Zygote Melted

When Kisten was five years old, a very impressionable age, her older brother, Arias -eleven years old- convinced her that she was a mutant who ate her own twin when Kisten was only a tiny cannibal speck inside their mother. He then proceeded to put his ear to her tummy and tell her, a hint of a malicious smile spreading across his face, that he could hear her twin’s screams as she digested in Kistens’ tiny stomach.      

            The effect was instantaneous.

            Kisten wailed, dropping the chocolate chip cookie she’d been studiously gnawing at, and heaved before pushing her brother to the ground and running, screaming at the top of her lungs, to their mother, who’d been working on a business project in the other room. Arias’ right cheek would be red and achy for the rest of the week because of the hard smack their mother had delivered whilst trying to calm a hysterical Kisten down.

            When brushing their teeth before bed that same night Arias had tugged on one of Kistens’ messy pigtails and whispered harshly over the sound of running water that Luci, the name of one of their neighbors’ dogs and now the name Arias had given her twin, was going to have her revenge for Kisten eating her. Kisten had hit him as hard as she could on his swollen cheek, spat her mouthful of foamy toothpaste in the sink, and scampered to bed to huddle under her sheets, attempting to forget the fact that she really had, in a sense, eaten her own sister.

                                                               ********

            Now, almost eighteen years later, Kisten Danale stood shivering on platform two at the Berkeley BART station waiting for the San Francisco train at eight o’clock on a chilly Friday morning. Kisten could be considered good looking: messy shoulder length brown hair framing a peach colored face, wide green eyes and a slight pug-nose with a dust of almost invisible freckles, thin and everyday looking. She’d been waiting on the platform for about five minutes, busying herself by reading the announcements and rubbing her bare legs together, to warm them. Kisten was only wearing the bright pink hoodie she’d snatched off her friends couch in her rush for the BART station this morning to cover her bared arms and midriff, and a short, slightly ruffled black skirt, stripped knee socks and leg warmers.

 She’d been out with her friends the night before singing drunken karaoke and having a general awesome time just running around in the dark completely shitfaced. And when Kisten woke up that morning unable to move and with the demented laughter of Luci echoing in her ears and vibrating her already alcohol mangled brain; she had freaked. Kisten managed to twist herself from her friends couch and went crashing to the hard wood floor, smashing her knee into his coffee table on the way down. The pain shooting up from her knee seemed to surprise Luci, causing her to break the control she had over Kisten’s body and retreat back into her hiding place in Kisten’s mind.

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A few months ago strange things began happening to Kisten, and at first she brushed them off. When laying on her bed on a warm afternoon she’d hear someone calling her name from a distance. When walking down the street she’d see, from the corner of her eye, mirages; trees creeping along after her, people melting into swirls of color and floating away. When she was nearly hit by a car on the way to work whilst distracted by the giant plant that was slowly creeping up a mans shoulder and snaring him in thick vines; Kisten felt as is something unnatural was wedging itself deep inside her brain and twisting reality just to fuck with her.

She toyed with the idea of calling her brother, who had become a supernatural fanatic when studying religion in college, and asking for his help but she still felt the entire situation wasn’t that serious. When Kisten had the dream that wasn’t a dream she decided that talking to her brother would be the least of her problems.

In her dream she had been pulled to what she oddly recognized as her own mind, an endless white room full of tall filing cabinets lit by medieval torches- Kisten was vaguely pissed that her mind wasn’t a little more modern- which covered the room in thin flickering shadows. Kisten nearly pissed herself when an arm she recognized as her own snaked around her neck and squeezed. Kisten ducked and pulled away, twisting around to look at her attacker.

She froze.

It was herself, a gross caricature, but definitely a mirror image of Kisten. Her twin stalked towards Kisten’s prone form, pushed her back to the floor and straddled her hips, a devilish grin twisting her face. She introduced herself just as she wrapped her long fingers around Kistens’ throat and squeezed.

“Hi! My name is Luci. I’m going to kill your conscious and take over your body.”

Kisten had nearly bent herself in two kicking Luci off and awoke gagging and scratching at her neck, trying to pry off fingers that weren’t there. It was two in the morning and she didn’t give two shits if she woke Arias up.

                                                    ********

Arias had given her the name of a tiny shop in San Francisco’s China Town, which she had scribbled on a gum wrapper and slipped inside her shoe, an out of the way place that was supposed to appear only to those who’d been referred there by someone who’d actually been inside. Kisten sighed and boarded, along with a slow trickle of other passengers, the San Francisco train that had pulled into the station moments before.

She eased herself into a door seat and stretched her legs out, knee still red and throbbing as a reminder of that morning. She’d been bullshitting around for the last two weeks, torn between going to the shop or waiting everything out and hoping for the best, everything had been fine until today. Kisten sighed again and closed her eyes, thoughts of what she would do when she got to the out of the way shop turning nauseating circles in her head.

It would be a long BART ride.

                                                  *********

The shop looked like it had seen better days. A worn threadbare awning clung valiantly to one bent peg hanging above a thick door completely covered in graffiti. The name of the shop was scrawled in magic marker on bits and pieces of ragged multi-colored paper glued to the shops front outer wall.  From the outside the place was literally just a dingy hole in the wall.

Kisten was going to rip off one of Arias’s arms and bludgeon him with it if he sent her to some sort of Chinese Crack House.

Kisten heaved a sigh and stepped forward, carefully avoiding a pool of dubious liquid, and grasped the old, slightly rusty, door knob tightly before twisting.  She fully expected the door to be locked or at least open with a deafening creak but it swished open almost silently, with barely a whisper of sound. Slowly easing the door open, Kisten winced as the shops door bell tinkled loudly and seemed to echo up and down the empty, save for one other shopkeeper who was setting up bins of vegetables and other wears, street.

Kisten slipped inside the dark shop quietly and the door swung shut just as silently as it opened.

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The Vanishing Shop was a very strange place Kisten decided as the door swung shut behind her. The outside completely hid how huge the place was. Shelves and display cabinets were arranged haphazardly around the dimly lit shop front. The front counter was a glass display case full of strange odds and ends; baubles, beads and bangles. She stepped further into the shop, watchful of the piles of cloth and books stacked around the door.

“Hello? Is any one here?” Her voice echoed around the high ceilinged room and a stack of heavy books thumped to the ground behind her. Kisten stiffened and quickly turned around.

There, standing only inches from her face was a thin blonde girl chewing gum and wearing rather large around ear head phones. The blonde then quickly blew a large bubble and popped it with a snap. Kisten stumbled back with a shriek and the girl stepped nimbly over her fallen form towards a backroom, the doorway of which was covered in gaudy hanging beads, Kisten hadn’t noticed. The girl paused in the door way and tilted her head backwards- Kisten was vaguely amazed she didn’t snap her neck- and gazed listlessly at Kisten.

“You comin’?” And she vanished in a swish of beads and a loud pop of gum.

 “Fuck!” Kisten scrambled to her feet, her knee almost causing her to crash into a glass case. “Just wait a goddamn hot minute!”

The path to the back room was even more cluttered with junk; a long carved stick and large empty jars labeled with different languages. Kisten was amazed at how the blonde weaved her way skillful through the stuff. She knocked into a pile of thick tomes, sending them to the floor in a cloud of dust and dirt, Kisten thought to pick them up and stack them neatly for all of a moment before she simple shrugged and shuffled past them.

The back room and all its secret wonders awaited her. Kisten stepped behind the curtain of colored beads.

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The Vanishing Shop was run by a woman named Tangerine. And as Kisten sat stiff backed at a polished round wooden table watching Tangerine flip through what looked like medical text books, popping her gum loudly, she realized that if the funky shop owner couldn’t help then Kisten had at least spent her last day amused.

“How’re you gonna pay me?” A loud pop of gum.   

“Wait…What? Run that by me again?”

Tangerine turned slightly from the shelf she’d been pawing through and eyed the tense Kisten balefully.

“Your brother owes me too.”

Kisten crossed her arm and learned back in the chair, she wobbled only slightly. “The hell does that have to do with me?!”

Tangerine picked up a long thin metal case, unscrewed the cap and upturned the contents onto her palm. It was a pair of chopsticks. Thin, painted a bright red and covered in neat golden dragon flies, they looked hand crafted and expensive.

“They’re from the shop down the street.” Tangerine clicked the chopsticks together almost mockingly. “And your brother said you’d pay his bill as well as your own.”

“I never agreed to that!” Kisten shot from her seat and slammed closed fists to the table top. Dust drifted in lazy snakes from the ceiling, hissing and twisting in the air while a frightened rat scrambled from behind one glass case to another.

Tangerine clicked her chopsticks again and popped her gum, obviously unperturbed. “Yes, that’s nice and all, but your brother owes me one soul and a sacrificial lamb. You gotta pay that off along with your bill, once I ring it up.”

Kisten open and closed her mouth silently, an enraged shriek building in her lungs, slowly winding itself up her throat to spill from her mouth, a fine china plate painted with a smiley face in a cluttered display case cracked. Tangerine clicked her chopsticks and smiled benignly, all neat white teeth.

“No need to get all worked up about it.” Tangerine waved her hand dismissively, “When we get to that hurdle I’m sure you won’t screw anything up too badly.”

Kisten fell back into her chair, mouth a thin line and eyes hard. Arias had seemed too relieved when she told him what had been happening and got the name of the shop, the sneaky little bastard.

“Now… Dear Arias said something about a chimera trying to steal your body?” Tangerine twirled her chopsticks from hand to hand, like two tiny batons, and Kisten noticed, rather belatedly, they tapered to thin sharp points.

“Yea…” Kisten sighed and rubbed a hand over her face, suddenly tired.

Tangerine hmm’ed and rubbed her chin, chopsticks still twisting a dizzying dance with her other hand, “I know a few things off the top of my head that’ll prolly work ok.”

“Like what?” Kisten tried not to sound hopeful.

“You could prolly just shoot yourself,” she skillfully ignored Kisten squawk of outrage, “and hopefully get the messed up part of your brain your little buddy is hangin’ in.” Tangerine took a moment, rubbed her chin and thought aloud, “But I dun think I could get a gun on such short notice…”

“Excuse me!” Kisten kicked at the table to catch the shop owners’ attention. “A solution that doesn’t involve me shooting myself in the fucking head would be helpful.”

The chopsticks stilled and a frighteningly familiar grin spread across Tangerines face. “I could pull her out using these.” The chopsticks glinted fiercely.

Kisten settled, liking this idea infinitely better than the shoot-self-in-head-and-hope-for-best thing, “That plan sounds cool.”

The chopsticks clicked again. “Alright, you stay here and get settled while I go get every thing.”

Tangerine seemed to vanish into the shadow of a display case and Kisten finally realized how large the back room of the shop actually was. Cages of multicolored birds hung from an impossibly tall ceiling, long shelves of books, boxes of goods and cases full of odds and ends vanished into the endless abyss that made up the back of the Vanishing Shop. Kisten spotted an impossibly long white cat looped comfortably about a shelve, an odd grin twisting it tiny face, suddenly it meowed and the calls of the animals that were silent when Tangerine was moving about the room finally rose to an almost deafening crescendo.

“Tilt your head please.” The animals fell silent and suddenly the backroom was smaller, a simple cozy circular room full of sparkling trinkets. Kisten tilted her head and felt long fingers sweep the hair away from her ear. “This may hurt a bit, I wouldn’t worry though.”

The stabbing pain of the red golden dragonfly painted chopsticks digging into her ear and tugging broke the shocked haze that had settled over Kisten mind. She thrashed and a bone jarring shriek ripped its way from deep in her stomach.

                                             ********

The popping of a cork woke Kisten from her daze. She lay stiff on the dusty floor, knee throbbing, and head split by the headache drumming away behind her eyes. She sat up.

Tangerine stood by the round polished table; the chopsticks in her hands holding what looked like a struggling ball of shiny goop, smiling down at the shocked Kisten she juggled a crystal stopper in her free hand.

 “I’m just gonna take this little ball of joy as the one soul your brother owed,” she carefully placed the struggling soul into a tiny round crystal jar and replaced the cork, “ I’ll send you a time and date for when your other payments are due, so don’t worry about that now.”

Tangerine clicked the chopsticks again.

Kisten gaped, looking from Tangerines hand to the jar sitting cheerfully on the table top, and staggered to her feet; Tangerine leading her from the back room and guiding her around books, shelves and other knickknacks, and over crawling animals towards the shops front door.

                                          ********

The bustling street was lit by bright signs and street lights as Kisten stepped from the twilit shop and into the cool gloom of a busy San Francisco evening. The sharp tug on a lock of her hair snapped Kisten from her slight daze, sending sharp pain crashing around in her skull- knocking over filing cabinets and sending flurries of paper into the air. Kisten turned her head slowly, wobbling only slightly, and glared; the events of this morning and subsequent afternoon finally hitting home.

“Hey,” a shit eating grin spread across Tangerines face. She was leaning languidly in her shops door way, shadows twisting like restless snakes behind her. “I bet you’re glad I didn’t use a fork, huh?” Tangerine then laughed- reminding Kisten of a hyena that needed to be kicked in the face- and turned, vanishing into her shop with a wave.

The door shut silently behind the shop keeper and the sound of a shops bell and Tangerines laughter echoed dully in Kistens’ ringing ears.