It had started with a lost cat. The boy’s mother was talking about it constantly, how the family a floor below them had left their door open too long and their pet ran out. They weren’t allowed to put posters in the hallways, so they resorted to adorning them along the outer walls of the apartment building. The boy and his parents saw the pictures every time they happened to go out.

            “See,” the boy’s father said to nobody in particular, “this is why we don’t have animals. Too dumb to know any better.”

            The boy glanced around, hoping no one had overheard. When his father spoke in English, it was in brief and sharp sentences. It made him seem harsh, but the boy knew otherwise. There was a softness within his father, buried deep.

            His mother held one of the posters in her hand, caressing the picture of the cat as if she was holding the real thing. She gently plied it off the glue that held it to the building wall, leaving an empty rectangle of dark grey concrete in its place.

            “I should bring them something,” she mused. “It must be difficult, with the children.” The boy thought of the family’s young daughters. They always seemed to be playing with the cat, at least for the few times he had seen them. In another life, that cat could’ve been another sibling. Not that he was devout in his belief in rebirth. It was something his parents had brought with them from back home, something his mother had gone on about. If you were reborn as a dog, she once said to his father, I would find you and bring you home. I would take you for walks every day and trim your fur and bring you to those dog contests on the television and you would win first place, or maybe you wouldn’t, but that would be fine as well.

The closest the boy came to truly believing in karma was two weeks after that, when they found out he was allergic to dogs.

            Noticing his mother’s sympathy, the boy’s father scoffed. “It’s just a cat. It can be replaced. The child probably won’t notice.” He hurried back inside the building, and the boy and his mother followed.

            Despite his father’s words, the boy’s mother couldn’t resist making a gift for the family a floor down. It always seemed to him that the things his mother put her heart most into were for other people. For the lost cat, it was a dessert the boy knew took hours to make. There was sweet potato, taro, bean paste. He tried to sneak a piece in.

            “Hey!” his mother shouted, catching him from the other room. He hadn’t even managed to pick up a spoon. “Get your hands off that! You know it’s for the people downstairs.” With a sigh, the boy walked away, taunted by the sweetness wafting into his nose.

            While his mother was packing the dessert, the boy looked over himself in the mirror to make sure he was presentable. In his early teens, he appreciated when his mother’s friends pinched his face and called him handsome. He knew from the way people his age looked at him that he was attractive; callous as it was, he couldn’t deny he liked the attention, and so he tried to look as good as he could put the effort into being. The most important part of it, he thought, was his smile. His teeth were white like pearls and perfectly straight.

When they arrived at the family’s apartment, they were met with a woman who looked younger than his mother in body but far older in weariness. What caught the boy’s attention most, however, was the figure that stood facing away from him, in front of the sink.

            “I brought a present,” his mother announced, stepping into the room. “I heard about the cat. I’m so sorry.” The family of the missing cat inspected his mother’s gift carefully. He knew how his mother hated that. She was afraid they would crinkle their noses in disgust at the dish she loved so much. They didn’t, usually, but when someone did his mother would be struck for hours with sadness.

            While the family scanned the food, the figure at the end of the room turned around. It was a woman. Her head was covered on both sides by curtains of greying hair that swayed as she moved. She was wearing layers – too many layers, really, for the temperature. Each piece of clothing was adorned with the same delicate illustrations the boy had seen on the keepsakes had parents had brought from their home. Through the shadows draped across her face, the boy could see her excitement. Like she had found something long lost to her. He couldn’t stop himself from thinking of the old witches in his mother’s stories, come to take what was rightfully owed.

            The woman walked over to them and spoke to his mother in a foreign tongue. It was one he was familiar with yet could not understand. He watched as his mother’s face lit up, sparked by the language she had grown up speaking.

            “This is my son.” The boy was glad his mother hadn’t used his name. When his parents had named him, they had chosen something hard to pronounce in a different language. He liked nicknames, and so did the people that surrounded him. His real name was only for his family and doctors to know.

            “Hello,” the boy hesitated before deciding what to call the woman, “Auntie.” The moniker came to him naturally, a term for any older woman. There would be no names between them, only titles, and he preferred it that way. Auntie moved toward him in an awkward hug. When she wrapped her hands around the edge of his shoulders, he could feel the bones in her fingers pressing against his skin.

            While his mother and Auntie talked, the boy helped the child open the dessert. He took a spoon and slipped some of the food into his mouth; though he knew it should have been left for the family, he was unable to resist. The daughter was too preoccupied to think him selfish. He kept his ears perked up as he waited to leave, listening in to his mother’s conversation. Most of it was in that language, the one he couldn’t understand, but there was one word.

            Fortune-teller.

            The boy had heard his mother say that word before. She talked about it with a sense of nostalgic wonder. Now that it stood before her in the form of Auntie, his mother was as eager as a child in a toy shop. The boy watched as Auntie guided his mother away from him, holding her shoulder and beckoning her deeper into the apartment.

            He returned home soon after, bringing back the empty dessert bowl. His mother came back a couple hours later with a spring in her step, telling the boy’s father of all the things she and Auntie had done.

            “You prayed?” his father jeered, “For the cat?” The boy had to imagine what his mother had told him of her praying, how it was filled with incense and figurines and lucky stones.

            “It was nothing,” his mother insisted. “It was just like old times. Don’t you miss that?”

            “A waste of time is what it is,” his father muttered.

            A few days later, when he went out, the boy noticed that the posters of the missing cat had been taken down. He learned later that the cat had been found.

            “Not found,” his mother corrected. “It came home itself.” They were at that family’s apartment again. Auntie was there too. She didn’t live with that family, but she visited often. What his mother said was true. The cat had brought itself to the apartment door in the night, sleeping outside of it and allowing the family to find it in the morning.

            Whatever the case, the family of the cat couldn’t have been more grateful. They called it a miracle.

━

The boy’s father didn’t take much of a liking to Auntie. The first time he met her was at a potluck. The boy had been filling his plate when he heard a familiar voice.

“Good to meet you,” Auntie said, bringing him in for a hug. The boy’s father wasn’t a tall man, but even he had to shrink to meet Auntie’s embrace. He bowed his head low, in some form of respect that was hard to distinguish from surrender.

“Son,” said Auntie. The boy froze. “Come with me.”

He spit out the mint he was chewing and followed Auntie to the other side of the room, where two bulbs of garlic were sitting on a table.

“Can you peel them for me?” Auntie asked. “I don’t have the youth in my fingers anymore.”

The boy got to peeling, digging his nails into the top of the bulb and wrenching each clove out, careful not to get garlic under his fingernails. When he was finished, Auntie took the bare cloves and held a knife to them. She began mincing without even looking, her fingers expertly evading the edge of the blade. His mother came over to talk, and from their conversation the boy learned the garlic was for a man on the same floor as Auntie. He was down with a fever.

“This is good,” his mother declared. “For you to learn these things. Watch.” The boy couldn’t see how minced garlic could cure a fever, but he obeyed his mother. He watched as Auntie cut the garlic until it looked like the pulp of a citrus fruit. She put the pieces in an ornate bowl and poured boiling water over it. The smell was pungent, escaping from the soup and snaking through the boy’s mouth, dripping into his lungs like a thick syrup that he could never fully cough out.

He accompanied Auntie up the elevator, to a door opened by a sickly-looking man. His hair, matted with sweat, stuck out at random angles. The boy offered the soup; all the garlic pieces inside swirled and flew around the surface of the liquid. The man, without words, accepted.

That was how the boy started spending the weekends with Auntie. He helped her prepare what she needed, assisting with the cutting, the sewing, the carrying. His mother loved it – when she got home from work, she would waste no time in asking the boy what he had done that day, ready to listen for however long the boy could talk.

“What now?” the boy’s father grumbled once. “Did you read palms?” he mocked. “Use a crystal ball?”

The boy’s mother gave her husband a gentle slap on the arm. “Why so rude? He’s helping people. That’s a good thing.”

The boy’s father was an assistant manager at a nearby grocery store. He saw the prices of produce, how they changed with the seasons. Maybe that was why he detested Auntie so much. He hated to see her burning and using such expensive herbs for the purpose of something he couldn’t see or touch.

His mother turned to him. “Bring something back for your father to see,” she directed. The next weekend, the boy asked Auntie for just that. Something he could touch.

“Get some string. From that drawer.” Auntie pointed to a cabinet. The boy had come to know Auntie’s apartment reasonably well by now, just three floors up from his family’s. It was covered in incense sticks and figurines, all meant to bring good luck to those who came and went. He didn’t dare touch the drawers unless Auntie explicitly told him to. The risk was too great he might find something embarrassing for him to see.

Him and Auntie collected an assortment of string, wood, and small metal rods. The boy understood immediately what they were going to make: wind chimes. Auntie had many of them placed around her apartment; she left the windows open for the breeze to come through and ring them. She had told him that wind chimes warded away negative energy, the sound of their chiming repelling evil spirits.

“Wrap the string around your finger,” Auntie commanded. “Like this.” When Auntie moved her hands, the string seemed to move itself, a loop made so quickly the boy could hardly tell what happened. The end of the string, only visible in the glinting of the sunlight, was pushed through a hole at the top of the metal rod and tied around a wooden circle. The boy tried to imitate her, but ended up with a tightly knot string attached to nothing else.

Auntie laughed, not a nice sound but not an overly cruel one either. “Don’t worry. My first time, I managed to cut my own finger with the string and metal.” She moved the end of her ring finger up to the boy’s eye, showing him a thin scar on it. If he hadn’t known, he would’ve mistaken it for just another wrinkle.

Auntie didn’t use any glue or tape when she made the wind chimes. It was all string, a long strand that she wrapped around and around until the metal chimes dangled from the wooden base like the tentacles of a jellyfish. The boy manipulated the positioning of his hands, arching his fingers in unnatural ways, to achieve the tying and looping Auntie had done. He didn’t ask for help.

“You only need ten fingers to do it,” Auntie said. “If I can make one, so can you.”

By the time he was done, the red string snaked around the wood and metal in much more jagged ways than Auntie’s. The rods weren’t evenly spaced; instead, they crowded towards one end of the construction. The whole thing tilted when he held it. He didn’t want to show it to Auntie. All that time working, and for what? An ugly set of levitating metal scraps.

“What?” Auntie probed, trying to see past the boy’s hands. “No good? Nobody’s first try is going to be good.” Reluctantly, the boy allowed her to see his work. Auntie held the structure delicately, knowing it would break if she grasped it too tightly. She pinned it up against the window and waited for a breeze. The air flowed through the chime, and the soft peals echoed through the apartment.

“It is fine. Ugly, but fine.” Auntie smirked.

The boy brought his creation home, showing it to his parents. His mother was delighted, pinning it up near the door so it would jingle every time someone opened it. When his father got home from work, he was alerted to the new decoration by the sound it made.

“This is what you made?” he asked.

“Yes,” his mother replied. “Isn’t it beautiful? And it’s supposed to bring us luck.”

The boy’s father flicked the wind chimes with his fingers. “Does that woman even believe in her own work?” his father probed.

Auntie did seem truthful when she spoke, at least to some degree. All the fortune-telling, praying, and incense burning was for something, he was sure of that. The boy settled on an answer after some thought.

“I think so.” The determination of Auntie was admirable to him, in an odd way. The resolution in her beliefs despite her age. But maybe that was what happened when people held onto something for too long. After all that time, the worst feeling would be to let go.

Although he would spend many hours with Auntie, the boy knew he wasn’t the one for all that stuff, the spirits and energies. It came as a light relief when he drifted away from spending the weekends at Auntie’s apartment. He had gotten a part-time job at the nearby dry-cleaning. There was no more time to spend the weekends helping prepare soups and charms.

━

The boy was still working at the dry-cleaning when the weather started getting colder. He imagined Auntie would be brewing and cutting away, trying to help dissolve the impact of the incoming flu season.

When his own mother started coughing, she didn’t think much of it. “A sore throat, that’s it,” she insisted. The boy remembered when he had gotten a sore throat. The pain started near the end of your mouth, moving lower and lower down the throat until it emptied into the stomach.

Eventually, his mother’s sore throat developed into a cough. She would hack around the house, a loud and dry gargle.

“I’m getting old,” she joked. The boy laughed for her. If she tried to, the air would send her into another coughing fit. A million small cuts, she would say. That was what it felt like.

 The boy’s father spent as much time with his mother as he could after work. The caring and affection he showed now was something the boy couldn’t imagine seeing before. He might’ve thought it romantic if his mother’s condition didn’t continue to worsen.

There was one morning Auntie showed at their door. The boy’s father was unenthusiastic upon seeing her but allowed her inside. Auntie gave him a tightly wrapped package in return.

“I won’t be here for long,” Auntie assured his father. “Only to drop this off.” It was food. Some kind of soup, perhaps, to aid his mother’s recovery. His father coldly thanked Auntie and ushered her out of the door.

The boy unwrapped the gift to find a rice dish. “Auntie brought this for you,” he said to his mother, delivering her the food.

His father leered at the rice. “What is she trying to do? What is in there?” He took a spoon and dug through the rice, examining the chopped-up herbs inside.

The boy’s mother swatted his father’s hand away. “Just let me have it, please.” His mother relished each taste of the rice, much more than she had any food of the boy’s father. Like all things of Auntie, the boy suspected it reminded his mother of her home. His father didn’t share the same nostalgia his mother did, of the place they came from. But all his mother had now, weak and frail, were her memories.

His mother did get better eventually, at least in some ways. But the sickness had affected her in a different manner. The sadness she held in her eyes while sick persisted as she became healthier. His father, with all his years of wisdom, was unable to fix it.

On the days the boy’s father worked late, the boy could hear his mother through the walls. She would cry, a quiet sobbing under her breath. On one night, he saw her standing next to a window, looking out into the sky. Soon enough, there were mornings his mother could barely stand to get herself out of bed. His father examined her over and over, trying to figure out whatever source of sickness in her body might be causing it. He found nothing.

Through all of this, the boy’s mother talked about Auntie. How she, surely, could help her, if just given the chance. His father disregarded the thought, but each time his mother begged, his refusal became less staunch. It was clear to him that he would be unable to cure his wife on his own.

 It was near the end of winter when the boy saw the first figurine. It sat innocently on the kitchen counter, faced towards the door so that it would lock eyes with anyone who entered the apartment. He had seen many statuettes like that in Auntie’s apartment.

His father appeared, holding two similar effigies. His eyes had dark brushes underneath, sagging, deepening, breathing.

“Did you get those?” the boy asked. He had never suspected his father, of all people, to purchase them.

His father put his head down, his voice stricken with shame. “Yes.” The tone of his voice made it clear that there was nothing more to be said.

━

It was soon after the figurines that Auntie herself would come over. The boy heard her voice when he entered the apartment, saying something to his father behind the closed door of his parents’ bedroom. His father’s voice came next.

“I don’t know…I don’t know what to do.” A broken mumble, nothing more. He hadn’t heard his father sound like that before. His mother, too, changed. She had always had a sense of longing within her, but now it enveloped her being, drowning out everything else.

The boy watched as the strength his father once held dissipated. It wasn’t something fast. Bit by bit, his father transformed. The sternness of his face was replaced by Auntie’s appearances, each time offering something new. It was devastating, watching his heart break. The boy told himself it was for his mother. Maybe this was love.

 He eavesdropped when his parents and Auntie huddled together. Imbalance in energy. His father purchased coloured stones, arranging them in circles meant to help. Evil spirits. There were bundles of herbs being burnt, making the air of the apartment so fragrant it was hard to breathe. Not an illness of the body, Auntie told his father, an illness of the soul. That was why his father couldn’t help her. The boy tried to be away from home as much as possible – it was only recently he had been spirited away from spending time at Auntie’s apartment, and to think she was now coming to his? Did fate truly will them together? It was during some of his time away that he found something familiar.

The figurines, at a store. The ones that had signaled the beginning of Auntie’s influence. They were there, for sale. He looked at the metal face of the figure depicted, the details in its robes. On the bottom of the statuette was a sticker.

Two dollars.

That was all it was worth. Was that the price of his mother’s sickness, two dollars? The price of her tears? Was that all the spirits that haunted her needed? The boy felt a bubbly feeling in the back of his mouth, like the opposite of a sore throat. Something hot, screaming, rising out of his gut.

Upon returning home, he held the three figurines his father had placed by the neck, grasping them like a freshly caught kill. They were the same figurine, there was no doubt about it. His fingers tightened, trying to contain his anger. He held them over the trash can.

“What are you doing?” The boy snapped his head to the side to see his father. He could hear, in a low mumbling, the TV show his mother was watching in the other room. One of those dog shows, with the tiny little perfect dogs doing tiny little perfect things like jumping through hoops and looking pretty for the camera. It was all she seemed to watch nowadays. Her condition had only continued to worsen, the physical ailments she had once been free of returning to her.

The boy locked eyes with his father. His shirt was lazily unbuttoned, his hair barely combed. Auntie had said that less light would be better, so the apartment was shrouded in shadow. Framed in the darkness of the hallway, only half of his face was visible.

“Throwing these things away,” the boy answered. His father didn’t say anything but continued to approach. His gaze was now locked on the figurines. “They’re pieces of junk.”

“You can’t,” his father told him.

“They’re worthless. They don’t help.”

“Yes, they do. They do.” His father’s body motions were coaxing, pleading.

The boy thought of the time Auntie had spent here. The phrases she had uttered. Not for nothing. A simple cure. A needed balance. This is how the soul enters the body.

He dropped the figurines, hearing them hit the bottom of the trash can. His father lunged forward, pushing him aside, scrambling like a wild animal.

“Stop!” he shouted. “Are you trying to hurt your mother?” The boy watched his father stick his hands into the garbage without hesitation, fishing through discarded napkins and plastic to find the figurines. A few months ago, his father would have laughed at the idea of him doing this. His actions didn’t speak of the dignity he had once carried himself with. All they showed was a desperate, broken man. The boy had once been certain those were not words to describe his father. Looking at him now, he wasn’t sure.

━

One afternoon, in the early spring, the boy waited for his father to drift off. He had learned many years ago which parts of the floor made noise, dancing around those to get to the apartment door. By now, the walls had several wind chimes affixed to them. He was careful not to touch them.

His father had been spending more and more at Auntie’s advice, tossing the money he had worked so hard to earn down the drain. Crystals, incense, decorations. The boy could do nothing but hope his mother would recover soon and hold out until then. That was what he told himself he was doing. Holding out.

When he got to Auntie’s floor, he extracted a silver key from his pocket. A spare Auntie kept in her bag. He had taken it during one of her visits. The click in the lock gave him a sense of hope he hadn’t felt in a while. He scanned the hallways, seeing no one, and opened the door to Auntie’s apartment.

There was time, at least. He could afford to slow down. Somewhere in the apartment was a drawer Auntie kept money in. He rooted first through the kitchen, finding nothing but the ingredients for the various mixes and constructions she made. It had been some time since he had been here.

Many figurines were placed throughout the apartment, though they were much more elaborate than anything his father had purchased. Faded paintings adorned the walls, mostly backgrounds and landscapes. There were rooms he had never been permitted to enter while he spent time with Auntie, now open to him. He entered one room and was shocked to find a sort of altar, complete with incense sticks and expertly crafted red knots. What really caught the boy’s eye was the piece of fabric that hung on the right side.

A wedding dress. It was the type of wedding dress people only wore in the place his parents and Auntie were from, brightly coloured and embroidered with large, looping letters. His own mother had once worn something similar to this.

Next to the wedding dress was a picture that must have been over twice as old as the boy. Auntie was in it, though much younger, wearing the dress, next to a man he hadn’t seen before. For it to be kept pristine for so long meant Auntie must’ve cared much for it.

The boy closed the door – to him, it held no use. It wasn’t what he was here for.

The last place he searched was a storage closet with a small cabinet inside. He gripped the knob of the bottom drawer. It was round and golden, reflective in a way that made his nose look bulbous and intruding. He could almost hear his treasure waiting inside, begging to be set free.

Inside the drawer was a flurry of bills, shaking as he thrust the drawer open. Yes. Yes. The boy knew Auntie had to be keeping them somewhere in the apartment. She liked to give the bills out as presents, or sometimes offerings.

He filtered through the bills, careful not to disturb the organized stacks. He would take just enough that Auntie wouldn’t notice. It was payment, really. For the money his father had taken to appease the spirits that haunted their family. It was almost painful to close the drawer when he was finished, stuffing the bills in his jacket pocket. He was ready to leave when he noticed something else in the drawers – piles of open letters.

In another time, he wouldn’t have bothered taking a look at the letters. But privacy was something gone from the moment he took that spare key, and he couldn’t contain his curiosity. Riding the high of the stolen money made him feel invincible.

The letters were folded into thirds. As he looked over the papers, he noticed how many different types of handwriting there were. Different pens, different strokes, different languages. He picked one up and began to read it.

Though it wasn’t addressed to him, the letter was familiar. The words were the things he had often heard in recent months, stinging his memory the way one remembered a nightmare.

Spirits. Energies. Ghosts. Fortunes. My little boy, my poor boy.

Each letter was the same thing – a cry for help, and a response in turn advising a cleanse. He recognized Auntie’s handwriting, recognized some of the prescriptions she recommended to the various families that sent her the letters. His father had received the same words she wrote.

Stay patient. It will be fine. Just one more step.

The letters were countless, piling up in the back of the drawer he had taken them from. How many people had reached out to her? How many people had Auntie guided, taken by the shoulder to the state his parents were in? He began to clench his fingers, breaking some invisible barrier of politeness he had managed to keep for so long. His family – were they just another letter? They couldn’t have been. Not after all they had done.

Have faith. Keep the lights off. She is ill.

The letter burst into two pieces, the stray bits of paper fluttering like insects in the air. The boy hadn’t realized how harshly he held the paper in his hands, how it had begun to tear near the ends until splitting entirely. He willed his hands to stop shaking, returning the intact letters to the drawer before picking up the small bits of the paper he had torn apart.

Pat. Pat. Pat.

The boy froze. Footsteps. They were echoing out from the hallway, getting closer to the apartment door. With the bits of the broken letter still in his hands, he rushed towards the balcony, closing the glass door behind him and standing just out of sight.

The sound was muffled by the surge of the air through his ears, but he could hear someone entering the apartment He couldn’t see, but it must’ve been Auntie. No. Not here, not now. His lips were closed tightly, trying to contain the puffs of air attempting to escape his lungs in his frenzied state.

Auntie was talking to someone on the phone, unless someone was in the apartment with her. The money in the boy’s packet flapped in the breeze. He tried to relax, releasing the tightness of his muscles and unbinding his hands. The pieces of the letter fell out of his open palm, riding the wind into the open skyline.

He was out there until his fingers grew swollen from the cold, praying that Auntie would leave again soon while his lips felt as if they were freezing over. Holding the money in his pocket made his hands feel warmer. At some point, long after he lost track of time, he heard the door open again before closing. The apartment was silent, but he stayed a few extra minutes, just to be safe.

Then, the boy left Auntie’s apartment, locked the door, and didn’t look back, running down the hallway. He didn’t bother with the elevator. The stairs were quicker.

He crept back into his apartment, careful not to make too much noise. His own mother had a drawer much like Auntie’s, where she stored cash. Stepping around the sleeping figures of his parents, he deposited all the bills he had taken except one into the drawer.

 Once he returned to the kitchen, he held the remaining bill up against the sun, watching the light filter through. It was his, all his, and no one could take it from him.

━

At the dry-cleaner’s the boy worked at on the weekends, there was a set of wind chimes. They were cheaply made, he could tell. Under Auntie, the boy had made many sets of wind chimes with his own hands. The chimes at the dry-cleaner’s didn’t ring nicely; their sounds were hollow and cold.

            The air there was hot and humid in a way that burrowed into the boy’s hair, the scent not leaving him for hours. Despite it, he found solace at his part-time job. It was how he could escape the tension at home, to not have to listen to the dull drone of dog shows coming from his mother’s room.

            There was only one other employee working there that day, an older man. He would often tell the boy about the dental school he was going to. Someday, when he was finished school, he would leave the dry-cleaner’s behind and never come back. The boy envied that anticipation. That hope.

            “Here, look,” the man said. He presented the boy with an x-ray. “Isn’t it cool?” The x-ray was of a human skull, but there was an extra set of teeth surrounding the jaw. The teeth poked far into the empty space of the skull in a way that made the boy uncomfortable.

            “That’s a little kid’s jaw,” the man explained. “With their baby teeth.”

            “The adult teeth are just in there?” the boy asked. “The whole time, sitting there?”

            “Yep.” Now that the boy thought about it, it made sense that the teeth were in the skull. There was nowhere else for them to be, not while the baby teeth had yet to fall out.

            “They make space for our real teeth,” the man said. “So it’s important not to break them. You’ll lose the space for the permanent tooth that comes in after.”

            The man took the x-ray back before rising from his seat. It was time for him to go. The boy would be trusted to finish the last few packages of clothing and lock up.

            In the silence of the empty dry-cleaning store, the boy couldn’t get the image of the child’s jaw out of his mind. All the teeth, stuck in there, piercing flesh to emerge when they knew it was time. He went into the bathroom and brought his face in close to the mirror. The black strands of his hair grazed his eyebrows, the same colour as the tiny, sharp hairs that had begun to sprout from his upper lip. He opened his mouth and his breaths emerged from his throat, deep rolls of air fogging up the mirror. The inside of his mouth was red, the shadowed corners black. His teeth were white and perfect, and he prided himself on that. Not a cavity or chip to be seen.

            He couldn’t understand how the man could want to be a dentist. To look at the inside mouth, even his own, for too long, made him uncomfortable. Mouths weren’t meant to be seen. Then again, there were many things about the man he couldn’t understand. Once, another employee had been careless and spilled some chemicals. They touched the man’s skin, burning it in a way that would stick long enough that the marks might never go away. All the man did in response was clean it off and assure the other employee they should hold no guilt.

The boy wasn’t the type of person to do that. He couldn’t forgive so easily.

            He moved towards the cleaned clothes, ready to be packaged and received by a customer. There was only one that day; he scrunched his eyebrows upon finding it. It was a familiar wedding dress, colourful and delicate. He had seen it before, he was certain. Auntie’s.

There was no mistaking it. The boy could still remember, clear as day, every embroidered detail. Most of all was the feeling in his stomach that rose up, some sort of beast that had been reawakened in the weeks it had been since he last saw the dress. He was reminded of the altar he had seen, the money cabinet, and the letters, unending. His mother, on her wedding day, had worn a dress like this, though he doubted she would ever do something like that now. The person she was in the photos of her wedding was a person long gone.

            The boy took the dress away from the counter and looped his fingers around the seams. He pulled as hard as he could, relishing each audible tear in the fabric. The dress was old, and so it fell apart quickly, but he didn’t stop. He grabbed each split-off piece and tore it apart further, scratching and twisting until the dress was nothing more than fabric scraps on the floor. The embroidered bird in the centre was now headless, looking up lifelessly at the ceiling. Afterwards, the boy walked outside the store into the falling night, tossing the remnants of the wedding dress in the alley adjacent to the shop. They settled like rose petals on the mud-ridden ground.

            By the time Auntie arrived to pick up her dress, the inside of the dry-cleaner’s was dark. The television behind the counter was black. The sign that read OPEN had been removed, and the double doors were locked shut. The schedule was taken down so that no one could know when the store was supposed to be on working hours. Looking through the large glass window yielded nothing inside.

            There was a knocking on the door, first sparse and then more and more aggressive, exasperated. After the door, Auntie tried the windows, banging on them with her hands. The boy could tell where she was knocking by the sound it made. Bone sounded different against glass, wood, metal.

            Auntie began to shout, asking if anyone was inside and that she needed a package. Her voice faded away from the boy’s ears as she moved from the main entrance to the sides, inspecting the perimeter of the building to try and find a way in.

            When she entered the side alley, he knew she had found the dress. Her shouts went silent, replaced with a scrabbling as her fingers scraped against the stone. The boy didn’t make a sound, didn’t even take his gaze from the spot on the wall he was staring at. He was huddled up next to a table in the back room of the dry-cleaners. Auntie began to wail, a cry that seeped in through the window and into the darkness of the store. The boy’s teeth dug into a piece of fabric he had in his mouth, blocking the gasps of breath rising up from his throat. He refused to loosen his jaw, not even when he thought he could feel all his perfectly white teeth begin to shatter.