May 01, 1995
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
211 Edgehill Road had green tiles on the walls of the bathroom, all lined up in a neat little row. Every other tile was a shade lighter, which created the most boring pattern in the world. The last bathroom had speckled wallpaper, the one before that was painted the color of puke. 211 Edgehill was the third foster home of the year already. Twelve year old Andy Barclay wondered what the next bathroom was going to look like. There surely would be another.
The kid was tall enough now to look into the mirror above the porcelain sink without needing a step-stool or even the benefit of the balls of his feet. A recent growth spurt saw to that. Long, dark-blond hair that came down to his shoulders covered his face and hung over one eye. Unlike other kids in the system who let their hair wrap up into knots and tangles, Andy’s was smooth and cared for. He could smell the sweet scent of the conditioner on the strands that dangled in front of his nose. Sloppy kids went unnoticed. Sloppy kids didn’t get adopted. The last thing a potential parent wanted to see when shopping for a new tax exemption was a reminder of the trauma and sloppiness that led the kid into the system in the first place. So Andy cared; he cared because no one else could or would. Andy wasn’t sloppy.
Sliding a rubber band off of his wrist, Andy pulled his hair back and used the rubber band to tie it off in a messy ponytail. It helped keep the hair out of his face, but it also made it harder to hide the black and blue ring around his left eye. The kid at school who gave it to him was almost a foot taller—it wasn’t a fair fight—but at least he had the courtesy to not call Andy names before cold clocking him across the face. He got right to the point, so that was something.
The black eye was tender and sensitive, it hurt when he blinked, but the swelling had gone down. Andy didn’t really care about the pain. He cared because it made him sloppy; it made the worst parts of him on the inside apparent on the outside, and he couldn’t let that happen. He opened up the mirror above the sink and searched for something in the medicine cabinet hidden back there. It took him a second but eventually he found some of his foster mom’s old foundation. He didn’t know enough to realize that it was a few shades away from his naturally pale complexion or that it wasn’t advisable to cover up a black eye with makeup, but it was something that made sense in the moment. It was a way to not be sloppy.
It stung a little as he rubbed it on, smearing it around the top of his cheekbone with his fingers. It was clumpy, and discolored, and maybe doing more harm than good but Andy kept going. To him, the ineffectiveness and uneven distribution of the makeup didn’t matter. It was like warpaint, covering up the weakest part of himself that was leaking out, concealing the patchwork kid hiding underneath. It made it okay to hide, hide long enough for him to figure out how to put himself back together.
An attempt was made to sneak out of the house and get to school before either the new foster mom of 211 Edgewood or the new foster dad of 211 Edgewood, noticed him. An attempt was made, but it was a total and complete failure. Andy tried to sneak past the kitchen—where a foster brother was getting his hair buzzed by foster mom and a foster sister was eating a bowl of cereal by foster dad, who buried his face in a paper. He didn’t even get halfway to the door.
“Eh, not so fast, young man,” Foster Mom 211 called out before Andy could make it past the kitchen’s threshold. “You put it off long enough. Haircut time, then school.” She pulled the smock off of Andy’s foster brother and let him run off. She dusted off the chair as Andy sighed and slumped into the kitchen.
“I don’t want to,” he complained.
“Well, I don’t want to either,” Foster Mom 211 shook her head, “but you don’t see me complaining.”
Foster Dad 211 chimed in with a well-timed, “Are you wearing makeup?” as he peered over his paper.
“Andy,” Foster Mom 211 patted the chair. “Sit.”
“I like my hair how it is,” Andy pushed back. “My hair’s nice.”
“You look like a girl,” his foster sister jumped into the mix, milk dribbling through the gaps in her baby teeth.
“Come now, son,” Foster Dad 211 set his paper down and stood up. He was dressed in beige and burgundy, with a pencil necktie dandling over his protruding belly. “The faster you sit, the sooner you can be off to school. Your hair will be nice when it’s short, too, trust me.” He smiled and ran his hand over his neatly buzzed hair. When he made his point, he licked his thumb and wiped the foundation off from around Andy’s eye. “Hair that long, it’s sloppy, parents looking for a little boy want to see a little boy, now don’t you think?” Andy was sitting now. He didn’t remember when he sat. Foster Mom 211 put a cape around his neck and Foster Dad 211 finished his spiel. “Easy peasy, Andy, trust me. We’ll find the fine young man in you under all that mess. This,” he pulled at the rubber band and Andy’s hair fall down over his shoulders, “it’s not who you are.”
***
OUTSIDE OF CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
EARLY OCTOBER, 2018
Andy’s new, small hands shook as they lit a cigarette. The new body Andy found in that morgue may have saved them from certain death, but it came with a nicotine addiction that Andy still had to get used to. Though, if everything went right, that wouldn’t be something that they’d have to get used to for long. If everything went right, this cigarette might be the last. Andy smoked that cigarette in the back of an open hearse behind the funeral home they had just broken into, taking a moment to acknowledge the new body that had gotten them this far before they moved on to something new, something more like the old. Chapped lips suckled the cigarette. The body—this body—had been in rough shape when Andy found it, though options were limited at the time. Whoever this woman used to be, she had bruised knees, and tension in her shoulders. There was a constant pain in the left breast which was a totally new experience for Andy on several levels, and her long red hair was constantly getting into Andy’s eyes and mouth. Though, maybe that part wasn’t so bad. Andy forgot how much they liked long hair.
It had been a week since Andy Barclay nearly died and managed to find a new body. But this body was transitional body, the only one Andy had access to that night. Tonight, the transition was going to come to an end. Andy found a newer body, one that would be easier for their mother, or step-father, or friends to recognize as Andy. They told themselves that it was a something that had to be done, but Andy had a hard time understanding why—as they sat out there enjoying one last cigarette—they felt bad about giving this new, achy, broken body away. Why was it so hard to say goodbye?
When the cigarette was done, Andy stomped it out and headed inside. The funeral home was dark and quiet, pretty much what one would expect a funeral home to be like when everyone was gone. It was eerie in there. It was the sort of place where it felt like a funeral was going on even when no one else was around. There was the smell of flowers and freshly vacuumed carpet. The people there worked hard to hide that it was a place of death. They did a good job, but Andy knew where to find death.
The dressing station was in the basement. It was where the funeral director prepared the corpses and readied them for their viewing. It was down there that Andy found the body that they figured would be suitable to live out the rest of Andy’s second chance at life. The corpse was a man once, a man with a name, and a family—a family that would be heartbroken to learn that their loved one disappeared before his own funeral—but Andy couldn’t think of a way around that. They weren’t going to take a body from a soul that was still using it, not like what Chucky had done to Nica, but it wasn’t like there were a ton of nameless bodies out there volunteering to be used. Andy had to make the most of what they got.
The dressing station was dark. Andy only turned on some of the lights, enough to show the corpse they’d be taking—stiff and splayed out on a cold metal table, waiting to be dressed. The corpse had short blond hair, not unlike what Andy was used to in the original body, and he had a rigid jaw line and a handsome face. Andy ran their hand over the corpse’s cheek but pulled back. They had smeared some of the makeup on the cheek, and Andy’s fingers came back slightly pink.
“Sorry,” Andy apologized, unsure of what they were actually apologizing for, or even who they were apologizing too. Andy wiped their fingers on their pants and sighed, turning back to the backpack they brought with them to pull out the Heart of Damballa amulet they would need for the spell. “Let’s get the show on the road, I guess.”
The sting of regret pulsed under Andy’s skin, a sting they couldn’t explain or make sense of. Andy believed that this had to be done, but as they prepped everything, it felt like shears cutting away long locks, exposing a naked scalp underneath. It felt wrong.
Andy took up a position at the head of the metal table. They were wearing the heart of damballa around their neck.
“Ade… due… damballa…” Andy chanted. “Ade! Due! Damballa! Give me the power, I beg of you!” Even though they were in the basement, Andy could hear the swirling wind racing outside, competing with the crack of lightning that made the lights flicker. Andy continued the chant, careful to get all the words right, pronouncing them exactly as they were meant to be pronounced. The lights hissed above her, flashing on and off, filling the dressing room with sharp shadows and pulsating light, but Andy didn’t stop. They put their small hands on the shoulders of the body that they felt obligated to jump to. “ADE! DUE! DAMBALLA! GIVE ME THE POWER, I BEG OF YOU!”
POP!
One of the lights above snapped and exploded into a shower of sparks. Everything calmed down after that, but the room was even darker than it had been, with just a single fluorescent light shining down on Andy and the corpse on the table. The corpse. Andy opened their eyes and realized that they were the same eyes they closed a second ago. They looked down at their hands, and touched the Heart of Damballa around their neck. Nothing happened. It… it didn’t work. The corpse on the table was still a corpse.
“What…”
The quiet didn’t last long. A metal cabinet across the room, the size of a dresser, began to shake. Andy watched as their reflection in the foggy metal shifted and blurred and changed into something else. Andy was still, but the reflection was moving. The cabinet moaned like it was being squeezed and then the metal started to dent. The reflection opened its eyes and Andy saw they were yellow, streaked with bits of red. The reflection was unclear and foggy but the eyes, the eyes were perfectly focused. Andy wanted to scream but nothing came out of their mouth. The reflection smiled at them and a loud BANG followed as the cabinet scrunched in at the side. The cabinet door opened slowly with a loud squeak, taking the reflection with it, and something else was standing in the darkness inside. Andy held their breath as that something stepped out, and they saw a duplicate of the body they were currently in, only paler and with darker hair.
Again, everything went quiet.
“Who… who are you?” Andy asked.
“I have a couple of names now,” the girl replied with the same voice Andy used. “You can call me Mia though. That’s probably easiest. Mia Allen.”
“Mia Allen,” Andy repeated in a whisper. “You’re… you’re who this body belongs to…?”
“Belonged to,” Mia corrected. “Past tense. Other things belong to me now. That body’s yours.”
“Mine?” Andy squinted and shook their head. “No, no I was trying to move on, to find something like before.” Andy gestured to the unmoving corpse on the table between them. “When I do you can have your body back. I’m sorry I took it I only—”
Mia raised a hand. “Don’t be sorry, Andy Barclay. You needed it. I was done with it. Our circles aren’t dependent on one another, they’re complimentary.”
“I don’t understand,” Andy said. “You just… you just like crawled out of Hell and you’re telling me you don’t want this body back.”
“To me this world is the hell now,” Mia shrugged.
Andy took a second to process this. It wasn’t clear if they were talking to a ghost, or a demon, or some combination of the two, but one thing was certain; Andy knew that this was real. Now what it meant, that was a whole different story, and Andy wasn’t sure that story had an ending.
“The spell didn’t work,” Andy said. “I said it right but… it didn’t work. I’m still in the wrong body.”
“In the wrong body?” Mia smiled. “Is that what we’re thinking now?”
A cough interrupted the conversation. Both Andy and Mia looked down as the corpse in the middle twitched and coughed, life slowly coming to him. Andy’s face twisted in confusing. “I… I don’t understand.”
“You tried to move consciousness,” Mia explained. “But you merely copied it. Like your enemy, you duplicated your soul and found it a new vessel.”
“No… no, I didn’t mean to… this wasn’t what I was trying to…”
Mia raised a calming hand. “I know your intentions, Andy Barclay. But that doesn’t change the facts of the situation. The man waking up right now is as much you as you are. It upsets the balance of things, and I can’t oblige it.”
“What are you going to do?” Andy’s eyes teared up.
“I’m going to even things out,” Mia said. “I’ll take one of you with me.”
“With you where?”
Mia blinked and her eyes turned yellow, peppered with daggers of crimson red. A crown of fire ignited above her head, floating inches over her hair and giving more light to the room. Andy took a cautious step back and watched in amazement, eyes wide.
“You want to take one of us to hell?” Andy asked.
“It’s not as horrible as they would lead you to believe,” Mia’s voice sounded different now, like two voices in one. “But yes. I can take care of one of you down there. You’ll know no pain, you’ll have no strife, but I cannot allow two of you to roam the earth at the same time.”
Andy looked down at the body on the table. His eyes were still close but he was rolling his head, like a person on the verge of waking up from a dream. “I have to choose?”
“The original?” Mia pointed to Andy, and then pointed to the waking corpse. “Or the copy.”
“I… I didn’t mean to do this,” tears streamed down Andy’s cheeks now. It took every bit of strength they had to keep from falling into a panic attack. “I was just trying to set things right, not be sloppy… I’m the copy, not him…” They shook their head and put their hand on the waking corpse’s shoulder. “I’m the copy… aren’t I supposed to look how I’m supposed to look?” Andy looked to Mia with tearful, pleading eyes as if it made sense to cry for help to a Hell queen.
Mia came around the table and put a warm hand on Andy’s cheek.
“You are…” she said, and then looked down to the waking corpse as he opened his eyes. “This is not who you are…”
Relief washed over Andy for the first time maybe ever. It was like hearing a truth that was always there somewhere deep down, but it didn’t make sense until it was spoken by someone else. Andy smiled and hell broke loose in the dressing room. There was a blinding red light and a heat that was all consuming. Something opened up in the floor—a pit, or portal, or door—something, and a giant hand reached up, clutched the copy of Andy lying on the table, and dragged it down into the fire. Andy stepped back, holding their hands over their face as objects flew across the room. Andy managed one last look to Mia before she disappeared. The Hell Queen smiled at her and vanished in another flash, taking the portal with her.
A small metal trash can zipped across the room on a dying wind and clocked Andy in the left eye, sending them to the ground into a dark state of unconsciousness.
It was hard to say how long Andy was out, but when she blinked back into the waking world everything was sort of quiet and calm. She could feel the pulse in her left eye and when she reached up and touched it she winced from the sting. Andy sat up and looked around the trashed dressing room. The floor was littered, the table and the corpse were gone, and half of the lights dangled from broken sockets. It took a little while for her to manage to get up to her feet, but eventually she did. Every part of her hurt, and ached, but at the same time… those things really didn’t bother her much.
By the time Andy limped out of that basement, morning sunlight was coming in through the windows and she realized that she had to get out of there quick before trouble came down on her. She passed a mirror on her way toward the back door, and stopped for a second to take note of her reflection. Sloppy red hair covered most of her face, but when she pushed it out of the way she saw the new black and blue shiner she got right over her left eye. She touched it again, winced again, but smiled. It hurt, it hurt like a bitch, but the pain felt different.
Nothing from before went away, none of the trauma, or the guilt—new or old—or regrets that Andy had accumulated over a long life, but everything felt different now. It made sense, like the first time putting on a pair of glasses after a lifetime of seeing everything blurry. Andy… Andy was the original, and maybe she was who he always had been.
Smiling made the bruise hurt more, but it didn’t stop her. She smiled on the way out the back door and went off to find another cigarette to smoke.
