Frustration tightens into coils behind my eyes, pulling the fine muscles of my face into knots. University Way is humming with motorists, students, and tourists. It’s late afternoon and the sun is still beaming. This would be a perfect day if I were just here for boba tea and gyros, but I’m not. I don’t know what I’m here for exactly, but it should be marked666. Unfortunately, after walking more than six blocks, I’ve realized that nothing in this district matches that description. The addresses all have four numbers and none of them start with six. I even tried looking for graffiti—maybe someone scrawled the number somewhere as part of their street art. But that also yields nothing.
Desperate, I reach for a twenty-something girl passing by, with braids and purple overalls. “I’m sorry. Can you point me to six-six-six?” Maybe it’s the name of a hip place around here or even just another nickname.
But she quickly jerks her arm away and scampers off like I offered her a fistful of Molly. Actually, if I’d offered her Molly, I probably would have gotten a lot more cooperation. Still, her reaction tells me what I need to know. Aaron’s theory, while logical, isn’t checking out.
Where is the voice when you need it? “You’re supposed to be helping me,” I say under my breath.
I start to slow, my feet barely lifting off the sidewalk, as I try and think of what I must be missing. I am reminded of long afternoons winding through the flowers as a girl, watching the house and wondering when my mother would return. The powerlessness I felt in those moments, a world away from everyone, adrift in a sea of gold, eats at me now as I wander the street, searching. All her rules growing up were exactly like this—riddles I could never solve, barked at me again and again. Countless late nights dyeing the roots of my hair as though she was ashamed of the real me, until she stopped doing even that. Countless locked doors and steely glances, refusals of the simplest of requests—a dog, a sleepover, a chance to go to school in a real classroom. And never a word to explain. The feeling feeds an intensity burning inside me like an old furnace that has been clanging through the years, dangerously close to exploding. I stop beside an intersection, frustration growing to fury in the pit of my stomach. I feel like I swallowed a cup of vinegar. Glancing up, I see the traffic light blink several times and then go out.
A rush of energy courses through the soles of my feet, but I’m too fixated to move. Two cars narrowly avoid colliding into each other when they try to go at the same time. Their horns blast through the afternoon.
The memory I recalled in front of the Space Needle resurfaces.
I saw my grandfather one more time after Dara’s death, days before he caught me in my grandmother’s room, before the assault and the fire. I’d been smoking outside, frustrated and alone, grief-stricken about my friend, about my predicament—being trapped in this deranged house with this deranged family, knowing now, with no room for doubt, what was happening between my mother and my grandfather. What he’d threatened would happen to me. I came in quietly, so Nina wouldn’t smell the smoke in my hair, and slunk into the hall. He was at the other end walking in my direction, an ugly grin growing across his face when he saw me. I knew in that moment what he was thinking. It happened so fast, I scarcely registered it.
The lights overhead flickered and snapped out, plunging us both into darkness. It took a second for me to realize they’d gone out in the entire house. And another to put together that I had done it.
“Nina!” he yelled as I crept away, a little bloom of triumph in my breast. I should have known then what was coming, what could happen. I should have run when I had the chance.
A steady tap, tap, tap pulls at my attention. I drag my eyes from the stoplight to the broad glass window of a shop front nearby. In it, an enormous polyphemus moth is trapped, flying into the glass again and again, beating dusky-eyed wings futilely. For a second, I think I see them blink at me.
I shake my head and turn back to the traffic light. It’s on again now, working fine. When my head snaps back to the window, the moth is crawling over a large canvas hanging there. It’s then that I notice the woman painted on the canvas, with wild bright hair and burning eyes, seaweed striping her body as the ocean roils at her feet. Her arms are circled with tentacles and dolphins leap around her. Crab claws sprout from her hair, and her face is held not in a smile but a grimace, as if she is shocked that anyone would have the audacity to level their eyes at her. At her back, the sun is setting into the water like a fire being slowly drowned.
The fireplace mantel at Solidago rushes back to me, the one in my grandmother’s room, pale as the woman’s hair and full of the same chaotic, aquatic energy.
Without another thought, I open the door to the shop and step inside. The heavy smell of incense hits me, like sandalwood boughs are drifting through the air. Canvases fill milky walls, paintings of women raging like storms or flowing like water, spreading over towns in the night, their bodies light as wings. By the counter, a display of geodes and fossils sits beside a shelf of books titled with words likedivine feminine,sacred archetypes, andIndo-European. They’re all by the same author—a Dr. Anneli T. Nilsen. There is another display of creamy hand-dipped candles and soaps that are thick and pretty as cake. Oil blends, dried flowers, and tiny packages of herbs cover a nearby tabletop.
It’s an art gallery but also an occult goods store. A market of New Age nuance and witchcraft supplies. The kind of things my mother would never entertain. I asked her once, if some kind of magic had made its home in us, why we didn’t use it. She silenced me with an angry look, flecks of blue fear glittering in her eyes. “Don’t toy with things you don’t understand, Judeth. What we have is a burden, not a gift. And a burden is something you carry, not something you use. If you let the lightning out of the bottle, you’ll never put it back.”
I didn’t understand at the time. When I finally did, it was already too late.
I approach the counter where a short woman in a linen jumper with frizzy white hair dripping past her shoulders is sorting beautiful wands of dried sage and roses. She has thin lips and wide eyes the color of glacier shadows, a pale, pristine blue. They drift over things like clouds skimming the mountains.
“Can I help you?” Her face is round and bare.
“You have a large moth trapped in your window,” I tell her.
She turns, concerned, and sets the sage wands down. “Excuse me,” she says, moving off in that direction, one hand tracing the edges of tables and shelves as she goes. But she returns a moment later, disturbed. “Are you sure?” she asks.
“Didn’t you see it?”
“No, but I wouldn’t have necessarily. My sight,” she adds, touching her own face. “I have profound visual impairment. But I should have heard it at least.”
I feel foolish for not realizing she had a visual disability and go to the window myself to check, but she’s right. The moth is gone. Maybe it flew out the open door when I came in.
A wave of dizziness strikes me, and I put a hand against the wall to steady myself before walking back. The one-eyed cat from a week ago jets through my memory. The way animals keep popping up, always a step ahead of me on the path. “It’s not there. I could have sworn…”
Her lips tighten as if deciding something, and she returns toher task. “Don’t worry, these things have a way of showing themselves when they want to be found.”
Still feeling awkward, I ask about the painting in the window.
“Thalassa,” she says with a smile. “Primordial goddess of the sea.”
“Primordial?”
She glances at me. “It means ancient. She is older than the Greek pantheon she belonged to. They are the originators—the primordial goddesses—the mothers of all. Those that existed before time. Some call them deities of chaos, but really, they are the stuff of creation, the shapers of the world. It made them powerful and more than a little feral. The goddesses that came after were often much more civilized, bound to a god through marriage. But the primordials made their own rules.” Her eyes round over her cheeks like moons cresting a hill. “Nearly every culture has their own version. They are the rulers of deep, untamable things—the water, the night, dreams, magic, death, fire…”
“Fire?” I repeat, almost to myself.
