Li Jing signs the last letter and sighs. Her fingers are brocaded with ink, her smile with exhaustion. A part of her aches for the liberty of isolation. It’d be so much simpler than explaining everything that had transpired. So much easier than instructing herself not to loathe Zhang Wei for his intent, to forgive his motivation if not his actions.

But that is not what Zhang Yong would have desired.

Li Jing sips tea from a cup made from her husband’s bones, its golden heat suffusing the ivory with something almost like life. Her eyes wander the ribs of her new domicile. The store is beautiful, lush with books and paintings like photographs, conjured flawless from history. When she closes her eyes, Li Jing can already see her family exploring the space, investigating cabinet and bookshelf, stove and garden. Briefly, she wonders how Zhang Wei will take to the statuette of him in the pond, marble-skinned and pissing fresh water into a glass-smooth pond.

Tomorrow, she decides, she will send out the letters and court her family’s questions.

Tonight, it is tea and reading and learning the patterns of this unfamiliar silence, which sit as awkwardly as new lovers. Nothing will ever replace the way Zhang Yong’s presence curled around hers, jigsaw-snug. There will never be a salve for that gasping loneliness she experiences each morning when she awakens and, in that purgatory between sleep and awareness, forgets why his side of the bed is unfilled.

But she will survive, will rebuild her existence, brick by brick, around the absence. Li Jing has a lifetime of memories in her foundations. It will never be perfect again, but it will be someday be enough.

Li Jing splays her book, begins to read. And in the quiet, the rustle of pages sounds almost like the chuckle of love departed but never forgotten.

bargains by the slant-light

“Yes.”

Yes, she murmurs. Yes, yes, of course. Voice parched of inflection, a rasp of a syllable like velvet rough against a nipple, she repeats the word until the devil shakes his antlered head, the metronoming of his skull keeping time with the click of scissors pale.

He does not tell her no.

Devils break bread with bargains, after all, and he’s grown a taste for her flavor of desperate: earthy as molasses, with a tang like coffee fresh from the first pot of the day. But still, that does not stop him from feeling bad.

So, when she peels her shirt—striped, too big for her rangy frame—back, breasts crisscrossed with stitches, it isn’t with glee that he approaches her, but some blend of reverence, the worship of a hunter, or more accurate still, the idolatry of a first-rate chef. Because there is no meal without the meat, no fulfillment without first the cooperation of the prey.