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Anna picks up the knife. It’s brand new, the sticker on the handle only half ripped off. She hefts it in her hand, testing the weight. It feels both familiar and not. She holds it with the blade pointing up, then with the blade down; breathing deep, she puts the tip against the skin of her left wrist, first holding it across, then down.
Anna holds a lot of different knives every day: heavy ones, light ones, long ones, short ones, new ones, old ones, except the memories she’s made recently feel like they belong to a much younger version of herself. Ever since being railroaded into an unexpected marriage, her old memories had become more like scenes from a TV show of someone else’s life. The sense memories of touching smooth, cold, sharp all became thorns deliberately buried beneath life’s surface, to make noise in her head only when she occasionally lets down her guard.
Bang, bang—
“Mommy I’m hungry, can I eat the cake in the fridge?”
“Oh, hold on.” Anna quickly puts the knife back in its packaging, then hides it behind the box of tampons at the back of the cabinet. Standing up from the toilet lid, she opens the bathroom door. “Can you wait just a little while Sven? Mommy’s gonna start dinner right now.”
“Okay mommy,” the little boy nods. “Then can I eat cake after dinner? Just a little, just thiiiis little.” He holds his thumb and index fingers about an inch apart.
“Of course, of course you can,” Anna says, smiling, as if reciting a familiar line from a movie.
“Of course not, Anna.”
Her mother takes away her pocketknife and the half-whittled piece of fir. It’s a time-honored tradition in her house: take away the novel, hand over the dish rag; take away the basketball, hand over the violin; take away the present for her friend, hand over the umbrella-- “take this to your father first, you can meet your friends later.” Anna sits in the chair, the scene she’s carving is seared into her mind’s eye: a vulture tearing at Prometheus’ guts. The thud of her mallet on the chisel is the sound the vulture makes. Far away, mighty Heracles draws his bow back fully, his form perfectly encapsulated in the uncarved portion of the wood. The arrow of destiny is not yet finished.
“It’s my hobby.”
“And it’s fine for you to have hobbies, Anna. But you’re too obsessed with it, no teenage girl spends so much time whittling that she falls behind in school. Can’t you spend more time with Elsa?”
“No, I have nothing to say to her.” She touches the bleeding cut on her finger. “Actually, what I want to know is--“
“Why isn’t daddy home yet?”
Anna tucks Sven into bed: “He’s very busy, we don’t need to wait up for him.”
“Okay,” Sven says, obediently closing his eyes. He doesn’t look upset, it was just idle curiosity.
Anna turns off the light.
To ensure that she makes it through the night peacefully, she puts on her coat, takes her keys, and decides to go buy some sober pills. In the early spring, the cold still bites at night, and walking through the streets Anna can sometimes see the white puffs of her breath. No one would be out at this hour, unless they had nowhere else to go. Eventually she passes a bar, simply decorated and advertising cheap drinks. She stops and considers it for a long time, until moments later when the owner turns off the “open” sign. Standing under the streetlight, in that instant it feels like she’s lost her connection to reality; but in the next second, she continues on her way.
When she walks out of CSV with a plastic bag in hand, she definitely could not have foreseen how her life would be changed by what happens next: she turns to the right and sees a shadow under the streetlight on the corner. The shadow is topped by a layer of grayish white sparkles. Normally she would have walked straight past with her eyes fixed forward, but that shadow was a tornado, a whirlpool, and she just a helpless minnow caught in its destructive tide, dragged into the center of the storm.
“Elsa?”
The grayish white was a woman’s platinum blonde hair. Smiling, half her face splattered with dark splotches of blood, she clutches Anna’s arm in open delight: “Thank goodness, you know me?”
Fuck the end of the rainbow, no one told her she’d come across her own sister by the side of the road on a late-night walk.
“So, you said you lost your memory?”
Anna takes Elsa back to her private workshop, a tiny two story apartment three blocks from her house. Elsa, freshly showered, wearing one of Anna’s dresses, sits on the camp bed. Anna sits on the floor in front of her, neck craned to look up. Elsa gazes calmly down at her and nods, shy like a newly adopted cat crouched high on a shelf, surveying the area. The look in her eyes gives Anna goosebumps.
Jesus fucking Christ, just her luck, she’s half certain this is someone else pretending to be Elsa.
“My name is Elsa, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your name?”
Anna holds her gaze, trying to detect any hint of deception or deceit, but ultimately fails: “Anna, my name is Anna.”
“Anna.” Elsa repeats quietly with her eyes wide; carefully, as if she wants to break Anna down along with her name and consume the pieces.
“Anna,” Elsa laces together her calloused fingers. “What are we to each other?”
“We’re—” she starts, but her voice catches in her throat. She starts to feel anger, it’s built up over a long time and is now insurmountable. Time is an insatiable and intangible vulture, tearing at her body and soul, day in and day out. But she didn’t have the strength to hold on, she’d given up calling for help a long time ago when hope seemed all but lost, and now all that’s left is an empty heart and a hungry vulture. What are we to each other? She must have looked very sad, because she could see Elsa getting visibly anxious. The question I asked you 15 years ago, you now dare to throw back to me?
Her trembling mouth curves into a smile: “Would you believe me if I said we’re lovers who haven’t seen each other in 15 years?”
“Liar!”
She rushes forward to kiss Elsa, like a newborn animal tearing weakly through its afterbirth. She closes her eyes because she doesn’t want to see the pained, hollow look in her sister’s eyes. Elsa puts one hand on her waist, allowing the kiss for a while, before pushing her away.
“Elsa!” She yells desperately. She hates feeling like this, no one cares what she thinks when the decisions are made. Her mother, her father, her sister, they love her and do their best to provide for her, but they’ve never cared about her.
“Anna, I have to go. I don’t want our last memory to be of arguing.”
“So is this my fault too? Kept in the dark, to receive what I’m given but never allowed to ask for more? Why can’t you tell me the truth!”
“Don’t say that Anna, we love you.”
“Love me?” She sneers bitterly. “The way mother and father love me, is that how you love me too? What are we to each other? You say you love me, but you act like you hate me?”
“No, no.” Elsa drops her gaze. “I’ve never thought that.”
“Anna? Anna, what do you think?”
Anna lifts her head out of a daze.
“Huh? Sorry, I’m listening, please continue.”
“We’re finished… you look happy, did Kristoff get a promotion?’
“What? Oh… probably.”
Her coworker takes the documents from her hand. Anna gives a vague smile, which they interpret to be a confirmation. Someone says, you have to throw a party to celebrate. Anna deflects: maybe, we’ll see.
Happy?
Elsa is curled under the blankets, one hand stuck under the pillow as if grasping for something. Anna crouches a little distance away, because she’s learned that Elsa can’t sleep if she’s too close, something that’s changed from when they were children. There’s been too much time between them, and Anna can’t tell if Elsa has not changed at all, or has become completely different. When they were children, Elsa and Anna had slept on the same pillow, under the same blanket, toes touching, breaths synced. She used to play with Elsa’s hair a lot, would make platinum trees grow between the fingers of her clenched fist, like arrows of light dropped by Artemis on a nighttime plain.
Happy?
Anna gathers up Elsa’s discarded clothes. The entire left shoulder is stained with splotches of blood, obviously someone else’s. She has a lot of questions: where did you go, what have you been doing all these years, why are you here now, miraculously appearing before me? The questions are eager to get out, like a litter of hungry rabbits that have been cooped up in a den through a long winter, but she can’t bring herself to wake Elsa up. At 2:30am in the morning she sits in her secret workshop, thinking about all the problems and chores waiting for her at home, as if without her the house would fall apart.
But right now Anna feels invigorated by some emotion close to hatred that’s flooding her heart. The vulture flies off with a shriek, for it doesn’t dare to peck at her heart now, not when it tastes sharp and bitter, soaked through with tears and regret. Right now she isn’t anyone’s daughter, anyone’s wife, anyone’s mother; those labels are suspended high in the air on the weighing scale, opposite Elsa.
Happiness, happiness is heavy.
“Anna, a friend is here to see you.”
Friend? She’s confused, until she sees Elsa blinking at her from behind her coworker. Her gaze is sharp, her face animated, and the contrast turns the cool but confused Elsa from the previous night into a forgotten secret. So Anna doesn’t ask Elsa how she found her workplace, it’s obvious her sister’s only lost her memory, not her intelligence.
“Anna,” her sister is so at ease under the gaze of strangers that Anna is stunned. As if she were not only completely comfortable in a crowd, but especially with being the center of attention. This is completely different from what Anna remembers.
“Do you want to have dinner together? I saw a great steakhouse on the way here.”
Elsa watches her expectantly; instantly their roles have been reversed, with Anna now the older one. She used to think the label “older sister” was like a mountain, and now she had been dropped on the summit with no warning whatsoever. Looking down, she realizes there is no city, no crowd, only Elsa’s limpid eyes. Did I also look at her like that? No one could be unaffected by such a look; if she had grown up under this sort of gaze, she would have made the same choice as Orpheus.
So now they sit at a tiny restaurant on a street corner. The furnishings are old but clean, and the storefront so plain that only someone with extremely keen eyes could have picked it out without having known about its existence beforehand. Absently, Anna picks up her knife and saws mechanically at her steak before putting a piece in her mouth. From the corner of her eye she sees Elsa, with perfect posture, pick up her utensils. In one measured stroke, she parts the steak as effortlessly as if she were parting dominoes. Anna can’t help but try it herself, yet even with her woodworking strength she can’t cut through the steak in one go. On the other side of the table Elsa’s completely absorbed in cubing her steak with practiced efficiency, as relaxed as if she were admiring roses.
“I told you right? This steak is very good.”
“It is pretty good.” Anna answers distractedly.
Distracted, or, mesmerized. By the heat, or the wine, or the contact, or all of the above. Elsa would often share ice cream bars with her, using her lips and teeth, a frozen sliver of the moon in her mouth. Or come up to her after showering, wrapped in the heavy damp heat before a summer storm. Drops of water fall from the tips of her hair to bloom darkly on Anna’s sheets. A dwindling river of desire, and they are tangled together and withering on the cracked riverbed. Whenever Anna opens her eyes in the night, the moonlight shining again across their bodies, and sees her red hair mingled with Elsa’s blonde, temporarily forming an unshakeable bond, she thinks that the golden fleece of fate has returned to spend eternity with her. So Anna no longer heeds the frequent sirens in her head; in fact, she decides to completely upend her stale life.
But she realizes she can’t bring herself to do it.
Ever since they were little, everything about Elsa had been a puzzle eager to be solved, some simple, some difficult. It’s still the same now, when Elsa occasionally lets slip a dissonant chord. Like when they’re in the workshop and her familiarity with sharp objects rivals Anna’s, or when she instantly identifies the weak spots of buildings. She never sits next to a window, she remembers how many times they’ve passed this stranger on the sidewalk that day. She’s alert, calm, cultured; in comparison she seems more like the caretaker, instead of the other way around.
Even Elsa herself was suspicious: “Anna, was I a police officer previously?”
“Yes,” Anna runs with it, “you hit your head on a case, I don’t know how you made it home. I don’t know the details, since you never tell me anything.”
“I see,” she says. They both pretend not to notice the details that don’t fit.
Some things were unavoidable. In the beginning Anna had pushed her away after being kissed, saying sternly: “No Elsa, this is punishment, your punishment for not taking care of yourself and losing your memory.” Elsa had acquiesced, because she could tell the kiss felt awkward, but she also didn’t want to say it so plainly.
Her Anna was like a sphinx, full of doubts and suspicions, and liable to spout riddles at any time. She didn’t have a set routine: she usually went to work, arriving early to the workshop, but also sometimes stayed overnight. Most of the time she’s in the workshop working on commissions. It’s like she’s just barely getting through life, and only when she has a knife in her hand does her focus come together, and she becomes earnest and confident. As if she were the one who had lost her memories of dealing with reality, and only after communing with silent blocks of wood does she regain the courage to exist peacefully in the world again.
She refuses Elsa’s kisses, gets nervous being hugged, and is flustered holding hands. Thus it’s easy for Elsa to draw conclusions: she resists being kissed, probably because she was hurt in the past; she can tolerate being held, but can’t relax into it, probably because she’s not used to it; as for hand-holding or more tender touches, she feels numb, or perhaps resigned.
Elsa thinks these are more like defense mechanisms.
Lying on the bed, hair tangled with Anna’s, she watches Anna subconsciously bring her hands up to cover her chest. Suddenly she’s struck with a baseless jealousy: at the darkness that hides her, the hands that barricade her, the cold skin concealing a warm heart. She’s surprised she would feel such deep hatred for inanimate things, but gives into it quickly, and slots her fingers between Anna’s as if nothing had happened. She startles awake every morning, the first ray of sunlight through the window like an arrow bringing down the judgement of heaven upon them both, like how spring judges the mess left behind by the previous winter.
Spring passes quickly.
A long summer comes like lightning, swallowing with a roar the cool nights spent dreaming, but not without difficulty. Downing a mouthful of snow in the winter is no easier than swallowing the shards of a broken mirror, but at least it stops the torrent of spring showers. Anna moves the damp wood outside, sorting them by type, and at last the small workshop can be seen in its entirety. The table is covered with wood shavings of tan and beige, as if time had passed through and shed a pile of feathers for its owner to clean up. A tiny old radio swings from a hook, diligently reporting the day’s news:
“Due to the recent increase in homicides, we advise residents of the affected areas to avoid…”
Anna stacks up some of the less damp wood, pushes open the glass door to the small balcony, and carries them outside where she squats down to lay out each piece side by side. She can’t hear the radio out here. From the apartment next door she can faintly hear the angry voices of a young couple, but louder is the crying of their two daughters. The younger one is wailing at the top of her lungs, and the older one comforting her sister through her own stifled sobs. The din is more than enough for a noise complaint, but Anna has always minded her own business in such matters. She has plenty of experience with arguments: the less people involved, the sooner the thing ends, especially when she’s gazing stone-faced back at him, his face red, eyes bulging, and grimacing mouth stinking of alcohol. The louder it gets, the funnier.
She’s had a vague feeling all day today, not good but not bad either, ever since she watched Elsa leave the house this morning. She could feel something bright moving in her darkness, poking holes in the black that’s long enshrouded it. Dim embers spill from the holes, causing the black to recede even faster. The once strong vulture lies on the ground, struggling for its last breaths.
“Stop struggling, I haven’t finished my question.” Elsa puts her foot on the wound in the man’s stomach. Blood spurts out in rivulets, and his thick stomach trembles, like a puddle of mud in the street.
Elsa’s in a hurry, she was going to see a movie with Anna today. She’d been hooked by the tagline “a sudden reunion, an unanticipated change”, and bought tickets immediately, only realizing afterward that she’d forgotten to ask Anna’s opinion. But she wasn’t worried; no matter what Anna’s answer was, she could accept it.
“You fucking bitch!” The man yells obscenities from the ground, he’s too angry to choose his words carefully, and can’t think to question why this woman would have shanked him, having completely forgotten the fact that when he’d gotten off the bus just now his eyes had been glued to a girl’s cleavage.
“I know your face,” Elsa lowers her head, her pale blonde hair blocking the light and making it difficult to see her features. But he can feel her examining him from head to toe, exposing all his dirty secrets. She says with the same tone that one would say “so you’re the killer”, but the pressure of her foot is clear: “I think I saw you when I was killing someone.”
The man stills immediately.
“I’m fairly certain, because I never forget a face.” Elsa nods and, to the man’s horror, moves her foot away and puts both hands on his oily head.
Click.
Anna closes the front door, locks it, and takes Sven’s hand. Her mother had been clamoring for days to see him, so she had no choice but to force down the constant roiling in her stomach and drive the 1hr into the countryside to drop Sven off at her childhood home.
In a ranking of the happiest people in Anna’s marriage, her mother was undeniably at the top.
Night has fallen her way back, the streetlights outside the city too sparse to fully illuminate the road, but she doesn’t slow down. The closer she gets to the city, the clearer she could see, but that doesn’t ease her anxiety at all. Quite the opposite, she couldn’t tell which had taken more years off her life, the nausea from returning to the countryside, or the suffocating pressure from being inside in her old house. Before her, the city’s lights resemble a huge bundle of burning torches, sending up the sighs of ten thousand women. After complete combustion, all that’s left is the cacophony of men’s energetic voices. In the glittering city, no one thinks to lift up the shiny exterior to examine the dirty underbelly; they merely heap more adoration on top. The moment Anna drives under the city lights, a roar starts in her ears: the sound of a castle collapsing, revealing the land, a bonfire extinguishing, the extinction of species. At the end of the world, all the people Anna has ever met in her life, from family to strangers, walk towards her, then past her, before parting silently to reveal a dark chasm. Outside the crowd, Heracles draws again his newly mended bow, his arrow aimed directly behind her.
Behind her is a table set for a dinner for two. Dim candlelight splashes the wallpaper with big blotches of orange yellow. The tiny balls of fire gutters, on the verge of extinguishing, like the life of the demon that’s hounded her for far too long. Anna feels like she’s back with Elsa at the steakhouse; every night she’s spent alone with Elsa has the same shadowy, claustrophobic feel. The eight-legged horse, the stolen flame, the trident, the golem, the golden fleece, they weave through humanity’s history and legends, and with Anna’s help come to rest on different pieces of wood; burying proverbs in her dreams, until the day they are unearthed again. That day would no doubt be hot and humid, with a metallic tang in the air. There is a continuous noise: listening closely, it might be someone’s screams.
Anna pushes open the door to her own bathroom. Warm water pours over the edge of the bathtub, warm air hits her face but quickly dissipates. Kristoff lies in the tub, a hand and a foot dangling over the edge, the other half of his body scrunched into the tub in an unnatural way. Elsa stands incongruently by the toilet, leaning against the wall, her clothes wet on one side of her body. Thinking about it now, whenever Elsa looks anything less than perfectly put together, it’s always been due to someone else.
“What are you doing?”
“Hmm?” Elsa lifts her head. She still has the apron on, cornflower print with white frills. The sun’s not fully set yet, she stands in the hall outside the living room of Anna’s house, having just put down two plates of steak on the dining table. She was heading to the bathroom to wash her face when she came unexpectedly face to face with Kristoff, who had just stepped out of the bathroom. “Who are you?” He changes tack, wary as he watches Elsa draw closer, as if she’s something dangerous about to explode or burst into flames.
“Who are you?” Elsa walks up and puts a hand on the bathroom door handle, as if she were the host. “You should introduce yourself first.”
“What? I’m… Wait, this is my fucking house!”
“No, this is Anna’s house.”
“I’m Anna’s husband, so it’s my house! Why am I even— Get the fuck out before I call the cops!”
“Oh, don’t be like that.” Elsa stops him from reaching for his phone, uses the chance to disable his right hand, then takes him by the throat and walks him back into the bathroom. “Let’s talk somewhere else, shall we?”
“First off, there’s been some misunderstanding.” She combs her hair back with her fingers, wetting the pale gold strands, which darken to a soft golden brown. She would have liked to follow her usual procedure but she was afraid Anna would get mad at her for making a mess. “You say because you’re Anna’s husband, therefore this is your house, but this logic is obviously wrong because,” she stares deeply into Kristoff’s eyes, and he in turn sees a vision of himself with a broken neck in her pupils, “by the same token, this is my house too.” She pats his shoulder good-naturedly, giving him time to digest this unpalatable info. “Secondly, from what I’ve observed, Anna doesn’t think of you as her husband at all-- no don’t start, I’m not finished, I’ve seen plenty of men like you, so don’t bother trying to argue you’re different.” After being sure that he couldn’t move, she dumps him into the tub and starts to scour the cramped bathroom, but comes up empty. “Not even a razor to shave with, do you even live here?” She says offhandedly, but she doesn’t miss Kristoff’s sudden short silence.
Her eyes cut sideways to the man in the tub, and she says in a mild tone as if apologizing to the ingredients on her cutting board: “I changed my mind, let’s talk about something else. How about steak?”
“Steak is good.” Elsa steps inside Anna’s house, the one with the kid, and decides to make dinner for Anna. Since recovering her memories about killing, she’d gone back to the steakhouse to learn their secrets. She’d waited a long time, waited until the fat man had stopped twitching, until the dark red blood had stopped gushing, until she’d wiped her shoes clean, until she’d picked up all the fallen strands of her hair in the vicinity. She took out her phone, then put it back; watched a snail crawl across the wall, then crawl back; heard the hour being struck, heard it struck again.
She went to Anna’s house, opened the fridge door, and found all the ingredients. She took out the raw steak, then realized the kitchen had no knives. But the ingredients were all prepared already, so she didn’t think any more of it. Clearly, Elsa’s steady hands were more than enough to grip the handle of a pan, which wasn’t any more difficult than gripping a wrist; turning a spatula no more taxing than turning a neck; plating and arranging food no harder than arranging a body. She decanted the wine, and noticed the room had gotten quite dark. But flicking on the light switch flooded the room with blinding white light, like an arc discharge in an illegal laboratory. So she turned off the light again, and rummaged through the cabinets for candles, lighting them on the stove with a pop and a puff of smoke. It was no different from sticking a knife into a body: a pop followed by a gush of blood, diffusing into the air; rain to river, dust to dust.
She’s ready. She said she would accept whatever choice Anna makes, and now she needs to wash her face in the bathroom.
The bathroom door is pushed open, and Kristoff watches with eyes wide in disbelief as Anna walks in with her eyes down, as she closes the door and locks it. He watches Anna’s face incredulously, taking in the hair loose around her shoulders and the exhausted look on her face. Her empty gaze flickers only when it lands on Elsa. Ignoring Kristoff’s yelling and struggling, she walks directly to the sink and opens the cabinet underneath, taking out the tampon box at the back, and the brand new paring knife that’s been waiting for a long time. She slowly, carefully peels off the rest of the sticker on the handle, making sure that no spot of glue is left. The bathroom grows quiet as a horrifying silence slowly consumes the damp, narrow space, it’s teeth scattering knife-tipped stars across the floor.
Anna turns her head towards Elsa slowly, face placid, as if she’s already waited nearly 20 long years. She looks at Elsa’s empty hands, and puts the knife in her hand, in hers.
“Probably you need this.” Anna says.
END.