Page 4 of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“This is Esther,” Pearl said to the woman she’d been talking to. “Electrician. Esther, this is Abby in maintenance, she lived in Australia last year!”

Abby and Pearl were giggling at each other, cheerfully drunk.Pearl poured all three of them a shot, then poured Esther an extra after she’d gasped down the first. Already she was feeling better, shaking off the malaise that had been clawing at her throat. She was a person made for the present, not the past. She couldn’t afford to forget that.

The party had done its job in starting to wipe away the over-winters’ protective isolationism, and soon enough there was dancing, more drinking, a weird game that involved shouting the names of birds, even more drinking. A beaker, predictably, puked. Pearl and Abby spent some time screaming happily in one another’s faces about someone they somehow knew in common from Sydney, someone who had a really bad dog, and then Pearl dragged Esther onto the makeshift dance floor and wrapped her long, leggy body around Esther’s shorter one. The music was deep and pulsing and soon they were grinding like they were in a real club and not in a little heated box on a vast stretch of ice, many thousands of miles away from anything that might be called civilization.

Esther pushed Pearl’s hair off her sweaty face and tried not to think about her family or her father’s warnings or about the days that had ticked by since November2. She focused instead on the present, on the thump of the bass and the feel of Pearl’s body against hers. She thought,I wish I could do this forever.

But there was no “forever” where bodies were concerned, and eventually she had to pee.

In contrast to the noisy clamor of the party, the bathroom down the hall was almost eerily silent when Esther banged through the door and fumbled with her jeans. The sound of urine echoed loudly in the stainless-steel bowl and she could hear her own drunken breath, heavy from dancing, raspy from talking. The flush was a roar. At the sink, she paused in front of the mirror. With one finger she smoothed back a dark eyebrow, batted her eyelashes at herself, wound a few locks of hair around her finger to give her loose curls more definition. Then she stopped. Squinted.

There was a series of small marks along the mirror’s perimeter, brownish red smears that sat atop the glass. They were symmetrical but not identical, one at each corner, a swipe as if with a paintbrush or thumb. She leaned close, examining, and wet a piece of paper towel to rub them off. The towel did nothing, not even when she added soap, her heart climbing into her throat. She tried to scratch the marks off. They didn’t budge.

She stepped back so quickly she nearly fell.

A person didn’t grow up like Esther had without recognizing the sight of dried blood, much less a pattern of it that could not be removed, and no one could grow up like she had without recognizing what that bloody pattern might imply. The smell of yarrow returned to her, though whether it was in her mind or here in the bathroom she wasn’t certain.

Blood. Herbs.

Somebody here had a book.

Somebody here was doing magic.

“No,” Esther said aloud. She was drunk, she was paranoid, she’d been locked in a cement box for six months and now she was seeing things.

She was also stepping away from the mirror, eyes still locked on her own terrified face, scared to turn her back on the glass. When she bumped up against the bathroom door, she whirled around and slammed through it, then ran down the narrow hallway toward the gym. The cardio room was so bright it seemed to buzz, the equipment standing in mechanical rows on the padded gray floor and the green walls making everything appear sickly pale. There was a couple making out on one of the weight benches, and they squawked in alarm as Esther crashed past them and into the gym’s white, single-stalled bathroom.

The same reddish-brown marks were on the mirror, the same pattern. They were on the mirror in the bathroom by the rec room, too, and the one by the laboratory, and the one by the kitchen. Esther stumbled to her bedroom, heart in her throat, but thank god her own mirror was untouched. Probably just the public mirrors had been marked—a smallcomfort. She couldn’t smash every mirror in the station without calling attention to herself or getting in trouble.

Esther locked the door behind her, standing in front of her mirror with her hands on the top of her low dresser, leaning her weight on the wood so she could think. Clearly this was some kind of mirror magic, but she was too freaked-out and drunk to recall what that might entail. One of her family’s books could turn a mirror into a kind of mood ring, the glass reflecting a person’s true emotions for an hour or so, and then there was that mirror in Snow White, the one that told the evil queen about the fairest in the land... but was that kind of magic just fairy-tale shit, or was it real life?

She needed sobriety, clarity. She hung her head and steadied her breath. On the dresser, bracketed between her hands, sat the novel she was translating from Spanish to English, and she stared at its familiar green cover, at the decorative border and stylized sketch of a dark doorway beneath the title.La Ruta Nos Aportó Otro Paso Naturalby Alejandra Gil, 1937. As far as Esther had been able to find, this novel was Gil’s first and only publication—and it was also the only thing Esther owned that had belonged to her mother, Isabel.

Inside the cover was a tightly controlled cursive note; a translation of the title, in Esther’s mother’s perfect hand. “Remember,” her mother had written to herself in English: “The path provides the natural next step.”

Esther’s stepmother, Cecily, had given her this novel when she was eighteen, the day before she’d left home forever, and at the time Esther had needed the translation. Spanish should have been her mother tongue, but Isabel had died when Esther was too young for language, and so it was only her mother’s tongue. But it was the Spanish title she’d gotten tattooed across her collarbones several months later: “la ruta nos aportó” on the right, “otro paso natural” on the left. A palindrome and thus readable in the mirror.

The party felt like it had been hours ago, though the sweat from dancing was still drying on Esther’s skin. She had stripped down to onlya black tank top; now she was shivering. In the glass, she could see the words of her tattoo around the straps of her shirt. When she’d first gotten the ink, she had just fled her home and family and been feeling adrift and frightened in a world that suddenly lacked any kind of structure, so the mere suggestion of a path, much less a natural next step, had been infinitely soothing to her. But now that she was nearing thirty, spoke excellent Spanish, and most importantly had actually read the novel, she understood that Gil’s title was not meant to be soothing at all. Rather, it spoke of a kind of preordained movement, a socially constructed pathway that forced people, particularly women, into a series of steps they’d been tricked into believing they’d chosen for themselves.

These days the words struck her as a rallying cry: not to follow the path, but to veer from it. In fact, this very phrase had helped her make the decision to ignore her father’s long-ago orders and stay in Antarctica for the summer season.

A decision she was now terrified she might come to regret.

“Leave every year on November2,” he had said, “or the people who killed your mother will come for you, too. And not only you, Esther. They’ll come for your sister.”

For these past ten years, she had listened, she had obeyed. Every November1 she had packed up her things and every November2 she had started moving, sometimes driving for that long day and night, sometimes taking a series of buses, planes, trains, not sleeping. From Vancouver to Mexico City. From Paris to Berlin. From Minneapolis to Antarctica. Every year, like clockwork, except this year. This year she had ignored his warning. This year she had stayed.

And now it was November5, the station was filled with strangers, and one of them had brought a book.

2

The cat was back.

Joanna could hear him scratching at the front door, a plaintive sound like branches skidding across a roof. It was five in the evening and already growing dim, the sliver of sky outside her kitchen window fading from white to a smudgy charcoal gray. The weatherman on the radio that morning had said it might snow and she’d been hoping for it all day; she loved the first snow of the season, when all the faded browns of the sleeping earth were awakened into a new kind of aliveness, everything coarse made suddenly delicate, everything solid turned lacy and insubstantial. Magic that didn’t need words to enact itself year after year.

The cat scratched again, and Joanna’s heart lurched. She’d seen him stalking around her dead garden last week, a young blocky-headed tomcat, skinny and striped, and she’d put out a bowl of tuna one night and a bowl of sardines the next and now he had grown bold. But she couldn’t attend to him right now: the stove was lit, herbs were charring in a pot, and her hands were covered in blood.

That last was her fault. She’d cut too deeply into the back of her left hand and instead of a trickle she’d gotten a flood. Even after she’d measured out the half ounce she needed, her hand bled sluggishly through the bandages, and it hurt more than she’d anticipated. It would be worth it if this worked—but this was her thirty-seventh attempt since she’d begun trying a year and a half ago, and so far, all she had to show for her troubles was a growing collection of thin white scars on her hands. She had no real expectations that now would be any different.

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