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O n , it snows.

Johnny needs to bury the evening before.

The ugliest moments, the blue light flash of Johnny’s phone on Alice's face, the loitering void of almost losing her, dims and dies under the cleansing white of fresh winter. Johnny needs to keep Alice, preserve the possibility of the two of them. She prunes pieces of time toward her purpose. She smothers the world in a pristine blanket of snow. She is an expert on forgetting.

Johnny and Alice peek through the bedroom window as crystalline flakes drift down from a powder sky. Snow drifts pile up, one-two-three stories, and the billboard across the street wears a frosty beard. The slogan reads: Call now! There’s a phone number too. Tucked beneath the powder where Johnny cannot see.

“It’s good you stayed over again,” Alice says, rubbing her crossed arms as she clutches herself. “Your place must be totally snowed in. I’ll turn on the heat.”

Johnny checks her phone. Dead. “Did you get anything?” she asks. “A severe weather warning?” Alice’s bare feet clap against the living room tile. There’s a click as she adjusts the dial. “Yesterday was what? In the 80s, I think.”

“Something like that,” says Alice. The heat kicks on, burning off dust and pumping the acrid scent through the vents.

“I’ve never seen anything like this.” Johnny is still looking out the window when Alice returns to the room.

“Climate change.” Alice shrugs.

Johnny’s imagining people beneath that blanket of snow, covered up like ants in a dirt hill. Is snow heavier than dirt? Flesh is softer than an ant’s carapace, more tender and malleable. “Do you think they’re okay?”

“Who?”

“The people lower down.”

“Which people?”

“Lower down.”

Alice tugs on a flannel shirt and fluffy boots. “Let’s make the best of this. I’ll light a fire.”

Johnny follows her to the living room where a stone fireplace dominates the main wall. Cut logs are stacked in a leaning tower inside, and Johnny is sure there was no fireplace yesterday or the day before. But then, they hadn’t needed one. Monday and Tuesday had been warm. The snow came and the need for heat arose and the fireplace appeared to meet the need.

When Alice claps her hands, Lucy, black as midnight with three serpentine heads, her body sleek and scaled, spits fire across the center of the room. The wave of heat sends Johnny backward, flames roaring, wood cracking under the sudden blast. The mouth of the hearth stretches up to the ceiling, yawning eight feet wide. Lucy, the creature that answers to Lucy, narrows three sets of yellow eyes in a satisfied grin. Her long necks weave and braid together, dipping and bending like kelp in a deep sea. In a shiny blur, she turns and kicks off, smashing through the sliding glass door, launching from the railing, and sprouting leathery wings at the apex of her leap, just in time to glide off into the white-out sky.

“Warmer now?” Alice asks, rubbing her palms together.

Glass falls in sheets from the borehole in the patio door. Ice crystals form along the jagged perimeter, and Johnny’s breath hangs thick in the frosty air. “No,” she says.

“Come closer.” Alice wraps an arm around Johnny’s waist, pulling her toward the inferno nestled in the wall. “Reminds me of Christmas.” Flames dance in her irises. “Remember that Christmas?”

Christmas with Alice is something Johnny remembers. It happened last year. They wore matching Santa hats. Burnt sugar cookies. Wore PJs all day. Johnny had a record made of Alice’s favorite songs. Alice gave her a teal teddy bear, unwrapped, with the price tag still dangling from its ear. Johnny glances around the living room, through the buckled radiance of fire where no fire should be. “Where’s your record player?”

“Oh.” Alice hugs her body tight. “Probably in storage.”

Where is the record I got you? is what Johnny means to ask.

“You still have Teddy.” It’s a conclusion, not a question. “What did you name it again? Cleo?”

“Clea,” Johnny says.

“Clea,” Alice says. “Clea, Clea, Clea. I’ll remember now.” Her phone buzzes in the bedroom. She follows the sound and Johnny is alone with the fire and then, “Do you mind if Brynne stops by?”

“Who?”

“Brynne.” Johnny doesn’t know the name, although Alice says it like she should. “Just for a few,” Alice says.

Johnny roils, dizzy and sick. There is so much she will accept: short hair, a fireplace, a dog-turned-dragon. But this shouldn’t be happening. It needs to be just them two, nobody else because?—

A knock at the door.

“That’s her!” Alice chirps, sweeping from the room to answer.

Through the front door comes the curly-haired woman from the Speakeasy Café, bundled in a scarf and overcoat, the perfect amount of powdery snow speckled in her hair.

“Brynne, Johnny. Johnny, Brynne.” Alice helps the woman out of her coat, hanging it on the hook behind the door. “Will you stay for dinner?”

Johnny doesn’t understand. They just woke up and now?—

“Johnny is cooking. She’s been planning quite the feast,” Alice says.

“I’d love to stay,” Brynne answers. “Vegan?”

“Always.”

Johnny looks from one to the other, then past the fire and through the shattered glass door, where the sun bows low in the sky. Everything is moving faster now, changing faster. Wooly clouds are trimmed in bronze beams. The sun is a star , Johnny thinks. She forgets that sometimes, but the sun is a star. Not the star. Just a star. Only the star for those on Earth, who see it brighter than everything else.

In the terminus of the horizon, a dark shape dives. Just a speck. An arrowhead that might be a tear in a dream or a dragon or a French bulldog called Lucy.

Inside the apartment, drywall crumbles around yesterday’s pockmark.

Within the pockmark is a chasm, within the chasm is a void, and within that void, shimmering liquid black. An iridescent, beating darkness. A living darkness. Red numbers on the oven clock read 6:36. “Any allergies?” Johnny asks, though she’s not sure why. It feels rehearsed, like she’s following a script she long ago memorized, though she can’t recall its purpose.

Johnny forgets things.

But I remember.

“Nuts,” the woman says.

Johnny nods, walking into the kitchen like a moon caught in orbit. Pans lay on unlit burners, cooking oil sits beside the stove. “Do you have any…” Johnny trails off. She’s not vegan. She doesn’t know how to cook vegan food.

“Seitan?” Alice asks.

“I love seitan,” Brynne says.

“Fried, right, Johnny?”

“Fried,” Johnny says, though she doesn’t know how to fry seitan. Johnny doesn’t know what seitan is. She doesn’t know how to fry anything.

“Where’s Lucy?” Brynne asks, Alice leading her to the living room.

The couch is gone, replaced by the roaring fire which is smaller now, just fireplace-sized. The women squeeze together in an overstuffed leather loveseat with brass studs. New. Not the secondhand couch that was here before. Alice and Brynne needed a loveseat and so a loveseat appeared to meet the need. They face away from Johnny and the kitchen, looking out over the winter-crowned city. Around their shoulders is the jaguar blanket. Real fur. Head on, snarl bared beneath green glass eyes, and jaws resting in the crook of Brynne's neck.

“Lucy’s exploring,” Alice says, indicating the hole in the sliding glass door.

“You know her. She’ll be back by morning.” Does she say it to Johnny or Brynne?

Why would Brynne know Lucy?

Johnny finds a package in the fridge labeled seitan and pulls it from the shelf.

Oil pops in the pan, though she doesn’t recall turning on the burner, or pouring the oil.

“How did you get here?” Johnny asks.

Silence from the living room.

She adds, “I just mean, the weather. The snow.”

“Oh,” Brynne says.

Johnny can’t see her face, but she imagines Brynne's eyes rolling. “I’m from Ithaca. We’re used to this kind of weather. I wore my coat.”

“But the roads…” Johnny starts.

“Were cold,” Brynne finishes.

In every version of this, Brynne and Alice exchange a mocking look. Johnny doesn’t see it, but she feels it happening, a tightening in the air like a hand around her throat. Like fingers squeezing, closing her airway, she can almost feel the blood vessels pop in her eyes. Red numbers scroll across the oven clock: 0-112-358-1321 , pouring endlessly like a hemorrhage. She thinks of predators and prey. She smells blood.

Smoke slithers off boiling oil, unfurling in dread-leaden ribbons. They buck and billow, soaking into her hair and eyes and nostrils, wild as a dream. Johnny feeds it seitan, which the oil gobbles up with a hiss.

“Ready?” Alice asks.

Through the kitchen keyhole cutout, a table stretches the length of the living room. Candelabras burn gold beneath candlelight. Long white tapers dribble wax to a linen table-runner that’s black and red and mustard yellow and patterned. China gleams in ornate setups. Metallic lips on ladles. Smaller plates stacked atop larger ones. Serving spoons. Tongs. Napkins folded into flowers and real flowers, hydrangeas, overflow a silver basin centerpiece, dragonflies flitting from one blossom to another.

Alice sits at the head of the table. A gilded chair frames her head, and beyond that, melt drips from the borehole in the sliding glass door. Brynne, at her right hand, wears a ballgown. Blue satin. Or silk. Johnny doesn’t know which because Johnny’s not an expert on fabrics or fashion. They’re talking about, laughing about, that Chinese spot in Harlem. The lady with the Maltese. Or was it a poodle? They can’t remember, and the Lyft driver’s accent. Russian, they think, but it might have been Bulgarian. Brynne imitates the back-of-throat position of his words, and Alice chuckles, trying her own hand at hyelloh! A memory shared between just the pair. A one-two hiphop Johnny doesn’t know.

Fireplace, gone.

Loveseat, gone.

Outside, snow changes shape. Collapses.

When Johnny looks down, she’s dressed in a three-piece suit with tails, seated opposite Alice at the table’s far end. Twelve feet of oak stretch between them, adorned with heaping plates of broccoli, Brussel sprouts, candied carrots, fried seitan, leafy salads with cut strawberries, fluffy rolls, and all manner of lidded sauce boats wreathed in steam.

“A feast,” Brynne says, a fork in one hand, knife in the other.

Dinner is played in grating keys of silver gnashing porcelain. Brynne and Alice scrape salad onto plates with a nightmarish fervor, speckling the runner with shades of wilted green. Alice stabs food and lifts it, but never eating, never eating while Brynne chews, chews, crunches, chews. Ice clinks in glasses, metal on metal on wood on china, clink clink , a clash of a symphony of hunger of need of giggles Johnny can’t join—a song of the damned like a choir of demons screaming hoarsely screaming and all of it, the sound, the smell of boiled broccoli, the—the cackling at the man with the mustache on the subway and the party that wasn’t a party at all, and the sum of it, all the sounds and sights and smells of it taken together makes Johnny nauseous; the changing and the laughing and the wrongness and nothing is as it was and the hacking. The hacking cough and the strained, weak whisper of strangled breath and Johnny thinks for a moment she has panicked, has had an attack, but then Brynne stands with such force the chair shoots out behind her, legs shrieking against the tile. Hands enclose her own throat, amber eyes bulge and the vein pops in her temple.

Brynne’s iris bleeds yellow. It’s dissolving, staining the whites around it, and the coughing stops, and Brynne’s chin juts up and out. And silence. Stagnant, desperate silence.

“She’s choking!” Johnny cries.

Alice blots the corner of her mouth with a cloth napkin.

Brynne gapes around air that doesn’t pass her straining lips.

Johnny stands, freezes, the table shuddering under her force, bottles clinking. Bottles clinking that catch her attention. Emerald glass, the label reading Peanut Oil , a skull and crossbones drawn beneath. Is that what she used in the kitchen? Is that how she fried the seitan?

Brynne’s fingernails rake her purpling neck, leaving white then yellow then pink railroad tracks. The allergy, Johnny remembers, but had she used peanut oil… That she didn’t recall, but she does recall that she forgets things. She often forgets inconvenient things and Brynne’s eyes are rolling and the grip on her neck goes slack as she slumps, mid-air, folded for the longest fraction of a second in time, then collapses, head smacking the corner of the table on the way down.

Alice looks. Goblet in hand and red wine leaking down her chin.

Blood pours. A hemorrhage. Soaks curly hair. Following the channels in the grout. Pumping. Spreading. Until it pumps and spreads no more.

By Thursday morning, the apartment is thick with a metallic scent, and Brynne is dead.