Folio Two, Page Twenty (svegra mos rokron)

“Why?”

“I want you to do it to me.”

I bolted to catch my slipping headdress. “I will tell Aunt Nikis and—”

She smiled. “It’s just a kowtow. Would you rather I told her you sliced me?” She reached into her front pocket and drew out a small pocket knife. When I saw her press it against her own cheek, I gasped. My knees trembled. “We will follow Nikis’s rules in public, but I still hold thirty years’ senority over you.”

“Just this one. No others.”

“Get down.”

The knife in her hand still looked threatening. Instead of kowtowing, I reached out for her and touched the steel blade. Her fingers relaxed. The knife was suddenly in my hand. She knelt in front of me and pressed the blade against her own cheek, but we had given the knife no pressure.

“No,” I said. I pressed the fingers of my other hand against her palm. Her fingers relaxed for a moment involuntarily, but it was long enough for me to get the knife and throw it across the room.

She sighed and moved back towards my dressing table. “Your kowtows are fine, but you have no sense of humor. When I was seven, I knew how to play with the adults.”

I sat on the bed and adjusted the safety pins once more. From my position, I couldn’t see what Anumë was doing, but I had an awful feeling about it. She turned around before I could ask with my tray of colored contacts in her hands

“You will want these, I imagine.”

I nodded.

“Too bad all of them are broken.”

She closed the case again and threw it at me. It landed at my feet. Contact shards spilled across the floor. I started screaming. Someone elsewhere started yelling. Anumë lunged forward and tried to pin me against the bed. I ducked past her and ran for the door, which hit her in the face just after I opened it.

Below, I heard the sounds of arriving guests and my aunt attempting to entertain them, but I didn’t care. I needed out, and I needed out now.

The cabinets where Anumë had imprisoned me lay only a few rooms away.

It had seemed perfectly logical that I correct my error that morning and wear contacts. After all, my family wanted me to. Salus had called them the two most important things in my life. No one could fill an order for new colored contacts, the guests were already arriving, and I was too young to know that just about every corner store sold them—and not the glass kind that my mother preferred, but the durable ones that require intense heat and pressure to break down.

Anumë threw herself into the hall, coming at me like a wild animal. Her headdress fell to the ground in one lunge, and her million tiny braids whipped forward against her face. She said, “Eràsis, you little shit!”

I ran through the room’s doors and opened one of the cabinets. In about five seconds, I threw most of the blankets and monsoon drapes onto the floor and inserted myself inside.

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