Underneath a Backwards Moon

They cracked my skull to see if dreams could rot. That was the idea, at least, when the man in green shoes paid a priest in Blitar to bless his knife and stick it into my temple. What spilled wasn’t blood. It was a parade. Tiny ones. Banging drums made from leftover fingernails and bits of wire. My mother said I was born on a Tuesday, which in Javanese myth means I’d bring fire to whoever kissed me too long. She wasn’t wrong, only she didn’t know the fire was a mouth, and it had opinions.

×

I met Eyo on a bus that reeked of goat meat and cheap gasoline. He had seven fingers on each hand, all painted a different color like an old carousel. His voice was syrupy, like he’d eaten too many church songs. We shared a bottle of anggur merah and a fried bat, and by the time we reached Kediri, he’d told me that his uncle could turn men into animals—only he forgot how to reverse it. I didn’t believe him then. I do now.

The first time Eyo undressed me, he laughed when he saw my bones had tattoos. “Who wrote on you?” he asked, tracing the symbols with a finger that ended in a fang. “Nobody. I was born already ruined,” I said. He kissed the part of me where my ribs showed like a broken cage, and something inside me screamed. Not in pain. In memory.

×

Blitar was full of people pretending not to believe. A woman with two mouths sold corn by the mosque. A boy with holes for eyes danced for coins at the railway. The priests were the worst—they stared too long at your neck, always imagining where to make the cut. Eyo said the city was cursed because someone once buried a cow alive and forgot to say sorry. He might’ve been right. At night, the drains hummed like monks, and sometimes the earth moved like it had to pee.

×

We didn’t call it love. We called it borrowing. I borrowed his hunger, he borrowed my sleep. He taught me how to boil a heart without burning it. I showed him where to find the people no one would miss. Our hands got used to it—the taking, the making. Sex became more of a ritual than a desire. We marked the walls with names. Some of them were ours.

But I didn’t mean to kill him.

He was laughing when I slit him open, thinking it was just another game. Blood came out in shapes. I saw his mother’s face in one, screaming. He forgave me with his eyes, and that ruined me more than any of the deaths we shared.

I kept his bones in a pouch made from my own skin. I wear it when I go dancing in Trunojoyo, where the girls still believe in curses and the boys still think witches are pretty.

×

Sometimes I hear him in my dreams. Not a voice. A tickle. Like ants crawling across my lower back. He says he’s waiting. Not in hell. But in a market that only opens when the moon is backwards. He says I should come, bring salt and jasmine, and the rest of the names we never got to carve.

I think I will.
But not yet.

There’s still one more priest I need to unmake.
And a boy with no shadow who says he remembers my tongue.

And I promised him
a story.