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Maman was darting in and out of her daughter’s face again, unhappy to be so soundly ignored. Laylee swatted at Maman’s insubstantial figure, her face pulled together in dismay. The daughter ducked twice and eventually gave up, carrying her dinner into the sparsely furnished living room and, once newly settled onto the softest part of the threadbare rug, Laylee cracked open the dinnerbox. The room was lit only by moonlight, but the distant orb would have to do. Laylee dropped her chin in one hand, crunched quietly on a snowflake the size of her face, and thought wistfully of the days she used to spend with children her own age. It had been a long time since Laylee had been to school, and she missed it sometimes. But school was a thing of luxury; it was meant for children with working parents and domestic stability—and Laylee could no longer pretend to have either.
She bit into another snowflake.
The first fresh flakes of the season were made entirely of sugar—this was a magic specific to Whichwood—and though Laylee knew she should eat something healthier, she simply didn’t care. Tonight she wanted to relax. So she ate all five flakes in one sitting and felt very, very good about it.
Maman, meanwhile, had just concluded her monologue and was now moving on to more pressing issues (the general state of the house, the more specific mess in the kitchen, the dusty hallways, her daughter’s damaged hair and callused hands) when Laylee retreated upstairs. This was Maman’s daily routine, and Laylee was struggling to be patient about it. She’d stopped responding to Maman long ago—which helped a bit—but it also meant that sometimes several days would pass before Laylee would speak a single word, and the loneliness was beginning to scar. Laylee hadn’t always been such a silent child, but the more anger and resentment welled up inside of her, the less she dared to say.
She was a girl who rarely spoke for fear of spontaneously combusting.
Laylee had locked herself in the toilet for far longer than was necessary. The bathroom was the one place Maman would not haunt her (just because she was dead did not mean she’d lost her sense of decency), and Laylee cherished her time in this unholy space. She’d just finished mixing a soaking solution in a copper basin (warm water, sugarsalt, rosehip oil, and a snip of lavender) for her aching hands when she noticed something strange.
It was slight, but it was there: The tips of her fingers were going silver.
Laylee gasped so deeply she nearly knocked over the bowl. She fell to her knees, rubbing at her skin like she might undo the harm, but it was no use.
It had been hard enough to watch her eyes turn, and even more devastating when her hair went, too, but this—this was dire indeed. Laylee could not have known then the full extent of the damage she’d inflicted upon her body, but she knew enough to understand this: She was irrevocably ill from the inside out, and she didn’t know what to do.
Her first thought was to appeal to Baba.
She’d begged him countless times to return home, but he could never see the sense in her words. Baba had become increasingly delusional over the years, never certain whether he existed in the world of the living or the dead. After Maman died, he fully unzipped from what little sense he had left; now he was forever lost in transit, and there was nothing Laylee could do about it. Just a little longer, he’d always say, in his charming, clumsy way. I’m nearly there. Baba kept his teeth in his pocket, you see, so it was very difficult for him to enunciate.
I should explain.
Once upon a time, Baba had seen Maman at the marketplace and had very swiftly fallen in love with her. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence for Maman; in fact, strangers had been known to fall in love with her with some frequency. She was, as you might have suspected, a supremely beautiful woman—but not in any common, familiar sort of way. No, Maman was the kind of beautiful that ruined lives and relieved men of their sanity. She had a face that was impossible to describe and skin so luminous it looked as though the sun itself had haunted her. And while it was true that many residents of Whichwood had beautiful skin (they were a golden kind of people, even in the winter, with brown skin bronzed by daylight), Maman outshone the lot of them, wrapping her hair in vibrant, fluid silks that made her glimmering skin appear absolutely other. And her eyes—deep and dazzling—were so captivating that passersby would faint dead away at the sight of her. (You might now hazard a guess as to how Laylee inherited her good looks.) Maman was courted by nearly every person brave enough to fight for her affection, and though she did not hate her beauty, she hated being defined by it, so she dismissed every suitor just as quickly as they came.
But Baba was different.
He wasn’t particularly handsome, but he was a man who lived to get lost in emotion, and he was desperate to be in love. After learning that Maman worked at her family’s dental practice, he made a plan. Every day—for just over a month—he paid to have a tooth pulled just to be able to spend time with her. He’d lie back and listen to her talk while she extracted healthy teeth from his open mouth, and each day he would stumble home bloody and aching and thoroughly, hopelessly in love. It was only after he’d run out of teeth that Maman finally fell for him, and though Baba was proud of their unusual courtship, Laylee found their story to be inexpressibly stupid, and it took no small amount of coaxing to convince her to share this memory.
I hope you are pleased.
In any case, Baba seemed a hopeless case. Laylee loathed and adored Baba with a great urgency, and though she thought fondly of their early years together, she also blamed him for being so recently careless. He was a man who felt too much, and his heart was so large that things got lost in it. Laylee knew she was an important part of him, but with so much in this world competing for his attention, the space she took up was disappointingly small.