Wisdom isn’t omniscience, but you didn’t hear that from me. She stares at me, slack-mouthed, and I pity her for a minute. She thought it was honey I’d spewed, not warnings, not game plans for what might be, not a way out but a route deeper into the stories she’d wanted.

I recite her the names of pain: the one like rivers under your bones. The one like crushed glass. The one like lying to yourself. The one like wires looped around the muscle. The ones like giving up, like breaking down, like every day in a world you don’t want. The one like his name and his name too, nothing in the sound of them enough no matter how you rearrange the letters.

I read them to her slow. Then, I read them to her quick. Until the tributaries of my proselytizing come together into a road map, pointing the way home. She shudders through every sibylline syllable. I repeat encores until finally, she begs me to stop.

“You’re lying.”

Humanity is such a piece of shit.

It is still morning in New York when I come back home, and Ligeia and Parthenope are at the kitchen island, sipping from ceramic cups that smell of honeysuckle and green lime. They look over, half-smile slotting into place.

“Did she want answers?” Ligeia asks.

I shake my head.

Parthenope, hair a fortune of braids bronze and black, lets out a slow, smoky noise, like she’d breathing the city’s fumes for days. “Nothing wrong with trying.”

Ligeia pushes a plate towards me. They’d saved me a sandwich: fresh-baked sourdough topped with tomatoes, fat slices of fresh mozzarella, some basil. She looks at me like she knows precisely what happened. “Nothing wrong with letting them do what they want. There’s no point to them. They’re just here taking up space.”

“What did you do to her, anyway?” Parthenope asks as I pour myself lukewarm coffee, shrewd as always.

“What else do you in these situations? She pulled a knife on me. First one in a hundred years. I told her the truth and I let her go home to grow old with her fear. The worst thing you can do to a coward is make sure they live forever.”

kiss, don’t tell

You never told me she’d be so human, so sweet. Marzipan bones and caramel hair, latte skin stretched taut over a face still new to wanting. Just a mouthful, really, a morsel, her eyes brittle as she watches us flit by, heartbeats sliding between the ribs of time.

In Europe, no one believes in kismet, but who needs faith to author fact?