The phone will ring.
It will be a Japanese woman somewhere between twenty and thirty. She will sound kind, worried and distant but kind. You will try to be polite though your vocabulary is lacking. She will smile though you obviously can not see it. She will smile, you know, because the brightness of it is in her voice.
'A house?', you'll say surprised because you'd thought all lost. A house with excellent rent and a better asking price. A house with a yard and a fence. A house big enough for you and your dreams to occupy. She will tell you what you want to hear so badly you're willing to damn yourself and never mind your puritan heritage.
Molly's eyes are big when you tell her. Bigger then her moon belly over her stick-like legs. Bigger then the single bleeding black moon she calls an eye on the onion-skin thin sheet of paper. Those eyes are a blue as emptier then an Arizona sky since the children died. Are suppose to be anyway but they're full of crawling things now and you- you can feel a puritan's claws scratching at your throat.
"We need a house" But you're lying. An apartment will do, is better in the long run considering how tenuous your company's holdings are here. She nods even through her face is pinched clinging to the yawning pits of her knowing eyes. "It's a steal." And your Midwestern training doesn't trust it a bit. "It'll be great for us." Yet her glowing eyes are clear enough to see your lies in.
You'll move in. It'll be as spacious as a mausoleum. There are no close neighbors and the ones you have might as well be wearing masks. Your middle school teacher had a snake she fed baby mice to. The way they watch makes you feel small and pink and naked. 'Foreigner. Stupid foreigner.' You write them off as xenophobic and try not to listen to the sounds at night.
You wake with scratches across your chest and nail trails down your back. You wake studying what looks like pink frosting smeared across your pelvis, dick, and upper thighs. Fur rubbing against your legs and a child's cold fingers play across your face. Some days you see Molly's head bent over the skin-thick paper and you wonder why her hair isn't black. Sometimes she looks at you and you can't even tell it's not her face.
Your boss dies and you are handed the reigns. Molly no longer says anything. You never noticed her hair was threaded through with black strains larger everyday. The business prospers and the neighborhood children stand in a line before your house singing dreary rhymes, something about 'four' or rather shi - 'die' Xenophobic, yes? And yet the scratches are healing and the dreams…. God so pale her sex a vise.
You'll lose weight and color. You'll lose track of time. You'll lose your life and your mind. You drowned Molly in the tub because she deserved it, because she had to be saved, because you couldn't stand the guilt. Her belly continued to pulse even afterwards. The cat that clawed it's way out wasn't much of a surprise. The infant's hand in it's mouth was. You won't remember violating her corpse. Repeatedly. You enjoyed it.
You'll die. Alone but for the ghosts. The Ghost - Her and she's still polite as she extends her thorn-covered tongue down your swelling throat. 'You' is what you'll think damning yourself for a fool. You'll still fuck her. As she rips you apart a praying mantis and you her single-minded beau, you'll still be smiling 'cause it's a fucking steal.
The phone will ring.
It's ringing now.