Anna doused the dolls in lighter fluid and fed them to the flames. They burned quickly, spitting out toxic clouds of smoke as plastic warped and blackened.
Beside her, Mary and Lily shifted and wrinkled their noses, edging upwind. They hunched into their coats, protection against December’s chill. Lily leaned into Mary, her sleek, dark hair a curtain dividing them from Anna. Mary’s crucifix dangled between them and the fire, a talisman against evil. They were close friends, a unit of two, just like Anna and Cora were. But Cora was missing, and now Anna felt like the shortest side of a triangle.
Anna didn’t wear a coat. She let the cold permeate her body and the smoke fill her mouth. She relished her numb fingers and the acrid taste scorching her throat. This was an offering, after all. A sacrifice. And sacrifice is supposed to hurt.
“I’m not sure about this,” Lily said, fiddling with a hole she’d torn in her jeans when she snuck out her bedroom window.
They were all thirteen and halfway through seventh grade, but Lily’s family still monitored her every move. They’d never give her permission to spend the night at Anna’s grime-encrusted house.
“We’re almost done,” Mary said.
They all looked at the final doll. Unlike Mary and Lily’s mass-produced plastic dolls, Anna’s doll was homemade. In better, happier times, Anna’s mom had crafted the doll and her wardrobe of stunning dresses. Anna remembered how Mom’s fingers had danced as the sewing machine hummed, the thump of her foot on the pedal keeping time as she transformed scraps into art. Anna had already consigned the doll’s other clothes and her name to the fire. Now, only the doll remained, the once immaculate lace of her wedding dress smudged gray by the years and Anna’s grasping hands.
There had been no doll dresses, no alterations for clothes that didn’t quite fit, no new curtains or quilts for years. Mom didn’t sew anymore, and she refused to let Anna learn.
“Please, accept this offering,” Anna whispered.
She didn’t bother soaking the doll in lighter fluid. It was fabric wrapped around cotton fluff: easy tinder for burning. The flames flickered in the old trash can, hungrily caressing their final offering with orange and black fingers.
After the dolls were reduced to smoldering lumps of plastic and ash, they starved the fire of air, then drowned the embers with water. They dumped the remnants into a hole they’d dug in the cold ground, smothering the evidence with earth.
It was like burying a body. Anna couldn’t help but wonder if this was what had happened to Cora. Did someone burn her then bury the remains where no one would ever find them?
Mary and Lily looked at Anna, waiting for her to speak, like they were mourners at a funeral, and she was the preacher.
“We’re too old for dolls, anyway,” Anna said, brushing flecks of ash from her long, shining hair.
She turned, and they followed her back into the house. Anna grabbed her bag of supplies as they crept through the kitchen. The cheap plastic strained against the weight of its contents, but held. They tiptoed past Mom’s closed door, though it wouldn’t have mattered if they’d stomped. Every Friday night, her Mom ritualistically fell into a drugged haze while her stepdad staggered from bar to bar, drinking himself to the edge of oblivion.
Anna opened the door to the basement. Lily grabbed her arm, face strained.
“Should we do this?” Lily asked.
Anna paused, staring at the grainy shadows the darkness wove around Lily and Mary. It was hard to make out their individual features. In the night, they could be any two girls.
“What else are we supposed to do?” Anna said. “It’s been three weeks, and no one’s any closer to finding Cora.”
Mary and Lily flinched at the sound of their missing friend’s name. Her name was a whisper from Schrodinger’s ghost: Cora was missing, neither alive nor dead.
But Anna knew this was a lie. They weren’t kids anymore. They’d scrolled through the dark corners of the internet. They’d watched and read and heard story after story about girls who vanished. In real life, girls didn’t step sideways into magical worlds or find loving, perfect families. Girls disappeared, and if they reappeared, it was as silenced corpses, their catalogue of hurts illuminated by the unforgiving lights of the meat-locker morgue and the pathologist’s impersonal touch.
Anna had heard Mom talking to her aunt on the phone just the other day: “Three weeks—Christsakes, the girl’s dead. If she’s lucky. God, I don’t know how her parents can stand it. If anything happened to Anna, I’d just die.”
Anna would never forget the self-righteousness in Mom’s voice, the edge of satisfied judgment, as if she were congratulating herself for having an unmissing daughter. It had made Anna’s cheeks burn with a rage that had smoldered for years, a rage she knew, even then, at this transitional cusp between childhood and adolescence, she’d carry her whole life.
Anna wondered, not for the first time, how long it would take for Mom to notice if she disappeared. If she sent Mary and Lily home right this second, if she left this sagging house with its worn carpet and smoke-soaked wallpaper, how long would it take for Mom to report her missing? Saturday, Sunday? Monday, probably.
“My kookum’s sister disappeared, and they never found her,” Mary said. “Not knowing—it’s a wound that never heals.”
They all nodded, hovering for another moment at the top of the stairs. Then Anna turned and they followed her into the depths of the unfinished basement. The smell of exposed concrete and perpetual damp enveloped them. Anna pulled a fraying string, illuminating the basement in a dull, yellow light.
The basement was mostly her stepdad’s domain. His tools lay abandoned in tangled heaps along the walls. His hunting gear was piled haphazardly next to his gun safe. The detritus of his abandoned projects and hobbies filled most of the room.
In one corner, a thimble gleamed like a lost star, resting on Mom’s sewing machine. Next to it, piles of damp fabric moldered. Judging from the smell permeating the basement, the fabric was ruined. But even though she’d never make these mildewed piles of imagined, future projects into anything useful, Mom couldn’t bring herself to throw them away. Anna understood that. When she’d burned her doll, old and worn as it was, it’d felt like she was burning away a vital part of herself.
“Will she come?” Lily asked.
“If we believe, she’ll come,” Anna replied, voice firm.
Lily and Mary shifted uneasily. Anna knew they didn’t believe, not like she did. Not like Cora had. But Anna’s belief was strong enough to cancel out their doubt. She took out the four candles for the summoning and arranged them on the concrete in a rough square.
“But what if she doesn’t come?” Lily persisted, fingers digging into the hole in her jeans, picking at the skin beneath the ravaged fabric. “We’ve tried spells before—and nothing ever happened.”
Anna didn’t know how to put her conviction into words. It was a humming certainty in her bones. Last night, she’d dreamed about Cora, though she couldn’t remember the details. Cora had felt so close. When she’d awoken, she’d known the Patchwork Girl would come. Even if Lily and Mary didn’t believe, even if the three of them were drifting apart, even if this was the final spell they wove together.
“Before, we were asking for silly things, kid’s stuff,” Anna said. “It was practice, pretend magic. This time, we’re asking for something real.”
Anna began lighting the candles.
“You’re sure your Dad won’t be back for a while?” Mary asked, hands worrying at her crucifix, Christ’s imploring gaze dulled by the yellowed light.
“Stepdad,” Anna reprimanded as she lit the last candle. “He’s never home before three on Saturdays.”
Mary nodded, squeezing her crucifix. Lily pick, pick, picked at the hole in her jeans.
Anna wondered, not for the first time, why her friends’ hands refused to rest and be still. Mom was the same way, hands fluttering, grasping after something to do. Even in drugged sleep, her hands twitched, agitated spiders remembering how they’d once hummed with life, fingers endlessly unspooling needle and thread.
Anna could lie still as the dead for hours, her hands frozen at her sides. More often than not, when her stepdad stumbled into the house, rattling the flimsy drywall, Anna was lying like this, completely still. Sometimes, she’d hear him pause outside her room. She would hold her breath and stare at the not-quite darkness of her eyelids until time lost all meaning, until he stumbled into the master bedroom and the door clapped sullenly shut behind him.
“Anna? Are you okay?” Lily asked.
“Yes,” Anna lied. “Let’s get started.”
They stood behind their candles, each one a direction, an element. Despite Mary and Lily’s doubts, potential crackled around Anna as she stood behind the candle representing the South and Fire. As she gazed into the flame, she felt the laws of the universe waver, ready to bend to her will. The air around her was charged with the heavy watchfulness that proceeded the brilliant defiance of lighting.
Anna glanced at the empty place, representing North and Earth, where Cora should be. She could almost feel Cora’s fingers lacing with her own, Cora’s breath freezing the back of her neck.
“Okay,” she said to the listening universe. “Let’s begin.”
As one, they knelt. And Anna began the story of the Patchwork Girl.
“Every year, girls and women go missing. They disappear, and sometimes no one ever knows what’s become of them.” Anna swallowed against the grief burning her throat and pressed on. “But the Patchwork Girl knows. The Patchwork Girl finds the missing wherever they are: in ditches, in caves, lying naked in fallow fields. She leans close, closer, closest, and their ghosts whisper in her ear. The ghosts tell her who killed them. And once she knows their stories, the Patchwork Girl raises her scissors and…”
Anna blinked rapidly, refusing to let the moisture obscuring her vision leak out.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Mary said, voice punctuating the gathering power, the stillness of the listening air. “Cora is gone, and this…we’re making a game of it, we’re playing pretend…it’s not right.”
Mary’s voice wobbled, then broke. She started sobbing.
“Mary!” Lily cried, abandoning her position and rushing to comfort Mary.
“Wait!” Anna said. “We haven’t finished the summoning yet!”
“She’s dead, Anna!” Lily snapped. “She’s dead, and this is wrong!”
Mary wailed, and Lily crumpled against her, fury spent. Tears stitched tracks of salt down their faces. They clung together, two survivors, wailing with useless, powerless grief.
Despite the interruption, Anna could still feel the energy pulsing beneath the surface of the world. The universe lay open, listening.
“The Patchwork Girl takes her scissors and she presses them against the dead girl’s skin,” Anna continued. “And she snips off a perfect square of skin, so small that no one ever notices—”
Cora’s candle flickered and went out.
“Stop it, Anna,” Lily said.
“—and she takes her needle, threaded with the hair of the dead and dying,” Anna continued, rising to her feet, lifting her arms to embrace the gathered power. “She sews that patch of skin into herself. Because she is The Patchwork Girl, and her skin is a quilt of all those dead and lost girls—”
Lily’s candle flickered and went out.
“SHUT UP!” Lily screamed.
But Anna was screaming too, her voice echoing from the shadowy crevices of the unfinished ceiling.
“—and she is made of all those dead girls, of all their ghosts! She has heard all their stories, and she has woven their unavenged deaths into the fabric of her being!”
The basement light winked out. The chest freezer in the corner ceased humming. Outside, a dog barked, then another. A car honked. Anna could sense that the electricity was out, not just in her house or her neighborhood, but across the whole city. She could feel the stolen power crackling in the air around them, fueling the summoning.
Anna reached into the bag and grabbed Mom’s fabric scissors, the only scissors she could find. They’d been crammed in the back of a junk drawer for years, relics of happier times.
Anna blew out her candle.
The remaining candle illuminated Mary and Lily’s four, terrified eyes. They were pinned so tightly together that they looked like one girl with eight shuddering limbs and two heads.
Anna’s eyes strained against the shadows, desperate to find an answer, a darker shape inside the darkness which would show her the truth, no matter how gutting.
“Anna, please,” Mary whimpered.
Even if Anna wanted to stop, she couldn’t. The words that crawled up her throat were pure will, pure invocation:
“Patchwork Girl. You are every lost girl, every untold story. You know every death intimately, hold each death in your skin. You are made of all those ghosts, from the very first lost and broken girl to the very last in the distant, unknowable future. Let me prove myself to you. Let me make a final offering.”
Anna cut, sloppily, harshly. Her hair fell away in ragged pieces. Cold metal kissed her neck and the tops of her ears as she worked. What did beauty matter when Cora was gone?
As Anna worked, she felt the pulse of electricity, of power, and she knew she’d been right to bring the scissors. The dolls had been a start, but Anna’s hair was a true sacrifice. When everyone saw the uneven remnants of her hair, they would know why Anna had cut it. They wouldn’t be able to lie to themselves, to pretend that the world wasn’t a terrible place filled with thousands of hungry mouths that swallowed girls like Cora whole.
“Patchwork Girl: accept my offering!” Anna commanded. “Tell us what became of our friend, Cora Jackson. If her ghost whispered to you, if you hold a patch of her skin, of her death, then come! Come and tell us the terrible truth! Patchwork Girl, we beseech you and command you: Come!”
The last candle went out. A crack resonated through the room followed by a clang, like something dropping onto the stained concrete floor. All three of them screamed.
Then the lightbulb above them flickered on. The chest freezer hummed to life. Outside, Anna felt the rest of the town flood with electricity once again.
Anna squinted against the restored light, searching for a figure. She saw nothing.
“We’re going,” Lily said. She pulled a shaking Mary to her feet. They looked at Anna like she was broken. Something to be discarded and forgotten. Anna stared back from the other side of a chasm too wide to cross. This was the end of their friendship.
Upstairs, the front door fumbled open. Someone stomped down the hall.
“Anna!” yelled her stepdad. “Are you in the basement?” He charged down the steps, shaking the whole house with his drunken belligerence.
Lily and Mary hid behind Anna, as if she could protect them. Anna held her breath, pulse pounding, clutching a fistful of hair, willing him to turn around, to stumble back up the stairs. Why was he home so early?
“You stupid little bitch, I’ve told you to stay out—” he trailed off when he saw Lily and Mary. “What’re you girls doing here?” He slurred.
As her stepdad lurched closer, Anna felt a veil lift, letting her see through to the heart of things, to what lurked beneath the false skin of the world. She saw her stepdad as he really was. He’d been hurt by the world, felt bitter, cheated out of something he could never articulate. And so he broke whatever he could—even if it was just himself. Anna knew she should be afraid. But the single bulb stripped him of bluster and pretense, illuminating his inner ugliness. Anna looked at him and felt only contempt.
She unclenched her fist, letting those last locks of her hair drift down. She and her stepdad both looked at the pattern her hair made on the gray concrete, like tea leaves embroidering the bottom of a cup. If she stared hard and long enough, Anna knew she’d see her future staring back. She forced herself to look away.
“What the hell’d you do to your hair?” her stepdad muttered. He took another lurching step forward and glanced over Anna’s shoulder to the far side of the basement. Rage flooded his face once again.
“Which one of you broke the lock?” he roared, jabbing an accusing finger behind her.
Anna turned. The padlock which kept the chest freezer closed lay broken into pieces on the concrete.
“That’s what made the sound,” Anna said to herself.
“Did you open it?”
Anna looked back at her stepdad. His hands knotted into fists. His rage filled the basement, crackling with the promise of violence. And yet, Anna was still not afraid.
Creak.
Anna turned. The chest freezer was opening. By itself.
No, not by itself. Something pushed it open from inside. A hand, fingers scrabbling, gripping, shoving the door open with a bang. An arm darted out, its skin—was that skin?— blurred around the edges. It must be the shadows, Anna told herself. But shadows didn’t writhe like living things.
Another arm joined the first. The arms grabbed the sides of the chest freezer and hauled a body upright. A long curtain of tattered hair, hair of every color and texture, flowed over the naked body like a dirty, writhing tapestry. It was a girl? A woman? Both and neither at the same time. It stepped from the chest freezer on legs that twisted, twitched, had too many bones and no bones at all. It crept closer, stuttering like an image in a camera that wouldn’t, couldn’t focus.
Mary and Lily bolted from the basement, one girl with four legs and four lungs, two throats screaming a dirge for the unhallowed dead. Anna and her stepdad stood transfixed, as the Patchwork Girl approached.
The Patchwork Girl was made of the missing. Her writhing hair had been harvested from the heads of the dying. She had no mouth, for she needed none. She was made of ghosts, and ghosts didn’t need tongues or teeth or lips to scream. Whispers rose from her quilted skin, a susurration of voices, snatches of stories, of lives, an intricate patternmaking of death.
Anna felt as much as heard the stories: tasted red clay filling her mouth, watched the sun, the moon, the dingy lights of a cheap motel room, vanish forever. She felt herself bloat beneath the ice of a lonely pond, undiscovered until spring. She was abandoned in a drainage ditch, in a decaying strip mall, in a shallow grave. Gore-smeared hands neatly bundled her into black trash bags and distributed her remains in dumpsters throughout an unsleeping city.
Anna burned from the weight of all those deaths, from the black voids of the Patchwork Girl’s eyes. She was pinned in place like a moth on a collector’s card. She couldn’t breathe until The Patchwork Girl shifted her gaze and pointed at her stepdad.
“He killed me,” said a voice Anna knew better than her own, rising above the cacophony issuing from the Patchwork Girl’s skin.
“It was an accident!” her stepdad stammered. “You—I didn’t mean to hit you so hard. You wouldn’t shut up. You made me hit you!”
“You relished it,” said Cora’s voice.
“I was drunk! I didn’t realize…” Her stepdad trailed off. He turned to run, but his foot slipped on Anna’s discarded hair. He teetered, and before he could drunkenly catch his balance, Anna shoved him. He slammed into the ground, hitting his head on a candle, cracking the cheap wax.
Between one blink and the next, The Patchwork Girl was on him. He flailed but couldn’t shake off the weight of all those deaths sutured into her skin. From the depths of her restless hair, the Patchwork Girl withdrew a pair of small, dainty scissors, the kind used for cutting loose thread.
The scissors opened. For a second, Anna glimpsed a gossamer thread fine as silk twitching above her stepdad’s heart. Then the blades snapped shut. The thread vanished. Her stepdad inhaled sharply. He did not exhale.
The Patchwork Girl stepped away and looked at Anna.
“I’m sorry,” Anna whispered.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Cora’s ghost said. “He watched me for months. Looking for an opening.”
Anna blinked, and the Patchwork Girl stood before her. She was taller than Cora, than Anna, than Anna’s dead stepdad, but no threat radiated from the chorus of ghosts singing in her skin. Just comfort, just solace. Her hand slid into Anna’s, and squeezed, grave-cold skin caressing her fingers.
“I miss you,” Anna said.
“I miss you, too,” Cora’s ghost whispered.
The Patchwork Girl leaned down. The skin where her mouth should be shivered as she kissed Anna’s forehead. Something squirmed into Anna’s skin. A knowing which would grow, as she grew older and able to bear its weight. A gift like a double-edged sword. The consequences of an accepted sacrifice. A lodestone for the unfound dead.
“Goodbye, Anna,” Cora whispered.
The Patchwork Girl juddered and vanished leaving Anna alone in the basement, the corpse of her stepdad at her feet.
Outside, approaching sirens wailed. Upstairs, Lily and Mary sobbed. Mom’s drugged, confused voice joined them. A chorus of the living, of those who would go on, without Cora.
Anna’s pulse throbbed with a terrible knowing as she walked toward the chest freezer. A foot away, she stopped. Cold wafted from the opened door, chilling her newly bare neck. She waited for fear to overwhelm her, but none came. The skin of her forehead pulsed with comforting hurt. There was nothing to fear from the dead. Nothing lying fetal and frozen in the chest freezer could hurt her. Anna stepped closer and looked down.
Freezer burn frosted Cora’s skin. Dried blood stained her stiff hair. Anna looked and looked, her heart beating, pumping warm blood through her veins; her heart breaking apart, breaking open, becoming something new. She looked until the police pulled her away and led her up the stairs. The Anna who emerged from the basement, the Anna who’d gazed upon death, beheld the narrow confines of her world—and found it wanting. She touched her forehead and made an unbreakable promise.
