The glass bottles are caked with so much grime you can’t see what’s in them anymore.
It’s better that way because you don’t think you’d be able to do what you need to, if you could.
You fish the knife out of your canvas bag, and a lighter with just enough fluid for one more flash of fire. This is your first time—but you’ve seen your mother do the same thing countless times before. Before she made her first mistake. Before you were forced to take her place.
You walk up to the bottles hanging on the trees. Count them as they sway against the forest wind like nooses: eight across, eight hanging down on each tree. More than enough for each person in town. That’s what always scares you the most. The quantified what-ifs, the faces that fill in the empty boxes.
You raise the lighter to your left eye. Spark the fluid. The orange flame licks your eye. There’s no pain, but your body jolts. A human body can’t tell the difference between hot and cold when something is too much of one or the other. Hypothermic bodies die naked, desperate for relief from the imagined heat.
You dig your fingernails into your fleshy palm and imagine yourself as a burning star, drawing everything in with your gravitational pull. You try to remember the way your mother looked before the curse turned her into a human-shaped monster, how she’d always held the flame to her eye without flinching, even as the creatures devoured her from the inside. This is a blessing, she used to tell you, half her body already tainted in shadow-stains, to hold the world’s curses inside us like secret treasures. The universe inside her eye, the same one she passed on to you, is a forbidden cavern that no one dares to enter. You are burdened to carry it, like her mother, and all the women before her.
The thin jelly membrane of your cornea splits against the flame. A shriek rips from the black cavern of your pupil. It rattles your bones. You sink your heels into the damp soil, looking for traction. The other bottles clink against each other on their wires, a storm of sound. They’re eager to see the newest resident inside your eye, that universe-turned-prison that traps human and demons alike.
You bring the knife to your eye just as a hand reaches out. The blade slices, drawing blood a color you have never seen before. A kind of luminous pollution. Your other hand takes hold of one of the bottles on the trees, uncorks it, and jams the open lip into the hole in your eye. You coax the prismatic blood into the glass, watch it fill the grimy surface in muted colors. One touch of your knife can liquefy any body, purify any curse.
You think to the first time you hiked to the trees with your mother, how you marveled at the light reflecting through the murky glass like tiny unexplored worlds. How your mother held the blade up to your eye. How you told her you could take it, but she told you she couldn’t.
“Don’t do this,” the creature pleads from your eye as its body spills into the bottle, fingertip to fingertip, legs to ligaments to bones, up its neck to the mushiest part of the brain. Your fingers loosen at the familiar voice. “Please. I loved you.”
“Loved?”
Everyone knows you should never talk to a cursed spirit or demon, even when it pretends to know you. Even when it has the voice of your mother. I’ll love you until the end of time, she used to tell you, long before you saw your first cursed spirit, before you learned how to slice a blade into a body. Back then, the universe was a jelly-black chasm with neither face nor name, a curtain of ancient night, and you wriggled out a tiny, wrinkled hand toward her. You were her curse. You were her blessing.
“She never would’ve begged,” you say, tightening your grip on the glass. You do not hesitate, the weight of a thousand shadows on your back. Sunlight slices across the forest floor, your only witness. You do not let go.