Fiction Short Story
Other Emily
“Commerce!” Emily shouted. “The hoarding and ceding and exchange of power. I see no clearer path into the souls of human people.”
Emily had an idea. She gathered the witches in an email:
July 8, 2016 3:23 a.m.
Hark. A vision has come to me.
Tomorrow. Let us gather in the Room of Conference. Other Emily can you please bring paper Thanks.
Emily was the oldest and the meanest of all of the witches, gangly limbs twisting out branchlike from her withered frame. She was still beautiful, though, in some ways more beautiful than the rest. Less so in many other ways. She was the closest the group had to a leader, an authority she siphoned from every living person she met by pretending they didn’t exist beyond her peripheral view. Speaking with her was like speaking to a televised address.
Lucretia and Rashida were both born before the Revolutionary War. Other Emily, meanwhile, was on the cusp of her hundredth birthday and couldn’t be described as old in any sense. She had the skin of an immortal just born. Engaged and curious and capable of feeling things deeply, she was the opposite of Emily, literally ancient, whose skin was radiant in a sad and blue way. It was anyone’s guess whether she intentionally omitted a question mark from the end of her email or not—so that she could sound curt, but not indefensibly so!—except it was nobody’s guess and everybody assumed she did it on purpose. A destabilizing gesture. Classic Emily behavior.
The witches arrived in the usual order: Lucretia, first and absolutely silently, placing herself on a stool in the manner of a decorative vase; Rashida and Other Emily, to the wet percussive beat of iced coffee against plastic and Rashida’s breath-soaked musings: “Isn’t it fascinating,” she said, “how cargo pants and shorts seem to be so popular among utilitarians and laborers, but cargo skirts of any length virtually do not exist?”
The conference room more closely resembled a small and windowless museum of garbage, with white shelves on all four sides stocked pathetically with the random objects a group of witches might use to emulate a corporate space. One shelf housed perhaps eighty black staplers. Nearby, another twenty blue staplers glowed in the heartbreaking light of the room’s single orange bulb. But it was, after all, a conference room. For one reason or another, Emily delivered all of her missives from this space.
Rashida said to Other Emily, “I bet you twenty dollars she’ll want us to crop again.”
But they had all cropped three weeks before, for Lucretia’s birthday, so the timing wasn’t right. By now, they were all nestled deep within a humid summer, and summers were famously slow, and famously risky. Witches who cropped in these months—in the season of family outings, distracted parents, and missing children in crowds—were the desperate and malevolent creatures of folklore, the stuff of childish nightmares. They were not tidily-appointed professional witches in creaseless linen separates, glimmering with tasteful hints of gold in the sunlight.
Yet all witches cropped. They had to. Cropping filled their cheeks and fed their muscles. It was both an essential ritual for their immortality and a nourishment for their foul hunger. It was also a logistical nightmare to do more than a few times a year. Other Emily grew uneasier.
Her gaze began to float nervously toward the ceiling. On the top shelf, she noticed a box labeled “Meeting Paper” that she knew for a fact was filled with dead birds. This was calming. It was a little funny. A psychic she once knew, who moonlighted as a therapist, once diagnosed Other Emily’s episodes of unremitting dread as panic attacks and advised her to cast the anxiety on a dial numbered one through ten. The trick was to dial it back by finding something at least a little funny in the room. It was a complicated mental gymnastics routine to execute in times of stress, but it always worked, so she always did it.
Emily arrived in a plume of green smoke, a flourish she had taken to lately.
“Your punctuality has not gone unnoticed,” she said, meaning she was sorry for being late. She was shrouded in an enormous jumpsuit. The only indication of a body underneath was the thin strap of snakeskin handbag, bisecting what onlookers assumed was Emily’s cleavage.
“You all gathered swiftly,” she also said, meaning thanks for coming.
“Shall we wait for Lucretia?” Rashida asked.
“I’m right here,” Lucretia said, standing four feet to her left.
Everybody jumped, having not noticed her before now.
“Jesus Christ,” Lucretia said.
“Lucretia!” Rashida gasped.
“Lucretia, that’s a horrible thing to say,” Other Emily said. Soon, the three of them were laughing.
“Silence,” Emily said, and there was. From her tiny handbag, Emily unsheathed an even tinier notepad. Other Emily dialed back her anxiety once more.
Emily’s handwriting spilled out over its pages in a mixture of glyphs and ancient phrases. She flipped through one unintelligible page after another before reading aloud: “A heat-styling cream made with goat milk and newt’s blood that can hold a blowout for three days longer than current market heat-styling creams.”
Lucretia suggested that the marketing could be about “owning your hair,” broadly promoting expression but also speaking to the product’s manifold styling capabilities. Other Emily pitched the name Hair Dominion, to which the room responded well.
Emily seemed pleased. Her eyes flicked around the room. Other Emily watched her glass lips stretch across her cold, ferociously white teeth—each one whittled from expensive mammoth bone at a time when it was fashionable to do so. She felt prickly whenever Emily displayed her teeth. Perhaps she was attempting to smile. But a smile is a friendly thing accompanied by kind eyes and round cheeks. Emily’s smile felt more like she was displaying the inventory of her mouth: two shelves of matching pottery.
Suddenly, the pottery fell away, and her charm began to slither from her throat: “Hark, ladies, an additional item. My heart has been yearning to tell you, and now, finally, that the contract is complete and has been agreed upon, I have euphoria in my heart to share that we’re receiving a brand-new Emily.”
This was news to half the witches. Rashida gasped, even though she did that all the time. Lucretia was still as always. Emily was never able to read a room, and so she continued her speech without missing a beat.
“She’ll arrive on the first night of the silent moon,” she said, meaning Friday. “Let us express our gratitude to her with a fresh crop.” She was to start at Envy Salon Professionals as the company’s first-ever social media manager, she would report directly to Emily, and did anybody have any questions?
“I brought paper,” Other Emily said, not asking a question. “Per your email?”
Emily’s eyes flicked to Other Emily. She did not move a single other muscle in her face until she said: “A detail unremembered.” Green smoke, and she was gone.
Like a toy set in motion, Lucretia immediately made her way to her desk. Other Emily had hoped for a moment alone in the closet, but Rashida was staring at her. For a moment, she almost looked concerned.
“Twenty bucks,” Rashida said.
Other Emily remembered the bet. She gave Rashida fifteen dollars, which was all the cash she had on her.
*
It had been three years since Emily had made a large, unwieldy request of the witches. Other Emily was charging crystals when she received the email:
March 22, 2013 6:02 a.m.
Hark. The hour of our departure from this place has arrived
Emily will you please retrieve my trunks from storage. Lucretia Please meet me in herb cellar Thank you!
She did not tell them why, but it was obvious to all that Emily was ambitious and unsatisfied and terrifyingly powerful, that the move crystallized some significant element of her ultimate journey toward world conquest. And because, at the end of the day, she was the closest thing they had to a leader, and because they were aimless otherwise, within days they had packed their things and moved.
It had been Emily’s idea to capitalize on their ancestral knowledge of herbal medicine. It was Rashida who rebutted that perhaps the optics of a spooky apothecary run by a pale woman were not so good. Lucretia developed an elaborate conceit involving plant-based shampoo and conditioner for salon professionals. They cackled about lacing the formulas with compliance charms, lulling the user into doing mischievous or straight-up gruesome things—sowing the seeds of chaos, as witches were meant to do.
“Per your email?” “Commerce!” Emily also shouted, at a different time. “It is merely the hoarding and ceding and exchange of power. I see no clearer path into the souls of human people.”
And so Envy Salon Professionals was born. But the truth was nobody was buying the stuff. “Meetings” with “vendors” were required, but they also meant risking exposure. Lucretia was the only one among them with any business acumen, and she hated interfacing with mortals. Their office was walled with unsold hair products.
Financially, things were fine. The coven was not wealthy by coven standards, but each witch probably had enough stored gold to sustain several human lifetimes. Lucretia had by far the most junk, but otherwise they were tiny and nimble. Their particular Sisterhood had dwindled over centuries, shattered into factions, crudely reformed into alliances, and dwindled from there. Some witches got other jobs and some witches got married. Sometimes it was a big deal and other times it felt simply like an item of furniture had vanished, which happened organically enough as is.
The four of them—plus King, a stocky mortal under the bewitched impression that he organized the finances and legal affairs of a small hair-care company—comfortably folded into a walkup office space in the nightlife district, where the sweet musk of beer-soaked wood would waft up from the streets when the bars opened around four in the afternoon. The Envy Salon Professionals headquarters had previously housed a boutique denim brand; previously previously, it had been a travel agency. A framed print advertising Tulum rotted behind its glass pane.
Everything in the room was ancient, save the mountains of products, the gleaming chrome personal computers, and the also-chrome custom nameplates. Emily was the founder and CEO. Lucretia was “Associate Director of Marketing,” and Other Emily was “Creative Director.” Rashida’s nameplate just said “Chief Rashida Officer.”
On the Sunday before they were to meet the New Emily, the three gathered in the office to plan for the crop. Rashida tossed the pages of CosPack: The Cosmetic Packaging Magazine back and forth on her desk. The cover featured a translucent bottle dressed in opalescent suds.
“Too sinister,” Rashida said. She was looking at a photo of a small plastic tub.
Lucretia was the first one to bring up New Emily, of course.
“I’m not worried,” Other Emily said.
“Everything will be fine,” Lucretia said.
“Emily needs you,” Rashida said. “You! Not another Emily.”
“I think she’s afraid you’ll leave before New Emily arrives,” Lucretia said.
Rashida turned to Lucretia. “Remember what she said at your birthday dinner?”
Lucretia slipped into a note-perfect impression of Emily: “When the last midnight chimes, the four will walk into the red dawn.”
“I would love a really hot Emily,” Rashida said. “No offense. Not that you like to go out, anyway.”
Other Emily always envisioned a future in which she would want to go out more.
Outside, urban dwellers observed the ritual of Sunday. The city they lived in was big enough to be its own universe, but it obeyed cosmic laws of human orbit. The previous night’s unseemlies had given way to colorfully dressed people on patios sipping drinks. Bubbles rushing upward endlessly. Everyone was trying and failing to overstate the heat. The sky was flameheart blue. The street cooked, and delirious murals danced in the concrete fumes.
“Too hot to crop,” Rashida said; then she began to sing: “ Too hot to crop. ”
Lucretia shrugged, boring and graceful. All of her opinions were locked up in the silence of her heart. “The timing isn’t ideal,” she said.
“I don’t remember cropping when I met you,” Other Emily said.
“Due to Old Emily,” Rashida said.
Immediately, Rashida felt a very specific, familiar sensation, as if realizing she had messed up an incantation only moments after it was finished, her body tensing to endure the bolt of fire or violent eyelash removal to follow. She saw the words drifting out of her mouth and diffusing into the air. Shame was not really a thing witches experienced, but there it was, welling up in her cheeks.
Other Emily sat still, typing ingredients out into a spreadsheet, trying to remember what Old Emily looked like.
Rashida’s shame passed in moments. “If she’s beautiful,” she said, “I’m going to tie her boobs together.”
“Tomorrow,” Lucretia announced. Her face was bathed in the anemic light of her computer screen. “Let’s go to the beach.”
Other Emily and Rashida said nothing. One was excited. The other felt like she was going to die.
*
A screen is filled with the image of a sun-soaked city heaving in humid symphony. Then Emily’s voice cuts in, as smooth and sweet as rum: Let’s get one thing straight: Hair matters.
The video cuts to an intercontinental assembly of beautiful women walking down the sidewalk, smiling at one another like they’re in love. The tallest woman swings a glossy sheet of honeyed-brown hair over her shoulder and turns to address the camera: Let’s get another thing straight: Your hair.
Another, wearing a denim jumpsuit, with loose chocolate-brown curls: Let’s get another thing curly.
4C curly! says the woman with the fluffy Afro next to her.
Own your hair , says the final woman. It is white-blonde Other Emily, winking at the camera.
Emily’s voice returns: Hair Dominion. Own your hair. And the four women look right into the lens, pouting or grinning, Other Emily looking truly delighted, for a single second, before it cuts.
The four women look right into the lens, pouting or grinning, Other Emily looking truly delighted, for a single second, before it cuts. *
The office at night was blue and still and shattered by the scraping of key-inside-lock. The hallway’s piss-yellow light, fat Rashida, and her muscle-bound date burst into the room, like a massive flesh asteroid bound for implosion, crashing into King’s desk, writhing there.
He necked her seriously, kneading his lips into her jaw furiously, which kept making her laugh. He kept asking her if she was “close,” and she was not—in fact, she was very far from—but Rashida was happy, euphoric even, exploring his body like a sandbox. Her giggles littered the night.
Rashida adored sex. She discovered it late one evening in the nineteenth century, and the rest was history. She was the only one. Other Emily didn’t love it, and Lucretia had it from time to time, and Emily was operating on entirely different pleasure centers from the rest of them. They had never talked about it, in any case, for the obvious reason that interfacing with Emily was a dangerous exercise, and for the less obvious reason that the topic was dominated by Rashida, who talked about sex constantly in a way that made it joyless for everyone else.
“Have you ever accidentally been anally stimulated?” Rashida had asked the other day, as a representative example.
At first, glimpsing men’s dwellings was Rashida’s private thrill. The squalid or otherwise heartbreaking situations comforted her the most, of course, because they reminded her of the places she had grown up. But there was also the sensation of being welcomed into the pristine domain of some otherwise-unremarkable dudes. Here are my neuroses, it said to her. She appreciated them with a museumgoer’s curiosity but handled them with a child’s sense of bodily mischief.
For ages, Rashida had told the other witches that she had never once cast a spell on a lover, which was such an outrageous lie that it became its own inside joke. It was not exactly tactful to admit, but if everybody was being honest, manipulating mortals was one of the top three most fabulous things about witchdom. So easy. Almost boringly easy. This is why Other Emily and Lucretia received no pleasure from it.
Though not picky, Rashida was drawn to men who were physically strong. “Not like a bodybuilder,” she said, “but like he could build me a castle.” More than the sad apartments, more than the adoration, she loved running her hands over writhing muscles and clutching handfuls of firing synapses and huffing the astringent body odor of a creature desperate to please her.
This guy was curiously chiseled for a grocery bag boy, she noticed. His trapezius muscles tented almost grotesquely. His shoulders were overdeveloped. He must lift , she also noticed, and he must hate himself . Or maybe he hates somebody else—his dad? Women? Thanks to the simplest of hallucinogenic charms, he was under the bewitched impression that he was protecting the queen, Rashida, from Viking marauders.
“Bite my ears,” she said.
“I don’t think we’ll be safe here for much longer,” he panted. Then he began biting her ears.
*
From the window of Lucretia’s apartment, a city glittered in the night, and from the open window of her kitchen, the acrid scent of Hair Dominion drifted out over it like a terrible song.
So far, Envy Salon Professionals had created three distinct hair-care outfits: Color Magic was the first (toning products for dyed hair), followed by Motion Potion (volumizing treatments for fine hair) and Aqua Mirabilis (hydrating products for textured hair). Hair Dominion was the witches’ first entry into the styling-product category. At the moment, it was little more than a small jar of troll fat, in conversation with many other jars, arcane flora, herbal textbooks, and ancient grimoires laid out over Lucretia’s kitchen table.
The ingredients simmered in a double boiler. Troll fat provided an unbelievable amount of hold. Newt blood thinned out the formula just enough to make it pliable. She swirled a small dollop in her palm, watching it melt into cracks of skin. The texture was almost perfect, but as usual, mother Emily’s instinct was right: An infusion of goat milk bathed the bloody troll fat into the consistency of custard. It smelled like an armpit, until Lucretia added a veil of eucalyptus oil. Then it mostly smelled like eucalyptus oil.
Feeling somewhat inspired, Lucretia decided to try something. She shuffled the various texts around until she came to a maroon leather tome bursting with rotting Post-it Notes. A bright blue one—“Hair Dominion?”—took her to a page somewhere near the back, to a basic charm with basic ingredients. The main ingredients were philodendron, which she had plenty of; some of her own blood, which of course she also had plenty of; and Seed of Hubris, which of course she had recently depleted. When combined, they produced a mind-control effect that Lucretia used all the time; Lucretia used it every time she had to renegotiate her rent, and her supply ran dry on the second. She texted Rashida to ask if she had any.
Lucretia thought of Emily and Other Emily. She thought of the red dawn. She was thinking of her body being consumed by flames when her phone vibrated with a text from Rashida: What is seed of hummus
It appeared that Lucretia had made a typo. Their text conversation:
Do u have seed of hummus?
What is seed of hummus
Seed of **hubris. Sorry sorry.
I have chickpeas but only 1 can
A half hour later, Rashida buzzed Lucretia’s apartment. She arrived in the kitchen sweaty and gorgeous, her head poking out of a vast wool scarf. From somewhere on her person, she produced a small vial of a milky, almost-pearlescent substance.
“And it’s fresh,” Rashida bragged.
Lucretia rolled her eyes. “A fun night for one of us.”
It was just after 3 a.m. Rashida was beginning the tale of her Viking lover when both of them experienced a tingle and a chime and a flash of light. A new email from Emily had just arrived.
The subject line: To morrow
*
Other Emily didn’t see the new missive until she awoke the next morning, on her beach day with Lucretia and Rashida:
July 13, 2016 3:23 a.m.
Hi Thinking about crop — two blonds pls Lucretia Rashida pls bring wines Thrilled to introduce you ladies to our new Emily!
Thanks.
Other Emily spent the morning in abject dread, watching the odds of her survival wane as steadily as the sun rose, thinking of Rashida and Lucretia, briefly sobbing, calming down, changing course, realizing suddenly that, actually, she was an excellent Emily, and though she didn’t necessarily trust Emily’s long-term goals, it made more sense to keep Emilys—both New and Other—especially leading into Q4.
Lucretia spent the morning yawning, distilling a pitcher of cold-brewed coffee into two travel thermoses and her own purple plastic mug, and assembling all of the cropping materials. When she called Rashida in a panic about not having any despellment tinctures and Rashida didn’t pick up, she considered calling Other Emily, found a tincture in her laptop bag (why did she leave one there?), changed into a one-piece and sarong, loaded up her Toyota Yaris, and drove downtown to pick up her sisters.
Rashida spent the morning choosing a sun hat, eventually selecting one the size of a dining room table. Interpreting the missed call from Lucretia as a signal that she had arrived, Rashida shouted at her roommate, Other Emily, to get dressed immediately. By the time they arrived downstairs, Lucretia was just in fact pulling up. Then they drove the Yaris until the city melted into crystalline shore.
A pathetic boardwalk bordered a trash-soaked strip of sand, on which swarmed a gleaming mass of heaving bodies, all looking out or sleeping before a glittering ocean almost bashful in its magnificence. The witches cropped at this beach often. Everybody hated being there, but their cropping success rate at this particular location was flawless, so.
“I need something else to drink,” Other Emily said, unfolding herself out from the backseat. She was trying very hard not to nervously shake. The sun stared down on her already blood-hot flesh. “Does anybody want anything?”
The sky was undiluted blue.
“I brought dispellment tinctures,” Lucretia announced, nonanswering.
“ Emmm ,” Rashida sang, and then she spoke: “Will you see if Dr Pepper is taking any more patients?”
The sand-strewn drugstore that serviced the boardwalk contained a single Dr Pepper. Other Emily grabbed it, plus an armful of sparkling waters, and waited in line. The bottles sweat in her embrace. Her eyes traced an invisible pathway that led out of the store and down the boulevard in the opposite direction from Lucretia and Rashida. She could take a ferry to very near the airport, she decided, or if she left now she could hail a cab to the office, where she was sure there were enough provisions to complete a basic teleportation rune, at least to buy her some time. But Other Emily was terrible at teleportation runes. Runes in general, but the last teleportation she attempted ended unfortunately. She preferred not to think about it. She was, in fact, trying not to think of it when a sweet stench fell upon her.
It’s difficult to describe the sensation a witch experiences when a child is nearby. A cottony feeling that crawls feline up the nostril and curls up behind the eyes. Passing through the body like a blessing. It shocks and soothes. It’s pink and alive. Other Emily turned around, intoxicated, to see a snot-choked boy staring up at her with intelligent eyes. His stomach, protruding over the waistband of his swim shorts, was a flawless orb.
His keeper was nowhere to be found, so Other Emily thought quickly, drilling her gaze into his.
“Would you like to hang out with me?” she asked. (This was a spell.)
The boy did nothing, but when she extended her hand, he took it, and the two returned to Lucretia and Rashida together. Even Lucretia was incredulous, rolling her eyes as Other Emily and the boy strolled up to them, the boy sucking happily on the plastic teat of the last Dr Pepper.
“No,” Lucretia said. “Too young. Too bony. And what the hell, Em, we’ve been here for five minutes. Come on.”
Other Emily looked at the boy, and he looked back at her, and the two considered the feedback. The boy appeared to be five or so. His gangly limbs seemed to dangle from his egg belly.
“Would you like to hang out with me?” she asked. (This was a spell.) Lucretia handed Other Emily the small vial of a dispellment tincture. “I hope we don’t need more!” Lucretia said to nobody, and then she and her espadrilles began marching seaward toward the human sprawl.
Rashida looked hurtfully at the soda hanging out of the boy’s mouth, but she said nothing and slumped after Lucretia.
Lucretia hunted children like she was born to do it. She did not particularly enjoy the crop, owing to the embarrassment of getting caught (it happened from time to time and was humiliating), but a natural sense of efficiency made her unfortunately excellent at it. Since the witches had begun applying the language of business to their affairs, sourcing the “highest-quality product” had been a small and private commandment that gave Lucretia, and only Lucretia, some sense of satisfaction.
According to Lucretia, the perfect crop was eight or nine—enough autonomy to wander alone but still enfeebled, still charmed by mysterious women, deliciously tender mouthfeel—and temporarily alone. The beach was a vast and muscular chaos, really the only place to crop during the summer. A parent or guardian might spend an hour drifting in and out of consciousness on the beach, gazing lazily on a figure bobbling in and out of the tide before they realized it was not their child, and speaking of, where is Ramsey and Cullen or Lila? Lucretia would cast a simple charm and then depart quickly and inauspiciously, with Ramsey and Cullen or Lila bounding a few yards behind her.
On happier occasions, the three would arrive early to the beach and embed themselves in the quilt of towels, tanning and swimming and drinking sun-warmed lemon seltzer. But today, from the boardwalk, Other Emily could see Lucretia—a far-off sliver of flesh-tone—moving through the crowds quickly, hoping to have this whole thing wrapped up by noon. Rashida, as usual, moved with less urgency.
Other Emily crouched down to the boy, who was dancing in a way that was more like rattling his limbs. She thought she would try something.
“Boy,” she commanded him.
He stood at attention, spellbound.
“I am your mother. Say, ‘I love you, mommy.’”
“I love you, mommy.”
It felt not unpleasant. But virtually nothing happened inside Other Emily. The words fell into a gust of wind and were carried seaward. She handed him the dispellment tincture. “Drink this.”
He obeyed. His pupils contracted as soon as the liquid touched his lips. When he saw Other Emily, who was still crouched at eye level, he was so shocked with unrecognition that he started to sob.
When his tears abated and his voice emerged, it was jagged and choked. “Do you know where my mom is?”
Other Emily pointed, and the boy’s eyes followed, to the drugstore across the street. When he looked back at her, she was already gone.
*
“Highest-quality product,” Lucretia bragged, and she and Other Emily laughed, looking at the blond twins, who were both deeply entrenched in a reality program about feuding hospice nurses . The twins’ eyes were glazed a bright, enchanted cyan. Other Emily had just dipped a pita chip into a bowl of maggots and raised them squirming to her lips when Lucretia brought it up again, it being the New Emily.
Lucretia rarely discussed personal matters with Other Emily, or with anybody. Still, she had invited her over after the crop for wine and maggots, and Other Emily sensed that Lucretia, too, was nervous, vibrating quietly under several layers of poise. It sort of felt like they were there to comfort one another. They weren’t friends, but they were sisters.
Squish! Some maggots were crushed by Other Emily’s teeth. There was a greater purpose to being an Emily, she had thought. Well, not really, but there was a very specific purpose to being an Emily. “It’ll happen, and then it’ll be over,” she said.
“I’m going to carve that bitch’s eyes out,” one of the feuding nurses said. Lucretia and Other Emily laughed. The children were frozen midyawn. They looked almost dead. But then the searing hospital lights would glint off of the gossamer threads of saliva suspended in their mouths to remind all that they were alive, if barely.
Lucretia left for the bathroom. Her apartment was enormous and labyrinthine, so the journey took ages. She returned as an entirely new story line for the feuding nurses was beginning to crest. Into Other Emily’s lap plopped a white jar.
Hair Dominion Ultimate Styling Cream with Nubian Goat Milk , it beamed, in silver-embossed lettering. The jar was heavy with moisture.
“It’s troll fat,” Lucretia said. It smelled both weird and bad, but the eucalyptus was bracing. Other Emily took a dollop and shuffled it with her fingers into the roots of her hair. Suddenly, she looked as if she had spent fifteen minutes on a beach, despite having just done so.
“Do you feel different?” Lucretia finally asked. “I’ve always wanted to know.”
“Different how?”
“Or do you just feel more powerful?” Lucretia was giggling, but her eyes were a little wet. “ Do you call upon the power of all Emilys, thence and hereafter? ” She was quoting an old legend she’d heard about the legion of Emily, the witches who were One. “Is your blood ink black?”
Other Emily piled another pita chip with maggots. “It’s all true,” she said, even though the blood thing wasn’t. Squish!
She’d heard about the legion of Emily, the witches who were One. *
The office was blue and still as always. In the kitchenette, King slept on a pile of flattened stapler boxes and an expensive duvet gifted to him by Rashida. It’s difficult to convey both how peripheral King was to the affairs of the witches and how useful. He had become, in fact, unexpectedly indispensable, especially when dealing with the building’s management company.
Rashida and Other Emily arrived early. They had wondered if Lucretia or Emily or the new Emily would precede them. Nope. Slowly, the gears of ritual began to crunch and turn. Rashida cleared off surfaces. Other Emily pulled great looms of sheet plastic out of a kitchenette cupboard. Rashida began unloading a box labeled “copying equipment” of its occult contents. King snored in enchanted slumber. Nothing special was used in this particular ceremony, so it came down to the essentials: candles, obviously; salts and incense; chalices; scrying pendant; obsidian dagger; extra crystals, if needed; and two tablecloths, one solid purple and the other a dreary damask.
“I hate both of them,” Rashida said, “but I hate the purple one less.”
“Both are awful.” A new voice entered the room like a moonbeam. “They’re perfect.”
Holy shit. New Emily. Eye-poppingly beautiful. Other Emily felt her before she saw her. A heat that crept up the surface of her skin. Now it was all over. New Emily’s cheekbones were their own light source. Her hair was unbelievable—frizzy, but radiant, a melancholy kind of gray-brown profound in its gray-brownness. She shivered there, in the doorway of the office, completely overdressed for the occasion.
“Fuck,” Rashida said.
“Hi,” New Emily said, looking like a refugee movie star. “Envy Salon Professionals?”
“Welcome, Emily,” Other Emily said, and New Emily nodded, and this was where everything began to feel irreversibly wrong.
The first time Other Emily had met the witches, it had been in a remarkably similar place—industrial, beer-smelling, erratically furnished—only it was freezing outside, and the town they lived in was buried in snow, and Other Emily had to drive very carefully due to icy weather. She had arrived late, after they had already set upon Old Emily, who at that point was well beyond her defining characteristics.
Emily had embraced Other Emily tenderly. “Welcome home,” she had said. And then they all dined on Old Emily.
The next day, when Other Emily awoke and looked in the mirror, she could not believe what she saw. Her skin looked polished and paved, and she felt properly hydrated for the first time in her life. Her eyes were green, where they once had been blue.
Now, her gorgeous hands were shaking. She was trying to light candles but was doing very poorly. “We can get started when Lucretia gets here.”
“I’m right here?” Lucretia said.
It was true—she was right there, strapping a catatonic blond twin to a desk—but everybody, including New Emily, was startled anyway.
Other Emily gulped. They were waiting for one other participant.
Then: A plume of green smoke, announcing Emily; and then Emily herself, whose wine-black gown preceded her like a symphony’s overture.
“Ladies, hark,” she said. “It’s a very special night.”
She looked at everybody. She looked at New Emily proudly, then Rashida playfully, then Lucretia approvingly, then the blond twins hungrily, and then Other Emily hotly, scalding her with her gaze. It was almost lust. Even New Emily, whose experience of the coven was limited to the four preceding minutes, could see plainly what was going to happen.
“Emily,” Emily said, addressing Other Emily, “I am filled with love for you today. My admiration runneth over, and I cannot keep it in any longer!”
She could not, apparently, as her face filled with creamy pink swirls of blood under flesh.
“I’ve waited for this day expectantly. I feel we should not wait any longer. Do you, ladies?”
She turned to the witches. Other Emily had wondered about what would happen next, but in the end it was Rashida who handed Emily the dagger. Lucretia and Rashida looked heavily at Other Emily. Rashida appeared on the precipice of crying.
But after a minute, they looked away. Each fell upon a twin and began to dine.
Emily looked at Other Emily lovingly, raising the dagger to her neck slowly. Other Emily parted her lips for her final words, while her hands leapt from her sides: one to Emily’s dagger-holding-wrist, the other to the dagger. In the end, it was easier than she thought.
Into Emily’s ruby heart Emily sank the dagger, and long, elegant cascades of blood rushed forth. Rashida gasped the loudest she would ever gasp. New Emily’s face was ugly with shock. Lucretia watched the maneuver unfold from the corner of her eye without lifting her head from her meal. Her lips dripped with blood, which went glossy in the moon’s light.
