We found it behind our school, in the alley the four of us liked to roam late into the night, after I dared Jesper to leap into a blue dumpster. “Fine,” he said, boosting himself up, jumping in. He landed with a squishy splash. “Sometimes people find things in dumpsters.”

“We have better things to do than to jump into dumpsters,” Colby said, “where things might be found.”

And while this was true, it was also true that I had dared Jesper to do it, and a dare was a dare. Even Colby couldn’t argue with that. Last week, Antonio dared Colby to kick the burnt-brick exterior of the school gym, and he did, even though it meant he was now hobbling around on a single crutch and had a grey boot on his right foot.

“You’re going to find things alright,” Antonio said, his voice cracked apart by the puberty we were all in the middle of. “Like slime and grease and the discarded remnants of chicken wings.”

Just then, Jesper grunted and held something in the air, his skinny arms trembling.

“What the hell is that?” Antonio squeaked.

It was garish in the gaze of the streetlamp and looked heavy. “Help me,” Jesper said as he tried to balance it on the dumpster’s lip. Colby hobbled over on his single crutch and Antonio rushed past him.

“Help!” Jesper said again, and just as Antonio, Colby, and I reached the dumpster, Jesper lost grip and dropped the thing over the dumpster’s edge. I watched it tumble through the air, end over end, and as I inspected its weird sheen, its cylindrical shape, it crashed into my head with a heavy crack and sent me crumpling to the ground.

“Ouch!” I said, and heard Colby and Antonio also say, “Ouch!” because I guess it had bonked into all three of us at once. I squirmed on the ground, and when my head stopped throbbing so bad, I looked over. Light blared over Colby, highlighting his thinning blond hair as he writhed around. Antonio was motionless, splayed out on his back, limbs in all directions.

… [Click here to purchase a copy of the magazine]

The house sat on the shore of the lake with a bald, open face. It was wide and white with a black front door and blacker windows, two gaping eyes on the second story that blinked with the flutter of pink lace curtains. The roof lumbered to a lazy gambrel peak and the siding was warped and weathered grey where the paint had long ago peeled. The house was older than the girls, but not by much, and it groaned and ached when they ran through it, barefoot and pigtailed, naked skin against wooden bones.

Outside the house, it was August, summer’s death, and the stiff heat held them like a coffin. The air was still and the light slanted regardless of the sun’s height, gold and swollen with a life it would soon lose, sinking through the blue sky in tandem with leaves just beginning to yellow. Before long the sun would be distant and cold, small and white, but this was no longer of the girls’ concern.

Nancy sat on the dock with her feet dangled in the water, a water snake looped around her ankles, the house watching her from behind. She couldn’t feel the wind, only her sweat. Carol shrieked, sprinted through the grass as Mary chased her. It was so hot not even the moths beat their wings, stilled as a broken heart, and the shadows were dark and thick enough to hold secrets. The old stone cellar behind the house was the only cool, dry place, and it held the bodies that would soon begin to smell.

Carol, having escaped Mary, ran the length of the dock to Nancy. The water snake floated away to weave between the shoreline rocks, its body spined with diamonds of rust, glittering with water and the creature’s own scales. Though it was not small, it was young, for it had yet to turn black with age. Carol sat down and pushed her wet hair from her cheeks and watched the snake with Nancy. The snake slowly brushed against the rocks as it went, inch by inch, its skin catching, pulled from its body until the hollowed silver ghost was entirely freed, a delicate lace on the surface of the lake, the skinned snake gone until whenever they’d see it again.

“A gift!” Carol clapped then, and she jumped from the dock to fish out the skin. She held it up to admire it, and it shimmered with sunlight in return. “Mary!” she shouted, and Mary looked to the lake from her spot in the oak tree where she hung upside down from a low, dead branch. “A gift!”

Mary fell from the branch and landed on her feet. She bound over to the dock, naked because she could be, the crooks of her legs scraped and jeweled with blood.

“If only ours had been so pretty,” Mary said, gently taking the snakeskin from Carol. “I’ll dry it from the rafters with the rest of them.”

The front door was open in greeting and Mary slid a tender palm along the wall as she slipped into the kitchen, the house creaking smally in response to the soft patter of her feet. Mary hummed to herself or the house as she climbed onto the kitchen table, her hair hanging long over her chest in tangles—she’d get Nancy to comb it for her, later before bed. Gently she draped the skin over the rafters and it shone and twinkled, a crystalline chandelier to light their dinners.

“There you go,” Mary said to the house, and a crow, perched on the windowsill above the sink, looked at Mary and then the snake before flying off when the hounds began to call. It did not fly far, just to the oak, for it was too hot to be startled away.

The house was on a hunting lake and the men used hounds. The hounds’ moans would rise from the woods that circled the shallow, tourmaline basin and the sound would echo across the water towards the house, drift up the shore and through the halls. From the kitchen Mary heard Nancy outside wail in return, Carol soon joining in. As though called Mary jumped from the table and ran to the door, stood on the threshold of the house to watch as Nancy and Carol danced on the dock as though the two were floating above the water, held fast in the thick light of the dying sun which cast the shadows that were dark enough to hold their secrets, howling not at the moon but the sky and the lake and the woods that surrounded it. As Mary stood, not quite outside, the heat pressed towards her, warm and familiar as tongues or the palm of a hand against her skin. But still, Mary felt light, as untethered to everything as Nancy and Carol were on the dock above the water, and as she stood in the mouth of her house she reveled—as she had every day for the last unknowable days—at all that the change had given them.

Mary could not remember how long ago it had happened, but she remembered all of the years that had led up to the change, and she remembered the summer when the change occurred, a summer nearly as hot as the one they lived in now. Days before it, when Mary was not yet young, her body had felt as though it were a dead thing as she laid on the bed in a circle of sweat. Bill had stared at her while he lit a cigarette before he scanned the floor for his belt. Mary’s arm dangled off the bed and blood jellied between her legs, the white linens stuck to her skin and soaked translucent, stained beneath her back like grease rings on parchment paper.

“I wish you would have told me you were on your period,” Bill said, exhaling smoke, the room and Mary’s body turning hazy with it.

Mary shrugged against the bed and watched the ceiling fan spin, the smoke and sunlight and dust swept up into the same unseeable particles of nothing. “You don’t mind,” she said, and the words were swept up too, up to the ceiling, flattened against the mauve-painted walls, slipped in loops around the tarnished gold bedframe, fluttered through the pink lace curtains, for though it was hot it was not so hot that things couldn’t still move through the air. Mary had had the bed and the room since she was a girl but now it was the guest room.

With his pants still unbuttoned Bill rested his hands on his hips and looked out the window at the lake, pearls of laughter coming in through the screen. A row of glossed porcelain cats sat on the sill baking in the summer sun, pink-nosed and milk-white and spotted grey.  On the dock, martini glass in hand, Nancy danced to nothing but the sound of the water lapping against wood and sand and rocks. Nancy’s husband, Frank, and Carol’s husband, John, were sitting in lawn chairs smoking cigars.

“Still.” Bill shrugged but didn’t say anything further. He zipped up his pants and buckled his belt.

Mary stood then, the sheets a second skin peeled from her body like a sunburn. She was warm, her cheeks red, and she didn’t care much about Bill. She looked in the vanity mirror framed with little white bulbs, photos from her childhood bent and creased and taped in the corners, an illegible love-note that still smelled like perfume yellowed and peaking from an unstamped envelope.  Despite being wet with sweat her skin was dry—old. Her bones were the same as they had been in high school when she had sat at the vanity getting ready for Friday nights, but her skin hung different, as if it didn’t quite fit, or it simply wasn’t hers. This period would probably be her last, she thought, and Bill should be grateful. He never was, but then again, none of them ever were.

“You’re bleeding on the floor,” Bill said and the bed springs groaned with his weight as he sat on a clean edge of the bed.

Mary looked down. She was bleeding on the floor. The blood formed small, perfect circles on the flat grey carpet that used to be white. Mary shrugged at it then but, as she looked at her blood, the air in the room seemed to clear of the smoke and the dust and the light. Everything seemed to show itself at once to Mary but she did not yet know what she needed to see. So rather than study her blood she once more studied her face in the mirror and while she did so she thought of nothing; she did not think about how they had come on this same vacation every summer for years, nor did she think of all the things she had dreamed up when she had been a girl sitting before the same mirror. Mary would soon leave the room that was now a guest room and ask Nancy to make her a martini, and the three couples would slip into the evening like the blood down her leg. They’d have dinner in a dim kitchen, the night coming in through the windows louder and closer than they, and when it was time to wake Mary would walk past the vanity on the way to the bathroom and not spare it a glance, not for fear of seeing herself but because it seemed too much to remember youth. It wasn’t the love letters or pink cheeks but the wild hope she once held, all she had imagined when she had laid in her bed on summer nights clear and bright as the moon.

That wasn’t, however, what had happened. When Mary woke the next morning it was in the blue hour, dawn hardly reflecting in the lake, and Bill was as pale as death in the nascent light. Although his skin appeared to have gone cold Mary could hear his warm, wet breath and she looked through the shadows to find what had startled her out of her sleep. At the foot of her bed was a child of about seven, her face hidden by tangled hair, her body naked though her skin was not the same blue as Bill’s, the moonlight not reaching her small feral frame. She held in one hand what appeared to be a blanket that trailed behind her. Mary, whose kids were grown and no longer visited the house, assumed, at first, herself to be in a dream, but nonetheless she spoke to the child.

“How’d you get into the house?” Mary asked, hushed with breath held, but the girl only giggled then quickly clasped a hand over her mouth. Mary shifted in her bed in unease and as she did so she realized her sheets were wet; she must have sweat during the night, the bedding sticking to her skin. She felt the sheets peel from her back as she sat all the way up to get a closer look at the girl.

“Mary,” the little girl whispered, and Mary’s skin crawled although she couldn’t quite feel it. Her heart beat and she suddenly felt charged with the knowledge of something light and impossibly free.

“Mary,” the girl repeated.

Mary tried to blink away the shadows and Bill continued to sleep.

“Mary,” the girl giggled again and this time she did not quiet herself, “it worked.” She began to prance and tramp about the room, and, sleep and dreams suddenly pulled from her body like thread, Mary recalled the night before.

Dinner had been cleared and the dishes were in the sink, the kitchen filled with the staticky sound of crickets and the lake and the fire the men were starting outside. Small papery moths that fit through the holes in the screen, drawn to the candles that Mary had lit, were nearly unseeable in the flickering light.

“Do you remember,” Nancy said, picking up a candle from the middle of the kitchen table. She tipped it just enough so that the wax spilled from its lip down onto the palm of her other hand, pale yellow like an echo of the sun. “Do you remember when this was fun?” The wax cooled and hardened in Nancy’s hand and she peeled it from her skin, set the coin down on the tabletop. None could remember because it had never been fun; not since they were children.

The candles flickered in a draft from the window and Mary suddenly saw the same light reflected back to her in a mirror. Startled she spoke without having planned to. “I remember that summer when we were seven, or eight maybe. When that kid down the way told us about Bloody Mary, and we stole those candles from that pharmacy in town. Remember, that night, how we went into the bathroom and turned off the lights?” Mary said it more to the kitchen itself than to Nancy or Carol, as though the memory belonged more to the house than to them, their childhoods too far from them, taken by marriage and raising their own children, growing old in other cities and towns, not on the shore of the lake and the sun.

In response Carol looked at her own hand, not pooled with wax but instead smally and almost imperceptibly scarred, a slight vein of silver burned down the stomach of her thumb. “I remember almost burning my hand off,” she said, offering a laugh quieter than the hum of the crickets. “I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to let a seven-year-old fumble with a lighter in the dark.”

“Wait,” said Nancy, pulling Carol’s hand into her own, holding Carol’s thumb up to the candle’s light. “You can still see where you burnt yourself?”

Carol nodded and Mary, seeing Nancy and Carol hand-clasped above the candle, suddenly remembered not just trying to conjure Bloody Mary but also her blood on the carpet. The same thought as before—the thought that she should be seeing something she was not yet seeing—squeezed around her heart and her heart seemed for a moment to beat in time with the moths’ small papery wings, erratic and panicked and on the cusp of a knowing or a possibility. But Mary assumed it was just the martinis and the wine, the saccharine dessert they had had after dinner; or perhaps it was just the night making her feel on edge in the way nights often do when one sits in them for too long without purpose.

Nancy, who was still holding Carol’s hand, now carefully dipped each of Carol’s fingertips into the melted wax puddled around the wick. Carol shimmered and shook with held-in giggles, Nancy’s eyes narrowed in focus and, though they were nothing but the small slits of a snake’s pupil, still they reflected the flame of the candle. Mary watched them, the two sitting in the kitchen in the night as though they were children, and suddenly the air that came in through the window above the sink felt thicker, heavier, either more real or less; Mary did not know which but still she could tell it carried something. It was as though the moon and stars beyond the house had shifted closer to watch Nancy and Carol too, the night and its darkness more present, a shadow seated with them around the table.

“Let’s do it again,” Mary said, once more speaking without having known she was going to.

Nancy looked up from her work on Carol’s hand and Carol too looked at Mary, her drunken giggles finally breaking free from her, her body wracked with laughter.

“What,” Nancy said, setting the candle down. “You want us to all squeeze into the bathroom and ask a ghost what our future is?”

“I, for one, already know my future,” Carol said before Mary could answer Nancy. Carol’s voice was slow with alcohol, and she didn’t look at Nancy or Mary or the night, just her own wiggling wax fingertips. “I think I’m having my last period, so with any hope my future includes a tropical island and a lot of men who aren’t John. No babies, no problems.” Carol laughed again, seeing only the fantasy inside her head, but still Mary saw more; she saw the flame and the night, the three of them hand-clasped in a circle. Mary remembered her own blood, how she too had been struck with the thought that she was having her last period.

Nancy rolled her eyes and she began to swat at Carol in dismissal when Mary interrupted her.

“I’m having my last period, too,” said Mary.

Nancy paused then and looked to Mary first, then to Carol second. She cocked her head. The crickets hummed and the moths fluttered. Carol’s earlier giggles echoed off both the lake and the sky although perhaps it was only laughter from the men around the fire outside drifting in with the night through the open windows. The moon and the stars came closer still, and, though a small gust of wind came then, weaving its way through the three of them, the candles did not snuff out, the flames steady and bright.

“Well then,” said Nancy, paying no mind to the still-lit candles and standing up from the table. “This calls for a celebration.” She looked for an unopened bottle of wine and poured three glasses, thick and red. “All of us, becoming barren at once.”

Carol took her glass eagerly and swallowed but Mary and Nancy did not touch theirs, Nancy simply raising hers to the middle of the table in cheers or in offering. “To becoming empty shells of women,” she said, though the other two did not raise their glasses in return; Mary ignored Nancy’s proclamation because she was looking at the chair where the shadow of night sat. It seemed to point her to the window above the sink, and when Mary followed the night’s finger she saw a glossed black crow perched on the sill, almost unnotable against the dark sky, but, because the stars and the moon were close, she could see. Mary nodded along with the night and shifted then, leaned across the table to blow out the candles.

The three sat for only a moment, all unable to see but to Mary, everything had suddenly become clear. “Follow me,” she said, and though she could hardly make out their bodies in the blackened room she could hear, in the creak of the floors, how Nancy and Carol stood, the women gathering in a line, hands settled on one another’s waists as they walked from the kitchen. In her own arms, Mary carefully carried the candles, still warm and wet with wax.

Mary, Nancy, and Carol ascended the stairs, stepping on the landings in the places they knew would not groan beneath their feet. Mary led them not to the bathroom but to the attic for she did not want the men to find them. She struck a match and the smoke lingered, the air in the attic unyielding, solid with dust and heat; it was the room in the house closest to the moon and the stars and so it was the heaviest, holding the nature of the sky. There was one window, small and octagonal, and though Mary lit each candle one by one the window did not betray the light—if Bill or John or Frank were to look up they’d only see black, the house’s third eye closed and asleep for the night.

The three women sat around the candles, palm in palm, held tight and threaded together with a sudden and wild hope. Their shadows loomed and stretched behind them, black and flat as though not of them, as if, in the attic in the light of the flickering flame, Mary, Nancy, and Carol had untethered themselves from their very bodies. Each drew in a stiff, deep breath and each held the stale air in their chests and stomachs and hearts before eventually exhaling, slowly and steadily breathing out a game of their childhood with just as much wonder and fear.

Bloody Mary Bloody Mary Bloody Mary, they chanted, none in time with the other so that the chant sounded more like a continuous pitched hum. At first, Mary thought of nothing but the words, about Nancy and Carol, the attic rippling and silver with heat from the closeness of their bodies, the candles and women alike aflame, the air between them a mirror.

Bloody Mary Bloody Mary Bloody Mary, they said again, eyes closed as though they existed only within the black stomach of the sky. Mary thought about being a child, stood in the bathroom with Nancy and Carol. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter in time with the beat of her heart and she wished, as she spoke, to be in that room again—she wished not for youth but for a freedom and possibility she now understood.

Bloody Mary Bloody Mary Bloody Mar—the candles snuffed out as Mary completed her silent wish. Carol shrieked, bringing her hands to her mouth in surprise, the chant and their circle broken. The shriek lingered because the air was still both thick and heavy and as it rang through the attic the women sat silently until it was gone, and as it left the stars and the moon returned to their proper places far from the house. After hardly a moment of silence, the women collapsed into laughter in the dark, hands blindly groping for one another once more as again their closed eyes watered and their ribs grew tough and breathless.

After, tired and sore from cackling and shrieking and rolling and chanting, they descended the stairs and each went to their rooms to sleep. Mary climbed in next to Bill, the bed dipping beneath her weight, and she had only just slipped into a shapeless dream when the little girl at the end of her bed had startled her awake.

Mary watched the girl now, how she twirled, her giggles as light and as shimmery as a pearl, as the water in the lake beyond the house. The sun had risen perhaps only a finger more but it was enough, the room shifting out of the empty blue of dawn to a tender, pale pink, and Mary could see that the little girl held not a blanket in her hand but something that looked like a skin, shed from a body much bigger than hers, hollowed and light but not, in the girl’s hand, a ghost.

In realizing what the girl held Mary looked down at her own bed, the sheets not wet with sweat but damp with the life of her own skin, peeled from her body and lying still and quiet next to Bill. Mary pressed her hands against her cheeks and neck and chest and stomach, her small knocked-kneed legs and sharp elbows. She held her palm before her eyes and studied it, smooth and unlined as if nothing were fated to happen again, her future as clear as the previous night’s sky. The little girl now kneeled on the foot of the bed, eagerly watching as Mary discovered that their magic had worked, and when Mary fully understood she looked at the girl once more. Though the girl’s eyes gleamed with a delight and wildness Mary had not seen in years she recognized Nancy, a child just as Mary now was.

“We should find Carol,” Nancy said, and Mary nodded, the two slipping from the bed and then the room hand-in-hand, their footfalls so light the house did not creak beneath them. But Carol was not in her room, her bed empty save John who slept as though nothing had happened. Quickly enough Nancy and Mary found her outside, floating in the golden, sun-stained water of the early morning lake.

“Where’s your skin?” Nancy called, and her voice skimmed the surface like a skipping stone.

Carol sunk beneath the sound for a brief moment before her head buoyed back up, her hair wet and slick and glittering the same as her mischievous eyes. “I hung it from the rafters in the kitchen to dry,” she called in return, and while the others considered this Carol stretched her arm out towards them, twisted her hand in the air as she admired it. “Isn’t it wonderful?” she asked then, her face widened with a smile as long as the shore. When she dropped her hand back down she hovered it just above the small, windless cat’s paws licking at her skin, a sudden seriousness clouding her delight. “There is, of course, a problem. We’ll have to do something with the men.”

“I’m sure there’s some magic for that,” Nancy offered, as if she had been considering it too.

Carol shrugged, the water rippling out in small circles around her submerged body. “If not there’s always the cellar,” she said and she laughed, a sound as golden as the sun. Carol then waded out onto the shore and joined Nancy and Mary, their bare feet in the sand, their hands reaching for one another without thought. Together they turned from the shimmering glamour of the lake, the sky and the water blended in the sunrise as one, and they looked at the house. Despite the early hour, the air was already still and hot, the curtains not fluttering in the upstairs windows. The house stared back at them, unblinking, its door open in greeting, and the three walked towards it to live not in their skins but inside their spell.