1.27

“This isn’t what it looks like,” she said.

It looked bad. I didn’t exactly know what was going on, but as my fight-or-flight reflexes slowly uncoiled themselves from the throttlehold they had on my windpipe, I finally started seeing. The scales littered all around the tiny bathroom were making small shuffling noises in the breeze from the open window. A few floated up and got stuck on the sidewalls or nestled in among the haircare products in the shower. They seemed delicate, like the thinnest shaving of wood left on the floor of a craftsman. That’s what they were, too; detritus from a transformation of gnarled oak into velvet-smooth wooden figurine. Her eyes were big and luminous, filled with some emotion—I couldn’t read her face to specify. It was too alien to me, too far removed from my slight experience. She reached out and shoved me away, her hands almost too-soft and yielding, the fingers bowing out from the pressure. I stumbled back into the hallway of our shared apartment space as the door slammed shut.

She, panicked, yelled “I’ll clean it up! Just give me a minute.” Scales billowed around the crack at the bottom of the door.

I picked one up, and it immediately fractured in my hand. I let it drop and picked up another, more careful this time. I held it up to the light, and I could see my fingerprints on the other side: a slight oil signature I had never thought about before. The surface of the little thing seemed to bend the light into vivid rainbow patterns, prisming the result into exactly her shade—the one you would name if you knew her long enough, knew her right down to the deeps and people asked you who she was, and they’d look at you funny unless they knew her first.