Cursed objects have always kinda been my family’s thing.

Of course, they weren’t in a museum until it was my turn to be in charge of them. My mothers insisted on keeping them in the family’s heavily warded basement storage room, just as the previous generations had for centuries. I, on the other hand, have always been something of an entrepreneurial spirit, and especially after seeing how popular cursed objects and similar things have become, I didn’t see any reason not to put them on display. Hell, my family has looked after these sorts of things for as long as our recorded history goes back. Why not make money about it?

You may be wondering why I’m choosing to post here now. Apparently, a smallish first-floor venue in the middle of a bustling big city doesn’t, in and of itself, draw much attention. My girlfriend and co-owner Emelie insists that if I want to make this work, I need to get some people interested, people who actually care about that sort of thing. And she insists you are these people.

So, hello. My name is Alexis, Alex for short, and I’m here to tell you about the Hall of the Cursed. Em says the best way to go about this is to walk you through a day in my life, so I’ll tell you a little bit about our hallowed Hall, and I’ll tell you about the new “attraction” I picked up this morning. I tell you what, no matter how many times you go through things like this, it never stops being terrifying.

Upon entering the museum, you will undoubtedly notice a set of rules. After all, as you all probably know by now, anyone working with the occult keeps a list of no-nos to survive, especially if they’re involving random civilians who aren’t experienced in this sort of thing. Following these rules is paramount to having a happy and healthy visitation, and you will not be permitted until you sign a little, harmless contract stating that you will follow these rules, and that if not, we at the museum are not responsible for any physical, emotional, or otherwise harm that may befall you. The rules are as follows, for your convenience, as I am working on my customer service (Em says I’m abysmal):

1) DO NOT touch ANY object in the museum without explicit permission from the museum staff or an official sign, which will ALWAYS contain at least ONE capital letter and which will ALWAYS be properly spelled.

2) You MUST kiss the dog on the nose upon entering the museum.

3) Follow ALL rules posted around the museum, PROVIDED they contain at least ONE capital letter AND are properly spelled.

4) Wash your hands before leaving the washroom for at least thirty seconds.

5) Visit the Nokia cellphone room AT YOUR OWN RISK. The museum WILL NOT be held responsible for any chance deaths.

6) You MUST be kind to the crow. You MAY offer him snacks if you like.

7) The janitor is nonverbal and unresponsive. Do not speak to him, but nod politely if he looks your way.

8) ALWAYS hold your breath when walking by the road sign. If you breathe near the sign, the museum will provide you with a complimentary bag of salt and sage and send you home with more detailed instructions.

9) Say hi to Herman the Bug. He likes it. DO NOT say good-bye.

Each guest also receives a pamphlet with these rules, although I’m definitely getting a little weary of printing them. These rules are simple to follow, and after a couple of choice...incidents...with the pink bonnet, we’ve even placed yellow tape in a circle with a six-foot radius to keep idiots with poor estimation skills away from it. No wonder the pandemic is causing so much trouble--apparently all men are physically incapable of estimating a six-foot distance.

Of course, the list of rules for employees to follow is far more extensive, but that’s not generally a problem, since it’s just Em, Jan, and me (Jan being the janitor, of course, and that’s obviously not his real name, but we don’t know what it is, so bite me).

Anyway, this morning Em got a call from a panicked stay-at-home mom who was reportedly in big trouble about some sort of vintage wedding dress she’d found on eBay. Since Em is really more the management type, and I’m the one who generally deals with the hands-on bits, I was the one who somewhat reluctantly headed to the address. I say reluctantly because I’ve never found a single good thing attached to a wedding dress.

Upon my arrival, it became clear that something funny was going on. There was the sound of a screaming child somewhere in a nearby room, which I’ve never been particularly fond of, and the woman who greeted me at the front door was in poorly contained hysterics. She had stringy brown hair, although I suspected that it was generally less unkempt, based on the obviously expensive comb wedged near the back of her head. Tears were streaming down her face, and clearly had been for some time, judging by the tomato color of her face and the general swollen stretch to it. Possibly most troubling was the blood staining her hands, already browning as it dried.

“How can I help you, ma’am?” I said in the least threatening voice possible. For god’s sake, she looks like she’s about to jump out of her skin.

“I killed my husband,” she said.

Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought. “May I come inside?”

She nodded, jerkily, like a badly made puppet, or one with a particularly anxious puppeteer. I followed her inside and was instantly hit with...nothing.

I should expand here and mention that I’m by no mean some sort of sensitive--that’s more Em’s thing, and how we met (a story for a different time, I’m sure). That being said, it’s hard to be around cursed objects for too long without getting a sense for the sort of evil miasma that leeches out of them. So either this woman just needed some haloperidol, or my circumstances at the time were not the right ones to invoke whatever was going on with this dress.

“It’s...in here,” the woman practically whispered. Hm, I thought. Not generally an awesome sign, the whispering.

“So why the museum? Why not the police?” I asked as I followed her into a modest kitchen, then through another doorway into an equally modest living room. In the other room, the child continued to cry. I assumed she had used the number my parents used to give out for any weird or unusual problems, but still, the police are usually the first choice for actual murder-related issues.

“I just...I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “It was whispering to me, telling me...I didn’t want to...but for days, for days it whispered and whispered and it was right! It was right...but now I..., oh, god, oh, god, I don’t know what came over me, what did I do, what did I do...”

Mmkay, I thought, so she wasn’t going to be super helpful. All I was gathering was that the dress had apparently been speaking to her, no doubt persuading her to kill her husband. At least it hadn’t been very fast-acting. That meant it was probably reasonably safe to transport in the lined bag I’d brought. Most things were, provided they weren’t especially hostile.

“Do you know why it would ask you to hurt your husband, Mrs. Meyers?” Or Ms., I corrected mentally.

“It...it knew,” she said in hushed tones. We stopped in front of a large, closed oak dresser. Her shaking hand rested on the handle, but didn’t open it. “It knew everything. The late nights, the lies, the other women. It knew about his drinking, too. It told me...it told me I’d be safe. Happier.”

In one swift motion, she threw the dresser open. Hanging inside, all alone, was a vintage wedding dress in mint condition. It was lovely, all delicate lace and soft edges and white so pure it was nearly blinding. The arms were long and translucent, and the neckline was gently curved. The second the woman’s gaze fell upon it, her eyes hardened. Immediately, a chill ran down my spine.

“He’s better off dead,” she remarked coldly. “Or rather, we’re better off with him dead. Why do women fall into these toxic relationships and just allow themselves to remain there forever? It’s as if they have no self-respect. No, I had to do it, and I’m glad I did. I was far gentler than he deserved.”

A quick glance to the other side of the dresser revealed her husband, eyes wide in death, spread-eagled on the ground with a knife still stuck in his chest, alongside several other stab marks that no longer leaked blood, as his heart no longer pumped. It’s not like I haven’t seen death before, but...the look in their eyes never gets less creepy.

Not only that, but Ms. Meyers still had that look in her eyes. You might call it unhinged, insane, hungry for death or pain or something worse. But for me, it was the look of a curse. The look of blankness, of emptiness, of a person completely not in control of their own body. Of a person to whom the limits of humanity and right and wrong have ceased to have meaning. Ms. Meyers might have said the dress was whispering to her, but this was not just whispering. Whatever was in that dress was in Ms. Meyers, and I had no idea if it wanted me dead, too. Sure, I wasn’t a scumbag husband, but I was definitely intruding, and I’m confident it knew it.

I backed away slowly, nearly tripping over the carpet, sending a jolt through my body. My throat clenched up, and I swear I felt like the dress itself was watching me as I tried to subtly place one of the dresser doors between it and myself. Ms. Meyers’ dead eyes followed me blankly. I forced the words out of clenched teeth. Professionalism, Alex, you’ll get out of this faster, and more alive, if you remember your professionalism. Do your job. “Ms. Meyers, it’s a beautiful dress. I’m...I’m glad you were able to gain your...your freedom.”

“That’s the other thing,” Ms. Meyers said. She was definitely not whispering anymore. Her voice was louder now, approaching a yell, yet still remaining just as hard and cold. Her anger, not hot but icy, frozen, made my stomach clench. “She would appreciate it if you could stop calling her it. Women are not objects, you know.”

The laugh that bubbled out of me was mildly hysterical, and I shoved down the awful feeling in my chest. I was still backing up, which I only realized when my foot hit the late Mr. Meyers’ limp leg and I almost tripped. “I’m very sorry. She is beautiful, and she took good care of you.”

I held my breath painfully. After an impossibly long moment, Ms. Meyers seemed to relax, and some light, some humanity, returned to her eyes. They were quite pretty when they weren’t blank and evil, a nice green. I allowed the green to soothe me. The dresser doors shut on their own.

The tension slipped from the room at once. Feeling as though I’d been released from an invisible vice, I gasped in a breath of fresh air and relaxed, although I definitely did take a step away from the body of Mr. Meyers.

“Ms. Meyers,” I said, still somewhat breathlessly. “I would love to take the dress--” The dresser doors wobbled dangerously. “I would love to take her with me and check her out.”

Ms. Meyers blinked, her eyes becoming dewy again. Poor thing. The influence of a curse tends to leave you with an awful hangover, not to mention the obvious guilt of murdering your husband, regardless of how icky he was. “I’m, um. I’m not sure if that’s okay.”

So, then. I glanced at the dresser. Her nerves made me suspicious that the dress could still exert some control, even out of the line of sight. That was inconvenient. “I do run a museum, Ms. Meyers. I wonder if she would not appreciate the opportunity to meet more women.” There was a pause, and I continued cautiously, “Women with partners, from all over the city. Multiple women every day, in fact.”

Ms. Meyers’ eyes glazed over for a moment, and I tensed, but in the end, she nodded. “I think that would be best.”

“Thank you, Ms. Meyers,” I said, relieved that the dress had apparently given her permission. Either that, or its influence only lasted so long when out of eyesight. Hard to tell, but I was glad for it. “Just relax, okay? Everything’s okay. You did the right thing by calling.”

Short minutes later, I was at the door with the lined bag carefully nestled in my arms.

“Is there anything else you can tell me about her?” I asked. “Anything that may help me?”

It was strange. It didn’t target us in the same way at all. If it had wanted to expand, the way some cursed objects do, it would have exerted its influence directly on me. Instead, it seemed it connected with Ms. Meyers, like there was a trigger, as there often is. I wondered vaguely if it was her feelings about her husband himself. Once I made it clear I wasn’t going to be a threat, it didn’t hurt me, so it must not have been random. Either way, I wanted to get as much information out of this poor lady as possible, especially because you would not catch me messing with that damned thing again.

“She’s beautiful,” sighed Ms. Meyers, and went into a dead faint on the floor. In the distance, her child sniffled.

“Hmm,” I said, and dialed the police. I made sure to tell them that I’d seen someone else fleeing the scene and the wife desperately trying to save her bleeding husband. The timeline won’t be right, and it’ll be overall pretty obvious that that’s not what happened, but the police have long since learned that when someone from my family, adopted child or not, says something, you trust it or pay the consequences. Not her fault, after all. He just ran into that knife. He ran into that knife...about six times.

...

Back at the museum, Em pretty well confirmed my suspicions: it seemed that the dress carried some nasty energy from a scorned new bride who had died tragically after some sort of cheating-related betrayal from her new husband. As usual, Em got an awful headache after interacting with the thing, leaving me to settle it into what we call the test room. Obviously, before it hits public viewing, it’ll have to be exposed to some visitors on an individual test basis--first one by one, then in pairs, then in threes, and so on. We’ll have to test couples, of course, although we suspect it will only exert its influence on women in unfulfilling relationships. We’ll have to see about same-sex versus opposite-sex relationships, double-check whether it’s actually a visual line of sight that’s the issue or whether it’s physical proximity, et cetera. It’ll be an entire process, but by the end of things, we’ll have a lovely vintage dress hanging in the Hall of the Cursed.

Anyway, I hope to tell you all more about this soon, as soon as I get a break--things keep me pretty busy around here. After all, with every day comes a new vintage wedding dress that convinces you to murder your unfaithful husband.

Or something. You know.

It’s foolish to be afraid of the dark.

People quiver in fear because their eyesight isn’t suited for blackness, for nighttime. Foolish, the lot of them. Do they even bother to think about what “dangers” the darkness holds?

Those large, shiny eyes from the bushes are raccoons and cats, watching for food or attention. The scratching on the bedroom window is the branches of the tree; the groaning of the house is the heavy wood settling in the cold or swaying in the wind. Someone leaving a window cracked is not the fault of the darkness, and neither is the scurrying of the rats in the dirty basement her fault.

The darkness tries to help the ungrateful fools anyway. She cloaks the sun so that they can sleep; she cools the raging heat of the earth so that the very ground they walk upon doesn’t burn them. Nighttime provides them with rest and respite, and the dark extends in the winter, when the sun reflects blindingly off the snow.

The dark is elegant and quiet, the calm of the inside of the eyelids and the void of space itself. She enhances tenfold the grace and beauty of the stars; without her, their light is meaningless. She makes way for the spotlight in the concert hall and the theatre, spurring on the performance with her supportive arms. She allows for sneaking fun, for hide-and-seek, for bonfires that glow and fireworks that dazzle.

Sure, some of those childlike figures laughing outside the window at night are real, but people fear them without giving them a chance. Their laughter brings love, humor, good fortune; the spectre that leaves footprints in the flour protects and the wraith that rattles pots and pans is cleaning and purifying and blessing.

People fear what they don’t know. They set up night lights in every room and make flashlights and headlamps to drive away the darkness, to cast her out. She tries to help anyway, because she loves them, those foolish, puny people that reject her so strongly.

It’s not the fault of the darkness that the eyesight of humans is so pathetic. It’s not her fault that they are easily deceived by magic tricks and dancing lights, and it’s not her fault that people are irrationally terrified of anything and everything that they don’t immediately, innately know.

She can only help them, save them, for so long. They flee from their guardian angel and into something far more dangerous. They’re going to regret it, the utter fools, running from her and straight into the true demons. Those bright rays do nothing but blind them to what lurks within, give a false sense of security, dim and cloud their eyes so that one day, with a morbid irony, darkness will be all they know. The dark can only protect so much if she’s turned away, and without her, people are helpless and vulnerable to what lies eagerly in wait.

It’s foolish to be afraid of the dark.

You should be afraid of the light.

Ally Vahn was perfect.

Actually, everyone was perfect. Ally Vahn simply failed to be an exception. She was five feet tall and had a perfect BMI of eighteen point five. Her cheeks were soft, her face flawlessly symmetrical, her fingers precisely the right length: the results of human mastery of the genome. Inside, she knew, was perfect too, just the right amount of platelets and cholesterol receptors and little inflammatory proteins, each joint submerged in exactly the correct amount of synovial fluid and each precisely the correct distance apart.

Ally was twenty-three years old and worked as a cook. She liked to refer to herself as a "chef," a word she'd heard her friend Mandy use once, but that term hadn't been popular since the Old Days. She worked on a line with nineteen other perfectly built cooks. Each of them produced fifty identical meals of exact, measured proportions, as mandated by code. They did this thrice daily, once for each meal of the day. Then the one thousand citizens of New Mount sat in the gigantic mess hell and finished eating in thirty minutes before returning to their jobs, or, in the evening, home.

On this particular evening, which was, of course, exactly like every other, Ally was clearing away her supplies for the cleaning bots to handle. It was lovely, having things like cleaning bots and retail bots. It meant that each and every New Mount citizen worked from seven hundred hours to seventeen hundred hours each day. There was no need for humans to work late at night anymore, not now that these services could be performed by unthinking machines. So every night, Ally cleared her station, placing her dirty dishes into the designated area, and left.

Which was why, when something rather unusual occurred, Ally was exceedingly surprised. After all, unusual hadn't really happened since the Old Days, either, or so she'd heard.

What happened was as follows: Ally heard a knock on the door.

Perhaps a knock on just any door wouldn't be irregular, just her fellow cooks alerting her to their presence as they bustled in and out of the kitchen making their evening preparations. This particular door, however, was situated in the very back of the kitchen, just meters from Ally's station, and it had never been knocked on before. In fact, as far as Ally knew, it had never even been opened.

Naturally, Ally turned to inform her coworkers of the Oddity, as per protocol, only to find that she had gotten distracted by the sound and had gotten left on her own. Ally closed her still-open mouth, feeling foolish indeed, and made her way to the neat stack of papers labeled "Oddity Report" on the counter. She'd been trained to do so many times (sixty-eight, to be precise), but as she penciled her name in uniform letters at the top, she hesitated.

The trouble was that Ally had always been the curious sort. It was she, and not her sister Sarah, who had asked why there were only ten names girls could be named yearly in New Mount, and received "That's the way it is" as an answer. It was she who questioned why the Old Days were spoken of only in hushed tones and neglected in history classes, she who was told time and time again to mind her place, lest she find herself in a nasty bit of trouble. It wasn't that she wanted to be curious. She simply was.

So, be that as it was, Ally found herself standing rather close to the door in question indeed. There was no sound coming from it now, and Ally's fears of some mysterious figure on the other side began to abate, and she began to think of what sort of marvelous Oddity could be inside. A stray animal, perhaps, as they persisted despite the Government's very best efforts to contain them. A broken machine, crumbling loudly to dust as it aged.

Ally's hand really was getting dreadfully close to that door, and she reminded herself sternly that it was not at all appropriate for her to be here investigating an Oddity after-hours. She really ought to go home. Her sister and mother and father would be missing her. She really ought to go home. She really ought to--

She opened the door.

It took a moment or two for her stinging eyes to adjust to the dark and the dust that settled over her like a second skin. When they did, she was a bit disappointed. Contained in the room were several pink and white bags on rusted old shelves. On the floor was a book, splayed upon the ground where it had fallen. The knocking noise, Ally realized, as she was no intellectual but was certainly smart enough to discern the sources of noises, had been the book falling.

Ally had honestly expected the door to be locked, and she had definitely not expected an old-fashioned, honest-to-goddness book. The proper thing, of course, would be to turn it in so that the Government could preserve it properly. Her fingers trailed along the spine, the texture rough and lovely, and she shivered.

It wouldn't hurt to turn the book in tomorrow, would it?

With that, Ally seized the book in a moment of euphoric boldness, then hastened out, shutting the door firmly behind her. When she arrived home, her parents expressed mild worry and disapproval at her absence, which she waved away with explanations of a cooks' meeting, although that was ridiculous, since the cooks only met every other Thursday. She avoided their questions and small talk and the second she was alone in her room, she flung herself to her bed and opened the book.

It was...hmm. It called itself a cookbook, which Ally found curious, and the dishes it described weren't like anything she'd ever seen, definitely not formulary-compliant. Breads and pastries, pastas, things she was almost certain would have improper caloric distributions. And yet, illogically, inexplicably, she found her eyes drawn to the photos in the book. These foods were so colorful, some golden-brown around the edges, some even possessing tiers of different hues. They were so unlike the nutrient-dense efficiency foods the formulary required she cook daily.

Her eyes were drawn to one of the descriptions. "A sweet treat for the whole family to enjoy," it said.

This was understandably a confusing sentence for Ally to read, and perplexed her on a number of levels. Only the family was to enjoy this treat? Additionally, in what food group were "treats" in the first place? She lingered on another unfamiliar word. "Sweet."

Vaguely, she thought she recalled one of the older, crotchety-er cooks mentioning something along the lines of "sweet." Something about an ancestor, the Old Days. Ally had discounted it because half the things the man said were entirely incomprehensible, and, well, at the time she was trying to put a damper on her investigative nature, futile as she would later find out it was. She returned her eyes to the book, which said, "If you'd rather a less sweet, more bitter cake, simply reduce the amount of sugar by one-fourth cup."

...

She didn't remember where she had seen the word "sugar" until the next day, when she was unable to resist sneaking back into That Room after the others had left. There, on each pink and white bag, was that same word. Sugar.

Her control altogether gone now, Ally ripped open a bag, revealing a crystalline white powder. Something shifted in her brain, and without knowing why she did it, she scooped a bit of the stuff into her palm and licked it off. Interestingly, it dissolved on her tongue, much like the elemental salt supplements she sprinkled on each person's morning meal.

She stuffed some of the tiny crystals in her pocket, resolving to ask Mandy about it after work.

...

Her pocket burned all day as she worked, and true to her word, she headed to Mandy's the second it was time to go home, sending her family a quick message to let them know she'd be home late.

Mandy's house was a strange place, just as Mandy was a strange person. They'd been friends since Ally was little, although Mandy was much older, probably in her fifties now. She was the type who never held down a job for very long. Asked too many questions, yelled at too many people. Generally being a nuisance. Ally thought it was exceedingly charming, ever since she'd had Mandy as a babysitter.

"Mandy," she beamed as she entered. The windows were covered by thick black curtains, the room dusty despite being lived-in. Random, seemingly unrelated documents were scattered all about the floor, covering every surface. She recognized at least one paper as a court summons from when Mandy was arrested for public indecency, which Mandy claimed was code for "refusing to be an obedient little puppet."

"Ally," Mandy replied. She had that look she always had. Her proportions were as perfect as anyone else's, skin flawless, eyes large and doe-like and precisely her mother's favorite shade of green. Ally wasn't sure, then, how she managed to look like an overgrown raccoon, but she did nonetheless. It went well with her reputation as local conspiracy kook. "What is it?"

"I wanted to ask you about something," Ally said, and plopped down on the well-abused couch without further preamble.

"You'll get yourself in trouble, kiddo," whispered Mandy in her usual scratchy voice. "Like a smoker's," she'd joked to Ally once, although Ally hadn't the foggiest what that was supposed to mean.

"Okay," said Ally, and then everything spilled from her mouth in a jumble, in typical Ally fashion. "What's cake? And sweet? And bitter? And sugar? And--"

"Where did you learn those words?" rasped Mandy rather sharply.

"I found an old cookbook at work," said Ally, and didn't bother following it up with "Don't tell anyone," because that was pointless when Mandy didn't talk to anyone anyway. She did follow it up with, "There were bags of something called 'sugar' too, some kind of powder, like the elementals."

Mandy was silent for a long moment, shadowed eyes darting from Ally's left to Ally's right. "It might upset you," she said. "To know."

"You know me," Ally said, which was answer enough.

"My mother was a geneticist." Ally didn't answer. She knew this already, had been told many times. "She used to bring some papers home. Wouldn't say anything, never really did, but I looked. I liked to read."

"Sure, Mandy," Ally soothed, familiar with Mandy's cycles of agitation and sensing a spike.

Mandy took a deep breath. "There's stuff the Government doesn't want you to know."

Ally tried very hard not to feel disappointed. She hadn't come for more random conspiracy babbling.

"People used to get fat," said Mandy. Ally nodded; she'd known that much, been told in school that obesity used to be a huge problem before genetic mastery had been achieved. "The geneticists of the Old Times figured out that there were hundreds, thousands, of gene variations that caused it. Receptors for certain kinds of lipoproteins, recycling proteins, enzymes, inflammatory mediators."

"They fixed it when they got rid of genetic diseases," recited Ally.

"It wasn't only that, though," Mandy said darkly. "They figured, even if your genes are perfect, you could make yourself obese. There was this whole...this stigma about it, that being overweight was as bad as cancer, somehow. Made you ugly. And they figured, you could still get fat even with perfect genes, if you ate too much, or the wrong things."

"Why would anyone eat too much?" Ally responded automatically. "The formulary is very clear and nutritious."

"There wasn't always the formulary," says Mandy, as though Ally were a very small, very dense child. "People used to eat whatever, whenever, just by themselves, or with their families. Things that tasted good, or whenever they felt hungry." Sensing Ally's lack of understanding of these words, she sighed. "Humans were...we originally had a hunger drive, a sort of urge or need or almost pain you would feel when you needed to eat. But some people didn't have the right amount of hunger, or felt hunger when they were stressed, so the geneticists shut down your brain's ability to process hunger, just clean snipped some nerves off the hypothalamus.

"And then some foods tasted good. They would...they would hit your tongue and you would feel good. Sometimes they were sweet, sometimes sour, sometimes salty. It's...hard to explain. But every food tasted different, and the chefs I told you about, they would compete to see who could make the best food, and they would sell it in restaurants. Only sometimes when food tasted good people would eat too much of it, so now, we can't taste."

"Why wouldn't they tell us about that?" asked Ally skeptically. Her brain was whirring, struggling to process. "They told us about the other genetic manipulations. They were good for us."

"Because, kiddo," said Mandy, "if you had any idea what's been stolen from you, you'd burn them to the ground."

...

Ally read over the cookbook again that night, trying to decide if she believed Mandy. It sounded insane, and Mandy was insane, in all fairness. But at the same time...Mandy hadn't made the cookbook, and it definitely sounded like "sweet" and "bitter" were qualities of these foods that Ally didn't, couldn't, understand. Sure, she liked the texture of some foods more than others, but she ate all of her food anyway, because that was how it worked, how one got one's nutrients. "They would hit your tongue and you would feel good," Mandy had said. Absentmindedly, Ally touched the tip of her tongue, probed along its length. Felt the bumps there, wondered what they were for, or if they were just one of the useless mistakes of evolution that humans sometimes had.

She tried to imagine it. Taking a bite of the food she made every day, and it made her feel. She couldn't envision, not really, how she would feel because of food. Would her mouth feel warm, or pleasantly tingley? She licked her finger, just enough to moisten it, stuck it into her pocket. It coated with sugar.

Ally stared at her finger for a long, long time, so long her bent elbow grew tired and achey. Hesitantly, she popped the finger in her mouth, and felt the sugar dissolve on her tongue, and tried to pretend it tasted good.

...

It plagued her. The idea of hunger, of taste. Of feeling something upon eating, of wanting to eat, rather than eating because it was scheduled to be so. It was bizarre, and she still half didn't believe it, and yet it consumed her completely, totally. She sprinkled the measured cubic centimeters of elemental salt supplements on the colorless blend of food for the afternoon meal and wondered what it would taste like. Salt, so salty? The cookbook had said more salt made a dish flavorful, tangy. Would her dishes have flavor? If she were a chef in the Old Days, what sort of flavor would her food have?

Each and every day, she tried the sugar, just a little. She furrowed her brow and scrunched up her face like a child throwing a tantrum, gave herself headaches trying to feel something, to taste something, anything. She rubbed her stomach and imagined she was hungry, imagined feeling a hole there and filling it and feeling satisfied.

She imagined she was a world-famous chef who owned a restaurant. She imagined people liking her food, not just tolerating it, not just eating it because they were supposed to.

Still, she tasted nothing. At least, she didn't think she did. How would she even know if she started to feel something? Was it even possible? She didn't think so, and yet, against her better judgment, against all logic, she kept trying and trying and trying.

The Oddity report lay forgotten, trampled underfoot long ago. Ally couldn't remember if she'd ever finished writing her name on it.

Brains were plastic, Mandy had told her once. They could adapt. Change. Could build new neuronal connections over top of old, outdated ones, compensate for damage. But this...this wasn't damage, not really. It was just a hole. There was nothing there. Nothing at all.

...

Ally should've expected the other shoe.

"This door shouldn't be open," snapped Rob. Ally, in her haste and frustration, had accidentally left the door open the previous night and had not arrived early enough for the morning meal to fix it. She cursed herself silently, schooling her perfectly pretty face into a neutral expression. She wondered, distantly, if this was the taste of bitterness: bitterness at her mistake, at what she would lose. Bitterness at the fact that she never really gained anything to begin with.

"If I find anyone opening this again, they will be fired," Rob said, shutting the door and locking it with a final-sounding click. Ally turned back to her station and weighed out an exact portion of fibrous nutrition supplement.

...

Mandy was right. Ally wanted to burn them, and she didn't even know what it was, precisely, that she had lost. Her curiosity had turned into a mind-consuming pursuit of answers that were impossible for her to find.

Ally Vahn was perfect. Ally did not require working tastebuds, did not need hunger. Didn't want them. She was, after all, perfect without them. She stood in front of her mirror all night that night, studying her perfect face with her perfect eyes, eyes the exact color her parents wanted them to be, a misty blue-gray that changed hue in the light. She brushed back straight black hair and reminded herself that a genetically masterful modern human did not require such silly things, was better off without them.

Frantic suddenly, angry, she turned her pocket inside out and watched the remaining sugar spill onto the floor, wasted. Good, she thought viciously, chewed agitatedly at her nail, only to stop short and stare in wonder at her own reflection.

It tasted...sweet.

She laughed too loudly. Tears, she found, tasted salty.

I live alongside a bear and a bee.

It can be terribly inconvenient at times. The bee I find more bearable; it just wants to protect me, aiming sharp stings at my fingertips when I reach for something new, something exposed or exciting. I feel its furry legs as it pads carefully along my collarbone, a sensation as constant as breathing, as the beat of my heart, which races so frantically when the bee approaches. It's a silent warning not to get too close, not to go too far, the stinger always posed over sensitive flesh. Sometimes, when I sit still too long, I feel the prod of the sharp tip against my neck, not deep enough to puncture, to hurt, but enough to force me to my feet and into action. At night, the bee buzzes in my ear, and I have no choice but to stay unblinkingly awake, letting the sound fill me. It doesn't want me to forget, after all. If I forget, I make the same mistakes again and again, so I have to remember. The bee understands that, so it buzzes away.

The bear, on the other hand, I don't understand at all. Some days, I awaken to a pressure on my chest, far heavier than the bee. The bear lies on top of me, its fur pressing me into the bed, smothering me until I'm gasping for breath, unable to move, to escape. Other days, the bear is nowhere to be seen when I wake up, and I stretch, yawn, rise, but I can hear its wet, growling breaths just out of sight. I go about my day cautiously, waiting for the inevitable moment when the bear will spring from the shadows and slam me to the ground, whatever activity I was doing forgotten as I abandon all thought but that of continuing to draw breath. At times the bear is angry, baring sharp teeth at me, at everyone. It frightens me. Other times, it's sad in the way only an animal can be, eyes staring blankly, light gone from them. I want to feel sympathy for it. I do. But all I feel is apathy.

I want to hate the bear and the bee. I want to. I try to hate them, but I can't, because I understand them. I understand the anxiety of new things, of staying still. I understand the depression that weighs heavy upon you like a living thing, that growls when threatened, that bares its fangs at others even as it desperately wishes to be loved. The bear, the bee, and I have become unwilling friends, comrades. Sometimes, when the bear rumbles deep in its chest, I stroke its wiry fur, and its breathing evens out. Sometimes, when the bee buzzes about my head in a panic, I offer it sugar water, and it calms for a bit.

I guess we're in this together, after all.