For as long as the merchant’s daughter could remember, Hunger had been working Its claws into the folds of her mind. She lived with the Hunger for what she could not have—she lived beneath Its wings, under the yellowed eye trained on her every motion; for when she did move, it was Hunger who moved her: with Its talons ripping deeper into the crimson of her throat, she flew to wherever on whatever whim Hunger could fancy. Dangled always in darkness, she saw herself for what Hunger knew her to be—prey.
She knew as much—nineteen years of living under the merchant’s roof had taught her she owed her life to anyone but herself. It had warped her: she sought tirelessly to justify her servitude, surmising it was fair that she should endure this treatment—for Hunger had not harmed her. To harm her would be to make her bleed; thus she checked her neck for blood, settling her undying hand where Hunger would use Its talons to take the liberty of dragging her from place to place. She had never stopped checking, nor had she ever bled; for this reason she had never objected to cleaning up after one of the merchant’s revelries, or having to scavenge for food when he needed a snack. Or being told to take the gravel road through the woods to the store at midnight to buy him some matches.
She tears her hand from her neck. The matchboxes tumble from her arms as she brings both hands to her eyes, searching, searching for traces of blood, the blood where Hunger would have left gashes. Over and over she scoured her hands, kneading them until they turned a shade of red so rich she wouldn’t have been able to pick out bloodstains had they existed.
Nothing’s there.
Tightening the coat around her, the merchant’s daughter left, feeling the Hunger to be home again.
Home, it seems, was just as hungry for her return: the door was wide open. The merchant, nowhere to be seen; a note thrown to the floor, “Back when out of cash” scrawled in red ink. If she were to peer out the back window, she knew, the truck would be gone—off to some bar in the middle of nowhere.
She sat down. She got back up; she had wanted dinner, she remembered. Tomato soup. She fetched a pot, filled it with water, set it near the stove, and reached for the matches to light the stove.
Nothing’s there.
Hunger had bested her yet again.
What had she done with the matchbox? She had just been carrying some. Or—had she? No—she dropped them outside. In the gravel. Yes, that’s where they are. She stooped to pick her coat off the floor—had she taken it off?—and moved her hand from her neck to open the door.
There they were. Five or six matchboxes strewn about, as if somebody had dropped them mid-sentence. The few that were unharmed, she set aside while she kneeled to collect the poor matches who were homeless.
One match in the matchbox.
Two matches in the matchbox.
Three matches in the matchbox.
Four matches in the matchbox.
All the way up to forty; then one box was completed and another began.
“Tough, huh, getting those apart from the gravel?”
“It’s not so bad,” replied the merchant’s daughter, her eyes on the ground.
“Yeah. Last time I tried, I got all the little rocks stuck up my fingernails.”
“I’ve learned to live with it.”
“Then at least let me help you,” the girl said, getting on the ground.
She waved a hand. “Oh, you don’t have to.”
“Nonsense! Can’t a girl just be wandering the middle of woods in the middle of the night, without needing to be somewhere?”
They both laughed.
They made a funny pair, picking up matches in the middle of the road in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night like that. Perhaps they should have had such a task done by now, but as more matches were collected, more seemed to take their place.
The merchant’s daughter couldn’t help but notice the girl’s pale skin—you could almost see through her hand to the match she was holding. She felt the pinpricks again, and continued with one hand. “You live around here?”
“What were you doing?”
“—What do you mean?”
“Walking all alone, in the forest, with matches?”
“Oh, that.”
“Yes—that. Sounds pretty grueling to me, doing that of your own volition.”
“I was told to go get some matches from the store.”
When the girl didn’t reply, she continued: “We needed to light the stove.”
The girl gave up on the matches. “Well, I can understand that. Hunger’s boss, right?”
“Right.”
“But you got that pretty fine cherry-red truck, don’t you?”
The merchant’s daughter said nothing.
“Working condition?”
Thirty-nine matches in the matchbox... “Oh, spilled the box. I’m sorry, I’m such a—”
“Why didn’t you drive. To the store?”
“Well, he, uh, wanted to use it...” Her voice trailed off as the girl started to circle her.
The girl sighed. “All I want is to help. Why should we throw our life away? But if you won’t listen to me, how are we going to do that?”
“We?”
“Yes, we. Us two.” Their faces were inches apart. “You and I? We’re two halves of the same whole.” In the girl’s eyes, the merchant’s daughter discerned a familiar longing; a longing she herself had felt to escape, but had never acknowledged. Now the longing was acknowledging her: it had been fed up with Hunger.
“I want us to live our own life,” the girl went on. “You just have to listen to me.”
“Listen to longing?”
“To what you want. Don’t wanna end up like those guys.”
“What guys—” Figures began to materialize out of the darkness before her, each with the same spectral skin as the girl. They stood silent, looking on.
“Oh, these guys? They want the same thing I do. All suppressed longings—like me.”
“I don’t ‘suppress’ you—”
“Think about that: for every person you see here, there’s another—like us—not living up to our potential.” She tried to take the merchant’s daughter’s hand, but the flesh fell through the girl’s ghost of a form. The girl’s voice betrayed her. “And I—I won’t stand for it any longer.”
“That’s not your decision.”
“You can’t justify this, this—half-life—because your neck doesn’t spontaneously bleed.”
“If it doesn’t bleed, then the wound isn’t fatal. And if the wound isn’t fatal, than I—
“We.”
“—‘we’ have nothing to worry about.”
“What wound?” the girl asked.
“I—you know what I’m talking about.”
“What? Say it.”
“The—the gashes.”
“The ones some ‘Hunger’ left on your neck? It’s not a vulture, it’s a feeling. You can’t be physically harmed by something intangible.”
“That’s not the point—”
“Then what is? Last I checked, there wasn’t anything on our neck.”
“How would you know? You can’t see back there.”
The girl scoffed. “Then you look.” Turning around, the hair was lifted from her neck.
“Nothing’s there,” she murmured; the merchant’s daughter’s longing validated, the girl’s skin became opaque. More real, but not yet alive.
“No, there isn’t, is there?”
“But—that’s not the deal I made.”
The girl, the hundreds of figures behind them—all gone. Only a row of neatly packaged matchboxes lay at her feet.
She picked up a box. Slid it open. Forty matches tucked away in the dark, waiting to live up to their potential. Should she light—should she light the stove...
She held a match. Struck it against the box. It lit. She let it drop. It died.
Hold, strike, light, dead; hold, strike, light, dead.
If she dropped it, the match would die. If she held it, the match would die.
If she lived like this any longer, she would die, her life unfulfilled; if she stepped out of line, made a life for herself, either Hunger or the merchant would kill her.
If she did nothing, she would die. If she did anything, she would die.
She had surmised that if she was unharmed, she could endure their treatment.
What if she was harmed either way?
A hand, now the same tone and of the same material of the merchant’s daughter’s figure, came to rest on the merchant’s daughter’s shoulder, her longing manifested in full. “Attagirl, Anne,” the girl whispered in her ear.
She picked out another match. Lighting it, she let the box and its contents fall to the ground. She threw the lit match as far as she could throw it, and kept her eyes on the flame until it went out.
Anne was walking back to the house when a small light appeared where the match had extinguished. She stepped toward it, in disbelief that the flame had grown into a fire; but then the light separated into two flames, and then the lights intensified into beams pointed at her and the house; them the beams turned into headlights and Anne leapt out of the way before—
Where she had been standing there was a mess of cherry-red metal and burnt rubber. The corner of the house had disappeared behind the hood of the truck. Behind the wheel...
She sauntered over to the car door. Opened it. Looked at the merchant—Anne’s father—unconscious. Her nose smacked by the mixture of booze and blood.
His chest was rising. Falling.
She heaved him from the seat and through the doorway into the house. On the floor he lay, motionless save for his breath.
Anne touched her left hand to his forehead, catching the streams of blood. Letting it pool there. Tracing in the outlines of his eyes, of his nose, of his mouth until he wore a mask.
Look at him; she had been living under his lock and key for nineteen years, and he hadn’t had the courtesy to die on her. Not even after she had just begun to question the system.
With one hand pressed to his forehead, she clenched her other hand around the matchbox.
She held a match. Struck it against the box. It lit. She let it drop.
She was outside before the first flames bloomed on the wood beneath her father’s body.
Hold, strike, light, dead.
First the floor, then the walls, then the ceiling, then the roof. Her house went up in flames. She would have stood there, watching—the cold was more bearable with the warmth of the burning cabin—had she not heard the sound of an engine revving.
The girl—she was backing up the truck, both hands on the wheel.
Anne shouted, but in vain: her and the truck were facing one another.
She took a step forward.
The girl slammed the gas pedal.
She sprinted toward the car. She didn’t care anymore. Her father dead, her home destroyed, her life, ash—what left did she have to live for? She knew only that she’d spent her life obeying orders; she was going to die on her own terms. In her final seconds, she saw the girl’s eyes, headlights in themselves.
One match in the matchbox.
Two matches in the matchbox.
Three matches in the matchbox.
Four matches in the matchbox—
—It came and went.
The moment of impact—it came and went. As in, one second, the hood of the truck was tickling Anne’s nose; the next, she was staring straight ahead, at an empty road in the the middle of the forest in the middle of the night.
She whirled around to find the bed of the truck facing her, and the ghostly crowd of onlookers returned. The girl was opening the door.
“Well, if I don’t believe my eyes,” the girl laughed. “Killing our brain-dead father? Where do we come up with this stuff!”
Anne strode over to her counterpart. “You said—”
“I said I wanted us to live our life; not murder someone!”
“But that was the only way to—”
“Oh, ‘But that was the only way to’—think. Again, Anne.” The ghosts were slowly advancing on the pair, trapping them against the truck. “We could have just as easily stolen the truck when he got back or something, don’t pin this on me.”
“But he’d find us, and he wasn’t—” she had stopped, transfixed on one face above the girl’s shoulder. The pinpricks were all over her body. Anne could not move. “What. Is he. Doing here.”
Their father stood behind the girl in the ghost crowd. Her father, who she’d not long ago burned alive—dead-set on staring his killer down. His skin may be translucent now, but his eyes had retained every last drop of mortality.
“Who, him? He belongs there, now.”
“What. Are you talking about?”
“We really have got the worst memory.”
Anne lunged at the girl, her hands aimed at her throat—but she passed through her.
“You just got hit by a car, and you’re wondering why we’re seeing ghostly apparitions of our father? Get your priorities in order.”
She stood hunched over.
“These ghosts—they’re each heir to their own suppression: they all got what was coming to them. You murder our father, you suppress him.”
She clutched her head in her hands.
“Did I not say they were suppressed—like me?”
Her hands were convulsing.
“Or at least, I used to be like them.”
Her hands—her hands were transparent.
“I’m not like them anymore. I’m stronger.”
“What have you done?”
“We killed our father. We chose to listen to our longing to be free, instead of you—the little scared, helpless thing who’s been in control since birth.”
“I, I—I thought you said you wanted to help me.”
“Us. I wanted to help us. And to get out of this hellhole, we needed to listen to me. To do that, you had to be eliminated. Bye-bye. From now on, we live on through me.”
“I don’t understand—”
The girl was already getting back in the trunk. “We did what we had to do to survive. And to survive, we had to let go of the thing holding us back. That was you.” She closed the door. “You suppressed me for too long.”
As the girl drove away to start a new life, a ghostly Anne threw herself to the floor. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed the fire spreading from her house to the trees. Fire rained down from branches falling to the ground, the rocks doing nothing to abate the swelling inferno.
She did nothing to stop it. She had waited too long.
There was no use in rebelling against anything. Hunger had starved her long ago.
From somewhere above, a vulture cried down to Its prey as the merchant’s daughter lifted her left hand from her neck for the last time, and it came away caked in dried blood.