Grief is an anchor, I think.
It traps you in one moment, weighing you down interminably.
I think about this constantly. I am thinking of it now, when the phone rings.
Mila Gurevic, it says. The number is a jumble of characters, like always.
I take a breath, slide to answer the call and wait. I don’t want to be the first one to speak. That feels too delusional. Too leading somehow.
“Maya?” I hear her voice say. It sounds faint, like always, muffled as if she was speaking through several layers of fabric.
“Mila?” I reply.
“I have missed you so much,” she says. “Have you found the fingernails?”
In November she said she needed seven hundred fingernails. I got seven hundred fingernails. I don’t want to talk about it.
“Yes,” I say. “I have stored them in the plastic box with the other stuff. How many more things, Mila?”
“This is the last one,” she says. I hear her breath on the receiver. “Then we can be together again.”
“Right,” I say. I try to be noncommittal in case I’m crazy. I feel some level of embarrassment at the idea of being unwell. I shouldn’t, but I do. After I see Mila again, I think I will go to a therapist. That’s the healthy thing to do. Or if it turns out I am actually going insane, then that’s still the plan.
“You’re not going insane, Maya,” she says, as if reading my mind. “This is real. I am real. I miss you.”
Tears well up in my eyes, but I don’t let the emotion travel through my voice. I don’t want to appear weak or stupid.
“I miss you, too,” I manage. “What’s this next thing I need to get?”
“Before I tell you,” she says, “you need to count the fragments you have already gathered. I need to know. I need to know we’re not missing something. Please.”
I recite the list of things. They are sitting in a box under my bed, but I look at them often.
“A child’s tooth,” I say. “Three dog skulls, dirt from a fresh grave, eight embarrassing photographs, a letter returned to sender, sixty-six blood samples, the urine of a broken man, a lost toy, my phone with the contacts deleted, a woman’s eyeball gouged out with my own fingers, four thousand Korean Won – that was an easy one – and a bird’s wing ripped from the bird and seven hundred fingernails.”
“Yes,” she says thoughtfully, “that’s right.”
“Mila,” I ask. “You said last month this will be the hardest one. The eye one was pretty hard. I don’t like hurting people. I’m not even sure you’re real.”
Her voice does the thing where she sounds hurt, and I know it’s all my fault.
“Maya, I’m so sorry. You know I said you don’t have to do this. I know it’s a lot, b–”
“I do have to do this,” I snap, struggling to keep the tears at bay. “Christ, are you fucking for real here? I do have to do it. You died, Mila. I was a mess, a fucking mess. And then you rang me on the phone? In some way you’re alive and the world is a fucking Harry Potter bullshit fantasy or something, and ghosts are real maybe, but there is a way for me to see you again. There is no possible reality in which I don’t do this. Just tell me what to do. Tell me!”
I realize I am yelling as the last word leaves my mouth. Fuck.
“Alright,” she says. “Okay. Listen. This is the hardest one. This one needs blood. Your blood, Maya.”
“How much?”
“A lot.”
“I could die?”
She pauses before continuing.
“You could die,” she says at last. “But you won’t. You have to syphon it out slowly or else you will go into hypovolemic shock. You need exactly 1.2 litres of it. You must arrange the other objects, Maya, and water them with your blood and in this cradle I will grow.”
“But what if I die?” I ask. I am not afraid of dying, but this lends more credence to my insanity theory. I feel like I must continue.
You would, too. You know you would, even if it sounds crazy.
If it’s about love, it doesn’t hurt to think too little. Love is a kind of curated madness, I guess.
“Then,” she says in a sad voice, “we will be reunited in this place. It isn’t so bad.”
She tells me the procedure in exacting detail.
Sprinkle the dirt in a corner store, she insists, beneath the flickering fluorescent lights. Between aisles four and five. Dog skulls in the middle, child’s tooth in the mouth of the alpha. A circle of dirt, a circle of money. Burn the letter, arrange the nails in neat rows of fifty from the center like gross sunbeams, pulverize the bird’s wing with a hammer until there is little left. Drink the urine. Keep the eyeball in your mouth and examine the photographs for a time. Place the blood samples in a pattern between the nails. Take a picture of it all with my phone, then place that in a different dog’s mouth. Play with the toy.
“And water the cradle with my blood?” I ask.
“And water the cradle with your blood,” she agrees. “This part is critical. It has to be done on site.”
I pose a lot of questions.
She answers, then tells me she loves me.
I cry in the silence after the call ends.
I stall for a few days, but I buy the needles and tubes.
After, I gather the tooth, the skulls, the dirt, the photos, the letter, the blood, the urine, the toy, the phone, the eyeball, the foreign money, the wing and the fingernails.
And then I go to find out whether I’ve lost my mind.
Grief is an anchor.
Love sets you free?
I’m ready to find out.
Christopher is a special educator, writer and podcaster living in Melbourne, Australia. He has made several contributions to published roleplaying game books, including Barbarians of Lemuria (second edition). He co-hosts the world-building podcast ‘Mythtakes Happen’. Much of his work is informed by his experiences with mental health issues, especially chronic depression and anxiety. He is fascinated by the idea of fundamentally broken people making powerful, often tragic choices or existing in a world where those choices are taken out of their hands.
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