“Yea, well,” Ashli dipped and bobbed like some sardonic heron as she pried open a wide coffee tin and fished about its fathoms. “You keep looking at it. Tell me when your brain breaks,” she drolled.

Diligently, I did her the courtesy of an earnest attempt. I took up the paper and traced the ends of cords, tilting the page again – like might present a new angle – and losing the light. “Hm,” I did so excogitate.

“I have to piece things together from Voice of the Mother,” Ashli continued, “I should have a copy or two... somewhere.” She set down a pair of long bone needles: whittled from turkey leg, and etched with tiny ochre script. “But they’re vague about everything. You get the sense they’re super paranoid about leaking her names.”

“Leaking, as in revealing? Does that matter?” I worried. “Should I be circumspect in how I speak on the Lady?”

My cousin paused her rummaging. “I don’t know,” her expression pinched. “Maybe?” she concluded. The pile between us expanded into clutter as Ashli laid down an encyclopedia, a lace doily, and a thin volume titled ‘A Situational Geometry: From Euclid & Liebnitz to Euler & Mandelbrot.’ A twist of smoke curled up with a malodorous potency, and we fluttered the coverlet to waft it out.

I eyed the last book suspiciously. “You can’t intend me to trust you’ve read that.”

“Well no, I mean I skimmed it,” she defended, “you’re missing the point. Focus on the thing,” she pointed in exasperation.

Taking one last look, I cast the magazine down and gestured an empty gap between my palms. “I suppose it can’t be done, then.” I fetched up Situational Geometry and ran my palm over the cover greedily. “There’s no turn or twist which would cause either end of that thread to make one whole. It’s an illusion of angle, a trick.”

This was likely the conclusion my cousin had hoped to snare me by; she grinned to the sharp of her canines. “Oh ho ho, my lil’ Zoog, that can’t be,” she crooned. The lace curl which I’d named a doily was something between a crochet and a macramé. Pale cream wool fiber was stitched up into a lattice of binds, knots, and seams such that it cupped a firm and stable conformation. She pinched it up, and thread trailed down from where it was unfinished. Then, holding it just under my nose, she dug her fingers into the center of the construction and folded it inside out.

On the fifth year of the ‘Vasion, the second annum of our settlement at Ghost Perch – and the sixth month of my living, I heard her die.

We all did, every child who was born under her jurisdiction. I wailed so loud my mother suffered a panic. Ashli had revolted so utterly, and with such a violence of grief, that the house, and her mother still bore the scars of it. It is fact that I was new into the world (which was the reason my kin could not believe it of me to recall the event), but it isn’t a matter of memory to know and bear the touch of the Ninth Calamity.

“By the sky and sod,” I shook. The Argument spilt out, overfull from grief and duty. It concentrated between folds and creases. It shone between closed partitions – from the pages of a shut book, or the seams of carpentry. She had an ardor for the fineness of joinery, and satisfaction in the precision of corners. I cannot tell you how much I had missed her. It’s something abstruse a challenge to explain what it meant to us who were born under the sign of the Witch: she was our midwife in spirit, more immediate and present than Juno had ever served in her duty. We could not help but love her, I’ll never be ashamed of that.

Yet the Residence did not belong to her; we were firm in the grip of another master. So, the wideness of spaces yawned. The must of the range spilt into the room, along with the crave of teeth, and the suspicion of iron.

“Stop! Quit!” I cried in a desperate hush. “He’ll know!”

Ashli calmly struck away my hands as I reached for the fetish, then folded it to curl, toroidal-like, back in on itself. The charm was unbloomed, and Craft receded with it. It was just my cousin and I under a blanket again, lit by a fire-hazard, liable to sneeze and stacked between by paper and oddments.

I blinked, confused. I stared at the weave and reached for it again. “But she’s so quiet.”

“She’s quiet, right?” Ashli placed the blossom-craft deliberately into my care, and pointing, drew my attention contigously round the surface. “But she folds out loud.”

“But how does that work?” I sputtered. My cousin stabbed instructively towards a brace of central knots, and I (in careful husbandry of the awkward light) made intently to scrutinize their make. The fiber there was discolored, splotched in the liver and mindaro of heme split from plasma. But the shape of the ties themselves? I snatched up Theodosia Proskauer’s diagram, and brought the two together until my eyes crossed. “Ah, what - how by the cut of Alexander his-self did you string this contortion?”

For by all my powers of sight and guile, I could not but conclude that Ashli Hektor had achieved a twist through such space that would envy Maurits Escher. But worst of all, oh! The closer I did look, the more that ligature began to fold out from impossible into making sense. It was unseating the proper directions, and I was not fully happy to see it so.

“I did it,” she admitted with a wry grin.

I handed Craft’s providence back to her. “You did it,” I accepted.

“I had to piece her together from… I mean, like fragments of memories,” Ashli clawed nervously through her hair.

I rapped my knuckle against Liebnitz. “And math?”

A scowl. “Goddamned topology,” she hissed.

I held my hand over the lamp, it lit my flesh diffusively such that my veins branched and traced visibly throughout. “And blood?” I guessed.

“Um,” Ashli nodded with creaking reluctance. “You... got that, did you? I mean she’s in there still, just a little.” She averted her eyes. “There’s so little left, I feel like I’ve got to empty myself out to piece her back together, you know?”

Deftly, Ashli unpinned the mount of the lamp from its power (which winked us into the black), then threw off the cover from our heads. She disassembled parts and repacked her treasures. The filament shed from its cup half-burnt and nasty, but she set it aside for sake of thrift.

I watched her until her possessions were envaulted again amidst the shelves. She smoothed out her leggings and faced me again. “But I have to. This place… the Lady isn’t mine. I’m not meant for her, Todd.”

This was true, more than it was false. She knew it, I knew it: the one yellow calf, in a brood of dark. Ashli was the piece which could not fit into her Lady’s design.

She leaned against the shelves and closed her eyes, her knees hitched up in the narrow space. “When Vaunda took me to do the prayers, I finally understood. Here I was, and I had this… potential bottled up. You know? It’s one thing to pick up a little juice now and again, but never enough to work with. That fuckin’ mole – it was like a breakthrough waiting to happen.”

She folded a magazine and swept it furiously to disperse lingering smoke.

“Maybe if Diana wanted me,” Ashli’s voice cracked. “If she’d – you know, if I could earn her blessing. Fuck it. Sure. Saddle me up, get me a shooter. I’d be down.”

She produced a cigarillo from beneath her pillow and chewed on it, wiping the back of her hand across her eyes.

“But that’s not the point of the whatever, the ritual.” She cleared her throat and addressed me directly. “It’s not to bring you closer to her, it’s just to take. Whatever it is that’s special and invisible, whatever’s magic, she just… takes it from you. Screw that, I gave it to Craft instead.”

My eyes were adjusted to the dark. I listened to the house and imagined it breathing along with its residents. Dust on a near shelf was settled on the spine of Lucian of Samosata’s True History, and I swiped it clean distractedly with my thumb. “Jonah feeds the fish,” I mumbled.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with us,” Ashli went on, sliding her feet up the rails to the banister and slumping lower until her neck crooked bent. She spat out her tobacco and wiped the drool off the gnawed end. “Animals pick up juice all the time. You know? Gizmos, like things people make, those can carry too. That’s what blessings are, right?” She wriggled to face me. “So why can’t people anchor juice right? Why do they leak?”

The answer was beyond me. At that time, I’d yet to have asked the question.

“You ever get juice of your own,” Ashli sighed, putting her narcotic on the lid of a tin, “don’t let the Aunties leash you. All their praying, all their oil and incense, the whatever, the kneeling – all their culting does is feed the guns.”

“Hm,” I offered her.

“Hm,” she echoed approvingly.

“So what does it do?” I stood and asked. “It’s almost done, right?” My cousin regarded me blankly, so I folded my digits together in a jumble.

“Oh. Oh, I don’t know.” Ashli rocked over and sat back up. “Maybe nothing? It doesn’t matter. It’s mine. Mom can’t take it from me. His royal highness can’t find it while she’s closed.” She gathered up her blanket around herself again and laid out her pillow.

“All I know is, I don’t want to be a part of someone else’s story, I just want to be me.”

As the hour was past late, and I could not think of what more I ought to say, instead I gave a ‘good night’ and my leave. Then I climbed down the mezzanine and into my bunk.

And went to sleep.