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Their luck holds long enough for them to get them to Ballarat. They’ve got less than four hundred bucks on them. Naim only had a creased twenty in his wallet when he got out of his mother’s car, the rest is Ryan’s, crumpled bills he’s been nicking from his parents for ages now. Meant for what, “I don’t even know,” he admitted sheepishly, exhaustion bleeding from his eyes, “Maybe for this.”
They rent a room at the grubbiest place that’ll rent them a bed for a couple of hours and not demand an ID from either of them. The walls are thin enough they can hear the television on in the room to their right, the creak and sigh of the mattress to the one left. Ryan thumbs on the television though this place doesn’t even boast cable, fills the room with chatter of a local weather report.
Ryan sits on the yellowing laminate floor of the bathroom while Naim showers, visible the entire time through the hard water build up clouding the shower curtain a milky white. He lends Naim a pair of clean underwear to wear, navy boxer briefs that match the bruises spotting Naim’s body, all the places that thing slammed into him, and held him down, and hurt him—
“I don’t have any clothes.” Naim says stupidly to the blurry outline of Ryan moving behind the shower curtain when it’s his turn. He looks at his bruised and scabbed hands, the thin bones of his fingers and his short jagged nails, rough-chewed after days and days of fear. “I don’t have anything.” He says and for the first time since his mother ignored his desperate pleas his voice cracks and the stormfront that’s been building and building in his chest, suffocating him from the inside out since the police woman told him what he was describing didn’t make sense (before then maybe, probably, since Naim was a small boy in a small body and already suspicious of himself, self-aware enough to know he wasn’t the same, wasn’t right—)
He bites his knuckle between his teeth, bites down hard enough to hurt, eyes spilling over and breath broken around the knot in his chest.
Ryan is dripping lukewarm water, stinks of the same cheap lemony shampoo and bodywash mounted to the showerwall, hands firm on Naim’s bare shoulders. He says Naim’s name but nothing more, thumb digging one of the fingerprint shaped bruises on Naim’s collarbone. Naim flinches, not from pain, the memory of the thing wearing Ryan’s face using Ryan’s hands to choke the air from his lungs.
Ryan says his name again, carefully pulls Naim’s hand away from his mouth, leaving him nothing to gnash on but his own stuttered breath.
-
Naim pawns the chain around his neck and his father’s wedding band. Ryan doesn’t try to talk him out of it. They both know they need the money.
The first order of business with their windfall is getting some hot food.
They find a decent looking chippy and order a pie, a bottle of water, and a can of coke each. They sit on a gratified plastic bench outside the shop to eat.
Naim waits until he’s finished eating to pull his phone out of his pocket. Naim’s phone died hours ago and he doesn’t actually want to charge it. He knows his mom must have called over a hundred times by now.
“Do you think she’ll call the police?” Ryan asks, mouth full, gravy smudged on his chin. Naim thinks they need to find a Vinnie’s or something, needs to pick up at least another shirt or pair of jeans, can’t live out of Ryan’s backpack for however long they’re doing this.
Until that thing kills him, he thinks, resignation blunt and cold in his belly.
“Maybe.” Naim answers. “Your folks?”
Ryan shrugs. “Maybe.”
Ryan doesn’t talk about his parents too much. Even before. He had so many questions for Naim about his mum, his dad, the life the three of them shared before Bandee. Naim thinks of the steely-faced man and woman who answered the door when Naim knocked, how they didn’t look surprised when they told him they didn’t know where Ryan was. “He’s always going off on his own.” His dad said, bothered by the inconvenience, as if Hunter hadn’t just been found dead days ago.
Naim thinks of the search party. The dogs. The dry grass and burnt out husk of the old mill and laundry left to be bleached pale under the watchful eye of the sun. The bird crying in its cage.
I looked for you, Naim doesn’t say.
I’m sorry. He doesn’t say that either.
-
He tells Ryan about the lighter. The fire. The way the thing screamed as it writhed on the floor, its limbs twisting as if unhinged, how it seemed to stretch, expand like a snake’s throat as it swallowed its prey.
The park is bustling all around them, children and families and friends, playing and picnicking and living their lives, unbothered by two strangers, two weary boys sitting hip to hip on a bench.
Ryan tells him what happened in the bathroom. Touches his ear, the stitches still visible, reconnecting the shell of his ear to itself.
“Did it ever, uh, seem to like it? When you touched it?” Naim lets himself ask, remembers how it had gone still, poised above him, cheek turning into Naim’s shaking hand for a split second. Like Naim’s gentleness had caught him off guard.
Ryan clears his throat. “Seemed to like kicking my ass plenty.” He tries to joke, but his eyes are bloodshot and dull and his mouth is pinched.
“Yeah.” Naim agrees, because he remembers that even better. The wild satisfaction in its face as it attacked. It looked familiar that night in the bathroom, the mean glint of its blazing eyes nothing like Ryan’s, and everything like the look in the deliverance man’s eyes as he laid his curse, in the schoolboys who beat them. In his mother’s certainty when she told him she wouldn’t lose him.
-
The hostel puts them in bunk beds in a room that sleeps twelve but the three rungs up to the top bunk might as well lead to the summit of a mountain. There’s no barrier between the bottom bunk and the rest of the room, but no one is looking their way when Ryan and Naim squeeze into the bottom bunk. Head to foot like boys at a sleepover.
They’re fully clothed, sleeping in the clothes they’ve been wearing all day because they’re too tired to bother changing, already too used to waking in a hurry and making a run for it.
“We’ll sleep ‘til check-out tomorrow.” Ryan whispers conspiratorally in the nearly empty room, just another boy with large headphones and a German flag sewn on his backpack on the top bunk all the way in the corner. But there are other beds waiting for their occupants to return. There’s no chance they’ll be alone.
His voice is the same as the one he once used to invite Naim to join him for a spliff at the mill. Naim can’t see his face but he can picture it, clear as day, the small pleased incline at the corner of his mouth.
Naim knows they won’t be able to afford this for long. Hot food and temporary shelter. They’ll probably have to leave Ballarat soon. Too close to home if anyone is looking for them.
But Naim is too tired to think about tomorrow or the day after that, shifts so that his arm is resting more fully on Ryan’s jean-clad knees, peers up at the metal rungs of the bunk overhead.
Ryan squeezes his ankle, warm metal bands of his silver rings pressing against the knobby bone. Naim lets his eyes close, shuts out the dim overhead lights and the rusty bars, eyes burning with the tired bone-deep weariness that stems from somewhere deeper than a lack of sleep.
-
They’re in an EzyMart, Ryan chatting up the clerk while Naim racks what he can from the grab-and-go section, putting triangle sandwiches and fruit cups into the backpack he picked from an op shop days ago. He thinks of his mother, a board book, a cartoon rendering of stone tablets. Thou shall not steal.
Naim thinks it isn’t fair to hear those words spoken at the head of worship halls from people who aren’t afraid of hunger. Naim had never gone to sleep hungry before this week but he knows now that he’d have starved in his mother’s house if he’d stayed, no matter what was in his belly.
“We hafta go.” Ryan says, appearing at his shoulder, whispering under his breath, hand on Naim’s wrist even as he drops a bruised apple into his bag. Naim doesn’t hesitate, lets Ryan tug him out the door, sneakers slapping furtively on the pavement as they make their way quickly down the sidewalk. Ryan doesn’t say anything, forward facing and silent, dodging passersby as they flee. When Naim tries to look back Ryan only pulls harder, Naim nearly stumbling as he adjusts his stride to keep up. They turn off the crowded sidewalk into a crack between two buildings, damp and dim, crowded with the scent of garbage and piss. Ryan pulls his arm, takes him deeper into the cool shade, and Naim is still listening for approaching feet, the rush of a clerk or a cop, but only uninterested strangers walk by the mouth of the alley.
“Naim!” Someone shouts behind him, no, Ryan shouts and Naim’s blood runs cold, his limbs turn leaden but Ryan—no not Ryan, pulls harder, hand squeezing mercilessly around his wrist. He digs his heels into the grimy asphalt underfoot, but the thing has always been stronger than him, it drags him when he refuses to move.
He takes too long to dig into his pocket, sweaty fingers fumbling over the square body of the lighter that lives there.
The thing in front of him stops so abruptly that Naim trips over his own reluctant feet, knees slapping against the ground, the pain of the fall an afterthought to the pain of it’s hand around his wrist, god, the bones are going to turn to dust within its grip, the fear in his body filling his bones like ice.
(He’s been so cold since the deliverance preacher forced him to look in the flame, like he pulled all the warmth out of Naim’s body, snuffed it out when he slapped his lighter shut.)
The thing that is not Ryan raises Naim by his arm like he’s nothing but a ragdoll, strains the muscles in his shoulder, his chest, his spine, pale blue eyes unflinching as it stares at Naim. A rock flies over it’s shoulder and when it looks up another one hits it in the forehead, slices the skin in two. Blood pours forth. It’s grip slackens enough for Naim to drop, elbow cracking against the cement as he falls. “Naim!” Ryan’s voice says but its mouth doesn’t move, it just backs away with a hiss, and then Ryan is standing over Naim, lighter held up in front of him.
“Is it still here? Can you still see it?” Ryan asks, flame flickering, voice shaking.
“You hit it.” Naim says dumbstruck, breathless, fingers still uselessly squeezing at the unlit lighter in his pocket. “Could you—?”
Ryan shakes his head, finally lowers his arm, lighter hastily slipped into the pocket of his jacket. He squats next to Naim slowly, eyes still searching the deep end of the alley though there’s nothing there now.
“I just saw you.” He says, finally reaching for him, pale fingers touching the reddening skin of Naim’s aching wrist.
-
“My mum says it can’t be undone.” Naim whispers, shoulder pressed to Ryan’s, the two of them hunched low in the back row of another bus. “She said that’s what they told her when she—” The words crack on his tongue, he can’t say it. “It’s permanent.”
(He wants to ask Ryan if his parents knew. He thinks of how the pastor cried, frozen in his grief with the microphone in his hand, desperate hitching breaths and his wife’s pleading murmuring, thinks he can’t have known, can’t have imagined it would end like that. With Hunter dead. But maybe he had. Maybe he and Ryan’s parents are just like his mum. Knew what the deliverance healer was doing to them and let him. He said it wasn’t my fault. It was yours.)
“What if,” Ryan starts as the bus rumbles down the empty roadway, voice barely audible over the droning engine. “What if it isn’t though? Maybe the deliverance man doesn’t know how to undo it, but someone else?” It’s a mad idea, makes Naim’s mouth go dry. Ryan’s eyes fix on his face, sees the dry-rot of fear that Naim’s whole life has been built on, turns more fully in his seat to stare at Naim. His hand curls over Naim’s forearm, presses down through the material of his jacket.
“Those people, my parents, your mum, they’re so sure of themselves. All our lives. They’ve been telling us what we’re supposed to believe and do and—” Ryan licks at his bottom lip, like he’s tasting the words, “They’d like to believe they have that kind of power. But it isn’t—we know it isn’t all powerful, right? It’s got weaknesses. It’s afraid of fire. It can’t attack when other people are around. I think—” There’s a frantic shine to his eyes, brighter than fear. The same color as hope. “We just need to find someone who can help us.”
Naim feels something warm rustle in his chest, a single spark threatening to catch. He can’t figure out why until it clicks. Ryan keeps talking about them like a set. “How are we going to do that?”
Ryan leans sideways, head tipped against the high headrest of the bus seat, still turned at an angle towards Naim. “I don’t know yet. But we will. Alright? We’ve just—we stick together.” Ryan’s eyes drop, glance at his pale hand over Naim’s arm.
Naim wants to take his hand, kiss their sweat-damp palms together. It’s hard to do sometimes. His skin itches with guilt. It’s his fault after all. His fault Ryan is here.
“Right.”
-
In Melbourne they sleep rough for two nights before they get woken up by a cop. “Park’s closed.” The officer says, shining a glaring light into their startled eyes. They lumber to their feet, packs grabbed with white-knuckled grips, rub too-little sleep from their eyes.
They spent the day walking from place to place. Libraries mostly, ducked into a new age shop, the kind of place that would have driven his mum to fits, choked with incense and crowded with crystals and tarot decks. They asked the man behind the counter what he recommended for protection, listened intently as he reeled off oils and herbs and stones.
They couldn’t splurge, each of them picking up a single glass eye—blue and piercing—strung on red string. They’re wearing them now, weightless on their wrists like matching friendship bracelets. Neither of them has been brave enough to test whether they work or not.
The cop sends them packing with a frustrated huff, mutters a word under his breath that Naim’s heard before. They find an all night diner, share a steak and onion sandwich, pass a chilled bottle of Coke between them. It's the closest thing to a kiss they’ve shared since before Izzy set them up to get beaten—since before Ryan learned the truth in the worst way he could have learned because Naim was too much a coward to tell him when he should have from the start, should have been brave and asked him about Hunter instead of—
The wait staff leaves them alone at their table, lets them sit there and watch as cabbies come and go around them. Eventually Naim goes up to the counter for a cup of coffee he needs more than he wants. Mum never liked him drinking coffee, said it would stunt his growth.
The clerk looks at Naim outright, scans his disheveled clothes and hair that’s grown into his eyes and what he’s sure is a permanent mask of pale exhaustion. She slides a cookie across the counter alongside his mug of coffee.
“You know, there’s a drop-in centre not too far from here. If you’re looking for a place to stay.” She says, pretending to count out the coins Naim’s dropped in her hand. “You can call if you’d like. If you need somewhere safe.” Her eyes slide towards Ryan, still sitting at their table, cheek resting against his hand, eyes drooping even as he watches Naim from across the restaurant.
Naim blinks. Hands frozen mid-reach. Bright red string on display on his still-bruised wrist. You’ve got it all wrong, Naim wants to tell her. He wouldn’t do that to me.
Even in the beginning, in the mill, when Ryan’s hands struck his chest, there was no fear at his hands. Not even now that something evil has worn Ryan’s face and forced a hand that felt like Ryan’s hand into Naim’s screaming mouth, even now Naim isn’t afraid of them.
He forces himself to grab his mug, picks up the crinkly wax paper sleeve wrapped around the cookie.
“Thanks.” He says, and goes back to their table.
-
It’s easy enough to search for the centre on Ryan’s phone when they’re outside, sitting at the bench at a bus shelter. They walk to the address because it’s better than sitting still in the cold, find their way to an unassuming building front with their packs hanging from their stiff shoulders.
“Uh,” Ryan says at the front desk, the receptionist’s face neutral as she looks at them through a thin pane of plastic.
“We—our families—” His Adam's apple bobs when he swallows. “We had to leave home.” He says, his head dips, his shoulders hunched forward. Naim thinks of him forced on his knees in front of the deliverance healer, his back straight and his shoulders at ease, how his body contorted and withered into itself, yellow bile spilling from his lips. “Our families, they’re religious types and we’re—uh–” Ryan clears his throat. “We’re gay.” Ryan says, lifting his head.
It’s the first time Naim’s heard him say the word. Boys in Bandee and back home before that, they’d call each other that often enough, fling it one another as both a joke and a jab. Naim’s done it too, Naim’s done worse than that. He sat at that table rain damp and angry and told Hunter’s parents—
Ryan, who took a dead frog to the face in front of their whole class, who tried to warn Naim away so his mum wouldn’t see them together, he says the word like it’s nothing. Like it’s just a word.
Because it is.
It’s just a word. It’s what they are. Even before they’d ever met. Even if they never kiss again.
Naim thought it would hurt like a flung stone the day it finally caught up to him, this truth he can’t cut out of himself. Even the deliverance man couldn’t do it. All he could do was make Naim scared of himself.
The truth barely makes a ripple now.
-
They don’t have any beds for them but the reception buzzes them in, leads them to a brightly lit room that reminds Naim of the youth room at the worship hall they used to go to before they moved to Bandee.
They have to turn over their lighters and the small pocket knife Ryan brought with him. It makes them both nervous to relinquish the only reliable protection they have, but there’s too much to turn away from on the other side. There are outlets to charge their phones and clean bathrooms and shower stalls and even a small laundry room just down the hall. They each get given little pouches with toiletries and clean socks and granola bars, all of which Naim and Ryan stick in their backpacks.
Besides, Naim tells himself before his heart starts to race properly, there are others here, a couple of young stragglers who look like them, tired and wary.
The site coordinator leaves them to their own devices, tells them they can stay here while they wait for one of the case workers to become available. “They’ll be able to make a referral to one of our housing units if you qualify.”
“Together?” Ryan asks, somewhere between hopeful and cautious.
“You’ll have to talk to a case worker. I can’t make any promises. It’s dependent on space—”
It’s something they can worry about later Naim tells Ryan when they’ve settled into one of the corners of the room. It’s got one of those L-shaped couches that fits flush against the wall, just long and wide enough for Naim to fit laying down if he curls his legs towards his stomach. Ryan lays down with his legs hanging off his end, looking up at the ceiling while Naim looks at him.
The throw blanket the coordinator gave them smells like the economy detergent Mum switched to when they moved, folded in half under Naim’s head, makes his throat ache like fire smoke.
Ryan lifts one of his arms, lets it fall in the empty cushion just north of his head. Naim watches the tilt of his head as he looks his way, the way something eases in his face when he sees Naim there staring back.
-
They have to tell a version of their story that’ll make sense to other people, and maybe the worst part is that even without all the facts, without the deadly creature lurking at their back, is the barely checked horror on the case manager’s face.
“Uh, the pastor, he brought in a, uh, called him a deliverance healer.” Ryan says, worrying at he ring on his finger. “He said he was gonna cure us, Hunter and me.” He rubs at the side of his nose. From the first time they met, Ryan’s always been moving, fluttering, jittering, flickering in and out of motion. “At first, people just ignored me, but then, they started saying stuff. The other boys.” The frog hitting Ryan’s face in the middle of class and no one saying anything as its guts plopped on the floor at his feet. Not even the teacher when he’d come back to the lab. Just told Ryan the mess had be cleaned up before he could excuse himself to the bathroom. “My parents. They stopped talking to me. They weren’t ever chatty but after, it’s like I just didn’t exist anymore. Not to them.”
“I think my mum always knew. About me.” Naim tells the wooden table in front of him when its his turn. “I didn’t before, but now—I think she at least suspected.” Had Dad? Had they ever stayed up late at night while Naim slept, whispering about him? What they could do to help him with this problem? It makes his stomach lurch to imagine it now.
“She said that the world wasn’t safe for people like Hunter and Ryan and that she needed to make sure I—she said she wanted to keep me safe.” Ryan shifts in his seat next to him. Naim hadn’t told him that. “She said that fear is what keeps us alive.”
Naim talks about Izzie taking them to the empty car park after Hunters’ funeral. Their classmates’ plans to beat their heads in. It had been as terrifying as the thing that wears Ryan’s face, makes his body go tight with fear, steeling itself for another blow.
At night he can still their faces, that unmasked hatred, their gleeful violence.
-
At Mellon House they get assigned to a room with two single beds and a small ensuite. They’re lucky, Naim knows, to have gotten a placement at all, nevermind one together. In the same room.
It’s only temporary. The case worker made that clear. They’ve got six weeks, maybe eight if they’re lucky, and then it’ll be back to park benches most likely. There’s loads of things they have to do to stay here. Go to counseling sessions like Naim had to after Dad died—after Dad killed himself—and do chores in communal spaces and take shifts on the kitchen crew and enroll in some kind of training or coursework since they’re both under eighteen.
The caseworker, Graham, said there was a work-placement program, but the chances of them getting placed at the same job are low. He said it like he was trying to soften the blow but there was no hiding their mutual distress at the idea. Naim saw how he scribbled a note at the top right corner of one of their files, wondered what it said. Whack jobs, maybe.
At his first counseling session Naim worries his leg, up and down, up and down, twists the red string ‘round and ‘round his wrist. He knows Ryan isn’t alone. He’s on lunch shift, working in a room with at least five other people. If he finishes before Naim’s done here he can go to the common room where there’s always at least one adult. It’s virtually impossible to be alone here.
The counselor is polite, quiet. She nods when Naim answers her questions to show she’s listening. She says his name every time she talks. Mostly she asks how he’s felt since leaving home.
Naim doesn’t know how he’s feeling. Tired. Scared. Worried about money and what they’ll eat and where they’ll sleep and how long they have until they fuck up, until that thing gets one of them alone. Until it kills him. (Will it still look like Naim when it comes for Ryan? Will it wear someone else’s face by then? Does it look like someone else now?)
Sometimes he’s mad at his mum. Mostly he’s mad at himself.
“Why are you mad at yourself?” The counselor asks patiently.
Naim chews his cheek. There’s a ridge on the inside of his left cheek. He must have bitten himself the night it came into his house.
She waits for him to answer. He waits out the clock.
-
They add to their arsenal.
A woman with cropped curly hair tells them to put a piece of blocky black tourmaline at their window, and shiny, glass-like obsidian by their door. “To block out negative energy.” She says smoothly, recommends a rosemary plant to ward against ill intentions.
In their room Naim turns the inky black blade of obsidian over in his palm. It’s just a rock. But then, his lighter is just a lighter. No different from the one the deliverance man held up in front of his face. And a cross is just a piece of wood until a certain type of person looks at it.
Naim closes his hand around the stone, feels the bite of its sharp edge against his skin. Not enough to slice, just enough to sting.
He thinks of the bells his mother told him were God calling out to him. Dad had only been gone for a handful of days and she wanted Naim to hear God in the chiming of those bells.
Naim isn’t looking for God right now. He doesn’t even know if he believes in God at all, if he ever did. Not the way Mum does, can’t imagine ever praying to the God his mother asked to do this to them.
But there’s something greater than Naim out there, he knows that much for sure. He doesn’t want to believe it’s just the terrible stuff, the bloody and gory and terrifying.
Ryan comes out of the bathroom, toothpaste smeared on his chin. They haven’t seen the thing in here yet. Maybe the bracelets help. Maybe there’s just too many people here.
“You alright?” Ryan asks when he sees him, sitting at the foot of his single bed, fist clenched around a shard of glass-like rock.
Naim nods, uncurls his fingers slowly. It’s still just a piece of stone sitting in his palm. “Do you really think this stuff will work?”
Ryan comes over. He picks up the piece of obsidian. It’s smudged with Naim’s sweat. Ryan holds it up, inspects it between his fingers, their fingerprints overlapping. It catches Naim by surprise when Ryan lifts it to his lips, presses a soft quick kiss to the surface of it. He holds it out to Naim, the shiny surface of the stone level with his mouth. Ryan nods at him. “For luck.” He says, eyes warm, hand holding steady as Naim leans forward. He can probably feel Naim’s breath on his fingertips when he kisses the obsidian.
-
There are dreams still. Naim doesn’t know if those are real or not, if the thing neither of them has seen for weeks is trying to find another way of getting to them.
He dreams of Ryan pale faced and somber as he stared at Naim from inside the burning mill. “It’s okay.” He said and then it wasn’t Ryan anymore, it was something bloody and grotesque that spoke with his mother’s voice and then Ryan again, laying on the floor of the roller rink, eyes open and unstaring, broken on the ground. The worst dreams are the ones where he’s back in Bandee, back in that room at his mother’s house. Dreams where he’s alone and knows, just knows, that Ryan’s gone. That he’s been taken or killed, that he wants nothing to do with Naim, not ever again.
He wakes up sweating, sheets twisted around his limbs, feels like he’s being choked all over again, his breath coming in shaky pants. His eyes sting.
“Naim.” Comes Ryan’s voice, soft and careful, and for a second Naim can see him sitting at the foot of his bed, shoulders gently curving, one hand reaching out, but he blinks sleep from his eyes and Ryan’s gone. His name comes again.
“Naim.”
Naim turns on his side, and there’s Ryan, sleep mussed and pink-cheeked, turned towards him on the bed across the room. “C’mere.” Ryan says, the authority in his voice at odds with the supine movement of his arm, lifting up, an invitation for Naim to fill the empty space at his side. Naim doesn’t hesitate, always so easy to accept whatever Ryan offers him. A smoke. A kiss. A kindness.
“You’re all sweaty.” Ryan mumbles when Naim presses up against him. He doesn’t push him away though, just lets his arm fall, brings the sheet and blanket down with it, encloses Naim inside with him.
“Sorry.” Naim whispers, eyes closed, tucked close. Somewhere in the back of his head he’s waiting for a strike, waiting for Ryan’s softness to melt away, turn bitter, sharp. Fingers yanking at his hair, slamming his head down, knees jabbing at his belly, between his legs, teeth gnawing at his throat, ripping out his windpipe.
But Ryan just presses a kiss to the top of Naim’s head, sweaty hair be damned.
“Go to sleep, cunt.” Ryan orders with another kiss to Naim’s tacky forehead. Even here, in the dark, with only the two of them to bear witness, it doesn’t feel like a secret.
Ryan brushes his lips over the salty moisture gathered on Naim’s eyelashes, such a careful nothing touch, but it means everything. It always does with Ryan.
-
“If you think it’s stupid we don’t have to do it.” Ryan says for the fiftieth time that afternoon. One of the girls on their floor is all into witchy shit, told them to go get a cleanse if they needed to put bad shit behind them. Ryan had asked around, curiously academic about the whole thing considering he was a below average student at best. He put together a whole list of options in his notes app, made Naim review them all and then tell him which one sounded best to him.
There was a lot of variety. Diets and cold plunges and anointing with oils.
They both picked fire.
The shop attendant smiles at them when they book the service, gives them a slip of paper with the time and date. They’re asked to pay what they’re able, which feels like a grift, but Naim can’t turn his nose up at the offer. They make a living stipend for doing chores and attending their training courses, but it isn’t much.
(“More than nothing.” Dad used to say when Naim used to whinge about his allowance. “Who else is going to give you twenty bucks for free?”)
Naim’s stomach turns over itself all morning leading up to the main event. But this isn’t anything like meeting with the deliverance preacher. “What have we got to lose?” He counters. The answer is bigger and scarier to consider than he can put into words.
But not doing anything leads to the same end so they might as well give it a go.
The shop attendant leads them out back to a small square garden, messy and overgrown with all types of plants. There’s a bird fountain gurgling peacefully in one sun-drenched corner. Everything looks and smells green.
“Do we, uh, kneel or anything?” Ryan asks, one hand closed around Naim’s now. His fingers are sweaty, squeeze too tight. Naim squeezes back.
The shop attendant, witch maybe, probably, shakes their head. The star-shaped piercing in their nose twinkles in the afternoon sun.
“You can if you’d find it grounding, but you can stand. Whatever feels best for you.” Their voice is lush, like velvet and custard and the greenery growing thick around them. They produce a heavy silver lighter inlaid with rippled tiger’s eye. Naim can recognize them now, touches his thumb to the smooth face of the stone he wears in a ring on his pointer finger. The flame snaps to life with a crack, dances in the open air as it’s lowered towards the three untouched wicks of a thick pillar candle.
The air turns sweet with the smell of beeswax.
Naim and Ryan remain standing, hands held fast.