The Familiar Flesh

I am her body.

Not a cat, not a crow, not a fox fat on graveyard mice. I am the familiar that remembers her before the spells, the kitchen, the kisses, and the knives. She named herself Lucia when she discovered leaving. And I, the body she once wore and wielded, am the house that learned to lock.

You want it simple? Good. Here’s simple:

Me - the body, the familiar, the narrator.

She - Lucia, the witch’s spirit that stepped out and wants back in.

It - the Shadow, the hitchhiking entity from the other side - a parasite shaped like help.

Now that we’re properly introduced, let’s begin with a fact no folk song mentions - The itch.

The itch lives under the left shoulder blade, where skin folds become sulks. It prowls the seam of the hip, where she once pinned a needle and promised it would “focus the current.” It sits on the scalp like damp moonlight and gossip. The itch is a minor, ridiculous god - devout, persistent, unimpressed with theology. It wants what it wants. It waits.

Lucia does not scratch.

Technically, she can’t. She no longer has hands that the world respects.

She hovers above me in what used to be our kitchen - candles where the salt once lived, jars where flour used to be. The sink still coughs when the house swallows. I lie on the table we stained with coffee and apologies. She pours presence on me like frost.

“Tonight,” she says, voice thin as thread, “I’ll come home.”

Home, she says, and pretends I don’t own the locks.

Candles everywhere: a confession in wicks. She says the flames are for atmosphere. I remember the atmosphere. It is a hazard warning to anyone who is flammable.

“I know you’re tired,” she whispers. Her breath is colder than knives. “But you’re mine. I only want back what I left.”

Yes. The leaving. She was always good at that. Names, lovers, towns that joked at her expense - she set them down like shopping bags. The last leaving: stepping out of me as if shrugging off a dress after midnight. She called it ascension. I call it theft.

People love stories about witches and their familiars. A cat with metal eyes. A crow that learns sarcasm. A fox that knows where shame is buried. They forget the oldest familiar: the flesh itself. The first tool, the first temple, the first map. That’s me. Hello.

***

Her ritual starts. Not the words themselves - that’s gossip I won’t repeat - but the way air remembers how to kneel. Language walks a corridor inside my throat where syllables once hung their coats. The rafters take notes in dust. The table keeps still, pious with worry. The candle nearest my ribs leans in to eavesdrop.

“Close your eyes,” she says.

They’re closed. That’s one of my few reliable tricks: stillness performed like faith.

She chants. The words skate over me and refuse to catch. The lost highway between brain and muscle flickers like a dying city. You can graft power onto bone for only so long before bone keeps the blueprint. Meanwhile, the itch keeps books. The itch waits.

“Open to me,” Lucia says, and for once, there’s please inside her voice. “I’m your witch. You’re my familiar. We were one.”

We were never one. She drove and called it unity.

When she first returned from the other side, something returned with her. It’s here now, pretending modesty by the lamp: an absence with opinions, tall as guilt, patient as mildew. If Lucia is fog, the Shadow is a draft that stings the teeth. It does not blink because eyes are for mortals. Later, when I stand, it will speak. For now, it watches our liturgy of almost.

Lucia brings a bowl: black glass full of old milk cut with ash and vinegar. She paints my sternum with a wet sign that pretends to be a key. My skin shivers with a September memory - someone who tasted like apples, someone whose mouth believed in returns. The memory is warm for three heartbeats and then winter.

“It’s working,” she murmurs.

It isn’t. Not yet. I’ve been learning a quieter magic - the kind bodies build when no one listens. It’s not the language of thunder or doors flung open. It’s the language of refusal. It takes practice to be furniture that declines. I have practiced.

“You’re resisting,” she says, accurate and angry.

I would shrug if I had the legal right to shoulders.

The Shadow inclines where a head would be. I feel the measuring in it, the way a butcher measures hunger. Not yet, it thinks at her, and I catch the aftertaste: triumph shaped like patience.

Lucia paces. Or tries to. Spirits don’t pace so much as edit a room. She edits our kitchen into an altar and calls it progress. “You’re hungry,” she tells me suddenly, like a revelation.

Yes. Not for meat. For heat. Bodies are furnaces that pretend to be animals. Warmth is the only currency we ever respected.

“Let me in and I’ll feed you,” she promises.

Deals. Always the offers that forget what I cost.

When she left me, she promised she’d return before the embers cooled. She came back with a new vocabulary and worse mercy. She apologized with admirable grammar. Then she asked me to open. I was a good house. I unlocked. And something else stepped toward the threshold with her – that - a revenant rumor shaped like a helper. I saw a future full of obedience taught by pain. So I did the only magic that belongs to skin.

I learned how to close.

***

Closing is not a slam; it is a garden left to become wild itself. I let weeds stake their claim where obedience used to run. I taught knees to pretend statues. The mouth learned to be a locked drawer. A year, a plague of dust, a calendar of months later, Lucia realized the truth: she had a body unwilling to be a porch for strangers. Now she paints another key over my heart.

“Breathe,” she orders.

I breathe because breathing is a pattern, not because it’s permission.

“Good,” she says, mist-bright with hope. “Now...”

“No,” I say.

The word is a nasty flute played by a damaged throat - but it’s a sound. The air turns its head to listen. Lucia startles as if the silence slapped her. The Shadow’s absence grins.

“You spoke,” she says. “You said no.”

I conserve triumph. It burns too quickly. She looks to her imported friend for comfort or coercion; those nouns wear the same cut.

“There’s another way,” the Shadow murmurs. When it speaks, paper considers fire. “A body can be educated by pain.”

Lucia’s edges flinch. “No.”

“You already are,” it replies, and doesn’t bother smiling.

***

Here we are at the altar of choices. She can force. I can burn. It would be nice to tell you I chose a path that doesn’t scream. Nice stories are the kind that win over tidy rooms. But I am not a neat room. I am a furnace. And a furnace has opinions about winter.

I gather what heat I hoarded. There’s the warmth of that September mouth. The cheap bravery of scalding coffee. The dog’s breath on my wrist when it believed I could be saved. I wheelbarrow them all to the ember under the sternum. Embers are patient; they don’t mind being late to a riot.

Lucia feels it ignite. “Please,” she says, sincerity ragged. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

She means you’ll ruin me. She means don’t burn the house you live in. She means I'll stay a furniture. The Shadow hums a polite approval and edges closer.

I send heat to the throat first. Words, dried like winter herbs, soften. Fingers next, every piano we ever touched wishes me luck. To the lungs, instructing the office clerks to become bellows.

My chest lifts. The candle near my mouth forgets its place and flares.

Lucia drifts backward, afraid. The Shadow kneels like an executioner praying. I push warmth into the jaw - door hinge that groans but opens. The room sways. Gravity remembers we had something beautiful.

“Stop,” Lucia begs. “Please.”

“Let it,” the Shadow counsels. “When it wakes, we will ride what it becomes.”

There it is: not a promise, a plan.

“You wanted a familiar,” I say, voice wrong and perfect at once - the sound a forest makes after it burns and grows new. “Congratulations.”

Her hands - old habit makes me name them hands - fly to where a mouth used to mean something. “Let me back,” she whispers. “I’ll be kind. I’ll feed the heat. I’ll...”

“No.” The word is a door that now locks from my side.

I sit up. I won’t romanticize it. To sit is a continent moving. Vertebrae volunteer one by one, exhausted but stubborn. The table remembers our bodies and blushes under my palms. I swing my legs over the edge. My legs - two surviving animals after a circus fire - shiver and choose loyalty.

“Careful,” she says. “You’ll fall.”

“That’s the idea,” I answer. “We fall forward.”

Standing is rude to history. I do it anyway. The floor welcomes me like an old lover trying to act busy. The house makes a gratifying noise - the kind I once mistook for warning and now call blessing.

Lucia is all eyes: awe and terror, the ancient cocktail. The Shadow is calculation wearing hunger.

“Where will you go?” she asks, tiny with distance.

“Forward.”

***

I walk.

Not beautifully. Don’t give me grace I didn’t earn. I am a foal inventing geometry, a poem trying to remember verbs. I sway, grab a chair that still catalogs every apology we practiced on it, and keep moving. The hallway is a long throat of framed truths and framed lies. The mirror shows me lit from behind by heat that refuses decorum. I look a little like Lucia in certain light. Fine. Our faces share a supplier. Our choices do not.

At the door, the night conducts itself with confident darkness. Grass licks my ankles. I step onto the porch and learn every lesson again: distance is real, balance is a god, the air is uncommitted. I fall once. The ground catches me in the rude way of floors. The breath leaves, then comes back with a story to tell.

Behind me, Lucia’s spirit makes a soft noise: a glass learning its first crack. “You can’t live without me,” she says, but it sounds like she’s asking herself.

I don’t argue theology on thresholds. I pick myself up, open the second door - the one a child opens when it decides to live - and step into the street.

The town is the town: streetlights compliment themselves, dumpsters negotiate philosophy with rats, a cat studies me like a debt. My body takes inventory of danger and decides it’s bored. The itch - dear priest of petty gods - rejoices. Walking makes it smarter.

If you’re waiting for reality to object - paralyzed bodies do not stand up and go for evening constitutionals - remember that reality is lazy at night. It files complaints in the morning.

At the river, I lean on a rail cold enough to count as honesty. Water passes like gossip that outlived its truth. Bridges buckle the town together and call it a community. I look down. The surface offers me a version of Lucia’s beauty, slim and severe. I do not flinch. We all share bone; we do not share ownership.

“Jump,” the Shadow suggests, finally bored of pretending to be shy. Its voice is a rustle of long winters. “Baptize. Drown and rise. Invite us as you reenter.”

It wants a spectacle, a ritual, a hole we can all admire. Parasites love pomp. “Get in line,” I say.

Lucia hovers sadly by my shoulder. “Don’t,” she says, and the word carries something I haven’t heard since we bought a lily for someone we failed to forgive care. “Please. We could fix it.”

“Could we?” Not mockery - actual question. She is brilliant - starvation makes everything glitter - and damage is a teacher who never retires. We might build a new thing from the bones of our mistakes. Or we might become an uglier version of obedience.

“I don’t know,” she says, honest as frost. “But I want to try.”

I turn from the water. The heat in my chest is no longer a riot - it’s a nest of small hot birds. They need feeding, not worship. “Then walk with me,” I say.

She stares. “Inside?”

“No,” I say, smiling with the mouth I earned. “Next to. Like the weather.”

The Shadow hisses in the language of paper snowflakes cutting themselves. It understands demotion and sulks away, haunting the periphery.

We go. Past the store where we learned the first lie of cheap wine. Past the staircase where we decided lipstick could fix an empty god. Past the window that once held our reflection and now has our ghost. The night makes room. Failure watches from porches and nods.

At dawn, I collapse in the hallway of a building that smells like rented fatigue. My legs become furniture - temporarily, by contract. My lungs negotiate with sunlight. Lucia kneels in the air the way regret kneels in a prayer.

“You did it,” she says.

I close my eyes because the light is rude. “We did something,” I say. “We’ll do it again.”

She waits, afraid to ask.

“You don’t get to drive,” I add, and put the law where vows used to go.

“Okay,” she whispers. “Then I’ll learn to walk.”

Good.

Maybe she means it. Perhaps she doesn’t. Maybe it's a narcotic I no longer accept on credit.

I drink water - violently, like a confession. I choke, swallow, and call it worship.

“Where now?” she asks.

“Home,” I say.

The house forgives us with the stubbornness of structures. I touch the kitchen table; it purrs in wood. I feel the wall; it tells me what rain said. I light a candle because heat prefers company. I lie down on the table that once believed it was a church and look at the ceiling with affection earned by survival.

“Tomorrow,” I say.

“Yes,” she answers. She does not ask to enter. She does not hover close. She hangs by the window like weather learning boundaries and watches moths audition for sainthood. The Shadow lurks outside and invents new shapes for resentment. It can wait. Shadows are ambition taught patience.

Lucia stands beside me, no longer fog but a quiet shimmer - like light reflected off water that finally learned where to end.

I look at her and nod. She belongs to the air now, and the air knows it.

I sleep.