June in Winter

JUNE IN WINTER

by Alyssa Kim Donnelly

(Content Warnings: implied cannibalism, problematic relationships)

The other girls don’t like me, don’t see me as one of their own. But she’s not like them, she says, she’s different, like me. She’s sixteen and knows little about the world, but you wouldn’t guess it, just talking to her. Talking to her, you start believing the world is exactly as she says it is. 

“Pearl’s an evil witch. An evil stepmother,” she tells me. “She pretends we’re related, but really, she killed my dad and put me under a spell so that I’ll never leave her. Also, she’s stealing my youth. And my beauty.” She peers into the mirror, her mother’s mirror, as she speaks. 

We’re in her mother’s room, large and high-ceilinged and empty aside from a queen bed and this floor-length mirror, propped against the wall opposite. The girl steps back, does a slow twirl. I watch her reflection from the bed, the twisting hem of her night dress, cherry soda silk against her thighs. 

“That’s why I barely have tits.” She pushes her chest up with her hands and poses, frowning. She catches my eye in the mirror. “It’s okay, I read online that boys like small ones, too.” 

She’s waiting for me to say something. “What would you trade,” I ask her, “for bigger tits?” 

“God,” she breathes, like she’s been waiting all her life for someone to ask her that very question. “Anything. My life would be so incredible. I’ve got everything else, you know. Pretty much. All I need are tits and freedom.” 

Almost everything this girl tells me is a lie. I’ve learned there’s a sort of taxidermy to her dishonesty, a truth that doesn’t break the skin, an animal that looks real from a distance. The girl’s name is June. More than anything else, it’s her name I covet. Imagine—a name of my own, and a voice to hold it. 

June’s hands are in my hair as her mother’s bed dips beneath her weight. “What do you want?” I feel her breath on my neck. Beneath my girl-skin, envy fills me up, the way a home smells after a meal, every plate licked clean. “Fishtail?” She’s been practicing different types of braids on me. “Milkmaid?”

“Whatever you think suits me.” 

June tugs on my hair. For a moment, I think she’ll pull it right off, hair and skin and all, but she doesn’t. It’s not that easy.

“Everything suits you.” But she’s already chosen, is already parting my hair and weaving inky strands into rope, the dark leash between us. 

•••

Gumiho, they call me. Shapeshifter. The stories don’t get me quite right, but they’re close enough. I've eaten every year, for almost a thousand years. But sometimes I start thinking it's the other way around, that maybe it's been a thousand years since my last meal. Maybe I've gone hungry all this time. It’s hard to remember now, to tell the difference. Time for me passes the same way it does the music-box ballerina. Moments I’m incandescent with light and rhythm, and the dark stretches in between, which seem, when I try to remember them now, no longer than the blink of an eye, a darkness I don’t see. 

June won’t know the stories. Not every girl does. She’s caught up in the classics: evil stepmothers and their beautiful step-daughters, princelings with chiselled jawlines who don’t mind—no, even prefer—a woman with a small chest. And if June did know the stories, she'd be flattered I let her live so long. “You must really like me, huh?” I can hear her smiling around the words. I can feel her waiting for me to tell her why I chose her, what makes her so special.

•••

“Look,” June whispers, even though we’re alone, sitting beneath June’s favourite birch tree by the edge of the woods behind her house, nothing but crows on the bare branches above to overhear us. She pulls something pink and shiny out of her backpack. “Lucas gave it to me after biology class.” She sets it on the grass between us. 

It’s a music box about the length of June’s hand, upholstered in pink velvet and embroidered with swirls of sequin flowers, flashing like eyes in the sinking afternoon light.

Glancing up to make sure I’m watching, June twists the crank and unlatches the box. Inside: Thumbelina in a tutu and pointe shoes, swirling to music and the ticking metronome of hidden machinery. 

The ballerina ticks to a halt. “Why do you think he gave it to me?” asks June. 

“Duh, he obviously likes you.” June likes it when I say duh and obviously; it makes me sound like I know what I’m talking about.

“You think?” June bites her lip, chapped and split down the middle because she chews the skin off them when she’s thinking or when she’s nervous. The split moves as she speaks, old blood. “For real? Promise you’re not lying to me?” 

“I promise.”

June smiles her doll smile, no teeth. 

The truth is, we’re both lying to each other. Me about Lucas and June about where she got the box. It was a gift from her mother. I found it months ago when I spent the night, buried in June’s closet. The incriminating message engraved in Korean into the bottom of the box: June—your mother loves you. I wonder if she knows what it says. I’ve found all kinds of things tucked into the crevices of June’s home. Posters of her mother, folded down to the size of a cell phone, tucked into June’s school binders from years long passed. Articles about her mother, a theatre actress, slipping between skins on stage for sold-out audiences. Photographs of a family of three, faded and creased, paper-clipped to the childhood diary June keeps beneath her mattress. 

It’s hard to figure out why I care. It’s June I want, not these little stories from her past. But I collect these pieces of her anyway, these spare pieces like the joints between her bones, the places where her skeleton bends. 

•••

I stopped eating when I met June. Real food, I mean. The food that counts. After nine hundred and ninety-nine bodies, one for every year of my life, it felt good to work up an appetite.  I don’t bother with guilt—what kind of animal feels guilty for eating? I’ve been friends with June for five years. Even then, in my child’s body, the other girls sensed me for what I was. But June was different. It’s why I chose her, why I’m saving her for last. 

Before June, I used to collect things. Silly things, bird bones and bat wings; it was my little pleasure, my petty delight. Yes, I have those too. I liked to put them together in different configurations, see what kinds of bodies I could come up with. They never made it as close to human as I’d like. It was pointless of me to try.

•••

June’s mother orders us enough takeout to keep June fed for the next week. “Fattening me up,” says June through a mouthful of glass noodles, “so she can eat me. If I don’t come to school next week, check the fridge.”  

Lunar New Year, and June’s mother is at a party in the city. “She said we should honour our ancestors tonight,” June tells me. “Feed them or something. They must be starving by now.” She meets my gaze from across the table. “They must hate her.”

There are still times I don’t know how to talk to June, times she makes me remember what I am. I have no ancestors, no one to feed but myself.

After we eat, June and I curl up on the couch in our pyjamas to watch a movie, some old childhood favourite of hers that I watch without taking in. Frost blooms like mould against the window as June slings her legs, bare, over my lap. I think about the three different ways a meal smells. Cooked, raw, alive. 

A few hours past midnight, June’s phone buzzes. “Mom says happy new year,” June reports. She spends several moments making eyes at her image, reflected in the dark screen, before her phone buzzes and lights up again. June snorts. “She says she wants to be happier this year. Wants us to make this our happiest year yet.” June puts her phone on the table, face-down.  

“How about you?” I ask. “What do you want?” 

June groans. “Where do I begin? I want to fill out a bra. I want Lucas to man up and kiss me already. I want to run away and live in the city.” She pokes my shoulder with her big toe. “You’d run away with me, right?” 

My hand is gripping her ankle and raising it to my mouth before my mind catches up to what’s happening. 

“Oh.” June’s voice, smaller than I’d ever heard it. She meets my gaze. “Shit, I guess I know what you want.” 

Your name. Your voice. Your life. Your body. 

Unbelievably, she’s smiling at me. “It’s okay, you can tell me the truth.” 

•••

June on her mother’s bed. June in the dark. June on top of me. June’s hair tickling my nose, apple-scented shampoo and sweat. Her forehead hot against my neck, her nose digging into my shoulder. June in winter, wrapping herself around me for warmth. I’ve waited for so long that the hunger has turned insect, tunneling through the damp, blind space between me and my girl-skin, turning me porous as a sponge. June in my pores. June in the mirror.