A boy died choking on his blood last night. No one told Cora this, but she knows because the police are out with flashlights again in the morning.

From her tiny tea shop, she has a front-row view of the scene across the way. 

The student housing building is sectioned off from the rest of the street with a white-tape barricade. At odds with the brown stone façade and gothic spandrels, a police car is parked squarely in front. The university’s bronze crest winks above the heavy wooden door in blue, red, blue, red.

Dawn breaks on cops trading notes, stopping bypassing women who look too long at the barricade as they pass. She watches the men click their beams on and off, on and off, in the women’s eyes.

“Scratch marks on the roof of his mouth,” the uniforms say to each other while Cora stirs cream in their Earl Greys. Her shop is itty bitty; on the other side of the sneezeguard, the men stand shoulder-to-shoulder and chest-to-chest. “She wore rings, maybe, or had long nails.”

Takeaway teas in hand, they manoeuvre outside without checking Cora’s eyes. Most women would see this as a compliment, but Cora thinks sometimes it would be nice to be mistaken for the madling. 

People talk about the madling all the time. Children know of her before they can tie their shoes. 

Best be good or the madling come 

Sit on your chest and dream you done 

Hand in mouth, she’ll take your tongue

Madling is a verb, like killing. Madling is a noun and an insult, like bitch. It’s a chronic mood disorder. It’s a hormonal affliction. It’s a ghost story. 

It’s something we must expect, nowadays. A woman in your life will turn. A domestic partner, a roommate, or a family member will roll over in her sleep and reach her fingers deep in you, digging for red and dreams.

Children are taught the preventative mantra bite (chomp the hand in your mouth—hard as you must), flight (evacuate the room, even if the madling appears stunned; she is likely still predatory), light (when it is safe to do so, turn on the lights and examine your housemates; they may not know what they are, what they’ve become).

Bite, flight, light.

Just as she’s losing interest in the scene, there’s a horrible, horrible noise. Her breath catches in her throat and her grip slips on the lemon she’s grating. She winces, but doesn’t look down from the window.

A keening older man—the father?—stumbles out of the dorms, tripping on his own feet. An officer tries to hoist him up by the elbows, but even then, his legs give way. He wavers, wobbles, and falls to his knees, grief-struck.

A living thrill skitters up her spine. She can’t wait to tell Michael.

“Shit,” Cora mutters, snapping back to her side of the glass. Her wood cutting board, littered with rind, stains red. Acid sears under the loose flap of skin. She sucks the stinging out as she scurries to the back room for a first aid kit.

While she’s bandaging her knuckle, the door chimes to announce a new customer. “Just a minute,” she calls.

“I’m on the clock.” The chief’s voice is rough from a lifetime of barking orders and smoking cheap cigarettes.

Irritation prickles the back of her neck.

“What can I get you, Chief?” she asks, parting the curtains to the back room, self-conscious of her injured hand. Then, a little excited by it. What will the chief think? That she’s been bit? Will he turn his light on her?

“The usual, thanks.”

The usual, as if she doesn’t have dozens of university students in and out every day, as if she’s meant to remember his order (though she does, of course). While she shakes loose leaves into a teabag, she volunteers cautiously, “I heard about the boy.”

The chief grunts. “Hardly a boy. About to graduate. A man.”

Cora, at thirty, still feels like a girl. She can’t imagine being thought of as a woman, alive or dead.

She lingers while entering his total into the machine. She takes special care to flourish when she presses, hoping that he will notice the little bandage around her finger, the fresh blood that’s seeping into the tack. “Been a while.”

“Not long enough,” the chief answers, shaking his head, oblivious to her injury. 

It’s not his first madling case. They’re almost expected in these parts.

The last case was neat and tidy, textbook madling. 

The media was a buffet, and Cora gorged herself. She knew the players by name, could recite the intricate he-said-she-said the courts heard. 

The defense tried to paint her as a victim: a woman (Vicky) incensed by a man (Gregor) behind closed doors. Vicky was driven to a terrible extreme by her health, yes, but who could blame her after suffering death by a thousand cuts? 

The jury looked at the photos. The bedsheet stained, the man’s mouth gaping and empty. Teeth missing, little yellow markers erected where they were found on the carpet. The pale, rubbery mess of his tongue flung at the window, where it left a scarlet stamp on the glass. 

Vicky was sent to rehab (you are not to call it an asylum), as most madlings are.

There are others, too: horror stories so alive in the annals of Cora’s mind that they feel almost like lives she’s lived. 

The lesbian couple who survived to tell the tale. The victim insisted, I won’t press charges, no, while spitting out blood from her wife’s wrist. The madling, with the lights on, cowered, curled into herself, repeating, I didn’t know, I didn’t know, while clutching the rip in her skin. Even after rehab, the couple had to move. Locals eyed them with distrust. What if it’s catching? What if it was not one, but both?

The sister who mauled her cousin at a seaside family reunion. The pictures were all of wicker furniture and bloodstained white linen. The madling sat on trial with vicious, triumphant eyes. When provoked, she said she might not have known what she did, but her victim got what she got for a reason. The defense entered a plea of madling; she was charged with first-degree murder. 

Cora follows even the spin-off crises: the young trans minor denied hormone therapy by her parents, who feared she would become mad post-transition; the man who struck his wife, saying if he didn’t, she would eventually come for him; the feminist scholars and doctors who begged to know why such a catastrophic condition is so under-researched.

She has listened to every podcast. She has read all the news. She skims Reddit before bed. Michael has called her bloodthirsty for it—not affectionately, but as if he is slightly put-off by her, like she is an ingredient he doesn’t like in a stew.

She doesn’t talk about it with him now.

Bite, flight, light.

The chief taps his card to pay, not commenting on her finger.

“Two lumps, is it, Chief?”

“None, if it’s quicker.”

She bristles again. Her blood-soggy bandage flaps around her finger, and the sting returns. Impulsively, she peels it off and drops it in the chief’s tea, then seals the takeaway cup with a lid.

When he leaves, she looks at her finger, the scarlet stain in the creases of her palm, and thinks, What the fuck? 

He’s going to notice. He’ll tell everyone. How horrible for business. How—

“I did something mad today,” Cora confesses to her boyfriend later, savouring the word. Mad, mad, mad. His apartment smells of chicken parmesan. When she chews, each overcooked, rubbery bite takes an aeon to dissolve. 

“Mad, eh?”

She knows already he’s doing that thing he does when he isn’t listening to her. He’s going to repeat words as many times as it takes to reach the end of the story. If she accuses him of not listening, he’ll recall the word he’s just said, flinging it back at her indignantly.

“I scraped my finger on the grater making a loaf.”

“Poor finger,” her boyfriend tuts, sawing into his chicken. “Does this look kind of dry to you?”

“Not really,” she lies. “Then the chief came in.”

Her boyfriend takes a hesitant bite, looking pensive and then a little depressed as he chews.

“I think he’s been doing this job too long.”

“Hm,” he murmurs in answer, either about the chief or the chicken.

“I mean it, Michael,” she puts down her cutlery loudly to demonstrate her seriousness. “This finger—look—” 

Michael, despite considering himself generally aware of her fingers, looks.

“I might’ve been bit.” She waves her scraped index, indicating her bandaid. 

“Bite, flight, light,” Michael agrees obediently.

“And he didn’t even check!”

Michael starts sawing off another hunk of chicken.

Cora huffs across the table, annoyed at his inattention. After a few moments of tense silence, she says, “It just feels sloppy.”

Her boyfriend swallows loudly. “I mean, Cora, what? Do you want me to shine a light in your eyes and report you?”

“Of course not,” she stutters. “I just want him to take this seriously.”

If she believed, even a little, that the madling might be her, she wouldn’t want to be seen at all.

“Well, then, don’t mind his business. Everyone knows checking your eyes would be a waste of time, babe. You’re sweet as pie.” Michael lays down his cutlery too. “The chicken really is terrible, isn’t it?”

🩸

That night, Cora dreams of the chief’s tea. She is swimming in it, a small speck of woman in a deep grey sea. The blood from her bandage ebbs into the pale brew, moving in lovely, languid curlicues towards the bottom. She smells lemon and honey.

🩸

Autumn stings the morning air, and everyone is out in gloves the next day. Yesterday’s excitement has subsided; the mood on campus is now full of dread. Uniformed officers usher students speculating at the barricade along.

Cora only has one customer: a honey-blonde woman, maybe in her late-forties, surveying her pastry shelf. Her roots are coming in chestnut with delicate silver filigree. When Cora meets the woman’s eyes, she finds the colour pleasantly startling—a light, warm brown, as if her pupils are trapped in sunlit amber. “It smells nice in here.”

“Baked fresh,” Cora explains, accepting the compliment with a smile as she sets down a plate of scones.

“You must start early.” The woman smiles back.

“Mhm,” Cora answers noncommittally, uninterested in this conversation. It’s so boring to her—so rote—she wants to crawl out of her skin.

“You must have seen it, then.”

She startles then, following the woman’s eyes to the university. It would be delicious, just once, to see the red before it dries. And certainly a better story. 

For the briefest second, she considers lying. But she admits, “No, I didn’t. Just the morning after.” So mundane. Trying to keep them both interested, she adds, “Always such a hullabaloo, that kind of thing. The police everywhere, and the lights.” Then she remembers excitedly, “and the father! He was…” she places a hand over her heart to convey sorrow, “absolutely ruined.”

While she speaks, the woman’s face remains placid. After a pause, she says, “He was my son.”

Cora freezes. The plastic lids she was stacking sway. Cold shame floods her body. “I’m so sorry,” she manages, the words strangled with self-disgust.

“It’s fine,” the woman answers, though surely it isn’t. She still wears her calm mask, the lines on her face unaffected, even the thin smile on her lips unmoved.

“I’m—” Cora doesn’t even know what’s going to come out. The silence feels charged around her, like it’s walking up and down her arms. “—so sorry,” she ends predictably, again.

The woman’s voice turns hard, “Don’t be.” Her gaze drifts from Cora’s face to the rows of fresh pastry behind the glass. “He grew up rotten. We should have known…whipping girls’ legs with branches when he was only this tall.” Her hand gestures at hip height, then falls heavily back to her side, as if exhausted by this quick motion. “I did my best.” A tear rips down her cheek, spatters on Cora’s tiles. “But there was always something. Another girl.”

Cora opens her mouth. Closes it again. Revulsion gathers in her joints. She doesn’t know for whom. She hates this woman for luring her into this trapped conversation. She hates the monster son. She hates, scathingly and all at once, all sons. What does she owe the mother who failed him?

“You don’t need to say anything nice. I’ve heard enough ‘boys will be boys’ for this lifetime.” The woman laughs bitterly. Unfocused, she stares past Cora’s shoulder. “I think we all choose what we become in the end.”

Acid builds in Cora’s throat.

The woman’s honey eyes snap back into focus, and she smiles again. “Could I get a chai?”

🩸

Her conversation with the dead boy’s mother leaves a foul taste in her mouth. Prickly. Metallic. 

For a moment, she dares wish the police out the window the worst. May whoever did this run free, turning her long nails on other wretched men. The sour idea tastes sweet to her. Imagine, she thinks, tickled with her unexpectedness, siding with the night’s bloody claws.

She’s so enamoured of this that she doesn’t think much when the sheriff comes in. A split-second later, she remembers the bandaid. Her stomach plummets.

“Afternoon,” the chief says. She detects caution in his voice.

“Afternoon,” she coughs back. She has lost all concept of how to behave normally.

“Toilet?”

Cora nods in the direction of the shop’s single-stall washroom. Her body is slow, but her mind is fast. It races with excuses, scrambling to explain yesterday’s incident. Chief, I can’t believe that happened. I didn’t notice at all. It must have been there when I poured the water in?

The chief reemerges, patting his hands dry on his slacks. She braces herself for a comment, but nothing comes. He stares at a sorry pair of pear danishes left in her case.

Eventually, Cora asks, strangled, “Any news out there, Chief?”

He lifts his pale blue eyes to hers, and she detects sharpness in his stare. “Yes,” he answers. One corner of his mouth twitches. “We found something the old-fashioned way.”

For a brief moment, she is too intrigued to be ashamed of yesterday’s behaviour. “Really?” 

Now, both corners of his mouth turn upward, “DNA.”

The chief leaves without buying a thing.

🩸

Michael is out with his friends tonight, so Cora goes to her own place after work. She doesn’t mind. The day is sitting wrong with her.

A quick dinner of instant noodles, a quick cup of chamomile, and she’s done for. She crawls into bed—early as always, so she isn’t stumbling half-asleep to the shop—and waits for sleep. The days are long. She’s usually quick to dream. Tonight, though, a vicious undercurrent roils beneath the surface of her thoughts. It slivers soft ideas with a blade-like fin. She’s thinking about the boy. If the world without him is better than the world with him. A nasty thought, blood in the water, bandaid in tea.

She sleeps finally, restlessly.

The sound of breakage wakes her. 

Bone, she thinks as her eyes start open.

No, the window’s plastic latch lies on the floor. She’s already upright in bed, clenching her sheets, when she sees it. 

A crooked figure crouches on the narrow perch of her sill. Silhouetted by the streetlamps and the night beyond, the person—no, the thing—is made up entirely of angles. Sharp elbows, poking sideways. Knees bent at such acute angles they frame the space between them, through which Cora can see her street.

All Cora can think is: But I’m on the second floor.

The dark shape pulls the window outward. It flings the pane aside as if it is nothing. Then the only thing between her and it is the screen she relies on to catch bugs in summertime. 

The thing’s heels kick effortlessly through the mesh.

Cora sees a flash. Eyeshine. 

Bite, flight, light.

She can’t move. She’s heard these words her entire life, but they were abstract. The older Cora got, the more unlikely it seemed she would ever need that knowledge.

When the thing—no, the madling—moves, her joints click. Her movements are so quick that, when Cora blinks, she feels as if she’s opened her eyes on a new scene: the madling at her window; the madling with her feet hanging through the frame; the madling with dislocated shoulders shuddering in; the madling on her bed. 

The madling crawling closer.

“Come on,” the madling says, her hands on either side of Cora’s hips, her knees pinching Cora’s knees. She’s so close that, even in the midnight light, Cora can make out silver streaks in her hair, a smattering of freckles down her loose, v-necked pyjamas. 

“Get away from me,” Cora pleads thinly, leaning back as far as she can into the wall behind her. What can she defend herself with? Can she make it to the light switch?

The madling sinks back onto her heels, sitting straight. Her head clicks left and right like a curious bird’s. Her glassy eyes blink at Cora. “I’m not here to hurt you.” The words are tickled with laughter. When she was in her shop earlier, the boy’s mother appeared composed and elegant. By moonlight, she’s sporadic, uneven.

The madling is in her room. The madling spilled her son’s blood last night. The madling might not know what she is. 

Cora needs this not to be real. “I’m dreaming,” she tells herself.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” the madling dismisses her. Her laugh is grotesque. It echoes round and round, vultures crying over carrion. “Other than ‘boys will be boys.’” Her hot breath floats towards Cora’s nostrils; it smells like woodland decay. “I’m here because you want to watch.”

“I—” her brain leaps to kink. Cora has never been kinky because none of her boyfriends have ever been kinky. Cora has had missionary-style sex as long as she can remember, rare exceptions, never thirds, never watching.

“I know you do,” the madling coos, rocking a little in her seat. The movement shifts Cora’s blankets, tugging down her fragile defenses. “The moment we met. You were so…” She looks for the word, snapping her fingers a few inches from Cora’s cheek as she thinks. “Hungry!” she settles gleefully. “So bored you were starving.”

A chill sweeps over Cora’s shoulders.

“You want to be close to it,” the madling continues, looking contented now, gaining sureness in herself. “Close to something awful. And red.”

“I…” Cora is slow on the draw. She knows she needs to say something. Like, you’re wrong. That’s rancid. I don’t want a drop of it. But it’s true, too. The bloodthirstiness she’s kept from Michael. Parched herself for him.

“Come, come!” Sensing Cora’s soft resolve, the madling bounces off the bed, gestures at Cora to follow as she does. She moves quickly, but her movements are jagged, like a marionette on twisted strings. “No need!” she chirps when Cora steps towards the closet.

“But I’m—” Cora indicates her pyjamas: an oversized tee shirt with a grocer’s logo across the middle and rose-coloured fleece shorts.

“Come, come!” The madling wants to move quickly. To hasten herself down Cora’s stairs, she moves on all fours, leading with her hands. She doesn’t stand at the bottom. She bounces around on the pads of her feet and the very tips of her fingers, watching Cora’s slower descent.

“What are you showing me?” Cora asks, shutting her door behind them as they step into the street.

“You know,” the madling says.

Cora doesn’t and she does.

Cora walks with caution while the madling moves with none. Somehow, even though she’s more careful, her footsteps are much louder. The madling’s uneven, four-legged gait is almost soundless but for the clicking of her bones.

The cold, cobbled roads numb Cora’s feet. She covers her chest with her goosebumped arms. She should be asking more questions—no, better questions; the ones she’s asked are wrong—but it’s too late. 

The stars look down at her, and she glances up at them. They can see a little part of her is thrilled.

They move through sidestreets Cora doesn’t recognize. Every so often, they stop—either to allow Cora to catch up, or so the madling can turn her nose up and sniff loudly and deeply. The madling leads her into a narrow part of town, where all the rowhomes are a little crooked, flecked and chipped and wrapped in dirt.

The madling heaves a great, satisfied sigh. “Here.” Her fingers reach above her head, and she pulls herself up to a window ledge. Her bare feet require almost no space at all to find purchase. She hangs by her creaking, bent toes. Her heels are black. “I’ll let you in,” she says, then effortlessly rips the rotting shutters off the window.

When the madling disappears, Cora waits on the doorstep.

She shouldn’t. She should run.

But she doesn’t. If she were going to, she would have by now. 

A moment later, the door unlatches, and the madling beckons from the dark interior. 

As quietly as she can manage, she asks, “Who lives here?”

The madling doesn’t answer. Instead, she sways on the balls of her feet and her fingertips, rump rocking this way and that. “Come, come,” she says, as she has a dozen times already. 

Cora follows her from the shadowed foyer into a sitting room, stubbing her toe as she goes. The carpet is soft underfoot. As her eyes adjust to the dark, she glimpses her reflection in the powered-down television’s screen: a pale ghost of a thing, wearing her silly pyjamas, uninvited in a stranger’s home. She pauses to smile wide at herself. Her mouth reflects back, a slice of darkness on her white face.

A gentle snore pulls her attention to the moment. To the where and why and danger of it all. 

It’s the chief, asleep on the couch. He’s out of uniform, wearing a bathrobe that hangs slightly open over boxer shorts and a tee shirt. His socks are patterned with tiny zigzags. His snoring is endearingly boylike.

If she wanted to, now would be the time to turn on the light.

She didn’t know—but she didn’t not know. 

Now is the time to break the trance. 

But she doesn’t even try. If I try to stop it, she’ll hurt me too. Somehow, she knows she’s lying to herself.

Cora stands a few feet back and watches the madling curl her spine over the sleeping chief. 

“Closer,” the madling suggests, and Cora takes one nervous step nearer. 

There is a line. She knows there is. Between listening to her podcasts and chasing ambulances in her mind. And this. Whatever this is. Whatever comes next. Still, she does nothing.

Another sequence of fast frames, changing with each blink: the madling swinging one leg over the chief’s middle; the madling using a thumb to pry his eyelid up, testing his sleeping; the chief, starting awake, just as the madling’s hand plunges down his throat.

Cora doesn’t realise she’s screaming until the madling looks her way, pressing a finger to her lips, “Shhh.” The chief’s tongue is pinned in her palm. From Cora’s vantage, it looks like a grey stone. Blood runs down the inside of the madling’s wrist. In the dark, it’s black as tar.

It shouldn’t be so easy to go quiet.

The chief squirms under the madling’s weight, but he’s making wet noises, sputtering black bubbles over his chin. His hands flap at the madling’s body, striking at her wrists where she holds his shoulders down. She’s stronger, and the gurgling sound worsens.

When his body finally stops fighting, the madling hops off, spry as anything. The mania seems to have lifted from her. Her joints no longer bend at awkward angles. She walks on two legs. Instead of heading straight to the door, she meanders through the sitting room, taking in the photographs on his mantle, the magazines on his coffee table. When she’s surveyed her fill, she jumps backwards onto the couch, landing on the chief’s body with such force Cora hears one of his ribs cracking. “What did you think?” 

Cora doesn’t trust herself to answer. A part of her thinks she is going to open her mouth and puke on the chief’s body. Another part thinks she should appease the madling. “I don’t…know,” she says finally.

“Well,” the madling shrugs, leaning forward in her seat to grab the television guide on the coffee table, “think about it.”

Their eyes lock in the dark. The madling’s flash with nightshine.

All the madling says is, “Guess I’d better skip town.”

🩸

Cora walks home alone. She leaves the chief’s house and marvels at the world outside it. She can hear every hissing heating pipe, every lie whispered between bedfellows, every scratch of a mouse’s paw on pavement. She can see the flaming edge of every star overhead, every crater in the moon. 

At home, she washes her feet in scalding water. The drain swallows grit, gravel, and a cigarette butt. She notes a constellation of blood speckling her shorts. When she lays down, replaying the night behind her eyes, she thumbs the stain softly.

She dreams in full colour of cutting the chief’s tongue apart. Up close, she can take in every lovely detail: the pebbled tastebuds, the greyish middle, the soft fat and tough edges. She cuts it so thin each sliver curls like a ribbon. Then she puts it on a halved croissant and grates parmesan overtop. 

🩸

When her alarm rings, she feels as if she hasn’t slept at all, and her stomach is growling. How can she have an appetite after last night? Making herself late for work, she sears six pieces of bacon in a pan, humming as she goes.

While she eats over the pan, she scrolls through the news on her phone. While there’s nothing about the chief, a local headline names a person of interest: Janine Strickland. She doesn’t bother opening the article to see the madling’s photo. This is the kind of story Cora has always hungered for—dark twists and murky motives, impossible dynamics and unreliable narration. Today, it feels flat, lifeless. Nothing in a paper could ever make her feel alive again, not after last night.

They are clearing away the caution tape outside the university. The flashlights will be retired until the next madling case. Cora realises she’s humming Yankee Doodle.

When she’s at Michael’s that night, she raises the subject just to taste it.

“I hear the chief didn’t show up today.”

She did not hear that. She knew that, though it was never said. Her secret melts on her tongue like chocolate.

Michael keeps flicking through TV channels, not turning to face her, though he nods to show he’s heard.

Has she really let Michael get away with this for so long? Absorbing her like rubber takes shock, sending nothing in return?

She snatches the remote out of his hands, punches her thumbs into the buttons until the TV mutes. “Did you see they think the mother did it?”

She knows the mother did it. Now, she understands why the madling moved as she did; Cora wants to bounce in her seat too, vibrating with knowledge.

Resigned, Michael shifts on the couch to look at Cora. He answers without enthusiasm, “Yeah. Sad. The paper’s saying he was a top student. Good grades. Sports scholarship.”

Her mood flattens instantaneously. 

“I heard he was abusive.” 

“Who said that?” Michael’s eyes flicker longingly to the remote. 

She can’t tell him.

“Well, there’s nothing in the paper about that,” Michael says. “Probably someone just looking to get another ‘Me Too’ story off an innocent man.”

Cora flinches, pulling her legs from their position over his lap into herself. She hands him the remote wordlessly. 

In his bed, she listens to his gentle breathing. She feels the blankets shift against her skin with his every inhale, exhale. Hyperaware.

She clambers on top of him, her knees on either side of his hips. She trickles her fingers down his warm, parted lips. 

“Hey, Michael.”