Nadia stood under the shower, letting the too-hot water run over her where it fell noisily into the drain in the floor. She sighed, and worked the shampoo into her long, dark hair furiously. Technically they weren't supposed to shower until the end of their shifts, and use the wash basin in their rooms in between clients. But her last guy, though nice, had such a pervasive odor hanging around him she was worried it might now be permanently grafted onto her skin. She couldn't risk her other customers leaving because of it, not to mention every time she caught a whiff of it on her hair she wanted to gag. Like fermented cheese and rotten mango all mixed into one - musty and sickeningly sweet.
In the middle of combing the conditioner through her hair, Madame pounded on the bathroom doors.
"Nadia! You're wasting water!" She practically had to yell over the sound of running water.
Nadia rolled her eyes but shut the spigot off.
"Next time don't send me someone that smells like he stepped out of a trash heap!" She called back, hoping that would be enough to thwart Madame for the time being.
It was.
With no more than an indignant huff, Madame and her colorful silks went gliding down the hallway, back out front to the parlor where new clients were waiting to be greeted.
Nadia cut the water back on and began her final rinse, trying to move quickly as to not incur any more anger from Madame or jealousy from the other women. The house was a delicate ecosystem, and one wrong move could make your working life less than tolerable. Or worse, you'd be out on the street, forced to look for work in the textile factories, where you'd spend 16 hours a day over a vat of boiling dye, working until your hands cracked and your vision faded from the dim light and harsh chemicals. It was just two months ago that a newer girl, whose name Nadia had already forgotten, had been completely ostracized for supposedly stealing another girl's client after she saw them talking together in the hall. It wasn't long after that that she had moved on, though no one knew where.
She shuddered, and shut the water off a final time, wringing out the extra moisture from her hair before wrapping it in a faded piece of cotton she kept in her room. There existed a lot worse in the world than Madame's penny-pinching habits, or even a man who smelled like a back alley, and she didn't really want to push her luck.
Wrapping a towel soft with age around herself, she made her way back to her room as discreetly as she could, thankful there was no one in the hall to see her.
The next several hours passed without incident - a taxi cab driver, still sweaty from the damp heat, a lonely teacher who spent most of his hour talking about his ex-girlfriend, and one of her regulars who was a chef at a high-end hotel across town. He worked double shifts and always came to her in the late afternoon, eyes bloodshot from cocaine and unable to stay hard. But he enjoyed her conversation and pleasing her, which he wasn't particularly bad at, and he always brought her one of the fancy desserts they served at his restaurant.
At one point Nadia had opened the door to see two men crossing each other, one coming in and one coming out, studiously looking down at the slated wooden floorboards. Madame liked to time it so no one ever saw each other, but you know, accidents happened. She thought it was funny, their inability to make eye contact with one another, heads bowed low, burdened by the shame of their unspoken desires.
By the end she was starving, and she took this week's dessert - some sort of chocolate cake bathed in a yellow passionfruit syrup, and trudged down to the communal kitchen.
Kira was already there, reheating leftovers on the portable butane stove, the air thick with the smell of red lentils and cumin. Nadia's mouth watered, and she raised up the box in offering.
"Mind sharing? We can split my cake from the chef."
Kira smiled. Nadia had never been one to cook for herself after a long shift. "Not at all - what do we have today?"
"Chocolate cake," Nadia answered, and went about dividing it onto two saucers before settling into one of the worn wicker chairs. Kira gave a hum of acknowledgement, comfortable in the silence as she prepared their meal.
Kira was older than Nadia, and Nadia always thought of her as wiser. She wore her long, jet-black hair in an elaborate braid every day, one that she expertly clipped up into a bun at the start of each session.
"I don't want them touching it," she said with a shrug, once, in passing, but to Nadia it was a revelation. It hadn't occurred to her that her hair, which she painstakingly oiled and combed every Sunday, could be off limits.
Nadia had never seen Kira without her signature kohl-rimmed eyes and matching spots of rouge on her cheeks, both of which she applied from delicate clay pots she bought from a street stall, though she would never tell anyone which. Living on top of each other as they did, secrets were preciously kept, even if they were unimportant. Especially then, as no significant event could happen in anyone's life without the whole house knowing by the next day. That's how it went when Mara got pregnant, or when Fatima ran off with her girlfriend, determined to build a new life for themselves on the coast, away from the stifling air of the city, thick with pollution and pressing in on you from all sides.
The two women ate with the familiarity of family; the kind of intimacy that grew at an accelerated pace in a house like this, where everyone was forced either into a pleasant symbiosis or doomed to be miserable every day, as you rarely had any break from your colleagues and privacy was a luxury no one could really afford. Their meal was punctuated by the sounds of other girls coming in to make tea or grab a snack, sharing their best and worst client stories for the day, the kitchen overflowing with the sound of their laughter and their sighs.
Eventually the sun set, and the room was left in the blue glow of the LED bulbs overhead. Kira drummed her fingers on the table, not ready to be alone just yet. Nadia moved to wash the dishes, and it was then that Devina blew in like a cold breeze, eyes bright and a coy smile playing on her painted lips.
"Who's coming with me to the festival tonight?" She asked, never once entertaining the possibility that they might say no.
Kira and Nadia exchanged a wordless glance, a communication they had honed the last eighteen months Nadia had been in the house. Nadia smiled.
"We're in. What's the festival for anyways?"
Devina gave an absentminded wave. "One the gods you have up here in the north, I don't know. We didn't have many of these holidays down in the south. Meet me ready and by the back doors in five! Love you!" And with a blown kiss, she disappeared down the hall in a flurry of red silk.
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The streets were crowded, bodies moving along the pavement slowly like a giant undulating snake making its way through the forest. Shoulders, hips, purses all rubbing up against each other in some sort of distanced intimacy. Nadia looked at the woman in front of her and the sheen of ebony hair cascading down her back. She had the strange thought that she could reach out and touch her - slide her fingers down her back, over the soft curve of her behind - and slip back into the anonymous crowd. No one would ever know.
Nadia blinked and realized Devina was talking, a steady stream of chatter in her left ear. She shook her head free and tried to pay attention. Kira was moving silently beside them, eyes languidly scanning the horde of people in their bright red clothes.
There was a seemingly endless line of stalls - selling flowers, vibrantly colored powders, candied coconut and incense so strong it made Nadia's eyes water as they passed. Even though she had lived here her whole life she felt like there was still so much she hadn't learned about her city; so much still seemed like a mystery to her.
"-and in the end I told him we could either finish by ourselves or he would simply have to leave," Devina's words floated back to Nadia and pulled her out of her daze.
Kira nodded knowingly, but Nadia's brain stuttered.
"What do you mean, 'finish by ourselves'?" Nadia asked, glancing sideways at Devina, noting but not offended by the almost pitying look she gave her in return. This was how knowledge was shared within the house - passed down from one to another, the more seasoned workers dropping hints and small acts of guidance for the newer ones to pick up whenever they were clever enough to do so.
Devina gave an easy shrug. "Just like it sounds. If it's just not happening after a while, then I don't let them keep trying. It's pointless, and by the end no one's happy. So I just tell them it's much more pleasurable if we watch each other while we take care of it ourselves."
Then she grabbed Kira's hand and was off to stall heaped with gold-colored jewelry, leaving Nadia with that kernel of wisdom to chew on as she walked slowly behind them. Though her year and a half in the house had been lucrative, she couldn't deny that there were days that weighed heavily on her, the ghosts of unwanted sensations clinging to her even on her days off. At the beginning she had thrown her whole self into the work, rapturous at the feeling of a stack of cash in her hand at the end of the night, feeling like a god in the power of her newfound freedom.
But then there were moments when she felt that she was missing some vital piece of information that all the others had. She felt that rather than offering something up that something was being taken from her, which was when her eyes fixed to the ceiling and she counted down the minutes until the end of the hour. Now she believed that Devina had presented her with an alternative to some of those situations that felt less tolerable.
When she looked up from her reverie, she realized she had lost sight of the others. She turned, and saw nothing familiar - the crush of bodies was so thick that she might as well have been looking through fogged glass. She went onto her tip-toes, trying to see any scrap of a familiar feature, but was lost.
"Don't worry. They always come back."
The voice cut across the tumult and into Nadia's years as if placed their by a ventriloquist, as if some unseen creature had carried it directly where it needed to go. She knew that she was being addressed, in the way one does in a crowded place - the body somehow knowing that it's being spoken to.
She turned to her right and peered into the stall. A woman sat there, her hair so long and dark it melted into the shadows of the night, perhaps extending even to the ground below them. Nadia thought of the woman in front of her earlier, and felt the same compulsion to reach out, though now she felt that if she did her world might shift entirely on its axis. Her stomach twisted and she became incredibly aware of her pulse in her neck and the trickle of sweat making its way down her back.
The woman reached a hand out to beckon her forward, and Nadia saw that her fingernails were long and stained a deep red, giving the impression of a set of rusted knives. Nadia stepped forward, compelled by feeling that was entirely foreign to her, smoky tendrils of want pulling her deeper into the wooden stall, lit by a singular light bulb, yellowed with age.
The old woman looked at her out of the corner of her eye, as if that’s the only way she could really see her.
"Every day is the chance to become someone new," she said, her voice roughened from what must have been a lifetime of cigarettes and shots of the sweet, fermented rice wine they sold outside after all the bars had closed.
In the silence that followed she pulled out a dagger from what appeared to be thin air, and Nadia strained her eyes to see it in the relative darkness. It was smooth and cream-colored. Bone, she thought, or ceramic. It had three sides that sloped elegantly into one another, and was covered in dark etchings that must have been burned in somehow.
A part of her wanted to roll her eyes at the woman's cryptic way of speaking, but the larger part of her knew better. Her family had always been superstitious, and she was raised knowing that one could never fully trust appearances, and that one never knew who was hiding behind they face they allowed you to see. So she said nothing, and took what was being offered to her.
Maybe it is possible, Nadia thought. Maybe there is a chance someday to become someone new, but most days she chose to stay the same, to wear the same long blue dress and leave her hair cascading down her back, to open up the door all day until she was tired, to go to sleep and dream of nothing more than putting up her feet at the end of the week and having a beer with Kira. And wasn’t that enough?
But the knife felt heavy and soft and significant in her hands and suddenly she wondered if it wasn’t, and maybe that what was new and different didn't have to be scary at all but rather strange, and still that strangeness is enough to keep her doing the things she's always done for the last twenty five years, that she could easily keep on doing for twenty five more.
"Nadia! There you are!"
Nadia turned abruptly at the sound of Kira's voice, slipping the dagger into the waistband of her skirt in the instinctive understanding that it should remain hidden, and turned to see her friends coming up towards her.
"Where have you been?" Devina asked around bites of a sticky bun that was currently in her hand.
"Here," Nadia said, and gestured into the stall only to see that the woman had vanished, the stool where she had sat empty and cold.
Devina eyed the empty space curiously, but didn't question it, accustomed, like all the girls, to evasions. She simply joined their arms together, pointing them in the direction of home as she recounted Nadia with tales of the bracelet she had found and the man with the beautiful eyes she had flirted with.
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Back at the house, Nadia held the dagger gently in the privacy of her room, running her fingers along the edges of what she now knew to be bone, smoothed down by centuries of wear, her mind still reeling from her interaction with the strange woman. She felt a deep longing open up in her chest that took her without warning - something she might have once felt as a child but had long ago learned to ignore.
She wanted to know what the woman, the witch, Nadia thought assuredly, had seen in her. She wanted to see it too.
Intricate designs danced across all three sides of the weapon, which seemed to Nadia much more ceremonial than practical. She didn't recognize them at all - not from any temple or book she had ever come across. But they seemed ancient, as if they could reveal some great secret at the heart of the world, if only they could be understood.
She moved both hands to the hilt and held the dagger out above her as she laid in bed, as if defending herself from some spectral attacker. She felt good. Powerful, even, the sharp bone an extension of her body. The whole evening had felt like a portal opening, and maybe the dagger was the key to walking through to the other side unscathed.
Another crazed thought came to her then, and she almost laughed at the absurd eroticism of it and how much it called to her. She sat up on the bed, quickly divesting herself of her long skirt and top. Naked, she looked up once more at the dagger, holding it against the unattractive light of her room, thankful that all the doors in the house had functioning locks.
She traced its fine point down her chest, her thigh, bringing it back up across her skin in a haphazard pattern that set her pulse racing.
What was she doing? This was crazy. And ridiculous. Perverted.
The word slipped across her consciousness like a decadent whisper, and she shuddered. Their house was no stranger to perverts - men who wanted their testicles crushed, who wanted to pretend to be dogs and horses, who needed their nipples squeezed so hard they bled in order for them to come. They were discussed glibly around the dinner table at night, the girls laughing at the grotesque details and the strange men who desired them. When a known pervert picked you out from the line up, it was your duty to the others to act entirely put-upon and disgusted by the freakishness of his want.
But as Nadia held the bone dagger against her body she felt a shimmer of understanding for those customers and their outlandish requests. Perhaps it a moment, just like this one, that had brought them to their own revelations. Perhaps they had stood at the precipice of 'normal human behavior' and simply decided to unburden themselves of any expectation, diving into the unknown just to see what could happen.
Nadia knew then, that she wanted to find out.
The dagger, now resting just below her belly button, found its way down to her innermost thigh, its blunt edging moving through her soft hair as if it had a mind of its own. A shiver laced down her spine, the dagger wound its way back up. Pleasure and fear battled inside her, and she wasn't sure which one she wanted to win. The dagger slowed, moving back down towards her opening like it was some sort of divining rod and her body a magnetic force.
Without giving herself time to talk herself out of it, she slipped the dagger inside herself, letting the cool of the bone meet with the warmth of her flesh. She worked it slowly, with reverence and also extreme caution. Though it didn't seem sharp enough to really hurt her, she didn't want to tempt fate too much in one day.
She continued to move, cleaving unto herself, the novelty of the sensation thrilling her, as well as the knowledge that her actions were entirely her own, regardless of how strange they may be. Despite her slowness she felt herself nearing an orgasm and was shocked at its quickness, for when she was with her clients it normally took at least half the session and all her concentration to get her to the point of climax.
Her breath came in shorter and shorter gasps, and though she would have liked to have stayed quiet for privacy's sake, a loud cry wracked through her body as she finished. Her hand slowed and then stilled, the dagger still inside her, a slight sheen of sweat covering her frame.
Nadia felt something then, different than the usual after-effects of sex, and propped herself up on her elbows to look down at herself and gasped.
What appeared to be dark brown ink was moving across her skin, spreading over her thighs and up her stomach like water spilled from vase. Through the haze of pleasure she recognized the patterns from the bone dagger, and could only watch as they crawled across her flesh, leaving a trail of electricity in their wake, until her entire body was covered. But as quickly as they emerged they faded, disappearing into her skin until she was left alone on her bed, feeling like she had just smoked one of the cigarettes that Madame rolled, which they all knew to be more than just tobacco.
As the bodily haze dissipated, Nadia felt no different. She took the dagger outside of herself and saw that it was now naked and shining. There was no question she could ask that would have any sort of reasonable answer, so she simply wiped it down with a spare cloth and tucked it in the drawer at her bedside. She snuck quietly to the kitchen to see if there was anything in the fridge she could eat without anyone noticing its absence, then went to sleep.
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In the morning she checked herself in the mirror for any sign that last night had really occurred. But there were no patterns, no marks, just the smooth expanse of her skin. A small bubble of disappointment grew in her chest, though what change she might have been hoping for she couldn't say. She sighed, got dressed, and went to start her shift.
The morning dragged on - each client that came in and passed her over soured her mood even further. She took an obscenely long time to eat her lunch, and only begrudgingly came back almost two hours later. The heat outside was stifling, and Madame's small air conditioners were losing the battle with the outside air.
As the afternoon faded into the evening and Nadia had given up any hope of making money that day, and was already planning and calling it quits early and asking Kira if she wanted to stop by the corner store for a cold drink and a good chat. It was at the exact moment when her mind was made up to leave that the school teacher walked in and asked Madame if she was available.
Nadia scowled, resentful that she now had to work when her mind had already decided to be done for the day, but hid it behind a smile as she led the teacher down the narrow hallway, praying as she went that this time he would come quickly and leave.
As they entered her room she tried to lead him straight to the bed but instead he settled into the chair in the corner, not so much as taking off his shoes before he dropped his head into his hands and began once more the litany of complaints about his ex. She schooled her features into a look bland compassion, nodding along at appropriate intervals to his rant and watching the minutes of the clock tick slow by. Twice she tried to redirect him towards the bed, only for him to resist. It was only much later, with only ten minutes left in his hour, that he undressed and joined her, some deep part of himself utterly unwilling to pay for an hour of her time and not leave with an orgasm.
He penetrated her, like last time, with little ceremony, the act devoid of any recognition of Nadia as she looked into his eyes and saw only a dim projection of his ex-girlfriend reflected back onto her. This time, however, the act sent through her body a hot jolt, and from his gasp she could tell he felt it too. The warmth from the previous night returned to her, and she felt as if the symbols from the dagger were burning underneath her skin. The look of a man possessed came over the teacher's face and he accelerated, working in a mad panic so unlike his previous flaccid apathy that all she could do was lay under him in surprise as he brought himself to completion in no more than sixty seconds.
In the moment of his coming Nadia felt something leave her body, attaching itself onto the teacher as he pulled out of her without a word. She was so taken by surprise by the whole interaction that she made no move to stand, to offer him a warm towel or make idle chit chat as he dressed. She simply watched him from the bed as he moved about the room, shoulders hunched but eyes alight with a fever she had only seen in those close to death, digging through his wallet to throw the remaining cash on the side table before leaving.
She had one another client that day, an unassuming shopkeeper from a neighborhood almost two hours by bus from their house. She knew he had seen other girls, but had yet to see him herself. He was polite and undemanding, and yet still when he entered her it was as if he became another, though perhaps less crazed than the teacher before him. He also felt it, a pleasant surprise coming over his face as they moved together as if in a dance they had done for years. There was a pull without force, the feeling of being led without the collar digging into your neck. And as he came Nadia felt something else go with him, out into the hot night air, and he thanked her with a shallow bow as he left.
When Nadia met Kira for dinner kept her words idle and light, finally in possession of a secret of her own. And if Kira noticed that her friend was perhaps a little more reserved than usual, she wisely made no comment.
▬▬ι═══════ﺤ
The next day brought with it a blissful change in weather as chill wind came in from the hills outside of the city. Nadia awoke feeling refreshed, the strangeness of the days before somehow already integrated into her psyche. She felt new, and this new self of hers felt much less inclined to question the mysteries that had started to invade her life. She felt so rejuvenated even Samira, with whom Nadia had never particularly gotten along, commented on the rosy glow in her cheeks.
She practically floated down the stairs to the line up, and was stopped in her tracks at the sight of not just one, but both of her clients from the day before, waiting for her in the parlor right when her shift started.
They stood on opposite ends of the room as if they were fundamentally, energetically opposed to the other. The shopkeeper looked surprisingly at ease for one who had previously seemed to approach his time at the brothel with a sort of sad resignation, a small box of sweets under his arm. The teacher, on the other hand, looked even worse than he had when he had left Nadia the day before. He appeared to be in the same clothes and they seemed rumpled and stained, as if he had slept in them. There was a small cut above his left eye that was crusted slightly with blood and that clearly hadn’t been tended to. Nadia questioned why Madame let him in at all in such a state, but assumed that the thrill of a customer coming three days in a row and the money he was bringing gave her quite a bit of leniency.
Madame gestured towards the shopkeeper, who must have arrived first, and Nadia led him back to her room, head swimming once again with questions but not really confident she would get any satisfying answers. They didn’t speak, nor he did move to sit down or get undressed once she had closed the door. He simply held out the box, tied with a piece of colored string, and she could see the bills folded neatly within it. She reached out to take it, fingers closing around the plastic wrapping, and looked down at it in confusion.
He spoke for no more than five minutes before leaving, though he had paid the hour in full. Nadia took only a few minutes to herself before heading back out to the parlor to get the teacher - even though she technically could have taken the rest of the hour off, she could sense that Madame wanted the teacher and his off-center energy out of the house as quickly as possible.
She went back for him, giving him as wide as a berth as she could as they got settled in her room. He had new complaints, it seemed, and his diatribe extended beyond his ex-girlfriend to now include his roommate, who had locked him out last night over a discussion about late rent, and the barkeeper that refused to serve him any more beer at closing last night, to the fellow patron he had gotten into a fight with after being kicked out of the bar, and was responsible for the cut above his eye.
Nadia listened dispassionately, curious that his life had seemed to take such a downward turn after leaving the house, and feeling more and more disgust for his general attitude towards life that always seemed to place him at the center of victimhood. She sighed, not caring if he noticed or was offended, and worked her hair into a braid as he spoke, twisting it up into a bun at the top of her head and wishing she had anything more to occupy her hands.
Like clockwork, at the fifty-minute mark he turned to her, his desire plain on his face, needing something in his life to go right, so assured that this would be it. It went as it had the day before - as he entered her the warm overtook them both, the rush of sensation unlike anything he had ever felt. He was hungry for it, and lost himself quickly in its throes, once again emptying his wallet almost compulsively before trudging out the door.
Nadia decided to take her lunch early and headed to the kitchen, desperately hoping Kira was there. Luck was on her side, and her friend sat at the table, eating curried potatoes and beaten rice leftover from yesterday’s dinner. Kira looked up at her as she entered, and cocked her head to one side in a silent question.
With a great huff, Nadia plopped down into the chair across from her and worried her bottom lip between her teeth. She hesitated, and then spoke.
“Something strange is happening to me.”
Kira raised her eyebrows, but said nothing.
“Both of the clients that saw me yesterday came back to see me again today.”
The older woman smiled. “That’s hardly a bad thing though,” but then her face turned sour. “Do you think one of them is dangerous?”
Nadia took a measured moment to consider this before she answered. “The first one I definitely don’t think so. He just came to thank me for the day before. Paid the whole hour and everything, but left just after a few minutes. Even gave me a box of chocolates. The second one…I’m not so sure. I don’t think so, but there is something off about him. Like he’s possessed or something.”
“Thanked you with chocolates? For what?”
The voice was Devina’s, who had come in to make herself a fresh cup of tea before heading back to the parlor. Nadia blushed furiously, looking down at her hands in embarrassment.
“For changing his life.”
There was a moment of silence before the two burst into a laughter so raucous Kira almost choked on her rice. It was devoid of malice, Nadia knew, just as she knew how ridiculous her statement sounded. She crossed her arms and waited for them to settle down, a smile tugging at her own features.
"Wow," Devina said, wiping a stray tear from her eye, "maybe I should see you too. If your pussy really is life-changing."
And then she was back out the door, tea in hand, sights already set on charming the next customer who walked through the door.
She was joking, Nadia knew, but the words tugged on some important thread in her mind. Something had shifted for both of those men, she had felt it, and she had no doubt that it had everything to do with the naked length of bone hidden by her bed. As she prepared herself to head back to the parlor she asked herself who she might be if she allowed herself to walk further into the constellation forming right in front of her.
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As days passed the pattern emerged, as did Nadia's obsession with her new-found condition. As men continued to see her, they seemed to be unwittingly engaging with some higher power, some ineffable and ancient energy that erupted from her and irrevocably shifted the course of their lives. Most of the men who saw her came back to her, and she pieced together the stories until she came to understand some of what was occurring.
With every penetration something was unlocked, a portal opened, and her customers tumbled unknowingly through, walking back out into the world at the mercy of whatever gods were out there, a countdown clock above their heads as their karma came swiftly to act upon them.
What was a genuine marvel to Nadia were those that returned again and again in a heated frenzy, even as their lives descended into a further chaos with each of their visits to her. They came to her with bloodshot eyes and mismatched shoes, the stink of yesterday’s disaster still on them as they dug into their wallets for whatever remained, ready to place it all at her feet. To them she represented a small beacon of light in an otherwise bleak existence, the weight of their misdeeds heavy on their shoulders, unthinkingly returning to that which was the source of their suffering. There was something deeply erotic and unattainable in the wild abandon of her dark eyes as she too gave herself over to the process and became its eager participant. Rather than simply lie there as she had that first day she gave into the performance of the oracular - allowed the heat of the fates to be echoed in the heat of her own sensual power as she dug her fingernails into their backs or threw her head back in an exaggerated moan.
Nadia flourished under the attention and in the wreckage of her own aftermath. Their hungry devotion was contagious, and for the first time Nadia felt both rawly desired and in possession of a power that allowed her to demand satiation.
In her sessions she started holding herself open with her fingers as if she was brandishing both a sword and a shield, the obscenity of the gesture foreign to her but thrilling all the same, and for the first time in her life she realized she did in fact possess something powerful, unknowable, and perhaps even dangerous.
Word spread among the psyche of her clientele despite no one ever having named the phenomenon. Men were drawn to her the way a moth is drawn to the flame; knowing they might perish but desperate for the judgment, to know if they were in fact worthy. And when they came up short, as they so often did, the rush of losing it all was so great that they had no choice but to come back for more.
The days grew into weeks and Nadia withdrew deeper inside of herself, the lock on her door staying firmly closed as she sat after her sessions, the bills littered on the bed around her at the end of each night. She grew distant from the girls, even Kira, though she barely even registered the skipped meals and missing camaraderie. She felt as if the gods had called and it was her duty to answer, and couldn't even see the sacrifices she was making each day, the things she was letting go of.
Her popularity was becoming a problem at the house, as the atmosphere of each shift became more eager and slavishly desperate. Her customers lined the halls and poured out into the street as they awaited their fortunes, avoiding one another as if karma might be contagious. The girls complained about the crowd, about their clients not being able to get inside, about the veil that Nadia had taken to wearing over her head as she glided into the parlor, a brazen othering that she did almost instinctively.
Madame did her best to navigate the rupture, but the tensions were mounting at an ever-increasing clip. Though she was overjoyed at the money that Nadia was bringing in, she couldn't deny the ethereal haze that had taken over her business, or the high keen of desperation that seemed to bang at the windows, desperate to be let in. She asked Nadia if she wouldn't consider moving on, if perhaps there wasn't a better house for her, or if this was at all the best profession for her to be in at all.
And Nadia did, briefly, consider quitting. But in reality she didn't want to stop - some part of her was gleeful at the prospect of the fates deciding what each man deserved and instantly doling it out, whether it was a costly divorce or a mysterious illness that laid them up for a few weeks, and using her as the vessel for their judgement. When the news traveled back to her that one of her newer regulars had died in a traffic accident, she felt a grip of ecstasy take over her body so intense she almost fainted.
She was a messenger, the divine oracle they were unknowingly visiting, a mouthpiece for the gods and whatever they had in store for those men lucky or unlucky enough to cross over her threshold. For the first time in her life she was extraordinary - and if that otherworldliness had also cost her something, she didn't feel inclined to look too closely at what exactly it was.
▬▬ι═══════ﺤ
It wasn't until seven weeks later that Nadia looked up and began to feel the weight of her new life. The morning had seen an unusual lull in her sessions - perhaps the men of the southern quarter of the city were finally feeling the squeeze, their pockets finally empty and their hearts wrung out to completion.
After a few hours of nothing she wandered into the kitchen and felt like an alien, as if she was looking at it through an antique mirror. It felt smaller, somehow, a hollowed-out version of what it used to mean for her, all the hours she had sat with the others now feeling incredibly far away.
She sank down into one of the chairs, aware of the jut of her bones against the wicker, a passing thought of wonder at how many meals she had missed because of her sessions crossing her mind.
"Welcome back, stranger." Kira's wry voice wrapped around Nadia like a well-worn shawl on a chilly night. She looked up at other woman, who was making her way to the chair opposite her. "You've had quite the run these past couple of months."
Nadia looked down, bashful at the ease with which the other woman saw right through her, how under her gentle scrutiny what felt to be such an intense shift in her entire existence was reduced to a mere fever dream, a slight deviation from the road of life that was otherwise largely known. And yet there was no accusation in Kira's tone, no judgement. Just the humor of someone who had seen so much of what life had to offer.
"I've missed you," she answered, and as she spoke she realized the truth of that statement. Kira smiled but said nothing, instead reaching out a hand to the younger woman, threading her fingers through her own. The simplicity of the gesture knocked her off-center, and she found herself questioning the truth of the last few months.
"Nadia," Madame called from the doorway, arms tucked within the endless folds of her red skit wraps as usual, "you have a client."
Nadia sighed and stood, and in spite of the reconnection she felt with Kira she also felt the now-familiar rush as she wondered who had come to her today and what lay in store for them.
She would be disappointed, as the man who waited in the parlor for her was none other than the chef, dark circles under his eyes, the smell of old cigarettes hanging around him like a halo, and a little white pastry box in his left hand. The disappointment was short-lived, however, at the delight of seeing perhaps her favorite client, so she embraced him, and led him back to her room as they caught up on his life after such a long absence.
The space looked different with him in it, and Nadia felt another pang of homesickness for the life she had just a few short months ago. Their intimacy, though constrained by the nature of their relationship, was simple and real. To him she was neither a vengeful god nor an oracle - she was just Nadia, a warm and welcoming body after a long shift, a place to rest and laugh and feel the pleasure of a simple presence.
After they had caught up sufficiently and moved on, Nadia looked down at the him, the easy slope of his shoulders as he went down on her. He would be spared, ironically, by his addiction, the absence of his penetration keeping him from whatever might be waiting for him on the other side of her blade. He would remain intact, if only because he was cracked in other ways, ways Nadia herself had never really considered as they lay beside each other and the light crept in through the cracks in the curtains, cutting his body in two.
This is nice, she thought, the fervor of the last seven weeks melting off her body like a spring thaw. Easy.
She had been changed, and she wondered if it had been irreversibly. There was a delight in being so divinely othered, though it had its own price. She wasn't normal anymore, though here with the chef she felt like she was coming close to it. Unbidden, she reached out to thread her fingers through his black hair, pulling his face closer to her. What was waiting for her tomorrow she couldn't say, but here
She asked herself if he was even a man worth saving, but realized it wasn't up to her to decide. At the end of the hour she almost asked him to stay, but he was already up, throwing on his pants as he prepared himself for his long trek across town.
"It's a lemon custard," he said, gesturing toward the box. "You should chill it before you eat it."
Nadia only nodded, tracking him with her eyes as he left the room, turning her neck to smell the faint trace of tobacco that had imprinted into her hair. She pulled on some clothes, already decided to tell Madame that she was done for the day. And then she made her way back towards the kitchen, box in hand, wondering if Kira would be cooking dinner tonight.