I want to talk to you.”

“Later.”

She thumped her fist against the door, then opened her hand so that it was just her palm, soft on the wood.

He laughed. “Get your scrawny arm out of the door, Miri.”

“ You said stay awake or she’ll die. Why did you say that? How could you say that?”

He opened the door fully. Behind him the light strips glowed red. He was looking at her through the skin of his eyelids. She didn’t like his eyes, she wanted to cover them with her hands, turn the lights out so she couldn’t see them. This was more than weed; he must have taken something else besides. He was looking at her but his eyes were closed: “You didn’t have to believe me.”

She stepped inside and slapped him. Then she laughed until she hiccupped, because she hadn’t known she meant to do it. The studio door clicked closed behind her. She could see her slap had been hard because there was her handprint on his face, a flushed shadow. He didn’t blink, but he slapped her back, and she fell onto a counter, scraping all her weight along her wrist as the glass in the cupboard rattled. When the throb died she walked up to him and dug her nails deep into his cheek, her other hand dragging his head back by the hair.

She wasn’t angry, she was just being deontological. He had to be paid out for the pain in her wrist. It was strange that she could hold him like this for even a second. She felt weak, but her will was cold. And there was a sort of wonder in seeing tears so close, in actually watching them form in his eyes. They scrabbled around on the floorboards, trying, for some reason, to hold each other flat in the shadows. She banged her head, or he banged her head, against a corner of the counter, and she let go of him and they rolled slowly away from each other. She was drowning in a flood of colour she had never seen before, she was scared it was blood from her brain. She heard Eliot breathing. She knew where he was, around the other side of the counter, out of her sight. “Miri,” he said. “Miranda. Are you alright?”

She didn’t answer. Let him worry.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He said it as if he was choking.

She could see under the counter, a strip about two inches thick. It looked sticky, as if developing fluids had dripped through to the floor and collected there. And there was a slip of paper,

or

a photograph gone astray.

She wasn’t sure if she could reach it, but Miranda reached an arm under the counter. If her fingers touched the photograph it was hers. If it was out of her reach then it belonged to the room.

She could hear Eliot moving. “Stay there,” she said. Her fingertips clutched the paper and she drew her arm out. With the slip in her hand, she rose to her knees at the same time Eliot did. They regarded each other across the counter from the nose up, wary grey gaze meeting its wet counterpart.

Lily and Luc had agreed that she and Eliot would take Lily’s surname if they were born grey-eyed, and Luc’s surname if they were born brown-eyed. Miranda and Eliot’s names were really just a matter of grey or brown, a choice between colours.

What would Miranda Dufresne have said now, how would she have made things better? She knew what Miranda Dufresne would have looked like. She would have had very straight black hair in a bob, she would have been a thin, already tall girl towering on heels, buttoned into a dark suit. She would have been born grown-up.

Miranda looked down at herself, touched her hair, started, then smiled nervously. Maybe the thing she needed to do was imagine what Miranda Silver would have looked like. What if she dyed her hair blond, she wondered, knowing that her skin was too pale to support it. Her thoughts were like ice floes, and she became too large for them — she couldn’t move from thought to thought without breaking them. One day she might get better and be pretty, rather than a sicklier version of Eliot.

Out of his line of sight she was holding a piece of A4 paper, a secret easily unfolded. It was a drawing on brown, crackly paper, a drawing of a perfect person. Miranda sat down.

(How excellent a body, that

Stands without a bone)

A perfect person has no joints. The arms, emerging from short sleeves, are unmarked by the ripple of skin that shows where the limbs bend. A perfect person’s portrait is lifelike despite their strange clothes, a black dress that fastens without buttons or a zip, just a straight line across the material to show that it was not pulled on over the head. It was still possible to believe that the person drawn was a real person despite the great almond-shaped eyes set deep into the head, deep and open, unable to blink. Eyes without eyelids or eyelashes. The pose of the perfect person was so natural, the colouring so lifelike that the omission of joints and eyelids seemed deliberate, so that the thing was art, or honesty.

The perfect person was a girl. Bobbed dark hair, black dress, pearls she was too young for, mouth, nose and chin familiar… Miranda’s, almost. Look, look, remember. This sight might not come again. The perfect person had beautifully shaped hands, but no fingernails. A swanlike neck that met the jaw at a devastating but impossible angle. Me, but perfect. She quickly corrected herself. Before Lily died, Miranda’s hair had been long enough to sit on. Me after the clinic, but perfect. Lily did you know? How did you know? Miranda turned the picture over and ran her hand over the back of it; in one, yes, two, three, four places the paper was rougher, once adhesive, now matted with fine hairs and specks of dust. Lily Silver, the lonely girl on the third floor, had kept herself company with pictures of people, no one she’d ever seen, she’d said. Miranda turned the page over again, and it was blank. So this was what happened when she hit her head.

Eliot collapsed onto the floor beside her. She put her head on his shoulder and he moved his head so that he was combing her hair with his chin. “That was really stupid,” she said, at the same as he said, “That was ridiculous.”

Without raising her head, she ran her fingers over the marks she’d made on his face, kissed each of her fingers and her thumb and touched them to each scratch. Just to be sure she touched his eyelids.

“Did you take something?”

“What?”

“Your eyes… I don’t know, maybe you smoked something.”

“No more than usual.” He crossed his heart.

“What do you really do in here?”