The Cost of Touching

Celia closed her fingers around the hand inside the salt membrane and pulled.

The hand was warm. That was the worst of it. Warmth meant there was someone to hurt.

The membrane stretched from the cellar wall in a clear, thick fold. Behind it, the figure’s arm followed her pull by less than an inch. A pale seam opened across the salt near the shoulder, and the figure’s mouth moved.

“Easy,” Mira said behind her. “Celia, stop.”

A stair creaked overhead. Brenda had gone up to watch the market entrance; the tide had left them only a short time in the basement. Celia set one boot against the wet stone floor for better purchase. The figure had moved when she spoke the address. The hand had answered with heat. One more careful pull might find where the membrane gave way.

A child ran through a kitchen with a wooden spoon in her fist.

The cellar vanished.

There was flour on the child’s tongue, gritty beneath the sweetness of stolen dough. Someone had left a blue bowl on the table. Rain tapped against a low window, and the child knew which floorboard to skip on her way to the back door. Her brother would be waiting beyond it with a paper boat. If she kept him waiting, he would put the boat in the gutter without her.

She had to get outside.

“Let go.” Mira’s voice came from a long way off.

The spoon slipped from the child’s hand. No. Celia’s hand was full of another hand, held fast by salt. The kitchen stayed where it was. The flour stayed on her tongue.

She tried to say the cellar address, the one written on the page. The number scattered. A wet finger brushed her palm from inside the membrane. The child’s brother called again, impatient now, using a name Celia could not quite catch.

The figure jerked toward her. Its shoulder pressed hard against the clear fold. A thread of cloudy fluid ran from the seam and down the wall.

“Celia, it’s drawing you in.” Mira was close enough now that her breath touched Celia’s ear. “Your left hand. Give it to me.”

Which hand was left? The one holding the spoon was empty. The other held a warm stranger. Celia looked down. Her own fingers had sunk into the wet salt up to the knuckles.

Mira caught her free wrist through the dry cuff of her coat. “We agreed. One count, then away.”

“I can get her out.” Celia’s voice sounded thin and high. She pulled again. The figure’s head tipped back. Its mouth opened, but no breath came through the fold.

“No. You can’t.”

Mira dragged Celia’s wrist toward her, but Celia’s other hand stayed buried. For an instant Mira’s bare fingertip touched the wet seam. She gave a sharp cry and snatched it back. Her grip on Celia loosened.

The child in the kitchen knew what waited outside. A gutter full of rain, a brother with muddy knees. Her mother would call them back before the bread was done. She could give the day up later. Not yet.

A strip of coarse cloth scraped across Celia’s wrist. Mira had wrapped her own hand in the dry canvas they had brought for handling pages. She pushed the cloth between Celia’s fingers and the salt, working one finger loose, then another. Celia fought her. The brother was still waiting. The kitchen door stood open.

“Say your name,” Mira said.

The name did not fit the kitchen.

Mira planted her foot against the wall. “Say it anyway.”

The canvas bit into Celia’s skin. Her fingers came free with a soft tearing sound. Mira hauled her back, and they fell against the cellar steps together. Above them, Brenda called down, “What broke?”

“Nothing. Keep the stair clear,” Mira answered. Her voice shook on clear.

The figure settled back into the fold. The seam in the membrane closed slowly. Its mouth shut. Celia waited for its chest to rise, though the thickness of the salt made the movement hard to judge. She started forward.

Mira put the dry canvas between them. “Don’t.”

“She isn’t breathing.”

“You weren’t either.”

Celia pressed her palm to her own breastbone. Air went in. The taste of dough remained. She looked at Mira, at the damp mark on the tip of her finger.

“Did it take you?”

“Only a touch. I’m here.” Mira kept the finger curled against her palm. “Can you tell me where you are?”

The kitchen had been more complete than the cellar. Celia could count the boards beneath the table and find the latch at the back door. Here, she could not recall which market stood overhead.

“Below a fish stall,” she said.

“That’ll do. Can you walk?”

Celia nodded. She stood, then reached for the wall and stopped with her hand in the air. Dry canvas. That was the limit. She used the wooden rail instead.

Brenda met them at the top of the stair with a covered lantern. “Your visit’s over. Water’s coming across the back floor.”

Celia looked down once more. The figure was still in place. Her attempt had left it no freer and, for a few breaths, less safe. She climbed before the rising water could force anyone else to touch the fold.

By evening the borrowed kitchen had faded at its edges. The spoon remained. So did the brother’s call, though she could no longer tell what name he had used.

They sat in Celia’s lodging with the window open to the harbor air. Mira had washed her finger and wrapped it in clean cloth, more to keep herself from touching any stray salt than to cover the small red mark. On the table lay Celia’s notebook, shut. The page from the basement rested beside it, dry under a square of glass. Its lines could tell them how far the cellar ran beneath the market. They could not tell her whose childhood she had carried out of it.

Mira pushed a cup toward her. “Tea’s gone cold.”

Celia took it. The rim was chipped in one place. She turned the cup until the chip faced away from her mouth, an ordinary choice she could make without searching for it.

“What’s my name?” she asked.

Mira’s wrapped finger tightened around her own cup. “Celia Marrow.”

“That was a test,” Celia said, though she had needed the answer. “I could recall Marrow. I couldn’t attach it to the girl in the kitchen.”

“She wasn’t you.”

“I know that now.” Celia set the tea down. A few hours ago she would have sworn the paper boat belonged to her brother. She could still picture its folded point growing soft in the rain. “I pulled harder after you told me to stop.”

“Yes.”

“And you touched it because I wouldn’t let go.”

Mira looked at the cloth around her finger. “I touched it because I missed the edge. Don’t take my part of it.”

Celia let that stand. Beyond the window, a harbor lamp burned with the steady light of someone’s donated recollection. Below the market, a living person remained pressed into salt. Neither fact gave Celia leave to put her hand back.

She opened the notebook to a clean page. Her pencil hovered where a measured route would begin. Instead she wrote the time of contact, how far her fingers had gone in, and that the figure’s shoulder had strained against the membrane when she pulled. Then she recorded Mira’s use of dry canvas and the hours it had taken for the kitchen to lose its hold.

At the bottom she wrote: No further attempt to draw a resident through by force.

Mira leaned close enough to read. “You can make that firmer.”

Celia underlined the sentence once. “I intend to.”