THE HOUSE IS QUIET.  blanketed by the night; chiyoh prefers it this way.  she sits, straight-backed, beside abigail in a chair set before the gaping windows, which yawn shadeless and empty, obsidian save for the reflection the room casts upon them.  her and abigail’s images are cast upon the glass, two dully illuminated figures staring back at themselves.  outside the low ring of lamplight, the room fades slowly to darkness—as though beyond the several meters of space surrounding them, the world fades out of existence.  if chiyoh peers past the projection of herself, she can just barely discern the shapes and textures of the outside world—the hulking shape of a tree, and the emptiness of the sky beyond it.  tangible, but separate.  perceivable, but distant.

    “passed between the hands of influence.”

    chiyoh turns her head toward abigail, dragging her gaze over the girl’s face, her throat.  she lingers on the scars there, raised and pink.  hannibal has left his mark on them all—body and soul.  she regards it now with a detached curiosity.  it is not surprising to chiyoh that hannibal has grown to care for this girl; she had never met mischa, but sees her likeness in abigail all the same.  the possibility of surrogacy.  she finds it interesting that hannibal has chosen to mold abigail, too, but then, his love encompasses both creation and destruction.  it has always been nearly unrecognizable in shape.

    “but even the strongest of fingers cannot make clay from steel.”

    that, too, is hannibal’s strength.  he can identify a kernel of sameness in those he meets.  it calls to him—like to like.  chiyoh looks away, and gazes at abigail’s reflection in the window instead.  through it, to the indecipherable shapes beyond.

    “i didn’t know your father—maybe it was different with him.  but what hannibal does is not alchemy; it’s sculpture.  taking one shape and twisting it into another.  he can only do this if you are already made of the right material.”

    chiyoh had been.  he had seen it in her, all those years ago.  she had not wanted it to be true, but hannibal has a way of obtaining that which he desires.  in that way, she supposes it is a little like magic.  but in the end, it is a trick all the same—a sleight of hand.  a manipulation.  and it only works on those willing to participate.  she does not turn her head, but slides her gaze over to abigail, and regards her from the corner of her eye.

     𝙲𝙷𝙸𝚈𝙾𝙷 𝙼𝙴𝙴𝚃𝚂 𝙷𝙸𝚂 𝙶𝙰𝚉𝙴,  her expression cool and unreadable.  part of her still feels like the girl—the woman—left in stasis on the lecter estate.  a shell, hardened but hollow, from which even the fear had leached over time—an egg, drained of its yolk.  her days turned into cycles, moving forward like the motion of a toy train around a circular track.  bereft of destination, of variation, it often felt like she wasn’t moving at all.  will graham had forced her to shatter that shell—to pierce its hard exterior and emerge from the cage that had formed around her.  it had taken decades, but in the end, she had answered hannibal’s question.  played his game.

     chiyoh looks away, turning to gaze out into the distance.  the sun has set, but only recently, and the world still clings to the feeble light it pushes up from below the horizon.  everything is stained a gentle blue, from the clouds to the trees to their very faces.  she runs her gloved hands along the railing in front of her, and its slight chill seeps past the glove and into her skin, tangible even through the supple layer of leather.    “sometimes.” 

     she can feel wes’s eyes on her, the weight of his attention, but she doesn’t look at him.  it’s strange, still, to have company that is not her own—or his.  and even then, she did not look him in the eye.  it was easier, that way.  to pretend.  chiyoh wonders if that instinct is something she’s taken with her; she had grown used to existing unobserved.  to speaking only within her mind.  it is a heavy chain to shake.

     “i see his face—the man i killed.”    saying a thing gives it power; the image begins to coalesce in her mind.  his matted hair, his wild eyes.  the startling strength in his emaciated hands.  she can feel the chicken bone in her palm, the sudden give of his skin.  a soft pop.  a breaking of tension—like piercing the skin of a plum.  there have been other men, since then, brought low by a silenced shotgun, but their memory is inconsequential in comparison.  less intimate, less meaningful.  they had not wrapped their hands around her throat.  had not had their lives intwined with hers.  she had not watched the life drain from their eyes, or felt the hot spray of their blood across her face.

The last pull-in before the border perches in an itchy beard of ripe rosehip. During the day, the hips pinch red like gnome hats, little chili peppers from coloring books.  

Chiyoh looks up to link hearing the ghost of a smile with seeing it. But Will’s kaleidoscope face absorbs the evidence film-reel quickly and if she stares longer, she’ll start noticing all the angles in which he looks like he’s bursting.

“It makes me rude back.”

At sundown, it froths with human yeast. A bald one, with a head shaped like an artichoke, slabbed into her way and waited there. For just a moment, he smelled of a wine cellar’s years-gardened filth. Shit and tears and growing things. Chiyoh felt her heart between her tonsils.

He didn’t like her knife when she teased it out of her pocket and it gleamed like a wet tooth pointing at his sandbag gut. He looked like a chicken in a slaughterhouse. A chicken with hands. Red at the neck, he raised them. He made space—his gut went first, then the rest, and Chiyoh passed without a second glance but with her pyramid of spurgos sweating in her sachet. Four for her and five for Will.

At night, it crowns around Will and the greasy bench they’re stuck to. The single lamp fans shadow on his strange shave. He does nothing and looks more a European than the people here have ever let Chiyoh be.