Once upon a time, there were twin sisters named Syndi and Abby Synger, each of them more terrifyingly beautiful than the other. Nary a boy (or even a man) could look upon either of them without losing his calm as his mind wandered into fantasy and desperation.

One day, the Synger sisters went to a fortune teller at a fair. They didn’t think much of it, really only went on a lark, but the fortune-teller told them “I see your path and it is a rocky one. Your beauty is an enemy to your love, for any man who falls in love with your beauty will suffer a terrible fate if you let him.”

At first, they merely thought the prophecy curious. Syndi mused “I thought fortune tellers were supposed to tell you what you want to hear?”

“She was probably just jealous,” Abby concluded. “Wanted to take us down a peg or two—well, we’ll show her!”

They weren’t—or didn’t think themselves—the type who would change their lives based on a prophecy. But it wasn’t just a prophecy they witnessed.

First it was Aaron Knoll.Syndi was out on an island in the bay, sunning, and he swam to her, but lost his breath and drowned when no one was looking.

“How do we know it was me he was swimming for?” she asked her sister, but Abby only looked at her until she realized of course he was.

Then it was Abby’s turn. Matt Golding stood outside her window in the rain, serenading her, and caught his death of cold. He had pneumonia, but still she visited him.

“Why did you do that?” asked Abby.

He could barely speak, let alone sing, but he managed to get out “You… are… so… beautiful… to me!” He died in agony three days later.

“That’s crazy!” Syndi insisted. “People don’t die of pneumonia—not anymore!”

“They’re not supposed to drown in the Bay, either,” countered Abby. “I’m telling you, this is the Curse!”

“The Curse?”

“Fine, then. The Prophecy. Whatever.”

“Well, we can’t just let that horrible old woman win!”

“You want to keep on killing guys who like you?”

But it wasn’t just liking them, and they both knew it. Syndi had been encouraging Aaron. Before she swam out to that rock herself, she sent him a come-hither glance that made him swoon, made him seek out his swim trunks. (Her glances weren’t quite powerful enough yet he’d follow her in his clothes.) It wasn’t enough that he loved her beauty, his love had to be requited. She loved that he loved her for it.

And Abby. She had truly loved Matt’s singing. She thought he was a wonderful person and she’d used her beauty to seduce his love.

“Never again,” Abby vowed. The red hair that was their pride and joy, she felled, sending it all down the drain to clog and salting the earth that grew it by continually bleaching it to hell. She wore make-up to hide her adorable freckles—not enough to stay pastily out of the sun. She covered herself in tattoos with rings through her nose, in her lip, in her cheek, not because she liked them, thought because she thought they looked good, but because she didn’t.

When she did take lovers, she did it through sheer force of will, overpowering them with her offputting frankness until they buckled under her sex. And the moment they sighed for her, the moment they said “It’s not the tattoos I love, it’s you,” it was over. They couldn’t come back.

But Syndi. She went the other way. “I’m not going to change who I am just because of some stupid witch,” she insisted when she saw what her sister was putting herself through. So she kept her beauty.

“You’re crazy,” Abby insisted. “You’re going to kill everyone. I swear to God, Syndi, every single guy you ever meet!”

But she didn’t. Not every one. They would fall in love with her, of course, just by looking—who wouldn’t? She was used to that. But she would never spare a second glance.

Once, she almost married a blind man. “You’re wasted on him,” her boss said to her after a meeting. “He could never really appreciate you.”

Which was why she let herself love him. Until one morning she was straddling him and he commented on the smoothness of her skin, on her scent and taste, on the sound of her voice.

That doesn’t count as beauty, does it?

Later that day, he was hit by a bus in the street and died instantly.

“You’re crazy,” Abby told her again after the funeral. “There’s no way you can live without love. It’s not physically possible!”

This angry challenge from her self-righteous sister was all Syndi really needed. She would not change who she was, she would only change what she wanted.

“You’re a cold-hearted bitch, you know that?” said man after shallow, ignorant man the last time she turned him down (and sometimes not even the last). Couldn’t they see, she had the warmest heart that ever beat. She expressed her love by sacrificing it to keep these men alive.

Every now and then, though, she found she couldn’t help herself. She’d notice something, or a girl-friend would whisper to her in confidence, and she would unleash. “You’ve been a bad boy,” she would whisper in the night, and he would die within twenty-four hours.

It gave her a reputation.

But that still didn’t stop suitors from lining up.

The old woman bent over her cauldron, the gnarled knobs on her hands dropping flecks of spice into the brew. The eye of newt, the ear of mole, all of the essentials were in it already. The recipe was well under way.

Outside, in the field beyond the heath, the earth stirred, the dirt cracked and when the dust had settled, there stood a menacing figure, thin and creaking and still wrapped in its shroud, the only wall between it and the elements. Not even flesh encased it; what lurked under the shroud was not bone-white but bone itself, divorced from even sinew, and yet it moved, crept skulking towards the small house on the moor.

The old woman poured herself some potion. It had been bad the last few days, but the warmth of it soothed her soul as much as its other properties worked on her body. With a sure, steady foot, she navigated the tightness of her hovel away from the fireplace at last and towards her bedroom when all at once her good ear pricked up at the sound of creaking at the door.

Was it her imagination? she found herself wondering. Or was the hour upon her at last?

Her suspicions were confirmed not by the fact of the knock on her door, but by its quality. She had no knocker on the eave, but here she could tell there could be no soft tissue muffling the rattle of bone on wood.

Choice was not a question in this venture. She changed course and set down her goblet on the organ on the way. Arriving at the foyer, she turned the handle and met the sight that awaited her.

“Well?” the old woman asked the skeleton, “are you going to stand out there in the rain, or would you like to come inside?”

Despite the nature of their depiction in art, there were no smaller bones in the face on the skull that could draw together or drift apart to create expression. The white shadow of a face gave no expression. Yet there was something unmistakable in its posture as it drew itself back in bemusement before graciously bowing its head.

“I know you can’t catch cold anymore,” the old woman remarked, “but I still have flesh and it’s not getting any less weak in this weather. Now get in here.” She made a path for the skeleton to pass her.

And pass her the skeleton did.

With stilted, creaking movements, the human remains approached and pulled up a chair and the old woman circled around the other side of her hoarded detritus, collecting the still-standing goblet on the way.

The skeleton reared itself up slightly before dropping back down—whether this was the affectation of a sigh by one who had no lungs or an attempt to pop an ill-used spine was beyond the crone’s ken. “I’d offer you a cup,” she assured the visitor, “but I doubt it would do you any good.”

One bony hand came up in a gesture of grateful refusal, but then paused and went back to the throat, as if suddenly remembering the unmistakable lack of vocal cords.

“Oh dear,” said the old woman, whereupon she put down her cup and made a series of hand-gestures, to which she received a response in the same medium.

“Do you remember how to talk like this?” her gestures said.

“Oh, yes!” was the reply. “Isn’t it lucky we learned this in our youth.”

“Yes, very lucky,” said the old woman aloud. Soon, she had setled down and picked up two long, sharp needles attached to a piece of children’s clothing. “Speaking of which, how are mother and father?”

The Skeleton nodded its skull and slowed, trying to decide how to phrase the response: “They have needed some time to adjust to one another after being apart so long, but they have found their way again at last.”

“Oh! Of course!” said the old woman in revelation. “What must have happened between mother and her first husband? And then father showing up to find her with a man who’d died before they ever met!”

“They are all fine now,” the skeleton assured her. “They have decided on an arrangement that is nothing short of modern, all marital bonds having dissolved at the point of death.”

“Oh, good!” the old woman exclaimed. “One oughtn’t fear a scandal in the AfterLife, it is what I have always heard said. Would not you agree?”

The skeleton nodded most emphatically, but then the nodding slowed as it drifted off into contemplation of its own loneliness.

The old woman soon realized what she’d stepped in and went back to her knitting, allowing the silence to seep into the space between them. Comfortably.

And soon the skeleton pushed back the hood of her shroud and nestled into the frame of the chair, leaning her head back into the soft shadow of the hearth and thinking how happy she was to be home for the holidays.

“Well, I don’t feel cold,” said Saskia to Sylvie. Though it wasn’t clear how. She was dressed in tight, thin T-shirt, not even wearing a bra, and here her girlfriend was, wearing three sweaters.

“It’s like five degrees in here!” Sylvie insisted. (Celcius, that is.)

“It’s like twelve degrees,” Saskia assured her.

“That’s still too cold!”

“Well, I’m not cold, I don’t know what to tell you!”

Sylvie kept thinking there must be something wrong with the heating, but they’d had it checked by three people and nobody found anything wrong with it. “I just don’t understand how it can be so cold.”

“I’ll keep you warm,” Saskia offered early on, inviting Sylvie in for a snuggle.

“No!” Sylvie soon realized. “I get even colder touching you, I mean not that I don’t want to, but you’re not exactly a space heater.”

One of their friends had joked that it might be worth investing in a boyfriend, if only for the specific purpose of keeping them both warm. He hadn’t stayed a friend of theirs for long.

This was why Saskia had gotten in the habit of taking a very hot shower just before crawling into bed with Sylvie. It was too hot—it was uncomfortably hot, to the point that it made her pale skin unnaturally red, but with the lights off, that didn’t make much difference, really.

“That’s better,” Sylvie would apologize once Saskia curled up against her, nice and warm. “I don’t mean to be such a bitch about this. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“It’s okay,” Saskia lied. “Whatever I can do that will make you more comfortable.”

They had been living together since they both graduated high school. They went to the KUL together and while they had each had their separate adventures there, they had emerged stronger than ever. Or so they thought. Now Sylvie was working as a speech therapist and Saskia was still studying for her doctorate in Physics and something seemed different. Off.

Sylvie sneezed. “I really should go to the doctor,” she said. “I really can’t go into work like this, what will people think?”

“Well, I do have to go into work,” said Saskia. “I promise I’ll be home for dinner.” But as she kissed her girlfriedn on the forehead, she couldn’t help but notice Sylvie flinch. It gave her pause. They had a moment, during which Sylvie looked embarrassed at what she’d involuntarily done, snorted and reached for the tissues, while Saskia did her best not to look too accusing or confrontational.

At work, Saskia was distracted, which wasn’t like her. She wasn’t used to being this person. If she was preoccupied, it was usually something external or specific to the environment that bothered her. She didn’t carry her emotional baggage along.

“You comign along to that frietkot?” asked one of her colleagues.

“Which one?”

She described it.

“I don’t know if I’ve been to that one,” Saskia said.

Going to a new frietkot on her lunchbreak wasn’t supposed to be the highlight of her day, let alone a big deal, and yet as she set out with four or five other physici to go there, she found herself reeling with the sense of anticipation. It was a feeling she hadn’t gotten since… well, her first day of university, she thought. Maybe even high school.

“It’s the cute one,” Marjolein whispered at her with a grin when they got in and it didn’t take Saskia long to realize what that was about, as her eyes found the very good-looking Moroccan young man behind the counter. It’s so rare, she mused, to find service people smiling like that. Especially immigrants. Especially the young and good-looking.

But why bring it up to her, the lesbian with a girlfriend?

Then he turned and his eyes found her and

something happened.

Something that… Had she ever?… If so, it was…

Suddenly, the young man looked familiar. He took her order and was polite enough, yet something lingered in his gaze. It shoudl have made her bristle, made her quip. Instead, it made her blush and smile.

“Wow,” said Marjolein at their table. “Even Saskia agrees!”

It was the only thing that could have possibly kept her mind off of Sylvie, but it was no more conducive to work. She wasn’t sure exactly why, or how she was going to justify it to herself, what good it would do or even what she was going to do when she got there, but she resolved to return to the frietkot in question after leaving work early.

When she got there, it was the middle of the afternoon and the place was deserted.

The young man was there and when she walked in, he looked at her. And she looked back.

A polite young service worker would have asked “Can I help you, ma’am?” or even “Did you forget something?” in Dutch only very slightly accented with Arabic, but there was none of that. Then again, a polite customer would tell him how he could help.

Did she even know?

“Do I know you?” she finally asked him.

The first thing he did was draw himself up, lift his chin a bit. But then his whole face changed—not his features, nothing quite that bizarre, but his expression was…

“Wait… I do know you.”

Suddenly, Saskia was transported back to a night several years ago—how many years?—back in high school. She was fifteen years old and out with friends and three of them were together—no, that wasn’t right, not till afterwards…

Two of her friends were being assaulted. And she had arrived with… with a boy she’d just met.

Some part of her had tried so hard to forget.

“So you do remember,” said the man, who couldn’t have been that young; not if he was the same man.

He got out from behind the counter and Saskia backed towards the door instinctively—except which instinct was she following?

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, as though it should have been obvious. “Don’t you remember that night?”

He had saved her. Her and her friends. She didn’t know from what, wouldn’t say. Nor how.

“There were three of us,” she said. “Liesbeth and Cathérine—“

“That’s not the night I mean.”

She looked at him. She wanted to be confused. She should have been, and she wished that she was.

That was when he called her by a name she hadn’t heard in centuries.

“No,” she said. “Stop.” She needed time, and answers. Which did she need more? “Who are you?”

“You know who I am.” But she didn’t want to. He moved even closer to her—

“Stop,” she said. “You say I know who you are, but do you even know who I am?”

“Of course,” he said, and she could see the breath steaming out of his mouth as he spoke.

“I don’t know who you think I am—“

He spoke that name again, a most familiar name—

“I don’t know who that is!” she insisted. “But whoever it is, I’m not her anymore.”

Now it was his turn to be confused, and he didn’t want to be.

“Goodbye,” she said, reaching for the door without realizing she’d just called him by a name she shouldn’t know.

Once she was outside, she realized the temperature was at least ten degrees higher.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Sylvie said when Saskia got back to her. “He said I have a cold, but my temperature’s fine and I felt fine while I was there.”

“We’ll figure it out,” said Saskia Van Sneeuwegem, knowing exactly what it was that was wrong.

“Maybe it’s this place,” said Sylvie. “Maybe I’m allergic to this house or something. Maybe we should just move.”

“Maybe,” Saskia lied.