The Hanged Woman

by Blair Nishkian

Eva Thorne had been pronounced well by multiple psychotherapists a decade before. But old habits had a way of dying hard. She knew exactly which pocket of her purse her knife was in, and which one the mace was in, and she knew exactly how she’d use either one if she needed to.

“Honey,” said her wife, with a squeeze to the arm, “come back to me, please.”

The cold wind coming off the northern Scottish sea whisked through Eva’s hair and woke up her skin. She smelled rain and brine. The sun was setting, purple and orange over the ocean, and down the hill long fairy lights glimmered across cobblestone streets made for walking from tavern to tavern, cafe to cafe.

“Hey!” Her wife shook her.

“Sorry. Sorry.”

Her wife gave her a look like: here we go again.

“Let’s get dinner. You told me they have good Chinese food around here.”

“It’s not going to be the kind you grew up with, my love.”

1. “I know that, I just want noodles—hot noodles. Please.”

To their surprise, they didn’t just find a Chinese place, but a proper Chinese hotpot restaurant. The interior was dark walls and low lights, with gleaming black tables around which families were gathered to cook their food in cauldrons of boiling broth.

It’d be a great place in which to settle, get stuffed, get drunk, and play footsie, so that’s what they did. The owners, Luna discovered, were Chinese diaspora and so she ordered in her native Mandarin. Over the divided pot of broth, spicy on one side, mild mushroom on the other, Eva and Luna talked about their day, tourists in the tourist-y part of Inverness, walking up and down stony streets, holding hands, taking photos.

It wasn’t until about half an hour into their meal that Eva started staring out the window again, watching the sun drown its last light into the ocean with a faraway look in her eyes.

“Baby,” Luna said. “Just order the alcohol. We’re on vacation.”

But Eva had been sober six months. It wasn’t that she had a tendency to go off the rails…at least not since her suicidal thirties. But she always liked it when she was able to quit for a long period. Still, there was warm sake on the menu.

“Alright,” she said and when it arrived, a whole carafe just for Eva, it was the perfect shot of

warm sour-sweetness she remembered.

Like drinking an angel’s bathwater, she’d said in grad school, to much laughter from her peers. She was really on a roll back then. She had also been drunk every night, pushing the boundaries of very intelligent women who told her to fuck off, and having auditory hallucinations when she sat still and quiet for too long.

“Baby,” said Luna, kicking Evan in the shin. “You’re doing it again.”

Eva knew how much Luna hated it when she got faraway and quiet. She didn’t do it on purpose. Usually it was because she was thinking about her writing. In rare cases, it was rumination.

“Sorry,” said Eva, as she took another shot of sake and dipped some of her gelatinous duck’s blood into a dish of sesame paste and garlic. “Just thinking about the past a lot tonight, I don’t know why.”

But it was nice to get drunk. While drunk, she didn’t think about stabbing anyone to protect herself or her wife. But she did, still, glance now and then toward the exits. Just in case.

They paid their bill and left the warmth of savory steam for the cold mist of a north Scotland night. They walked downhill toward their hotel and Eva fawned over Luna, kissing her cheek, squeezing her hand. It was ten o’clock and way past their bedtime as settled women. But whether it was the booze or some other, deeper feeling, the long shadows of a nearby walking trail called to Eva.

“We should take the shortcut through the hiking paths,” said Eva, tugging on Luna’s arm toward the winding, warmly-lit path that led up into woodlands.

“No.” Luna pulled back. “We can do it in the morning.”

Eva stared into the shadows. She wasn’t smiling anymore.

Luna pulled on Eva’s arm. “I want you to come back to me.”

Eva saw the shadows in the trees moving independently of the trees themselves. She saw long fingers and round eyes. She knew that Luna didn’t see any such thing. It was strange because Eva had been well for the better part of fifteen years; this wasn’t supposed to happen anymore. This was the kind of thing Eva saw when she was six and seeing faces in the bedroom walls, or watching lights come down from the moon.

Luna was speaking but it was so far away. Eva felt the tugging and went along with it. That was always the best thing to do—follow your love. Follow your Luna. Follow your anchor.

“Did you hear me?” Luna shook Eva’s arm.

“...no, I’m sorry honey.”

Luna didn’t look at Eva when she said, “Are we safe?”

Eva knew the knife and mace in her purse could protect them from stray men and beasts of flesh and blood, but not the Emptiness. Never the Emptiness. The Emptiness liked violence. But now she had a love to protect and a life to live. There was too much to lose.

“We’re safe,” Eva said. “We’re alright. Just a little tired, I think.”

They both knew it was a kind lie. They didn’t walk through the woods, but all along the stroll home, the woods walked next to them, in the form of curving shadows along the corners of Eva’s vision, and the anxiety they produced in her manifested as a silence that Luna felt. Luna hated that silence more than anything in her otherwise warm world.

Their hotel room was dark wood and white linens. They were on the fifth story, with a balcony and sheer curtains that waved in the cool wind on sunny afternoons. But this was a grey, wicked Highland morning, and Eva was woken up by the cold on her cheeks. She snugged the quilt up and rolled over to reach for her wife. Her hands found cold, empty sheets. Her wife was gone. She was never gone. She was always there, every morning, ready to roll over and snuggle, face-in-neck, for at least half an hour.

Eva fought to sit up in the cold. Her lower back ached, her wrists were sore, but this was a normal morning for a woman turned fifty, even one who lived on vegetable soup and fresh air, like her. What wasn’t normal was the balcony door open to the rain spattering outside, or the absence of the one person in the world who really loved her.

Eva stood up and walked quickly across the room to shut the balcony doors. She found the thermostat and kicked it on maximum. As hot air poured into the room, she pulled on thick socks, boots, and her favorite grey sweater. She slung her strap-bag across her chest and checked the bathroom just in case her wife was there. She wasn’t. The next place to check would be the lobby cafe, and if she wasn’t there, it was time to give her a call. Eva’s typically authoritative inner voice was still there, but it lacked its usual gravitas. It just trickled into her brain, murmuring, “She’s probably out for a walk. She’s done that a few times in our life.”

“And this is a foreign country and she’s eighty pounds lighter than you and very pretty and doesn’t have her gun,” said another, stronger voice.

“Worse still,” said a third voice, “you’re losing your mind.”

“Shut the fuck up,” she muttered under her breath, as she closed the door to her room.

“Beg pardon?”

It was a man’s voice, right nearby. A hapless bystander in a wool robe with a bucket of ice in hand. He had apparently witnessed Eva muttering to herself. His eyes seemed concerned, but they also could have been surly and looking for conflict. Eva refused to engage in speculation on the matter, because her long-dead father had always said, “Never enter a room with a preconceived notion.”

Eva smiled. “Not you, sorry,” she tapped the side of her head and raised her eyebrows for emphasis. “The voices in my head.”

The man, who was six inches taller than her, with red-brown hair, a rifle-stock jaw, and a full beard, gave her the side-eye. Then he laughed and wagged his finger at her. “American?”

“Sir, yes sir, land of the free, home of the depraved.”

“Love you loonies. Carry on, ma’am.”

“Will do. Hey, have you seen this woman recently?” Eva pulled out her phone and showed him the picture of Luna on her lock-screen.

“Nope. Why, you hooking me up?”

“No, brother, that’d be my wife.”

“Damn, well done, ma’am. But sorry, haven’t seen her.”

Eva skipped the elevator and jogged down the stairwell toward the lobby. Scenes flashed in her mind. Her wife broken on cement in a pool of blood, having jumped from their window in the night to kill herself just to escape Eva. Police, suspecting her of murder, locking her up forever. She would lose everything all at once.

“Shut the fuck up, pleeeeeeeease~” she sang as she pushed through the door at the bottom of the stairwell, into the lobby of the hotel, where a significant portion of her subconscious expected to see cops questioning traumatized coffee-drinkers and receptionists. What she saw instead was a bustling hotel lobby with oak floors, an attached pub and cafe, peaceful tourists and locals enjoying their morning routine, and the bright smile of Siobhan, the freckled concierge with the shaved head and rainbow earrings from days prior.

“Eva!” Siobhan beckoned her over. “Good morning!”

“Good morning,” said Eva, sidling up to the counter. “Have you seen my wife this morning?”

Siobhan pointed, and sure enough, there was Luna sitting in the corner of a little booth, drinking from a big mug, picking at a croissant, and staring at her phone.

“That’s one mystery solved,” Eva said. “She scared the shit out of me this morning, you know.”

“You love her so much,” Eva heard Siobhan say as she left the desk. “It’s adorable.”

Luna looked up to see her and put down her phone. She smiled, like all was well.

Eva leaned in to kiss her wife’s cheek. “I was scared something happened to you,” she said.

“Honey, please. I told you yesterday I wanted to paint in the morning,” Luna said. Indeed, Eva noticed now, there was her linen artist’s tote bag on the floor next to her feet.

“Did you get anything done?” Eva asked.

“A little,” said Luna.

“Can I see it?”

“It’s not done.”

Eva leaned back and looked out the window over Luna’s head. The people outside were a busy blur she didn’t have the attention span for—Luna was her world right now. She nosed into her wife’s scalp and smelled that familiar smell, the smell of vague shampoo and woman. Then she got up, went to the bar, and got herself a fine good morning in the form of a foamy, creamy, mocha coffee with two shots of espresso and as many shots of whiskey. With foam on her lips, she settled in for a quiet morning sitting across from her wife.

Luna used her calligraphy brushes and a dish of black ink to work on a project Eva couldn’t see, the portable easel propped up as a barrier between them. So Eva cracked open a spiral notebook full of smudges, aimless poems, flash fiction, and bite marks.

Eva’s mind wandered entirely elsewhere, and neither of them spoke for two hours. Eventually, Eva realized the pages of her notebook had filled with scrawling spirals, vine shapes, faces with scratched-out eyes, and her own name written over and over with gashing strokes. It was the kind of thing she hadn’t done since she was in her twenties and early thirties. She snapped the book shut.

“I want to go to the countryside today,” said Eva. “Maybe take a walk and see that old cairn in the hills.”

“A wonderful idea, darling,” Luna said.

Eva drained the last cold gulp of boozy coffee and cream from her mug, then stretched out over the table to try to catch a peek of her wife’s work. But Luna grabbed the easel and turned it away. “It’s not finished,” she said.

Eva held up her hands in surrender. “Can you tell me about it?” she asked.

“It’s special,” said Luna, her long fingers rapping on the sides of the easel. “And just for you. But I want it to be a surprise.”

Eva beamed. It was rare that her wife made something just for her. But there was something off about the air again. She watched her wife’s fingers rap-rap-rap on the edges of the easel. And she saw, quite clearly, that her wife’s right hand had six instead of five fingers. Just as soon as Eva noticed, Luna drew her hands back into her lap and out of sight under the table.

Eva felt her stomach tumble. That pale, sweaty-but-dry feeling prickled all over her neck and face. She couldn’t look at her wife’s sparkling brown eyes anymore. “Honey, I need to use the bathroom,” Eva said, as she slipped out of the booth.

Luna’s smile was stuck in the corner of Eva’s vision as she power-walked to the ladies’ room and burst through the door. Eva slapped her notepad down on the sink counter and leaned on her palms. She turned on the cold water and splashed her face, but it didn’t stop the thoughts in her head.

She dried her hands. This was a small, cozy bathroom with a granite floor and a wooden stall divider. A fat candle flickered on the sink next to the faucet and a small shutter was open above the stall. Eva thought about whether or not she could fit through that shutter if she had to escape.

“You know,” said a woman’s voice from the stall. Eva hadn’t realized someone else was in there with her.

“She’s an imposter, you know,” the woman said.

Eva picked up her notepad.

“Excuse me?”

“That isn’t your wife. It’s the bad faeries fucking with you, dude.”

“Jesus Christ, I’m hallucinating.”

“Is that what they keep telling you, Eva?”

Eva put her hands on the stall door. She couldn’t see over the top and there were no large seams to peek through. She pressed her hands against the door and found it unlocked but hesitated to open it all the way. She didn’t know what she was going to see.

Finally, she took in a breath, held it, and pushed open the door. Inside the stall was a clean toilet and nothing else. She exhaled. Then she saw, perched above the toilet in the open vent to the street outside, a tiny bird. It was a robin, orange-chested.

The bird cocked its head at Eva. Eva cocked her head at the bird.

“Bad faeries,” the little bird said, in the form of an intrusive thought in Eva’s brain. “It’s the bad faeries. You have to play their game, you’re in too deep now.”

Eva opened her notebook to a random page. Sure enough, among scrawled glyphs, spirals, doodled gashes, there was the image of a sunken-eyed, lanky faerie with a long smile hunched over in a dark room. She knew these creatures well. In a way, she missed them.

“They love you dearly, Eva. They miss you. They’ll keep you if you’re not careful.”

“Maybe,” Eva whispered, “that’s what I want.”

The door to the bathroom swung open. Warmth, human voices, light poured in. A woman started at the sight of Eva and scolded her for not locking the door. Eva apologized, pushed past her and went back to her table to find it empty.

Eva went back to Siobhan, the concierge.

“She’s outside in your car,” Siobhan said. “Don’t keep Them waiting.”

“Okay, thanks. By the way, my wife’s not nonbinary.”

“Oh, I said ‘them’? My tongue must have slipped. Or maybe I meant something else entirely. You know, like the plural use of the word.”

“And what would you have been talking about if you had used it that way?”

Siobhan bounced some of her copper curls over her shoulder. She wrinkled her nose like a good witch casting a spell. “Maybe the faeries. They like you.”

Eva laughed and smacked her notepad on the counter, maybe harder than she intended, because a few nearby tourists started like woodland deer. One even wrapped arms around their children. Siobhan was still smiling at Eva, though, because Siobhan understood Eva and accepted her. She knew.

“You should get going,” said Siobhan. “And if you’re going to the cairns, mind the signs!”

“Of course, the signs,” Eva said. “Okay, I’m off! Wouldn’t want to keep ‘Them’ waiting.”

And right there out the front door was Luna in the driver’s seat of their rented electric car, waving and blowing kisses. The sweetness of her, at a distance, almost fooled Eva, but Eva knew she was dealing with bad faeries and she had to go along. She hesitated a moment at the car door, and for the first time in the twenty-seven years since he died, she heard her father’s voice.

“Into the rift,” he used to say about his knock-down drag-out rounds with psychosis. “You have to go into the rift. Play along, keep it together, because the audience is the people you care about, and if you’re scared, they’re scared.”

Eva opened the door, kissed her wife on the mouth, and didn’t look at her fingers. She couldn’t, anyway, because now Luna was wearing fuzzy mittens. Eva laughed a little; of course she was wearing mittens to hide the truth.

Luna put on some music, art-pop and lo-fi dreamscapes. Eva leaned her head back. The day would be what it was fated to be; whether it ended in a romantic sunset, blood, tears, or all of the above. For now, Eva was just happy to be along for the ride.

But then like a fool remembering forgotten keys, Eva recalled something. Siobhan had a shaved head, not long red curls. Eva looked back out the passenger window, and saw Siobhan behind the glass of the hotel lobby, doing her banal routines and smiling at everyone. Her head was shaved, and Eva wasn’t sure who or what she’d been talking to before. A little rotten seed of fear formed in the pit of her stomach.

The trip to the woods was demented. Though it was bright midday, the light had a sickly, flickering quality, like the feeling after rubbing your eyes too hard. Eva listened to the music to keep her somewhat tethered to reality. She and her wife, if indeed it was her wife, didn’t speak. Eva wanted so much to sleep, but she was afraid of what would happen if she slept. She was afraid she’d crash the car—but wasn’t someone else driving?

“I think I’m losing it,” she said.

Luna smiled but kept her eyes on the road. “It’s okay. You can lose it a little bit. Why don’t you talk to me about it?”

“I feel like I’m not really me and you’re not really you and I know that’s not true. I know when things aren’t real but the scary thing is when I go along with them anyway, and the scarier thing is wondering who’s putting these unreal things here.”

“No, no one’s putting them there, my love,” Luna said. “It’s all you.”

Deep in the scrolling woodlands, as they drove and drove, Eva saw a standing stone, the type you’d find in a henge. It wore a beard of moss and atop it sat a pale, faceless, and slender figure with no eyes.

Luna was speaking but her voice felt so far away. They took a turn, down a woodland trail barely big enough for the car. They stopped, out of sight of the road, where the trail tightened into a wet, overgrown path that disappeared into fog and trees. There were no signs, no tourist information boards, no one else around. It seemed wrong, where they were.

Luna opened the driver’s side door.

“Wait,” said Eva. “Where are we?”

“Someplace you can find old things, like you wanted to.”

“I don’t know if I want it anymore.”

“Well, you came all this way. Go down the trail, honey—you’ll find the cairns as soon as you lose your way and can’t see me or the car anymore.”

Eva stared out into the mist. She was sure she could make out the shadowed mounds of great cairns in the beyond, but she hesitated at the broken fence where the trail began. “You’ll wait here for me? What if I don’t come back?”

“You will. Strong-heart wife, that’s you.”

Eva looked back into the mist. She felt hot and cold. She saw the shadows of the cairns loom; she saw spindly shapes between them. “Into the fucking rift, then,” she said, as she stepped over the broken fence and walked into the fog with her bag, her knife, and all the courage she could muster.

The walk felt long. The forest was silent; there was no wind rustling the trees, no light shining down between boughs. Not a bird, not a crackling leaf, only the odd sticks or rotten logs crunching beneath Eva’s boots.

The car had long since disappeared behind her, and there was no longer a trail, or if there was, it was so faint that she was following it by instinct. She’d grown up in woods like these, and the one comfort she had was knowing that unlike the foothills of her native California, the cold woods of Scotland weren’t lousy with rattlesnakes.

“That was a fear you always had,” said a woman’s voice in her head that sounded like the therapist she’d had in her twenties. “Snakes, always snakes. I think over the course of ten years, you complained about dreaming of snakes maybe forty times.”

“You used to write about them all the time, too,” said the voice of her poetry professor, the type of voice that sounds like it has a beard.

“My dad used to tell me stories,” said Eva, “about mean-ass snakes hiding under cars and just waiting to strike ankles out of pure malice.”

“You always assume,” said so many voices, “that the world is going to hurt you.”

“It’s a pretty safe assumption, you motherfucking demons.”

The cairns were before her. They were great, grassy mounds of mud and stone, and oak saplings grew out of their tops. The stillness of the air ceased being dreadful and, all at once, became serene. She walked to one of the cairns and placed her hand over the stone; she let the silence take her in.

“Have I been here before?” Eva asked the stones. They were cold. The moss dripped over her fingers. It all seemed to hum beneath her skin. But there were no visions, no voices, no answers. There was now inside her a deep feeling she rarely felt at all: shame.

“Ask better questions,” she muttered to herself. “Or don’t ask at all.”

Eva leaned on the cairn and pulled the knife from her bag. She stared at her reflection in it, saw the dark bags under her eyes. A wind blew through the woods, the trees sang like a waterfall. It was a sign, wasn’t it?

Eva stuck the knife into the ground beside the cairn.

“We’re always with you.”

“Always watching.”

“I know,” said Eva. “Because you are me. You’re a testament to the richness of my fucked-up imagination. I came here wanting to fight some undead Vikings or something, but all I found was anti-climax, and I’m glad for it.”

The ground groaned beneath her boots. A deep voice within the stones had her attention: “I could fight you, if you wish. Fight and fight until you die, that’s your choice, but I promise I’ll have more fun than you.”

Eva smiled. She planted the flat of her boot on the knife she’d stuck in the ground and drove it in deeper. “Let’s share something, before I go. Any advice for me, O faeries, for my adventures in the realm of Men and Women and Bank Statements?”

The voices fell into one chorus, and the sun shone bright and warm. The pixies danced above, and the wind gushed through the trees:

“The men and women can break your body, but not your oaths. You may feel cold and lost in the dark. Hold love close, question it not. In your soul still beats a heart.”

Eva’s shoulders loosened, tears rolled down her cheeks, and she felt something she could only describe as The Divine.

She then wandered back into the woods and became immediately lost.

After some hours, the sun set. Eva sat down to rest. She checked her phone and saw no bars, but the uploaded weather data indicated that overnight temperatures would be well under freezing. She had only her winter coat, no survival gear, no blade, no food, no water.

Eva walked more. The drop in temperature forced her to stick her hands in her pockets. She wished she’d kept her knife, but it was too late for that now.

It would be better to accept death, wouldn’t it? Poor Luna would be devastated, but she’d survive. Eva sat down beside a tree and stared out into the woods.

“Really?” A voice hissed next to her. “You’re just giving up?”

Eva felt it breathing on her neck. She saw its sticky, pale fingers in the corner of her vision. She saw greasy hair swaying from the back of a long, winding neck.

The surge of adrenaline sent Eva sprinting through the woods. She could hear the beast chuffing and huffing behind her, slithering over logs and around trees with far too many legs and fingers. Eva didn’t look back; she knew what she’d see. Empty black sockets and a grinning mouth full of human teeth. No, she didn’t want to see the faces in the walls or the dragons in the night, not the hybrids or the horrors, not the severed human cocks on rocks or the rituals in the woods at night, none of it, none of that madness, no, for to brush the divine was to risk the demonic and now she yearned so badly for the banality of taxes and a nine-to-five.

It was catching up to her. It would ravage her like it had so many artists before, chain her up and feed her burning plastic and make her write black bibles in Their honor, just like in her roaring twenties.

“No!” Eva screamed.

A car honked far away. Eva turned and ran toward it, and the thing behind her turned as well; it couldn’t be escaped but she would run anyways, until her heart gave out and her lungs burned to slag, she would run.

Eva vaulted over a broken fence. Headlights blinded her.

“Eva!” Luna screamed through tears. She stopped honking the horn through the window of the car and ran to Eva.

Eva pulled on Luna, tried dragging her back to the car. She heard the beast rushing through the woods behind. “It’s coming,” Eva coughed, “it’s coming, get in the car.”

The beast burst through the darkness and Eva screamed, threw herself between it and Luna. But the beast stopped short of her, planted its paws, and barked.

Eva cleared her eyes and saw a German Shepherd wearing a rescue vest. She heard car doors opening and shutting, men and women speaking in clipped voices about how they found her, and then Eva realized she was surrounded by police.

Eva trembled in Luna’s arms. “I’ve been missing all day, haven’t I?”

Luna rage-sobbed into Eva’s shoulder and smashed her fists into her chest. “I woke up and you were gone! What the fuck were you thinking?! Why did you scare me like that?” Eva knew her wife was furious because she was now swearing in Mandarin and calling Eva a stupid moss-brained dog baby.

“I’m sorry honey,” said Eva, “I thought…I thought you were with me.”

“You’re scaring the shit out of me right now, what the fuck do you mean you thought I was with you. I had to go to the police and they tracked the rental car, thank fucking god aaaaHHH!”

Even though her wife was cussing and hitting her, she was still holding onto her, still kissing her between sobs. Eva held onto Luna and sat on the hood of the car as an officer with a notepad approached. “Where’s the knife?”

Eva’s guts sank into her feet. “Pardon?”

“Someone said they saw you with a knife earlier.”

Eva could no longer remember if she’d actually stuck her knife in the ground. Her head was still a thunderstorm. She handed her bag to the waiting officer, who found no knife but nevertheless told them to report to the station tomorrow morning.

The next day was blissfully, rapturously banal. Eva signed citations, filled out paperwork, took questions about her history of mental illness, and held her wife’s hand. At last, back in the hotel room, Luna set up her wooden easel to make some ink work. Eva relaxed on the bed, happy to be bathed and warmed with someone who loved her nearby.

“Honey,” said Luna, standing with her sketchbook in hand. “Did you…did you do this?”

Eva glanced over. She smiled, because Luna was so pretty with the sunset behind her. “Do what?”

Luna stared at the sketchbook, transfixed. Eva sat up straighter. She remembered the six-fingered wife drawing a surprise days before. The wind rustled the curtain.

Eva saw a bird fly past, but she couldn’t tell what kind. Maybe a robin.

Luna turned the sketchbook around to show Eva. It was a stunning ink-brush picture, in Luna’s distinct minimalist style.

A long knife stuck into the earth between two burial cairns. Dragonflies flew overhead. Strange, twisted limbs framed the foreground.

There were words in simplified Chinese. Eva didn’t recognize half the characters.

“What’s it say?”

Luna recited like she was reading a scroll from the tomb of a forgotten queen:

“Only you can break your promises.”

Eva’s wife had five fingers on each hand. This was real.

“I didn’t do this,” Luna whispered. “You didn’t do this, you can’t…make my art, this is my art, what the fuck is this, honey, what the fuck?”

A robin flew into the room and landed on the edge of the bed. Luna startled and pressed back against the wall, but Eva just stared at it. She knew what was happening. Now, she was sober. Now, she had her wife.

Now, she couldn’t doubt Them.

The bird stared at them both. Thirty seconds passed before it flew out the window. “I’m not crazy,” whispered Eva, “I’m not crazy, Luna.”

“I know,” said Luna, slamming the window shut. She ran across the room to Eva. “I know, baby. Just don’t go running into the darkness without me ever again.”

“I promise I won’t.”

They kissed. They held one another. And when they made love, they did it with their whole hearts and savored every moment of clarity.

"I write darkness to draw attention to the light."

Blair Nishkian was born and raised in a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains. She grew up in a home built by the hands of her parents. Her father was an artist and philosopher, while her mother was a carpenter. She grew up in a subculture of aging civil rights activists and a tight-knit, small mountain community.
In her time, her experiences with debilitating mental illness in both herself, friends, and family members led her down the path of an artist. It has always been her dream to explore the depths of consciousness through fiction and thus cultivate understanding between human beings.

For two years, she was a preschool teacher in Zhengzhou, China. There, she spent time immersing herself in local culture and learning Mandarin—she also met her wife. The two now live in a small home in Washington state.
She has an MFA in fiction and has mentored directly under authors such as Caitlyn R. Kiernan, Ben Percy, Gayle Brandeis, and Alan Heathcock.