Madeline Vosch
In those days, I wore lipstick like blood, lush and crimson slashed across my face. I lived in an attic and would not dress like it. I lived in an attic, in a room so small there was a bed, a mirror, and nothing else. I slipped whole baguettes out of the grocery story with no one noticing. The crinkling paper in my palm, a smile to the door clerk. I was good at not being seen.
I was working in a wine bar downtown in the evenings and a café during the day. I smelled all the time.
That night, I was at the bar. My feet hurt in the way they hurt when you've been on them all day and your shoes are old and don't really do much except look like what shoes are supposed to look like. I was washing the wine glasses, my back turned to the bar. The bar owner had splurged, bought these delicate glasses that were suited for every type of wine, so we wouldn't have to always be switching and finding the right glasses, so that if the place were full of kids who were younger than me and richer than me all buying that natural chardonnay that tastes like SweeTarts, we wouldn't run out of glasses anymore.
I was scrubbing gently, washing the lipstick stains off the thin glass. Eric, the owner, was running around behind me, bringing new people new glasses and whisking more dishes my way. The counter was low, barely below my waist. I bent over the sinks, my fingers playing in the warm soapy water. I kept my head down, in the sink, with an ear cocked to the bar for when someone wanted me. I dunked the glass into the middle sink, to rinse off the suds and make sure I had scrubbed everything away.
"Behind," Eric said as he passed. The wine glass went into the toxic blue sanitizer. "Can you do water?" he said, leaning towards me as he passed behind again, holding a bottle of cava.
"Yeah," I said. It was late, nearing midnight. The lights were dimmed. Candles were sprinkled across tables, the flames casting shadows of light on the faces. I kept my face down as I refilled their glasses. The bar was small, and when it was crowded, moving was a dance. I slunk across walls, on my tip toes, squeezed between customers. I could make myself smaller than a shadow.
It's easy enough to take something, when someone's not looking, when someone's not using it. I picked up the empty wine glasses with ease, without being noticed. No empty glasses, Eric always said.
I'm not a thief. I don't know what I am but I'm not that. I take things that no one is using, things that no one will miss. The things I take are nothings, nothing next to what they take from me.
I only took enough for them to guess at feeling it. I don't like to talk about what I took, the jewelry, the shoelaces, the ticket stubs slipped out of pockets. I smiled in blood gushing colors and in the dim light of the bar, I was nothing but a specter in the background.
I worked all day, knowing what would come for me at the end, what was waiting for me when the sun fell and I was alone in my attic. I had so little, and every night I lost more. The things I took were so small, compared to what was taken from me.
Sometimes, people my age came to the wine bar. People who looked at me and looked down, so they could feel taller. They were my favorites. Them, them I felt no guilt about, no shame, not even the smallest question. When they were staring at each other in the bar, dimpled with candlelight, sipping their Chateauneuf-du-Pape, the tannins tripping over their tongues and staining their teeth, I would lean close, pass behind, take what I wanted, and they would never notice.
Sometimes, people came who I knew. Who knew me. Who knew what was going to happen to me, what was already happening. Laura came in often, and when she did, she bent her head so I would think she understood, so that I could know that she felt bad. She was the worst of all.
I've known Laura since we were children in school, when none of us could comprehend how much of our lives had already been determined. We used to watch each other on the playground. Laura was the leader of a group of girls who always looked somehow the same. They never played tag with me or my friends, but sat on green plastic benches and looked, and we ran past them and looked back.
When Laura came to the bar, when she saw me carrying pitchers of water and scrubbing the lips of wine glasses, the pity seeped from every pore. People like Laura, people who know what happens at night, people who look at me like they were sad for me, taking from them was my own celebration.
We don't get to choose who and what we owe.
When I was born everyone already knew how the story would go, though people let me figure it out for myself.
I was twenty-seven years old, and I was going to die soon.
Until then I had to work, to do what I could. I woke up in the morning and put on lipstick with care, meticulous. My bow, my weapon. The red of my smile, the slow way I let it crack across my face.
Most of these people in the bar, they forget me as soon as they see me; they'll forget me the moment I'm gone. It doesn't matter, maybe it's better that way. They can continue their lives and keep going to wine bars and feeling bad for the people they know who are like me, the people who have no way out, whose existence makes theirs possible. They can't change anything, or they won't change anything. I don't know. I don't really care. I just don't want people to see what I take. I just want to keep living until I can't.
When it takes from me, it happens automatically, the money part of it anyway. Most of my paychecks vanish and I know why. I work all day, every day, and my bank account gets smaller. It's okay. I only have a little while left, and the attic is all I need.
The other part, the other part happens slowly. At night, when I don't want it. I don't ever want it, but especially not at night, not when I'm desperate for sleep because tomorrow is coming fast and there is no promise of rest at the end. I can't remember the last time I wasn't tired. I don't know what that might feel like.
It comes to me at night and takes what I owe. It opens the door, walks up the stairs to my room. I have taught myself, over the years, to not be afraid.
What they take is not quite my blood, not quite my body. I don't understand how it works, even though it happens every night, even though it shapes my days. A creature comes into my room and it takes something, something I can never get back, something that is my body and is not my body. Sometimes I leave my lights on so I can watch it happen. Sometimes I don't, and I close my eyes so I do not have to see its face. It needs me, needs to feed off the people like me, so it can keep living. We are daily sacrifices, offerings, so its life can continue. It is a multitude, a horde. There are so many of it and it is so hungry.
When it started to come at night, it only made me a little more tired than normal. The medical complications wouldn't be that bad, except there is no health insurance, no money to see a doctor who could help. You'd think the government would want me around longer, to keep me making money, to keep me alive so that I can pay my debts, but they don't think that much about it. I am, in so many ways, unnecessary.
Eventually, the fatigue settles in the marrow, unshakable. At first it was hard to know if that was because of it coming at night, or because I woke so early and was on my feet all day, heart beating unregulated.
That night, after last call, after the customers left, after I washed and dried and polished every dish, Eric offered me the shift drink. I tried to drink it slow and fast at once. That night, I picked a white wine so crisp I could feel the lemon grass slide across my tongue.
Eric didn't talk to me about what we knew was coming. Instead, we made bets on how much we'd done that night in sales.
Someone once explained to me that you can't ever really touch anything. That on a molecular level, the cells and atoms never come into contact, and the sensation of touch is really the push and pull of these things as they scuttle through microscopic space. Or at least, that's how I remember them explaining it.
Before I left that night, I pressed my lip against my empty glass, and held it there. I pulled away to see the marks of myself. There on the rim was an unmistakable gash of red, a mark that someone tomorrow would notice, a smudge that someone else would have to wash away, this sign that I had been there, for a little bit.
I placed the glass next to the sink, listening for the soft chime of the crystal touching the counter. We'd already drained the water, and left the glass for the openers to clean, like we did every night.
I took a butt of bread home with me, cupping it in my palm where Eric couldn't see. He wouldn't have cared that I took it, but I didn't like to remind him how hungry I was.
At home that night, the spinning room reminded me of myself. The way it twisted. The way it closed. It was easier when I was drunk, when I could pretend there was something in me that was still fighting.
I pulled from my pockets some of the things I took from them, things I could touch, and held them in my hands.
Buttons, brown and marbled. A blue earring with a small flower bud encased in resin. A smear of sapphire in this monochrome attic. I hadn't taken that much that night, the crowd was thin and boring. I fell backwards onto my bed.
Some of us owe things, some of us don't. That's just the way it is, the way it was on those days I went to work with my face painted like it mattered. It was going to stay like this until something big, something at the bottom of things, shifted.
That night in the attic, drunk, looking at the trinkets, I did not think of anything. I closed my eyes and waited. I slept, I think, a little.
It came then, opening the door and walking up the stairs like it knew what I had. It was taller than me, it's skin pale like mine. I got up and went to it. I stopped wondering who it was a long time ago. There was no use trying to figure out why it came for me, why it came for any of us. Every night, a different one of it comes. When it comes like this, at night, it no longer has a name, whoever it is outside of this room doesn't exist. It has many faces, many bodies. In the daylight, its name might be Eric, or Matthew, or Sarah, but in my room, they are all part of it. They become it. Every night, the things that are it go to a different house, a different person.
There are so many of us who owe so much.
It extended its hands towards me, solid and dry. It grinned hungry. I waited. It wore a tan suit, too big for its shoulders. It had thick hair, dark hair that looked darker in this place with the lights off. I held out my arms and it took what it always took.
In the morning, I put on lipstick crimson bright. My face was already a ghost. It was coming, inevitable.
I paused before I left the attic, before I walked down those wooden steps into the hall that twisted through the belly of the house, past strangers' locked doorways. I looked at myself in the dirty mirror, touched my fingers to their shadow selves on the other side. Soft at first, then hard like I was drowning, I pushed my blood mouth against the glass. I pulled away and looked at a creature I had made, at the proud smears.
I fixed the places where the red had smudged on my face.
I was so tired I thought I was already dead. But I was still walking, and as much as I felt myself dragging, the morning air was moving on my bare arms. I couldn't remember the last time I woke up.
The manager was already at the café when I got there, entering through the back door. I had to brew the first urn of coffee before I could make my own drink. The metal coffee pot was large and tall, and I made a joke to her about it being phallic. She stuck her head around the corner and said if anything it was vaginal, its mouth hanging open as the hot liquid rushed down into the chamber. I made a face and she told me that was what I got for gendering a hunk of metal and plastic.
The espresso whirred in the grinder as I pulled my shots. My manager knew what was happening and let me have as many drinks as I wanted, no charge, when I was on the clock. She was kind to me in the only way that mattered.
Four shots in one cup, a hefty dollop of milk.
That day, when I walked from the café to the wine bar, clutching a fresh coffee, I stepped into the grocery store. Quick, purposeful. The aisles were as familiar as my attic room, as the contours of my own face. It gets so easy, sometimes I forget this is something with risk. Something with danger. I opened the bag of kale chips as I left the store, the doors sliding behind me. The pockets of my jacket sagged. This was unsustainable, but I only had a little longer.
That night it was busy at the bar, busier than normal. I had stopped keeping track of days, but it must've been a night before a day when most people did not have to work. I didn't recognize a single face and took from them greedily.
The night before, it had told me something it wasn't supposed to. In the middle, it had let slip. Who was coming tonight. I had started to laugh, even as it took. Its round eyes got rounder.
During my shift that night I ate scraps of bread torn from baguettes, crouched down below the bar. Every few hours I squatted where no one could see and crunched on the brine of a gherkin. I am not allowed to eat where the customer can see, but I can eat if I am unnoticed. I can't let them remember that I have a body in the same way they have a body, with needs and hungers and aches and irresistible, illogical wants.
I didn't take from Eric, normally. He was a good boss and never got mad when I dropped things, when I got dizzy and a wine glass shattered like rain over the floor. That night, I broke a glass as I was pouring a Riesling, my arms giving out as I held the bottle, the neck crashing against the rim of the glass, the shards scattering on the table.
"I'm so sorry," I said, keeping my head down. "I'm so sorry." I did not look at the customers, did not want to see if they knew why my arms had begun to tremble, if they shook their heads and murmured to each other. I darted through crowds of people, returned with a broom, and as I was sweeping, collected things from people that they would never know to miss.
Behind the bar, Eric looked at me and did not say anything, and I knew better than to apologize to him. He broke off a piece of bread and pointed to my spot below the counter, as if commanding me to eat.
That night was blurred, running between people, filling water and wine, toasting bread, washing countless dishes. When my back was turned over the sink, I could close my eyes for a moment, and think of who was waiting for me that night, of how I would greet it, how I would take it by surprise. Hands in the soapy water, I tried to hide my smile as I imagined what I might do, how it would be to watch the shock spread over its face.
Sliding in between strangers, carafe of water in one hand, bottle of wine in the other, slipping between bodies in the dark bar, I smiled to the customers that would never look at me like a person. These people who, if they saw me on the street in between shifts, would scoff, would shake their heads, would think that here is a girl who has never tired, here is a good for nothing, a girl who let the world pass her by, here is a girl who got what she deserved.
At the end of my shift, I sat on my heels at the wine fridge, picking out my shift drink.
Eric was talking with the last remaining customers, who were visiting from New Zealand and had been so excited to see wine from their part of the world that they had called their friends back home to tell them. I uncorked a bottle of viognier. I sank lower and drank deeply. The bottle ran dry. I put the empty bottle toward the back, where the blue light made it look full. The rest, I took for later.
I walked home that night clinking. The bottles hidden in places no one thought hideable. It is so easy, when no one notices, when you are a thing not worth noticing. At home, in my attic, I lined the bottles up against the pillows. Lightest to darkest.
When the door to my attic creaked open, I was ready and waiting. My lips were bright even in the darkness. It came up the stairs with measured, even steps.
It came with eyes full of pity. It came with hands in its pockets. In another room its name would be Laura. Its hair was curled, brown. Its skin was pale. It held out its hands.
I gestured towards the things I took, offering half-empty bottles of things I could never afford. Its eyes gasped. It shook its head, as if to say, that is too much even for me.
When it was time for it to take what it came for, I did not look away. There was pity in the dark forests of its eyes.
Everyone knew I wouldn't last much longer, not with working so much and not being able to buy food and with them coming every night. What did I have to lose.
Before it started, before it leaned in to take what it needed, I smiled. I did not say a word as I took two steps, six inches, so that our noses were touching. I kept my eyes open as I pressed my mouth against its lips.
I will be gone soon, and it will wash away the stain. It will go to another house tomorrow, after the sun falls, and another one of it will come to my attic. They are so hungry. When it leaves my attic, it will go back to the place it lives, the place with lights and the scent of roasting vegetables. It will not look in the mirror before it washes its face, before it raises its sleeve to rub away the crimson that I smeared on its lips. Maybe it will stain the fabric, but even if it doesn't, at least for a moment, when its door closes and it is again known by the name of Laura, it will remember, the two of us there in my attic, our lips pressed together, the red of my mouth marking its face, our rising chests brushing against one another. It will remember the color of my eyes, the way I kept its gaze as it gasped beneath my lips. The way I stepped back and waited for it to take what it came for.
After it left, I fell into the bed. I moved some of the bottles and drank from others. The wine hit my stomach and, high from the loss of what it had taken, I threw up, once, greatly, over the side of the bed. I laughed over the puddle of bile. I would stain this world in every way I could.
The next day, I did not get up to go to work. I woke in the attic room, the sunlight on my face like a stranger, like something I had known in another life. My body was an aching wound. My alarms were still ringing, though I had slept through their noise for hours. I turned them off and stood in the light.
They would come for me soon. I had no excuse for missing work, they knew that. I knew that. My manager at the café would have to report my absence, though she might not want to. It was only a matter of time before they came, before the door to my attic slammed open beneath their weight.
For a moment, though, I stood in front of the mirror, and saw how I looked in the light. The last time I had been outside, in the unbridled sun and air, not late for work, not on the clock, I was so young.
There are rules about what happens to a person like me, when I don't do the things I am supposed to. When I'm not where I'm supposed to be, when I'm not at work, when I haven't told anyone where I am, when I don't have a good excuse. When the debt keeps rising and there is nothing left to pay it.
The morning light looked so pretty, where it came in through my window. I kept looking at myself in the mirror, saw myself in the sun, and thought I looked pretty too, even if I had heavy circles under my eyes and my skin was ash. I took one of the wine bottles, one that I had left open on the bed next to me all night, and drank, just a sip. Beaujolais, bright and thickly sweet. This morning didn't have to be my last morning, but it would be.
For a long time there was no noise in the house, the other tenants either at work or going about their lives behind locked doors. It was so strange, the way time felt when I wasn't stealing seconds between shifts, when I could sit alone in a room by myself with nothing pressing down on me. I had forgotten how nice the world could be, when I could close my eyes, feel the sun on my skin, hear the distant chirp of birds.
I pulled a cardboard box from under my bed, looked at the collection of things I had taken. The backs of earrings, the rhinestones picked from clothing, the crumpled receipts, the clasp of a necklace, the hair ties slipped off wrists, the keychains, a single bookmark. These small, useless things, that no one will know what to do with when I'm dead. These tiny pieces of people who will not remember me, who never even knew I was there, refilling their waters, making their lattes, washing their dishes after they've gone.
From downstairs, there was a knocking.
I picked up the tube of lipstick that I had taken from a woman who was worth more than twenty of me. The door to my attic squeaked on its hinges. I painted my lips with the glossy red, the slick sheath of it sliding over my face. They took the steps two at a time. I was already dead, but they didn't know that. Three of it appeared in my attic. I watched it appear in the mirror, above the stain I had left the day before. It was pale and took up all the space. I was going to die, but I would take something with me. I turned to it, grinning, mouth bright, teeth knifesharp, and ready.