There is no one in the world like you except you.
That’s what Green and Ember told you when they brought you to their studio. At least, it’s someone’s studio. You don’t know who owns this white unfurnished chamber, but they have an easier time saying it’s theirs, same as their convenient monikers. Green with her mint-colored mohawk pulled up from a pale scalp; Ember with her red fiery fluff over bronze.
Whoever they are, whoever owns this studio, they’re paying, so you’re here. Ember stands behind an easel where a thick sketchbook clipped to the drawing board lets her scrawl charcoal and pencil unseen.
You sit empty-handed on a raised stage-like platform, a little nervous, a lot unclothed. Green perches behind you, coating oil over your bare back like she’s greasing an uncooperative wheel before a journey while she slides encouraging whispers into your ear.
“Hands clasped, look to Ember, hands clasped, don’t look down, look at Ember, you’re doing amazing, hands clasped.”
You’re half-listening, half-lost in memory, trying to recall what Ember said when this session began. The studio has no windows, only the stern wooden door where Green and Ember led you inside, but it must still be night outside. Not much time has passed, right? Too little for you to have grown fruit in your once-empty hands.
And yet a red apple sits between your fingers. You haven’t looked down—you’re behaving, a good model for Ember’s art—but you feel the weight on your palms, the crisp skin beneath your thumbs. If you push hard, you can dent and bruise the surface, and the flesh would turn earthen beneath.
Green’s gasp in your ear makes you jolt and cast your eyes down. Only a flicker, but in that instant you spy the apple. It wasn’t there before.
It isn’t there now. You blink, and it’s gone, and you hurry your gaze back to Ember before she or Green realize you’ve disobeyed.
They don’t seem to have noticed. Green works with you, Ember captures the act.
Another gasp flutters behind your ear. Warm breath follows it. You almost look back, but you don’t want to defy Green’s encouragement again.
Her teeth clack together. “I’m with you,” she says. “We’re in this together, our visages in Ember’s hands.”
You’re together on the platform in skin-to-skin contact, but you’re not really in this together, are you? Green isn’t your girlfriend, and Ember didn’t find the two of you. They came together. Green is more Ember’s collaborator, even as her oil-slick fingers dance over your naked shoulders and across your collarbone. You tense your chest against a gasp of your own, unsure if you’re supposed to react or enjoy this. When her hands dive deeper across sensitive nipples, you can’t hide an uncoiling shudder down your spine. Your head tilts back, exposing your throat.
It’s not complete disobedience—you’re not looking at Ember, sure, but you’re not looking down again either. You’re looking up, at the world above you, at Green.
At the face of a horned goat. Close enough to count the chin hair, to feel hot breath and take in the curve of the horns.
You crumple forward and scream, ducking your head beneath your hands. Green’s fingers withdraw from your chest, your shoulders. You feel her crouching beside you, hear her calling your name and asking, “What’s wrong?”
A pencil clacks on the hard floor, followed by a clatter of bootsteps. Ember leans against the platform’s edge and pries a hand from your head.
“What did you see?” she asks.
You tell her about the non-existent apple first, as if that matters. You then mention the goat, which stood where Green stands, but there’s nothing else here, only you and her. She stares into Ember until Ember hurries back to her easel and tears away the top page. When she brings it to the platform, you look, as if Green is still urging you to gaze ahead.
But you wish you hadn’t.
There’s a perfect black-and-white depiction of you upon the platform, on your knees, hands clasped, eyes staring out from the drawing. The only inconsistency between the art of you and reality is the apple in your charcoal hands.
Green’s depiction stands further off the mark. While the picture shows her hands slathering your body with oil, her torso remains unbent and upright. Another pair of arms break from her shoulders, raised to either side as if welcoming a pencil-drawn rain.
Her mohawk is gone, replaced by curved horns atop her goatish head.
“No way she could’ve seen,” Ember says.
Green beams. “It’s working.”
A nervous joy flits butterfly-like beneath their expressions, but they’re not too distracted to forget you. Both sets of eyes fall to yours, two blues, two hazels.
“You’re shaking,” Green says. “Let’s take five, yeah?”
* * *
Outside the chamber, the world is drywall and linoleum, and the glass windows frame a gloomy parking lot beneath a starless night sky. You find the restroom and have a cry, a terror piss, and a breather to check yourself in the mirror. You’re naked beneath a thick crimson robe, but you’ve been naked in tougher situations.
Remember, it could be worse. You’re at a three-way fork in your personal road, with no way to pay on rent, groceries, or student loans this week, or at least you were before this night began. Green and Ember are paying you to be here, and that matters. Better company with these two money-bound oddists or occultists or whatever they like to be called than back at the bar with Randolph and Jackson, playfighting over who gets to buy you another unemployment pity drink, and then fighting for real over who gets to take you home.
“You won’t hit me,” Jackson said earlier tonight. “You’re just a boy.”
“And you’re nothing but a yappy dog,” Randolph slurred, raising fists. “Still, we’re going to do this like men.”
You had no idea what movie either of them thought they were in, and you didn’t stick around for the climax, let alone the end credits where both men likely landed ass-first on the street.
Green surprised you, arm in arm with Ember. Both wore smiles on their faces as if they expected to find you outside the bar, and they had their explanation of art projects and payment all lined up. Someone in your social circle must have tipped Green off that you’d been fired from Patterson’s. You’d probably started the word down the grapevine while sucking down a sympathetic margarita.
“How comfortable are you naked?” Ember asked. “All the way?”
You never had to answer a question like that before.
Green popped in. “We need someone deep. Do you understand? There are so few truly deep people in the world. In fact, there is no one in the world like you.” She reached out to one side.
Ember grasped her hand. “Will you be that depth for us?”
You wanted to be. It warmed you to be told you were special. You had one other question for them though, inklings of instinct held tight since the days of listening for signals your parents were about to fight, a wariness for school kids about to hurt you. Life’s eternal lesson—best watch out for yourself, because no one else will.
“Is it dangerous?” you asked.
“Not for you,” Green said, quickly.
That was enough to bring you here, before appearing/disappearing apples and Green growing a goat’s head and horns because a picture told her to. These weird sensations make you wonder what exactly is in the oil Green’s been soaking into your skin. Some kind of drug? A poison? Were someone to lick you, would they die of your toxins? All for some hellish art project.
No matter where you go or who you’re with, it seems there’s always a battle.
The restroom door cracks open, and Ember’s red hair precedes her. “Ready for more?”
You don’t answer in words, but you follow her.
* * *
Back to the stern door, the chamber, the platform where Green helps you up and coils you into her limbs. Her hands are still slick with oil.
“More challenging angles this time,” Ember says from behind her easel. “Let it be pictured; let it be so.”
Your robe falls away as Green’s hands again run down your shoulders and creep toward your chest. She whispers for you to watch Ember, see her fingers coated by charcoal and graphite. A studious greed powers her eyes as she recreates you on paper.
This time, watching her is no struggle. You’re curious what exactly she’s drawing now. How much of her art will depict you and Green upon the platform? How much will deviate? Is there a difference when every artist molds the perceptions of real life through the lens of their art, and is that any different than what people choose to see, and not see, through their own eyes? Memory is imperfect, a fragment of perception.
Like art.
Green’s hands pass your chest and cross at the wrists over your belly. You aren’t sure how far down she expects to go, but you can’t help a glance this time.
Turquoise patterns swirl down her skin. You think they must form thin writing, a kind of tattoo, but they’re too plentiful to have gone outside your notice before.
Your eyes flick back to Ember. Has she drawn these markings on Green? What dictates the vibrant color when the art is black and white?
Green’s hands splay over your waist, and then she unfolds her wrists as if her hands are opening double doors.
A chasm gasps inside you. You feel it suck at the underside of your skin, a greedy mouth about to drop your flesh down some unseen pit. Ember and Green said you were deep before, but you hadn’t realized how much, and no one until now has treated you in a way to make you think so.
But there must be a far-reaching pit in your guts or heart or somewhere. Wind whistles down its throat, as if it has been covered all your life and only tonight has taken the chance to open.
You bite your lip to keep silent and then realize you’ll never forgive yourself if you don’t speak now.
“You said it wasn’t dangerous for me,” you whisper.
“Why would it be?” Green asks.
You have no answer. A funny feeling inside? You like the idea that you’re special and deep, but maybe you’re too special? Too deep? Somewhere down that inner pit lies a suspicion that Green and Ember are hiding something.
“Please,” Green says. “We need you. There’s no one in the world like you.”
You wish you knew what that meant. Something to do with your body, the pit inside, or your mind? Nothing’s clear anymore. You let her hands work down your abdomen, fingers plucking your nerves like the strings of an organic lute, like she might coax you into relaxed pleasure. It almost works.
But you tilt your head back, and the horned goat stares down, its strange eyes offering oblong darkness where two dark blobs seem to hold hands.
You jerk your head down. “We need to stop.”
Hot breath rushes past your ear. “We’re making terrific progress.” It should be Green—it sounds like Green—but it’s not quite Green.
“I don’t want to do this anymore,” you say, to whoever or whatever will listen.
“But you want to pay your student loans and rent,” the Green-like voice says. “You want to eat, don’t you?”
That three-way fork of misery stretches through your mind. You focus again on Ember and her easel, imagining the goat head she must have drawn in place of Green’s. How many limbs does it have this time? What else will change in the picture? On the platform?
In you?
Your eyelids stiffen, and you count how many seconds you stare between blinks. Eleven at first, because you’re thinking too hard about it. And then twenty seconds. Thirty. You manage forty-five before your eyes water. Goat whiskers tickle your ear, and you blink hard, shudder, and then stare ahead again, as if watching Ember will stop the night, as if averting your gaze from the changes means they aren’t happening.
As if you have any control of your life.
When has that ever been the case? Remember when you were that kid who tried to keep your parents from fighting? They’d only argue worse, no different than the boys at the bar. And when you tried to keep your head down at school, that would only draw the hellspawn to your scent.
Everywhere, everyone, a battle. You’ve never had a say. Never taken a stand. Every job, you’ve been the one fired, never the one who quits. Every relationship, you’ve been dumped, never the one who dumps. Is there really a three-way fork of misery in your future, or do they all loop back onto the same broken highway? Would you know the difference even if signposts marked the off-road ditch every couple miles?
The pit within doesn’t answer, but you can always try. Your hand twitches at the beginning of choice—you can disrupt the reality of Ember’s drawing by removing your body from her sight. Fingers grope for the robe and draw it toward your body. You brush away Green’s still-human hands.
“You can’t,” she says. “We need you. There’s—”
“I know,” you say. “There’s no one in the world like me. But that’s too bad.”
Your legs tense as you begin to rise. You’re finally making a decision for yourself, and maybe fate will be kind in return. A detour might open, an exit, even a trail of matted grass carved by wildlife. There can be other directions in life besides those handed to you, and you’ll find them outside this room, somewhere in the night.
If only you could get up.
Your legs are no longer the firm limbs of bone and toned sinew that carried you out of the bar earlier tonight. They’re limp, toeless wads of flesh, like grand slugs stretching from your thighs. Your arms, too, have gone boneless from the elbows down. Your fingers have fused into awkward lumps. There’s a hardness to their ends, and you wonder if these are your knuckles or the forming of hooves.
“You can’t go,” Green says. “We have to keep you. We’ve learned we have no choice.”
Hard surfaces clack down the chamber, and you turn from your traitorous limbs to the easel, and Ember. She’s placed her hands around her ream of paper, and she’s midway through turning the easel so you can see what she’s made of you.
“Did you really think you were the first?” Ember asks. “That we’ve perfected the technique all in one night? We’ve been so close before.”
Your test your lips, tongue, jaw—all still yours. “Let me go,” you say. “If you’ve done it before, you can find someone else.”
“Weren’t you listening? There’s no one in the world like you.” Ember raises her pencil, deadlier than a pistol. “Because when they tried to walk, we stopped them. You’re all that’s left, and we’re too close to move on. Now slide back into Green’s arms. She’s cold and lonely.”
It isn’t your choice to return to Green’s embrace; she lays her hands on your chest again. Coarse hair brushes your spine, and you wonder how goatish she’s become, why that particular animal might be important. Something about the eyes, the way their pupils resemble figures with clasped hands, their echo of a divided world.
You catch glimpses of the art ahead, in the momentary gaps where Ember’s torso and limbs give way to the paper and its cursed drawing. There, a curved horn. In the corner, a sluggish former leg.
Other shapes surround you and Green in the picture, odd angles and crude markings in the same swirly patterns as decorate Green’s skin. There are gaps in the paper, too, as if Ember has drawn another artist into the picture who likewise blocks and reveals sections of the drawing with her body.
The same gaps open beyond the easel. You feel one inside, don’t you? And look out the corner of your eye—there’s another, a breach in the studio’s white wall.
A swirling blue hall opens where there has never been a door, at least that you could see. Indiscernible figures wander a path in the darkness, their midnight-blue robes flaring behind them, their white masks never glancing your way, as if you and Green and Ember are the bizarre sight and they are travelers walking their own doomed road. You wonder if they’ll find a three-way fork ahead.
Another breach slides open in a shadowy corner near the studio’s exit. And then another parts its lips in the wall near the platform.
Ember’s pencil turns brutal against the paper’s corners, a hurricane of crosshatching shadows and dark smears. The more furious her strokes, the more friction blurs and distorts the studio’s edges, as if the entire world were one great sketchbook ravaged by an artist caught between brilliance and madness.
“It’s time,” Green whispers.
“Almost,” Ember says.
Green’s hands rise beside your head. They also remain upon your chest and belly. She must have four of them, maybe more. Some might wander the room unseen, helping Ember to stretch open the world.
“We’re ready,” Green says. “I feel it.”
Last chance. You flop your dead-fish limbs on the platform, hoping for some detour off this universal page. Reality to art, art to reality—none of it matters outside this room. That must be why they’ve chosen it. You’re only one person they found on the street; this shouldn’t be your problem.
But it isn’t your choice either. Unique as you are, it was never about what you wanted. Nothing ever has been.
“Now, my love!” Green shouts, and you think you hear bleating beneath her voice.
“Yes,” Ember hisses.
She curls her fist around her pencil, raises it high over her head, and stabs knife-like into the drawing. You catch another glimpse of the worlds she’s opened at the page’s edges—heavenly bodies in space, paths through strange nothingness, an infinity divided by triangles and eyes.
And then her stained fingers dig into the paper and shred it from the center, tearing open both the art and the world.
It gasps around you, the sudden light shocked to find this mundane room thrown into its splendor. The opening draws from the torn edges around you, but also it gapes from the pit you never knew stretched within your body, your soul. The depth you cherished, and the others craved.
You are open now, like you never have been. Had Green and Ember found you years ago and worked subtly at this chasm within, maybe your openness would have spilled honesty into the world. No more trying to please parents, employers, peers, lovers—you would have told them how you felt, and maybe they would have run, or maybe they would have wanted you. Loved you.
But that road lies far behind.
You’re here instead, where Green’s goat-head has returned to its vibrant mohawk and human shape, where Ember’s bootsteps storm through the studio, onto the platform, into a light so thick it runs river-like from your belly. If the world is paper, you’re the bridge between one side of the sheet and the other, and the whole thing is folding around as if you’re both inside and outside yourself. A thousand edges, many thousand sides to some cosmic papery shape.
You’ve become a sucking wound, and reality won’t suffer you for the length of time those parents, employers, peers, and lovers suffered you. Everything is open; everything is closing.
“Hands clasped,” Green says.
“Don’t look down,” Ember says.
Two heavy stones make to drop into your river—Green and Ember, clasping each other’s hands. At a surface-level touch, you glean a surface-level understanding. There’s something in the world they want to escape, and this might be their way off that road. There’s also something in the beyond they want to reach, and they’re going through you to get it.
Fixing the rip lies outside their power or yours; the world will close this wound on its own. There’s little time left to decide anything, and your image has already been determined by Ember’s broken drawing.
But not their images. Ember may have jellied your limbs, but she and Green haven’t broken your willpower. Fate may offer a fork in its path for them, too.
You’ve never had a say. Take a stand now. If you can’t win the battle, make a stalemate.
As Green and Ember slip into your doorway’s waters, you stretch your spine the way you did when Green’s fingers danced pleasantly down your skin. The doorway twists with muscle and flesh.
And it twists against Green, the more malleable of the couple. Ripples surge through your river, and she’s thrown one way while Ember sinks elsewhere.
They have one frozen moment to realize their hands have come unclasped, no stronger than two slugs seeking each other in the dark, and then Ember drifts one way, Green another. Both vanish into the blue-folded currents without so much as a thanks or a scream.
You can’t really blame them. You’re about to do the same. At least they won’t enjoy what’s to come any more than you will.
Reality’s page finishes folding, pushing you into yourself until you erupt out the far side of your doorway. You should be torn inside-out, but instead you’re plummeting into the thick light. The breaches you glimpsed in Ember’s art and from the platform ripple open, but none of them show the studio, the stern door, the hallway, the windows to the parking lot and the familiar night.
There is no one in the world like you anymore. Not even you.