Desiccation
Ma wanted me to befriend the only other Indian girl at our skating rink because Ma knew the rest of the girls didn’t like me. She imagined Pritha and I would be fast friends just because we looked more like each other than we did everyone else. I now think Ma only wanted another mother to commiserate with, one who didn’t ignore her while she sat in the stands during competitions, wearing her ridiculous puffy coat. Someone from her own country might have been more sympathetic to the choices Ma made, less fearful of the person she’d become. My mother had been alone for a long time, ever since they took my father with all the men years ago. I’m sure she had friends once, but I hardly remember a time before she took the job at the Bureau and everyone in town stopped speaking to her. At that age, I thought my aloneness was a choice, a badge of individuality, but my mother knew it was a consequence of her own choices, and that’s probably why it bothered her to see me stretch alone.
The night before the winter competition, Ma and I made our weekly trip to the shop. She handed me a can and said, “Just talk to her, Meghna. You’ll find that you have a lot in common.”
I didn’t know how to explain to her that Pritha didn’t strike me as descended from any nationality. The only adult I’d ever seen her with was her coach. Pritha had a singularity that felt like it couldn’t have an origin. I was fairly certain she wasn’t even human.
To avoid answering, I rearranged the items in our cart—cans at the bottom, boxes up top.
“She wants to talk to you, I can tell,” Ma insisted. “She’s always watching you.”
I didn’t find this comforting.
Pritha was pale, slim, and lithe. Everything about her had precision but no warmth. She rocked smoothly from the inside of her blade to the outside, her body a sail against the wind. She was terrifying when she competed, waxy cheeks split by an uncanny lipsticked smile. She always won gold, as though the judges were afraid to give her anything less, and I was always stuck a step below with silver.
Pritha never smiled on the podium. In all the pictures that lined the rink’s office during the past three years that she’d lived here, she stood expressionless. I think we must have been the same age, but beside her, with my toothy, white grin, I looked like a child.
I expected the winter competition to be like all the others, with me and her taking first and second. There were only a handful of girls in town who competed year after year, and of them, we were the best. Tiny and aerodynamic, equally hardworking, she and I had the most ice time booked each week and flew through our jumps like gravity was nothing. By the time I got to high school, the other girls were more concerned about competing with one another and ignored us for the most part.
But midroutine that day, I couldn’t help but remember my mother’s words. I thought of Pritha’s gaze for only a split second, a crucial mistake, as I twisted over my left shoulder to prepare for a double Axel, the most difficult element in my program. I shifted my weight to my left foot, swinging my right and using that motion to launch into the air. I closed my eyes, and the rink went black. Cold air cupped my cheeks, my molars pressed neatly together in the back of my mouth. My body, which had been clenched tight, unwound after my second rotation, knowing from hours of practice where and when to spring open, and catch the ice back on my blade. On landing, I saw Pritha there, her face stark white like a summoned ghost against the shadowed risers, clear as if she were standing on the ice with me. The music continued, but I couldn’t move, numbed by her fixed look. My ankle gave out, and I slid across the rink, at the mercy of my own momentum. The cold chafe of rough ice on my bare arms jolted sensation back into my body. When I looked up, my coach was hurrying across the ice toward me, and Pritha was gone, buried once more in the crowd.
I had seen corpses, which is why I knew Pritha was not alive. Baba did autopsies before the Bureau relocated him to who-knows-where when I was seven. In middle school, I started snooping around his things. After Ma went to sleep, I often snuck into his old study and opened drawers, peeking into folders of coroner’s reports. One day I turned on his computer. His passwords were easy—my birthday or Ma’s. I scrolled through the photographs he left behind: women and men naked on steel tables, sutures across their chests. Crime scenes dotted with yellow tabs, and a body gleaming under the flash like
fresh ice.
Pritha looked like she had climbed out of one of those photographs and pulled on a skating dress. Her face was blank; her flesh appeared hard and painted. In a locker room full of teenage girls, she was a plastic ball hidden poorly in a bowl of ripe plums. When she walked past, a morgue-like chill raised goose bumps on my skin.
I’ve always loved cold things—the hum of Popsicles against my teeth, the chlorine sting of pool water. Whenever my parents took me skating as a child, I would lie face down on the ice in a tantrum at the end of public skating, partially because I didn’t want to leave and partially because I liked the way the cold against my cheek turned into pain and then nothing.
Ma said it was Baba’s idea to start me with a coach, but I think this was a lie to make me love someone I barely remembered. Sometimes it felt like I missed him, but I was never sure if what I missed was really him or a father fabricated from the ones I’d seen on TV. And maybe it was because he was so unreal to me, so absent from even the places in the house that were once his, that I could find my darkest appetite in that study.
I touched myself for the first time there, photographs wallpapering the monitor. The softness of flesh against metal made me want to tense every muscle I had. Eyes open, lips parted, the bodies looked enraptured. They convinced me that death was akin to ecstasy, and imitating their contorted poses on the high-backed chair, I came.
Ma drove me to the clinic after the fall, my ankle wrapped in ice. On the way, we passed our house, then our neighbor Gabriel’s. I noticed his driveway was still empty.
I turned to my mother’s tired profile. For many years, she’d been enforcing the draft in our county. Our town called her the Collector, as though she were the one who kept the men shut away somewhere. Each time a boy turned seventeen, she had to escort him to the Bureau. After that, we never saw him again. If he tried to dodge, she’d disappear for hours, sometimes days, in pursuit. She always found him.
“Did you turn in Gabriel?” I asked her, even though it was a morbid question that would only make both of us feel bad. My raised foot, signaling weeks of skate-free boredom, had put me in a shitty mood.
“No,” she replied, her eyes on the road.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Yet. No wonder Ma was in a shitty mood too.
“They don’t have to take everyone, do they? What happens if you let him go?”
She sighed. “Nothing good.”
“Are you going to leave soon to look for him?”
Ma didn’t answer, and I was afraid to ask again. I liked Gabriel. We had been neighbors for as long as I could remember, and he was the only friend I had at the rink. He drove me to practice sometimes, when Ma was gone. He had dark curls that writhed with their own life when he skated. Whenever he jumped, his clenched teeth left neat dimples by the sharp part of his jaw. He was the closest thing I’d seen to a man since I was a child.
One morning, a month before the winter competition, we sat in his truck, waiting for the coaches to come unlock the doors. It was still dark out. I had seen him become more sullen
over the past few months because he no longer had anyone to compete against. Just shy of seventeen, he was the last remaining boy at our rink, and it was almost his time.
I touched his jaw, and he turned to me. “You’re so lucky, Meg. You can be anything. You can skate forever.”
I shook my head. “There is no forever. Nobody knows what the Bureau has planned.”
He turned off his headlights and kissed me. We grasped for each other between the seats, and I bruised my pelvis on the stick shift. I shoved my hand into his pants and he turned hard, so jarringly warm in the cool dawn. He came quick and sticky in my palm. As we searched for napkins, I saw Pritha standing at the door to the rink. I don’t know how long she had been watching, but her white face made me shiver. Gabriel wiped my hand gently, not noticing her. I kept my eyes on Pritha until her coach arrived, and when I stepped out of the car, I was so wet my knees quivered.
Two weeks later, Gabriel stopped coming to the rink.
This is what we were told in school: There’s a war going on, unlike any that preceded it. Eight years ago, things became so dire, they conscripted all the men in the country for a top-secret purpose. There were no battles we could see, no bloodshed on soil. Nobody could be trusted to know what was going on because we were surrounded by leaky technology that could see, hear, touch, read. Shortly after, they switched all communications to local: mobile devices bricked, internet access restricted to nearby servers, all packages and shipments thoroughly regulated, landlines hitting an apologetic operator when people tried to dial outside of their area codes.
Our world shrank, but after the initial shock and a few transitional years, most people in our town became comfortable. If there was unrest anywhere, we couldn’t see it. Some even argued things became better for women, as the world was seldom good to them before, but that might have been propaganda fed to us by the Bureau. Even as a child, I wondered what was “good” about being left behind. We entertained ourselves with hobbies, competitions, books, and old movies. I was lucky that my town had a well-established skating rink before things fell apart. I twirled and twirled around the rink every day until I ached too much to think, but to say I could “be anything” was a stretch.
I tried to ask Ma many times where they took the men, but she always said she didn’t know. I only came to believe her when I missed school after the injury. Lying on the couch during one of those days, I heard Ma in the kitchen. Her voice carried through the heating ducts and hissed perfectly out the radiator. “He’s only a boy!” she whispered, and I knew she meant Gabriel. “What will you do with him?”
I was surprised to hear her ask this question outright. She never showed mercy or resistance; that was why everyone hated her so much. When parents cried and begged, she didn’t flinch. But I thought of my mother smoothing bandages over Gabriel’s elbows when we got little scrapes on the rink, when she gave him piano lessons in our living room. I felt so sad for her all of a sudden.
I could tell from the silence that she didn’t get an answer. The Bureau never gave answers. The phone hit the table with a clatter, and her breathing became shallow. I turned on the television so I wouldn’t have to hear her cry. I thought about Pritha instead. My gut told me if I hadn’t met her eyes, I would have landed that jump like any other.
I still went to the rink for conditioning while I healed. For days I talked to no one but my coach, and it felt awful when I couldn’t skate to keep busy. I came to terms with the fact that Gabriel was not coming back, leaving me friendless.
I was alone in the locker room feeling sorry for myself one day, when Pritha came in and sat down. She shuffled around in her bag for her lace puller and untied one skate. While she tightened it, I asked, “Was it you?”
She looked up.
“Did you make me fall?”
“It’s beautiful.” She tilted her head. “The way you fall.”
“That’s not how the judges felt.”
“When you touch the ice, you come alive. Like you want it to hold you.”
I had no idea what to say to that. The squeak of laces against leather echoed between us.
“Where are you from?” I asked at last, in an attempt to appease my mother’s hopes.
She smiled. “Far away.”
While I sat in silence, perplexed by her vague answer, she tied a knot, dropped the puller back into her bag, and left the locker room. I felt oddly relieved. I loved how little I knew about Pritha, how strangely she spoke. She didn’t go to my school, and I didn’t know where she lived. At the rink, we assumed she was homeschooled, but we were all too afraid of her to ask. She was just teeth and flesh and empty eyes, no different from a body on a slab.
In February, a rat infestation emerged in the neighborhood. We were told to keep our snacks in airtight containers—no bags or chewable wrappers or loose fruit in the locker room. The custodian stuck her broom into every corner of the rink, searching for vermin, but found nothing. A few days later, she discovered a pile of half-chewed rat corpses by the rink’s dumpster.
“We must have cats,” she told the concerned mothers.
One morning, as I paced around the rink with no Gabriel to kiss before the doors unlocked, I found Pritha crouched against the building’s gray wall, her teeth deep in a crumpled rodent. I turned the corner before she saw me.
A few weeks later, the rat problem was under control, and I realized I hadn’t seen a single cat outdoors, ...
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