He surrounded me voice and touch like a summer night. His breaths fogged my lips in a wintergreen cloud, a stinging pallor that carried sweet sayings like barbacoa on the Christmas-black dawn. Rich, dark and shining, Zofloya lived to his name, towering and strange, smelling—how could he not?—of peat, honey, chocolate, leather, truffle, mink, cedar, char. His voice rumbled sleek and low like a cove, undertones vaguely mammalian, and his teeth were so white that when he smiled I saw skeletons. The conch pink gums I could have traced with my finger, if I had loved him. I didn’t. What I felt for him hedged on the idolatrous, the fanatical. He was fluid, opioid, artful, and he rose like an obelisk from the wells of my subconscious, all I was and wanted. I gave him my soft pink brain and watched it run like ice cream through his fingers.

We spoke in a chamber of unknowable vastness, though we occupied a small portion of it, the rest steeped in a chai haze of dark orange and reds that led to lesser spheres of thought. We circled each other like master and mustang, each imposing yet vulnerable before the other. He called this place Afuera and tranced me there when I needed him.

“Bring me her heart,” I said, wading through the garnet smog.

Zofloya made me queenly, gave me license and sway with his powers if I served him too. So when I wanted something, I told him in jest—I wouldn’t dare demand of him en serio.

His cheeks rounded and shined. The light dashed them like diamonds, then receded along his contours, into the velvet black. “You have hearts enough.”

“Then I’ll have her head.”

“Spare yourself, Sophia. It’s empty.”

And he circled out of sight, leaving me to my thoughts—Then how does she undo me?

He resurfaced. “She does very little. He degrades himself. You thought you had taught him better, but perhaps you’ve overestimated your charms.”

Our circling accelerated—

“Speak for yourself.”

“I do not pretend more than my ability.”

“Which means nothing to me if not exercised.”

—and stopped.

“I am not God. I am your guardian. Yours alone.”

He was not at my disposal, to be unleashed like a pooch on others. His presence was subtler, restricted to me. I felt the weight of him settle on my shoulders and press me like a flower under shrinkwrap. He was omnipresent and immediate.

So he must excuse me when I assume his reach to be broader than his condescension. The knight will wash your feet and hear your woes, but that dragon you hate? Let it rage on.

He was probably right, though. I would enjoy slaying this one myself.

My brother had a whore with apple-green eyes. Lamb was a sweet boy, pleased like a dog to be belittled to scraps. Eva conditioned him well. She toyed with his pappy mind because she flattered herself a domina in latex, sharp cane and sharper tongue. Really, she was a trashy loudmouth from the railroad who poisoned all in her company.

But Lamb no. He could never be spoiled, only trod. And what a soft footstool he made. He played cloak, roof, bank, and shield, with one cheek fast succeeding the other in a ready forgiveness I could not comprehend.

“The whore demands her wretch,” I muttered. “But she cannot have my Lamb. I want her gone.”

“Wouldn’t her absence pain him?”

I nailed Zofloya’s gaze. “I want her to suffer.”

“As the whore demands her wretch.”

I snorted and stamped. “Am I wrong?”

“Only unbecoming. You’ve been drinking spiders again.” His smile bared teeth like ivory pikes, a portent of mischief.

Drinking spiders. I would have walked on anyone else but Zofloya’s flashing—his eyes, teeth, cheeks—charged his words with a certain gravity. He could say anything and I’d nod along like a golden retriever before a milk bone. Of course to get to the other side, you’ve cracked it! and then what?

It took me a while to learn how to counter him.

“Tell me, Zofloya, that I’m worse for Lamb than she is.”

His lips dropped in sobering. “But you’re indisposed.”

Aren’t I.

Because having a husband meant I could no longer love anyone else. Howie was jealous, thought I loved Lamb more than him. He told me as much when he tossed me against the headboard of a Scottsdale motel.

In the purplish dark, between the up- and downbeats of my husband’s allegro, I first glimpsed Zofloya. He stood over me watching and when it was done led me from the boar’s bed to a July afternoon on the Atlantic shore, a gravel-and-seashell pier of cutlasses, mustangs, and pintos in waitressy pinks, blues, and reds. Girls with bubblegum skin and sandy knees crowded the sparkling hoods, theatrical in their doll-like apathy. Planes had painted whipped cream in the sky, but the city lay behind us, an afterthought to the blue. Gulls, white caps, lace bandeaus, waves like wolves charging the bluffs.

I looked to my guardian. I wore a yellow frock, Zofloya a white straw hat. “How long do we have?”

The sun lit his cheeks. “Go. Enjoy.”

I ran into the water and, at knee deep, dove.

The sun shafted through the underneath in white and gold bars. No crabs, no fish, no seaweed. Just me in the peopleless green, caught in the deep like a fly in amber to be found and cast a hundred years later in a rich woman’s necklace. For the water dissolved my bruises, and so, wet and white as a pearl, why shouldn’t I be flaunted?

Zofloya watched from the boardwalk, medieval in his sobriety among the snow cone carts and beach umbrellas and tinselly pinwheels that clacked in the kite-dotted wind. He disappeared as the sky darkened, but for the whites of his eyes.

When my limbs tired of swimming I spread my arms and floated—a daffodil between two big blacknesses—to watch the fireworks. They welted the night like painted eggs broken. When the show finished, the colors dribbled down the sides of the sky, taking with them the infinity of the night so as to leave a semidark stencil, a flat rectangle that narrowed and descended and boxed and suffocated, stopping maybe eight feet above my face and sprouting ugly papered walls to fence me in, and then there was Howie snoring between my breasts, his head a rock on my discolored ribs. I contemplated cracking him upside the temple with the bedside lamp, but what if I ended up with blood and light bulb all over the sheets (Egyptian cotton)? Also Howie would just get mad again, and I wouldn’t be able to throw him off before fists flew.

So I stroked his curls like a good wifey and thought about how much I missed Lamb. Wondered where he was, imagined him gentlemanly with some lucky girl, treating her as if passion were caring and not a euphemism for violence.

They say to keep boys who treat their mothers well. Growing up Lamb had only me, but he was still a keeper. The kids at school punished him for it—they said I was off—but he would fight friends and teachers for me. I remember us on a Sunday morning, curled up on the kitchen runner. His sunlit arm over my ribs like a gold bracelet gave me a place, which Eva sought to take.

Let her try to displace me. What was the oilshine of a whore to my second shadow, my Zofloya? I trusted our service to each other. Something in that dark kindred gaze compelled me to—irrefutable, a toast to a New Year. I resolved like a metamorphosee hopeful to be his ward, and he assented,

Yes, pearl.

I hated pearls growing up. Not until I was twenty did I understand the lustrous world behind them. Mink and pearls and something red—maybe lipshade or gloves or the hands themselves in a fast-blushing washbasin?

We were Pearl and Poseidon—he in whose arms you could go fully under and still breathe.

But I had to wonder, what of the sea-king without his sea? (Still a king, but no longer a god?) It was Friday. We were somewhere in the badlands. Between chasms of scarred red rock and dots of shrub, the cul-de-sac parodied an oasis with its terra cotta treepots and turquois pools.

It was still the desert. Its tile roofs and asphalt cracked and burned like the people. A textured place, charged with friction and abrasion.

I carried a pot of chili up the steps with an argyle Howard at my side. He could pull out the stops when he wanted to. Tonight he was the modern dandy, the boating economist from Duxbury in an uneconomical shade of red. Fucking Breton red. We actually looked lovely together. I could have clubbed him for it.

The house was a small one with red shingles, whose modern curvature echoed that of the adobe churches that once domineered over the last of the Pueblo until they disappeared into the dunes. Or do I romanticize? A house could be a history if one or the other merited remembrance. Neither did, in this case, but I am a generous historian: the house contained Eva’s sister Lily but belonged to the boyfriend, who had acquired it fair and nobly by squatting in the basement of the former owners (his parents, of course) until they succumbed of natural causes (so the neighbors hoped, but never questioned despite the architecture which, if not appropriated, insinuated foul play) and yielded him, the boyfriend, their property. Perhaps he still slept in his boyhood twin bed, unless he and Lily had assumed the master bedroom of the former Mr. and Mrs.?

Likely haunted, the plot made a charming backdrop for the church’s annual Christmas Eve bash.

In one screen door, out the other, we processed to the backyard where parishioners milled in gooselike clusters, chattering about their children in grade school—pom-pom collages, hermit crabs, crushes, bullies, anxieties of the young—and other trifles. Mostly young fathers aged by the home and robust grandmothers peacocking in floral print dresses with T-shirt sleeves. I cleared a space for the chili on the buffet table, poured myself a pepsi, and let the atmosphere spool me.

Overhead they had strung lights of seventies reds, greens, and blues, cutting the night sky in parallel bands of color and darkness. Burgers and shish kebabs spat grease on the grill, breathing a dark charred smell over the yard that ran lungs to brain. The host wore flip-flops and a Santa apron for the children, who were paddocked in the basement. Camels, sheep and shepherds fussed over by their mothers, many-armed furies wielding hairspray, bristlebrushes, and cameras like staff of Old Hollywood. It was the same old Nativity, ages three to ten, but parents fussed as they liked. How will my child do today? Why, if I were my child I would…

But the children seldom fulfilled these wishes. Made of image, not of mind. The mothers realized this, the offspring’s otherness, and shivered over their hair-dryers.

The outdoor set was stooped but well painted, the fathers’ contribution. The hay-strewn scaffold that held the manger stood before a sulfurous green palo brea on whose branches hung an electric Star of the East. When the children emerged, sheeted and roped, they climbed the scaffold and sang Silent Night.

Would that it were, I thought.

Zofloya stood by, grinning over the slatted glow of the grill. I tipped my pepsi toward him. I was here because we adults must go everywhere with everyone, arms linked like schoolchildren in a museum, traversing to brothers’ girlfriends’ sisters’ boyfriends’ until we’ve circumnavigated the planet and reduced six degrees to two. Zofloya had no such obligation, but he followed anyway. He said he answered to me. Made not in image, but of mind. Here it may be requisite to acknowledge his blackness compared to me, the apple-cheeked product of white suburbia. But, just so, wouldn’t he, the apparition of fantasy and fantasized otherness, appear as he had?

I grew up sad and kind in a town of like bores. I blistered under it, the homogeneity. Of course I dreamed of fire and sea, and conjured the deepest of both, a man whose face was ash and abyss, who sprouted from an unknown place in my mind. See, losing Lamb to Howie had loosed a querying reverie in me that answered itself a friend. And he from that new, probing headspace could only be foreign. Ancient and other, the Moor. Well, he could have been Christian, as I liked to think him—Angel of God, my guardian dear—but who was I to evangelize? He lived for me, he didn’t have to be me. In that way, I guess, I am not so motherly. But, again, does that surprise?

To Howie, maybe, who looked without listening and married me, the girl with the benign cherub’s face, a smiling accessory to his design. Little did he know the person I was underneath. It may appease him, however, that for a moment—Scottsdale, morning after—I wished to be pregnant. Not for family’s sake but so that he would leave me be. Let the grotesquerie of ungirlish womanness make him fly to some lithe whore in the hovel while I fattened on the couch. Metamorphosee proper. But I didn’t want a kid with Howard’s bulbous pate or whale-toothed mouth bloviating about the zoology of animal crackers.

I quit on the old female enterprise and created a different sort of person.

Lamb tapped my elbow. “They really go all-out for these things, don’t they? That sheep over there, with all the cotton balls? Poor little guy was glued into costume. Hey, Lily’s gone inside to get the kids some punch for when the play’s over. Why don’t you give her a hand?”

Lamb wasn’t the delegator sort. He just wanted to please. Eva must have put up a stink that I hadn’t yet homaged the hostess. I handed him my drink and kissed his cheek. He was so thoughtful. Misdirected a la vez, but true to his namesake. A gem.

I went inside. A scalloped punch bowl sat on the kitchen counter, empty but for a rubber ladle. A woman stood muttering and misting in the open fridge.

“Need some help?” I asked.

The door closed. Not the hostess. Unfortunately, I knew this one.

“Big of you to come,” said Eva, making smarter than she was as she jabbed at my size. She was waifish in the current vogue to my amazonian. “I know you have other places to be.”

With a forced inhale-exhale, I asked after the punch.

She said we—the enlightened matriarchy, bodhisattvas of suburbia—only served organically sourced. Sourced what? Why, natural fruit beverages squeezed by midgets in underlit basements near you.

No, but she’d said something equally stupid.

I shrugged. “Lamb told me there was punch.” He also mentioned a Lily, but screw her and her boyfriend’s haunted house, rife I saw with tchotchke of doting smallminded parents—cherry-cheeked gnomes in a maple hutch, more than one cookie jar, a flowerpot that read Desert Rose, potting mums (the dandelion’s holier-than-thou cousin) instead.

Turning back toward the screen door, I made to leave when I glimpsed in the stainless steel oven frame the reflection of my friend. Zofloya.

His smile showed teeth. Whether order or omen, it changed my mind.

I stayed. “Is your sister here? I’d like to introduce myself.”

“Lily knows who you are. And she’s busy now.”

“Sounds like she could use the extra hand.”

“She doesn’t want to see you,” Eva snapped.

Was there even punch at all, Lamb?

Not that it mattered. I was having fun now.

“Shame. I was hoping to get to know her. I mean, you’ve worked the past two years to attach yourself to my brother, and really we’ll all be siblings soon if you think about it. If you want.”

She leaned on the counter, her aspect turned dreamy. “You mean…Lamb will propose?”

I closed in on her. “He’s a coat-and-tie kind of guy, very traditional and upright beneath the curls.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, but you would know, you fell in love with him for it—how gentle and solicitous he is. How he has to please all parties. Even when we were young, when they told us you’ll be angsty, you’ll rebel, Lamb wouldn’t. Decorous and sweet against the tide, that’s why all the girls fawned over him. And if he picked one of them, he couldn’t just ask her out. He had to ask the parents if he could ask her out. And it always ended a happy day for the gentleman caller, but that never abated the tremor of his hand as he knocked on her door, an apprehension for an unforeseen reception… But nothing you don’t already know.”

“I don’t know that I do.” Her expression had wilted beyond confusion, past doubt. She looked troubled. I smiled.

Lamb needs me to like you. I need Lamb happy. You please Lamb. I don’t like you. You’ll ruin him. He needs me. I won’t stop. Me, not you. He’ll hate me. We all fall down.

You first.

“Just tell me what you want, Sophie.”

I want what you want.

I said, “I want to honor the birth of our Lord and Savior with some punch,” and walked away.

I heard a wailing “Ugh!” behind me and felt a dull smack on my left shoulder. The ladle bounced to the floor. Eva rounded me, picked it up, and held it two handed, elbows locked, like a misshapen handgun under my chin.

“You stay away from Liam and me!”

I snickered at her usage of Lamb’s legal name, that documentary label that lacked all confidence and intimacy.

She didn’t faze. “I am sick of you coming between us. Do you know how hard it is to be with someone who’s never left alone, whose sister is always looking through the keyhole? It’s sick, what you are.

“You can’t cling to his shirttail forever. You only get away with it now because you’re pathetic.”

I paled at that. She capitalized.

“I mean, what kind of a woman can’t please her man? Because that’s the only reason you’re always leeching on to us, isn’t it, because you and Howard don’t even like each other. But one day you’ll wear out your welcome, just wait. And that poor-me charade will go next, and show the hag you really are, and Liam will be mine.”

I looked to the oven. Zofloya’s face had vanished, but I could hear him urging me, Let her speak, let her speak, trust in me.

Swallowing my temper, I goaded her, “You’ll never know him like I do.”

“And a good thing!” she exploded, “Because you don’t love him for him, you love him for yourself. You live off our relationship because you’re jealous of what we have that you and Howie never did. So you drool after your brother because he’s found an equal who treats him the way he deserves, while your husband…Well, I guess he does the same.”

Enter Lamb. Or rather, notice him. I figured he’d wander in when Zofloya appeared. Punctual brother, he had heard everything.

Return to his girlfriend, who, having barbed and insulted his beloved sister, still held her at ladle-point.

Eva froze, eyes betraying the horror of being found out.

Show him the hag you really are.

Lamb looked to me. I thought Eva had talked herself into a deep enough hole, so I said nothing and let the tears pool on my lashes, tantalizingly unshed.

He shook his head. “What are you doing, Soph?”

“What am I doing?” I echoed, stomach squirming.

Glancing at his mistress, Lamb took me by the shoulders. “Soph, listen. Eva has worked very hard to make tonight happen. She doesn’t need you to stir anything up. No, listen, I’m not suggesting anything, I just think we should all take a breath and think about those kids in the yard who need our support right now. Tonight’s about them, Soph.”

My lips stuttered like frosted windshield wipers. I had to make them move. “But you heard what she said, Lamb.”

Do you agree?

“I think we need to take a step back and remember what tonight is about.”

“What, our Lord and Savior?”

I backpedalled, sniffing against a wave of nausea. Have you two discussed me behind my back?

I saw them laughing at me, the two of them, in premarital bliss—or worse, praying for me in an empty pew, to help and save me.

My fists charged with blood. “Just take a breath, just take a step. You’re unbelievable, Lamb.”

Poisoned.

I left him calling after me. I didn’t know where I was going, but the house was finite and perhaps vindictive as I wound up in the study with Howard and his bottle.

He offered a commiserating grin. “So you hate children singing as much as I do?”

I wiped the tears from my eyes and laughed. I hated him most when he said the best things.

I mentally ducked out of the study and called to Zofloya. Why did you make me do that?

Zofloya was seated this time, I revolving him.

Eva’s taken hold of his mind. He doesn’t see what’s right anymore, he can’t see his way back to me. You’ve done that.

I’m not finished either. Trust, and I will deliver him to you.

My throat shuddered with a vulpine whine, but I held my breath and returned to my husband in the study.

“How much longer do we have to stay to look legit?” he was saying.

Look legit? Did he mean us?

“You know, like, we made it, we loved it, we have to go now.”

I realized he meant the Nativity.

“I know, I know,” he said, with pacifying hand gestures, “it’s important to your brother. We’ll stay. I’ll just wait it out in here.”

I may have forgotten that, whereas I held Lamb’s arm and let him tow me wherever, Howie held mine. He had less reason than I to be here, but he had come for me.

I still hated the pants.

“I’m sure we can slip out at the applause. They’ll probably have cake or something afterward, so we’ll leave them.”

He shrugged. “Unless we got blocked in, in which case we’re here for the long haul.” He smiled at me, extending a hand. I sidled up to him, and he looped my waist. “Better yet, I’ll mow the bastards down if you call Jing’s.”

“Only if we do the lo mein.”

He cringed, wringing his hands around his beer and supplicating, “Come on. It’s Christmas.”

I rolled my eyes, grinning. Sometimes we acted like the people we thought we had married. An enviable match. In such public parade, how could you suspect its knots and strains? Our mutual disillusionment and debilitation cut too deep for conversation in a stranger’s study. Follow us home, and you’d see.

He liked sex rough, which should have please me given the banality of our courtship. Howie would zoom up the drive in a foreign car and lay on the horn until I jumped in and let him take me. Were it a movie, we would have broken into song and ridden to blackout. Free spirits wholesome and safe to the point of sickening. So the honeymoon, his ferocity and license, shocked and exhilarated me, yes, but it also insulted me. That grit, urgency, and bruising euphoria, when done and dark and I alone, ached in my bones as painful as any betrayal. Is that how he thinks to please me? As if I were some charity slut, gruff and simple, who needed hazard in her bed to stay her boredom? I had married—that is, I had outgrown the pretty young thing, the student with potential, the fiancée fresh and promising, and become the ol’ lady. A periphery fixture, a glass chandelier—lighting the window and waiting for hubbie to come home.

But the knot was fresh tied, and I knew that he loved me and that if I loved him as I had vowed to God I did, then I would grow like a carnation into the intensity of our marriage.

I chafed. Whole evenings I spent at Lamb’s, nursing an unspeakable pit of anxiety in his familiar company, where I pretended we were young and together and back in the country house, the first and only home we knew. Howie got angrier the later I returned to him and moved us four towns over for the business. He was freelance, no office required and already well established, but I said nothing as he secreted me away. Some things—if not love, then matrimony—are sacred, irrevocable. Howie and I grated each other, but it was our mutual burden. We might have been happier separate, but it would have broken the people we’d made of ourselves. If only to honor the youth that grafted and made us, we stayed.

I watched him drink at night. He’d return from cocktails with friends I didn’t know and poop out in his armchair with a tumbler of whiskey. Good, I thought. Weight his joints and gum his eyes. Tonight he’ll bunch and unbunch himself inside me like an inchworm and expire just as fast. But tenderly, perhaps, if I pour him another. More often than not he submitted. It showed in his belly, the red bite of his belt that worsened each day as he pudged out. He was too proud to go up a size. I say, the bigger the better. I could handle a drunk Howard—could deflect him or slow him as I liked. A couple times I lost control and almost suffocated when he passed out on top of me. The shower lasted a half hour as I teased his vomit from my hair, but I laughed the whole time. Don’t let your possessions control you, Howie.

I could have told him pointblank what I wanted. But if he couldn’t figure it out, what hope had we at all? We had already lapsed into an unspoken pact to honor our wedding vows. What good would thinking on it do?

Softening to nostalgia, I almost regretted what I did next.

Trust, my friend murmured from the depths, kissing my knuckles. Obey!

The slap stunned Howard.

A cuff to the ear, catching my nails on the soft grooves of cartilage, drawing blood. He dropped his Bud Lite and touched the area gingerly, wincing.

“The hell, Sophie!”

You have to know how sensitive men are, especially the handsome ones. Touch the untouchable, and shake them.

“We’ll do the lo mein, whatever you want… Jesus, what’s gotten into—”

“Pick it up.” I nodded at the bottle. It lay in pieces on the oriental, ale hissing into the fibers. He stared. “Come on. You’re bored, I’m game. Or do you need the lights off to play?”

The perimeter of the room darkened and ebbed until only the conical beams from the desk lamp lit us in their viscous yellow glow. Come to the Afuera. I could feel Zofloya’s presence like the palpable charge before a hurricane. Our secret room in the brainstem where pan is lawful rhapsody.

I swung high to low, a predictable arc, baiting.

He grabbed my wrist, catching on. I willed him to hold it and take my neck with his other hand, grapple me like an asp, until my vision burst in red mums of nerve impulses, the trachea pinch like a hose under heel, the eyes dial back in their sockets to glimpse Zofloya’s cheshire grin in the pooling night sky. But Howie only dished pain when it was least productive, it seemed. Not a fighter, but a fool. He held only my wrist.

I would have been disappointed had Lamb not found us.

He wandered in, saw the bottle and my red eyes, and lighted on my husband before the poor bastard could let me go. The three of us flew.

I lay on the floor, head propped upright along the desk front, and watched Lamb grapple my husband. With a few quick blows to the face, Lamb dispatched the scoundrel and sent him back to the car, nursing his nose with an old dishrag. I had glass bits sparkling up my forearms, but it was beautiful, wasn’t it? I had wheedled my brother to fight for me again, my trusty German shepherd.

He brought me back to his place and set me on the sofa, tucking a blanket over my shoulders. What kindness and civility I craved and could have wept for having. He made me grilled cheese and coffee and drove back to the Nativity to collect his girlfriend. When she arrived to see me curled up in their living room, she balked but said nothing and edged out of sight. Lamb must have told her off, after everything he had witnessed. First the kitchen fight, then the study, incriminating Eva and Howard in one deftly blocked night. I thanked Zofloya. More, I owed him for the closure to come.

I listened as Eva ascended the stairs, following her in my mind. Up the last step, down two doors to the left, to the pretty bath with powder blue tiles and brassy nozzles. She would light the candles, draw a bath, and slide down the porcelain, knees up, nose down, head shy of immersion, but a pity to be remedied. I sent my friend and fury to lend her a hand, so she could better inhale the fragrant waters.

Lamb and I were watching a movie when we heard a dull thunk from upstairs.

“You hear that, Soph?” he asked, eyes turned up.

“Hmm?” I willed my cheeks to stay cool, settling into him. Wouldn’t we always wind up like this? It was true, right, and resonant. A psychological loop that permitted no other reality—this was my life. Nothing would come between me and Lamb.

The room darkened.

I tried to focus, to resist the summons, but my vision receded to the haze of our lair. My pearl, purred the omnipresent voice. I could feel Lamb slipping from me, I from him, as Zofloya pulled.

No, not now!

You’re indisposed? he challenged, manifesting before me. Since when have you no time for your own? What good is a gift without celebration?

A faint red light opened over the Afuera, burning transparent streaks through the smoke to reveal a modest stage raised over a tinder-grass lawn wasted with cups, cake plates, and foldup chairs. I squinted at the source of light, and found the Star of the East, humming faintly its voltage.

I stood on the empty Nativity scaffold, Zofloya behind the grill. It still fired and wafted, its smoke a density rich, sweet, and wet underneath. My friend waved a pair of blackened tongs and brought them to his nose like incense sticks. Come and taste.

I joined him behind the hood and basked in the delicious heat. We watched the slab of meat percolate between sear lines. It smelled of rosemary, orange peel, and viscera.

That’s divine! What is it?

Zofloya shrugged. Why, roast lamb.

My nostrils clogged with the smell. It traveled through my sinuses and sedimented char along my esophagus, down and in and deeper. The taste was bitter.

What have you done? I tried to rise from the Afuera and return to the couch, but I kept slipping back into the yard, nowhere to go. I coughed and cried, Where is my brother? He was mine!

I staggered toward Zofloya, bile and tears welling in horror.

He tweaked my nose with his tongs and sprinkled some pepper onto the grill.

I am your guardian, you my keep. You are not his to have. But you may have him.

My entire sternum throbbed, the lungs inside batting for air.

I come of and for you, Sophia. You deserve better than to deny yourself with anyone else.

This was your aim all along. I could barely string the thought as I suffocated.

You wanted yourself, Sophie. For that you made me. And I am here to serve.

He handed me a plate.