The sole calm entity in the vehicle is Jasmine's not-sister in the front seat. The creature pretending to be Rebecca. It stares outside. Since Mom isn't watching, its expression doesn’t change. Jasmine tracks its lack of response through its bug-pitted windshield reflection. It looks like Rebecca: it has her chapped lips, oval green eyes, and stocky legs. The sunlight oiling its blonde scalp seems to think it’s lighting Rebecca. 

But Rebecca would heave out “fuck” after “fuck” right now. Rebecca would yell at Mom for hitting the dog. Rebecca, Jasmine knows, would not leave the car.

Mom screams.

“Rebecca! Come back!” She lowers the window as Not-Rebecca plunges into the swaying grass. “Rebecca!”

As Mom prays, Jasmine wrenches herself out of the backseat. She doesn’t love Not-Rebecca. She doesn’t want it to be bitten by a dying dog either, mostly for Mom’s sake. She scrambles through the thistles after her not-sister, Mom's impotent protests trailing her. Jasmine slides down a gravel slope. The car vanishes.

In a wash of Himalayan blackberry bushes, tangled switchgrass, and geodes blended with bottle caps sprawl the dog and the creature. Jasmine pulls up short.

The dog, once a Jack Russell, lolls in Not-Rebecca's lap. Blood spews from his nose in little sprays. His mouth gapes. A broken tooth scissors at nothing. He shivers, forcing his vitality out through his pores. His eyes bulge. One – larger than the other through an optical illusion – trembles behind a smashed cheek. Not-Rebecca cups the dog's neck. Its other hand pets his flank. Inches below, the dog's intestines balloon from his belly.

Rebecca, Jasmine thinks, numb and nauseous, would never ruin her jeans for this.

“Sssh.” Not-Rebecca strokes the dog. “Sssh.” Then it falls into a stream of guttural noises, the primal sounds animals make when they are telling each other that evening nears. 

The dog's trembling ebbs. His gasping fades into the buzz of mosquitoes. Jasmine freezes when Not-Rebecca looks at her. She doesn’t recognize the terrible tenderness in Not-Rebecca's gaze. The acceptance of atrocity. None of that belongs to Rebecca.

“I need to bury him,” Not-Rebecca says, cradling the dog's carcass, a grotesque pietà embracing a roadkill Jesus. “If I don't, the coyotes will eat him right away. Do you want to help?”

How Catholic of you, Jasmine thinks.

“No,” she says, faint.

Her not-sister begins digging into the loam. Jasmine flees.

🦷🦷🦷

The creature started wearing Rebecca's skin back in May. No adults realize it, but Jasmine immediately notices the creature's peculiarities: moodiness. Seclusion. Sobriety. A lack of style. Guttural cries circle their house at night, waxy fingerprints appear on tabletops, and dewy footprints slather bathroom floors in the morning. When Jasmine confronts the creature two weeks in, her terror of the unknown almost renders her mute. She clutches a bottle of wasp spray in one hand and her rosary in another. Not-Rebecca stands on the sun-broken patio behind the house, placid, watching Jasmine shuffle closer. The cherry tree above murmurs, shedding all of late spring's sunbeams.

Not-Rebecca looks lost in Rebecca’s giant Pissgrave t-shirt. It bears none of Rebecca's studded bracelets. Wears the sneakers Mom gifted Bex instead of her boots. Jasmine doesn't buy the illusion of passivity. Rebecca's short fuse haunts her. The phantom bruise on her wrist from a hurled book stings. Who says this beast will be better-tempered than Bex? It's likely far, far worse.

“I know what you are,” Jasmine squeaks, ten feet away from the creature. It's a miracle it hears her. It's a miracle she hears herself. “You're not Rebecca. You're not human.”

Not-Rebecca shifts its weight along an invisible fault line. Its body does not settle how bodies do. It chews on its tongue. Its ears droop, camellia petals sagging in swampwater. Jasmine fights the urge to vomit. She presses a sweaty finger onto the wasp spray lid.

“You're right.” Not-Rebecca’s tone is so close to the one Rebecca took while apologizing for the bruise that Jasmine almost staggers back. “I'm not.”

All Jasmine can do is stand there, sickened by validation. Rebecca's apology repeats in her head: “I’m sorry. That wasn’t meant for you. I’m mad at our parents. I’m mad at Kentucky. The world is so small here. It’s suffocating me.”

“Then what are you?” Jasmine cannot hear herself this time.

The creature’s hidden torso squelches. Rebecca’s shirt sways.

“A friend,” it says.

🦷🦷🦷

Jasmine prays to Saint Mary to handle the creature. Then she prays to God in hopes he’ll deliver the real Rebecca back to them. Nothing happens. Jasmine ceases her extra prayers by June. Saint Jude must be protecting her, but God is unresponsive. Jasmine concludes He’s telling her to help herself. ‘Helping herself’ begins with informing Mom a monster has replaced Rebecca.

Mom isn't receptive. 

“Rebecca is a teenager,” she says. “She’s maturing. I was a teenager once too. I know what it’s like. Your sister becoming a little distant from you does not mean a monster took her place, Jasmine.”

Jasmine wants to scream that Bex excluded her plenty of times before. This is different. This isn’t growth. It’s abduction.

But post divorce, Mom quickly submerges in her pit of glamor magazines and taxes when confronted with unpleasantries, and after hearing countless parental quarrels through the walls, Jasmine knows the creature can hear them. Though it never confronts her, she does not want that. So she slips back into silence again.

Jasmine vows to force the communion wafer of truth into Mom's mouth before summer’s end whether she likes it or not.

🦷🦷🦷

Fire and brimstone smoke Jasmine's prayers the night after Mom hits the dog with the car. Not-Rebecca must be a demon. An unholy outside force that pried its way into their lives because Bex shunned God and lusted after Lilith. Rage at everyone, including her sibling, wicks Jasmine. Why did Rebecca invite this thing into their lives; why did she disappear? Why is a creature pretending to be her sister; why is Mom doing nothing? 

“Please, God,” Jasmine prays in her locked room, “smite the demon in our midst. Destroy it with lightning, earthquakes, and locusts. Kill it with a car. Smash it under an elevator. Shred it in a combine. Blind it with your eternal love. Return Rebecca to us. Punish her for her sins. Forgive her. Let her come home.” 

Her doomsday wishes sear themselves into her retinas, airbrushed apocalyptic scenes torn straight from Rebecca's heavy metal posters.

🦷🦷🦷

“Kill it with a car. Smash it under an elevator. Shred it in a combine.”

Coincidentally, the day after they hit the dog, the dog days start. Mom escapes the heat by absconding to her air-conditioned office across town. Jasmine, shaky and foggy-headed, goes for a walk. 

Heat presses everything into strange, variant forms of itself. Asphalt roads metamorphose into lengthy roadkill griddles. Manicured fields transform into gummy, bug-filled carpets of gamma grass. When Jasmine can’t replay yesterday any longer, when she gathers her courage alongside ticks and burrs, she limps back to the oak-shaded farmhouse.

Jasmine discards her shoes then heads for the kitchen. Silverware and sticky notes shingle its crooked counters. Calendars and peeling mint paint paper the walls. Outside, catbirds tear cherries off the backyard tree, birds and berries alike shriveling. 

Jasmine takes a long drink from the sink spigot before tossing a teapot on the stove. When it’s boiling, she’ll pour it into a mug, a death jacuzzi for plucked ticks. She drips sweat. As the kettle roils, Jasmine hears footsteps behind her. Angry shame armors her to the creature's presence. She ignores Not-Rebecca. The circular conversations they have in private often feel worse than Jasmine's own cowardice. 

“Let me help you,” the creature says.

“No.” As the kettle whines louder, Jasmine lowers the gas. The cotton curtains framing the window in front of her sag with steam.

“There’s a tick on your leg,” the creature says. “I can grab it.”

Jasmine shudders. Ironic that a parasite would volunteer to remove a parasite. She grabs the kettle. “Don’t touch me.”

The quiet grows pregnant with desperation. Swells like a tick gulping blood.

“I didn't hurt Rebecca,” the creature says.

The kettle smashes into the sink. Jasmine swears, clutching her burnt hand to her mouth. The creature squints in concern. Its pupils drip onto its lashes.

“You keep saying that,” Jasmine says. “I don't believe you.”

“I know,” the creature says. “I’m sorry.”

“If you were actually sorry, you'd tell me where Rebecca is.” 

Jasmine stands in the kitchen, weak-kneed, rattled by the dribbling egg-white eyes peering at her.

The creature shakes its head. “I can't.”

How Jasmine hates those words. She’s ceased wondering how the creature learned to speak English, imitate people, or dodge interrogation. Those aren’t the right questions. Prometheus wanted company, too. To learn. To explore. As Jasmine looks at the creature before her, a plaintive pacifist without Bex's bite, a cradler of dying dogs, a lump comes unstuck in her throat. A door unlocks. It’s one she pushed at before, one she jiggled the latch on. Now, it opens.

“I'm not scared of you,” she rasps. “I know you can't hurt me.”

“You already knew that,” Not-Rebecca says.

Jasmine jabs a blood-blistered finger at its chest. Deuteronomy 31:6 steadies her, choking her shallow breaths into level ones. No more running from half-confronted demons.

“You've hidden enough from me,” Jasmine says. 

The creature looks at her balefully.

“I'm going to search your room,” she says.

🦷🦷🦷

Dunes of dust coat Rebecca’s desk, dresser, and bed. Any uprooted motes drift through the room, prismatic imperfections in the atmosphere. The creature stays back as Jasmine searches through her sister's debris. Its rubbery arms hang by its sides. It blends into the metal posters collaging the wall and the crooked, closed blinds.

Every passing moment it remains docile motivates Jasmine to search faster. It can hide from Mom. It can’t hide from her. Jasmine trembles after inventorying Rebecca's dresser. A fourth of her clothes are missing. So is Rebecca's suitcase.

“Her copy of Frankenstein is gone,” Jasmine says. 

Dread overwhelms her. Though a sea of differences separate her and Rebecca's shores of taste, Frankenstein is the lighthouse between them. Did the creature throw it away? Not-Rebecca stares at the wall. Its face stretches into a mournful mask. Skin congeals at the point of its chin in waxy beads.

“It's in a safe place,” it says.

“Is it with her?”

The creature purses its lips. Jasmine’s next question dies when she spots a polaroid of Rebecca with her old girlfriend, Dolly. It dangles from a red thumbtack in the drywall over the bed. In the photo Rebecca is vibrant, smiling, a dimple denting her right cheek. Dolly leans into the crook of her neck. Dust entombs both of them. All of the nearby dart holes and craters in the wall from Bex’s tantrums are equally shrouded in neglect. Jasmine tears her gaze from the photograph.

“I'm sure Rebecca carries the book in her heart,” the creature says.

Jasmine works her jaw.

“Rebecca would hate you,” she spits. “She'd hate how weak and gummy and quiet you are. I hope you know that.”

The creature shakes its head. Jasmine can't tell if it’s with disagreement or knowing. Abruptly, she tires.

“Leave.” Jasmine waves Not-Rebecca away. “Go make dinner or something. Be useful.”

When the creature’s footsteps vanish, Jasmine crawls under Rebecca's bed. Summers’ worth of junk bristles against her arms. History crunches beneath her fingers. Jasmine finds two empty cigarette boxes, crushed trash bags, moist sawdust, skull-patterned boxers, a desiccated umbilical cord, terrier fur, and her copy of Frankenstein, wrapped in grocery bags and placed lovingly in the back corner.

🦷🦷🦷

While Jasmine suspects the creature didn’t kill Rebecca—her gut tells her it’s unwanted, not murderous—she fumes with fantastical nightmares. It doesn’t matter how many times Not-Rebecca swears it didn’t hurt her sister. The nightmares enrapture Jasmine to the point of sickness. Her resurfaced memories drive her sniffling into her bedroom, leprous with mood swings, until Mom hugs her and pleads with her to cheer up before mass.

“It’s okay, honey,” Mom says. “Come on. It’s summer. What would people think if they saw you this way? Things are good! Your sister is starting over. Why don’t you talk to her? Do you want to?” 

Bex doesn’t care what people think. No one else laughs alongside Jasmine or indulges her in secrets. A distorted shell replaced Jasmine’s sole company in the world, yet Mom hasn’t noticed. Jasmine despairs more about her than Not-Rebecca now.

“Jasmine?” Mom twitters in worry.

“I'll go outside,” Jasmine says. “I'll see if it makes me feel better.”

Mom kisses her temple in gratitude.

Jasmine fulfills her promise by carting a nectarine onto the concrete porch stairs. Instead of crying, she destroys the fruit. Her fingers punch into its bruised flesh. Rivulets of juice drench her wrists. Jasmine mauls the nectarine until there’s little left, then closes her eyes. The sticky creases of her hand and the pit cutting her palm tether her to reality. She pretends they make her whole.

When she opens her eyes, the creature is next to her. Jasmine starts. Its eyes are too blue, its hair too dark. Jasmine scrambles away from it. It doesn’t pursue her.

“What did you do?” she says.

“I changed,” the creature says.

It looks less like Bex. Jasmine finds herself grateful. The creature scratches at its tendons, its knees curving backwards as it stretches. Jasmine's teeth scrape her inner cheek.

“I bet you normally look nothing like a person.”

“You're correct.” The creature pries off a fingernail before pasting it on again. Jasmine shudders. “It’s hot. Do you want to splash around the stream?”

They pretend to be siblings daily, now. The creature’s smile remains too wide. Too sloppy. It looks like Rebecca if she soaked in a cistern for five years. Jasmine still wishes it would call her Jas. She wants to kill it nearly as much as she wants to kill herself.

“I hate you,” she says.

“I know.”

Her vision blurs. “Why are you doing this?” 

“I want to take care of you.” The creature snags her hand. When she flinches, its grip loosens. Carefully. Jasmine doesn’t stop it when it seizes the nectarine pit. The creature tosses the seed into its mouth and crushes it between endless spirals of molars.

Jasmine pictures Rebecca feeding the creature a nectarine. She imagines her sister stroking the rim of its lips the same way she saw Dolly doing that to Rebecca. The creature’s eyes are soft. Bex is never soft.

Not-Rebecca stands and extends a hand to her. Jasmine takes it.

🦷🦷🦷

At the back of the rolling field—a field so sunstruck it blinds with bluegrass—sit two gravestones bleached with age. Behind the gravestones, down the slippery gullet of a sinkhole, rests a cave. A stream runs through it. It sings over pebbles, turning them smooth. Jasmine stands ankle-deep in the cool water.

“Rebecca and I came here all the time,” she says.

“I know. I watched you.” A bittersweet laugh escapes the creature. “I heard you two playing.”

“Do you have a family?” Jasmine says. If it has a family, why is it ruining hers? Oh, God! What if there are more of them? 

The creature smiles. The points of its teeth stick together. “Not how you have one. No one is alone, in the caves, but it’s not the same as having siblings. I am my own family. Like a swamp. Or a chain of fungi.”

“Oh,” Jasmine says.

The creature bends. Rungs of spine stick up beneath its shirt in broken bone fence posts. Despite the icy water, it wears no goosebumps. It pets a minnow. The less it resembles Rebecca the easier it is to look at.

“Is that what you want?” Jasmine says. “Company?”

“Yes,” the creature says. “After Bex coaxed me into the sun, I had it. It was better than anything I imagined before.”

Bex. It too calls Rebecca that. Jasmine reels.

“You know what would be extra amazing?” she says. “If Rebecca were here with us right now.”

The creature apologetically lifts a finger to its lips. Jasmine fights the tide of betrayal washing over her. To her surprise, it’s toward Rebecca. Jasmine calls her Bex! Why would Rebecca let this thing call her that too? Jasmine swallows.

“When did you meet my sister?”

“Three years ago.” The creature stares at the cave. It speaks with something much like love. Like loss. “We’ve been close since. Were close.” 

Jasmine’s heart chills.

“I don't want to be out here anymore,” she says.

“Okay.”

Not-Rebecca molds itself into a sister shape again with a vertebral squish. They return to the house, grass seeds sticking to their damp legs. As Not-Rebecca takes out the trash, Jasmine watches from the dining room window. Mom chops at a cantaloupe. The absence of Rebecca’s fire cleaves Jasmine’s chest.

“Doesn’t it bother you,” she says, clenching the windowsill, “that Rebecca’s so meek now?”

Mom hums. “It isn’t a bad change, sweetheart.”

“It is divine punishment. It is the halo of thorns God placed upon Jasmine for failing to please Rebecca.”

🦷🦷🦷

The creature isn’t a demon. It is divine punishment. It is the halo of thorns God placed upon Jasmine for failing to please Rebecca. When she registers this, Jasmine falls down a deep well within herself and splashes into the guilt below. The shame. If she had been a better sister, Rebecca wouldn’t have lashed out, fought Mom, or left.

All of this is her fault.

“Almighty father who art in heaven, blessed be thy name,” Jasmine whispers, her forehead pressed to the tear-dampened edge of her bed, “please forgive me for my failures. Let Rebecca come home.”

After hesitating, she adds, “And let the creature die quickly.”

🦷🦷🦷

“Do you believe in God?”

Jasmine’s bun, a sweaty lump perched on her head, bounces when she speaks. The porch stairs cool the back of her bare legs. A plastic fork protrudes from the aluminum bowl in her lap.

The creature scarfs another bite of take-out spaghetti. It places its bowl on the stairs. “No.”

The only people awake in the world this August afternoon are Jasmine and the creature. They recline on the porch as distant trains chug by. A bag of paper plates, Parmesan packets, and napkins rustle next to them.

“What do you believe in, then?” Jasmine says.

“I believe in the cave that crafted me.”

“So you weren't born. You were made. Unless those are the same to you.”

The creature wipes its hands. When it sets its napkin aside, smears of finger no thicker than onion skin paste the paper together.

“I culminated,” the creature says. “Enough living and dead beings layered together, until one day, I existed. I'm not too different from the dead dog. If the dog knew of all the worlds living in his stomach, if he recognized all the slippery strings composing him, he would resemble me.”

“Are you from Hell?” Jasmine twists her fork into her pasta.

“No. I’m from a cave. Caves don’t hate. Or punish. I didn’t understand those words the first few times Rebecca used them.”

Do you know what ‘hate’ means now? Thoughts of purgatory, punishment, and atonement swirl in Jasmine’s head. When she grits her teeth against the fork, she tastes iron. Her fate after death seemed clear a year ago. Now, with Not-Rebecca here, Jasmine finds that certainty gone.

“It’s my turn to ask questions,” the creature says.

“What?” Jasmine says.

“Does Bex believe in God?”

“No,” Jasmine says. “She doesn’t. Bex doesn’t believe in anyone believing in Him, either. She thought me caring about church was stupid.”

“Do you believe in God?”

“I think I do. There’s justice. We make justice, or God does, and if He doesn’t—though He does—what’s the harm in believing in it?” Jasmine exhales. “Bex disagrees. People have to suffer like she suffers. They have to think everything is spiritless atoms, even people who are grieving. I hate that.”

Flies skim the grass. Their buzzing returns Jasmine to the hum of their heater in winter. The days of Mom sobbing on the phone and praying child support would go through. Whenever she prayed, Rebecca rolled her eyes. “God isn’t real,” she’d say. “Mom is an adult. Why does she expect her imaginary friend to help her? If God was a man, he’d treat her like garbage anyway. She’s a fucking child.”

“Last question.” The creature folds its index finger. “What do you think I am?”

Jasmine looks at Not-Rebecca sprawled out on the porch stairs. Its limbs twist at odd angles; its skin splotches its limbs in moldy galaxies. Beady eyes speckle its excuse for a face. All of them gaze at the sunny lawn with reverence. Not-Rebecca is a twisted piece of stained glass. A horsefly lands on its brow. Jasmine shoes it away. A blotch of translucent blood shines on the creature's temple.

“You're not a demon,” Jasmine says, finally. “You have a soul.” She samples the word she found on the back of her teeth. “You’re a Nephil. A son of God and a daughter of something else.”

The creature preens. “So that’s what that word means.”

“Did Rebecca call you that?”

The nephil shakes its head. It draws its globs of knees to its chest, then lifts its bowl again. Ants swarm across its spaghetti in living specks of pepper. They vanish into Not-Rebecca's rot-black maw: a plurality entering one body. Jasmine thinks of fairy rings and Mammoth Cave maps. Singularity isn’t the answer here. Nephilim, as Jasmine mentally dubs it now, taps her temple. Jasmine smells petrichor. Decomposition.

“You’re a smart girl,” Nephilim says.

🦷🦷🦷 

“Saint Jude, patron saint of lost causes,” Jasmine mutters, her knuckles white, her patellas in pins and needles from kneeling on hardwood, “I ask thee for thy blessing. Open my mother's eyes to the creature in front of her. Have her cast it out without hurting it. Let it be outed only to Mom then fly back to its cave in peace. Let Rebecca find her way home and tear this place the fuck up.”

The coyote choir outside howls the 'amen.'

🦷🦷🦷

Mom always insists they go to church as a family. They don't head to mass twice a week anymore like they did after the divorce, which means Jasmine enjoys it again, and Not-Rebecca never objects to anything. So every Sunday, Jasmine, her mother, and the creature squeeze themselves into their best attire before driving to Our Lady Of The Caves Church.

Our Lady Of The Caves is small. Its white steeple points into the often thunderous sky, imploring God to strike it, as the cross above its doorway awaits ascension. Its interior is simple: checkered tiles, fluorescent lights, a chunky altar, rows of metal folding chairs for pews. Half of the congregation is gathered when Jasmine’s family enters. Jasmine settles into a chair as her mother hurries over to greet church friends. The creature seats itself next to Jasmine.

“Why do they never change the food for communion?” it murmurs. “There are many surface things to eat besides crackers.”

“The Host is supposed to be plain,” Jasmine says. “That’s why.”

“That’s bizarre,” the creature says. “Flesh is rich. Rot is rich. It makes no sense for the Host to be plain.”

“Well, it is.”

Not-Rebecca rubs a knuckle in contemplation. Jasmine digs her toes into the end of her shoes. She’s used to the creature aping Rebecca now, though it hurts to see those familiar gestures. Only around Mom does the creature still pretend to be Bex. Jasmine finds herself thinking the same confession every week: I am lying to my mother. I have let something take my sister’s place without fighting it. I might even pity it. Father, please forgive me.

She feeds the priest confessions about trying Rebecca’s lipstick or stealing library books. God already knows her plight and penance. There’s no need to compound them.

Mom’s laugh echoes through the room. She blends into the clutter of church ladies. The old tension in her posture has evaporated. For once, she resembles an average congregation member. Not someone who lives in fear of the priest pulling her aside. Maybe because Rebecca isn’t here anymore to challenge her assigned penance or insist that Jesus loved eating pussy.

“Flesh is rich. Rot is rich. It makes no sense for the Host to be plain.”

How’s Rebecca?” A wrinkled senior waves at the creature. Not-Rebecca waves back.

“Wonderful,” Mom says. “She’s really matured. I was starting to worry, but…”

As the senior squeezes her mother’s shoulder, Jasmine elbows the creature. “You should get into trouble more often,” she whispers. “People are starting to notice.”

She cares about nothing except making the church ladies realize what’s gone. Horrible pressure clamps her ribs. The creature shrugs.

“Are you afraid of being caught?”

“No. I cannot die in a way that matters,” the creature says. “If they catch me, they catch me.”

Jasmine wants to strangle it.

Metal clangs. A teenager several inches shorter than Not-Rebecca inches into the aisle next to them. Her lengthy hair slithers from her skull in two braids. Eczema craters her cheeks. It’s Dolly Magnolia: Rebecca’s ex. Dolly grips a folding chair with a loose wrist. Anxiety bubbles in her fidgeting.

Jasmine recalls Rebecca shredding half her photos with Dolly.

“A few months in that Bible Camp in Louisville,” Rebecca said, “and suddenly, that spineless little bitch doesn’t do women anymore. She wears her Easter dress properly and dates boring Catholic boys. She even blocked my number. Jesus, Jas. If I ever spay myself, euthanize me.” 

“Hi, Jasmine,” Dolly says.

“Hi, Dolly,” Jasmine says.

“Uh.” Dolly glances at Not-Rebecca. When no attack comes, she focuses on Jasmine, heartened. “Before service started, I wanted to ask you something. Would you like to join the choir? We could always use more singers.”

Jasmine reclines before she remembers no pithy answer from Rebecca is forthcoming. She has to make this choice herself. How does she feel about choir? About church? About anything? An unfamiliar emptiness surrounds Jasmine. The church ladies watch. Dolly waits. Jasmine's tongue turns to lead.

“—I’ll think about it.” She flushes.

Not-Rebecca leafs through a hymn book. Dolly beams.

“Let me know what you decide,” she says.

🦷🦷🦷

That night, Jasmine counts the spiders crawling across her ceiling, then the cracks, then the stains. A car hisses by in the distance. Its headlights flash her blinds before vanishing. The pipes in the ceiling groan.

It must be showering, Jasmine thinks. She appreciates Nephilim's night baths now. The tile always bears odors of lion's mane and crayfish for an hour after it finishes, but the bathroom is always clean. Nephilim never leaves problems for others.

The creature isn’t more likable than Rebecca. It is easier to exist with. When Bex was here, Jasmine did best in her sister's shadow. Jasmine’s chest tightens when she thinks of Rebecca. She was infinite. A delinquent, a rebel, a stoner; a friend, a sister, a confidante.

“I need more,” Rebecca said. “I’m shrinking the longer I stay here. Does that make sense, Jas?”

Jasmine hates Mom’s nervous expectation. Rebecca cloaked her from that. Rebecca never encouraged Jasmine to be her own person. She incorrectly assumed Jasmine had the fortitude for independence already. Without Bex, Jasmine is nothing. Without Jasmine, Bex—wherever she is—remains everything.

Nephilim doesn't fill space. It packs the facsimile of Rebecca’s skin with naps, peacekeeping, and secondhand whispers about how to be human. With Nephilim, Jasmine is… something. She doesn’t know what. 

Fear encases Jasmine. How can she be something without Rebecca? Independence requires strength, but she can’t even say no to Dolly Magnolia. What is she besides not enough? How can she become enough? God isn’t answering her questions anymore. Saint Jude barely does. Who can help her be enough? First comes Mom’s judgment, then the world’s.

The panic of metamorphosis glues Jasmine to the bed. She swallows tears. Eons later, the shower shuts off. Jasmine buries her face in her pillow until she hears Nephilim's door open. She shoots out of bed. The house groans beneath her panicked footfalls as she stumbles towards Nephilim's room. Velvet night masks the windows. At the door, puddles of strange, pulsing gelatin squash beneath Jasmine's toes. She knocks, trembling.

The knob jiggles. Nephilim's startled, luminous eye peers through the crack. Rivulets of cobwebby hair plaster its face. A towel wraps its head. Another soaking one encloses its body. Nephilim reeks of creek water. In the shadows, it’s pliable and half-made, a recently molted cicada that resembles Rebecca and other unknown things. It hides itself in the dark.

“Jasmine!” Nephilim's voice is mushroom-gill wet. “Are you alright?”

“I need you to answer two questions for me,” Jasmine says. “Right now.”

“Okay.”

“Do you love me?” Her throat closes. “Do you love Bex?”

Nephilim licks its lips. Its tongue smears its flesh. One of its waxy hands grips the door, conforming to the wood. A worried spark passes through its gaze. A will-o-wisp. Then, pliable as it is, Jasmine sees it steel itself.

“Yes,” Nephilim murmurs. “I do.”

“Then prove it.” Jasmine inhales. “Do something for me tomorrow.”

🦷🦷🦷

“I don't know if you truly want this.”

“Well, I do,” Jasmine says. “You promised on Bex's name that you'd do it. No backing out.”

Nephilim hovers outside the dining room, torn. Jasmine stifles her pity. Regardless of what Mom does, it cannot die. That’s all that matters. Pots clang in the kitchen. The open doorway makes shadows of them both.

“I’ll still see you after this,” Jasmine says. “I promise. I know where you live.”

“That's not what I'm worried about. Jasmine—”

“No more excuses,” Jasmine snaps. “No more hiding. You don't get to keep Rebecca from me all summer then object to a speck of truth!”

“Dinner time!” Mom calls.

Nephilim places a cool palm on Jasmine’s shoulder.

“Since this is what you want,” it says, “I'll do it. You’ve been warned.”

Jasmine shakes it off. Her gut roils. She stands at the apex of a cavern ceiling about to collapse. The thought of eating repulses her.

“Just go,” she says.

Nephilim drifts into the dining room. When Jasmine can bear it, she creeps in. Mom beams at her. Nephilim sits in front of the casserole pan, its plate already burdened with dinner.

“It’s nice to see you in the land of the living, Jasmine,” Mom says. She dishes out a lump of mashed potato. “Take a seat. Help yourself.”

After grace, dinner commences. Jasmine couldn’t pray and can’t eat. She mangles her casserole slice. Nephilim hunches over its plate. For twenty minutes, forks clatter against ceramic without interruption. As dessert nears, Mom clutters the quiet with forays into sentimentality—reminders of summers, masses, and school years past. She radiates uncertain joy.

“Summer hasn’t been bad,” she says. “Right?”

“It's been fine.” Jasmine glances at Nephilim. “You wanted to say something, right, Rebecca?”

“Not yet.”

Nephilim, paler than usual, cups a grapefruit spoon in its hand. A potter's field of abandoned plates litters the table. Mom coughs before drawing herself up.

“Girls, I know I’m imperfect, but I’m trying,” Mom says. “Your father said I was unequipped for this. I’m proving him wrong. I’m taking care of my children. I’m getting the best for both of you. As women…”

Nephilim drives the grapefruit spoon into its palm. Twists the spoon. Yanks it out. Drops its scoop. Gel falls from its hand, wetting the tablecloth in soft, fat plops. Meat riper than melting plum flesh oozes down the plate rim.

Mom turns ashen. She stares. Jasmine cannot breathe.

“I see the two of you are talking again,” Mom says, finally. “I’m happy. Rebecca, keep taking care of your sister.”

Nephilim, eyes downcast, shovels its flesh into its mouth. Mom knew. Mom knows, but she prefers that over Jasmine’s harsh, wild, gay sister. She traded Rebecca for a comfortable monster. Even if the church would disapprove she must see Nephilim as a blessing. 

A daughter of something else.

Jasmine sweeps her plate off the table. Broken porcelain showers the floor. Mom whimpers as Jasmine tears out of the house.

🦷🦷🦷

At dusk, red drips from the sky, turning the gravestones into bloodied teeth. The cave becomes an entrance to another world. Scarlet water and cricketsong trickle into its depths.

Nephilim catches Jasmine's wrist before she can hurl another rock into the stream.

“She knew Bex was gone!” Jasmine cries. “She knew!”

“She traded Rebecca for a comfortable monster.”

“She wasn’t the only one,” the creature says.

Jasmine remembers the copy of Frankenstein moldering beneath the bed.

“Rebecca left me,” she says.

“She left us,” Nephilim says, pained. “She didn’t want you to know. She asked me to take care of you and your mother. I loved her too much to say no.”

“Bex left me with a monster,” Jasmine says, thinking of her fractured family, thinking of the cityscape Rebecca must live in now, thinking of Horse Cave and everything she’s failed to be.

Nephilim embraces her. Jasmine sinks into its gooey angles. As it frets, its skin peels. It strokes Jasmine’s hair.

“There is no monster,” Nephilim soothes. “Only me.”

Jasmine sobs.

🍑✝️