The only source of light in the catacombs is the torch burning bright in my hand, its flickering flames crackling softly next to my ear as I look out at the skeletal pathways laid out for me. I lift my torch a little higher. Flames swing across my vision, leaving blurry orange trails in their wake. Skulls, rows of them, come into my vision. I suck in a deep breath. I’ve heard rumors about the catacombs, and the dead bodies buried deep down under the heart of France, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this. My fingers trail across one of the skulls. The jawbone drops a little lower and a small maggot crawls out of the gaping eye-socket. It wriggles across my thumb and only then do I pull back, shaking my hand away from it in disgust. I can’t get sidetracked. I’m here for a reason, after all. Deeper down the tunnels I tread. My torch is in front of me, a homing beacon. My footsteps sound like fireworks. My breaths sound like bombs. He is here, somewhere. I just have to find him. I take another deep breath of the musty air, trying to catch the smell of him lingering. The sweet scent of sour applewood fills my nostrils. His cologne passed right down from our grandfather. The cologne I’d beg my brother to let me use, but I was a lady and ladies were supposed to smell of blooming rose gardens and strawberry shortcakes and miniature tea parties around the hearth. The thought fills me with a strange vindication. “Matty?” I call, experimentally. “Matty, if you’re such a man, why’d you leave me?” That's why I was here, after all. We had been having such a nice time together. My fingers clench. My lip trembles. I hadn’t cried since I was eight and I had kept the streak going five years strong, so there wasn’t any reason to cry right now, no matter how much my brother would pretend he hated me. “It’s my birthday, Matty,” I whisper to the skeletons of the past. “Don’t you love me more on my birthday?” There is no response but the sound of my own voice, echoing echoing echoing down the chamber halls. There is no Matty here for me, except for the ones engraved into these stony walls. My heart fills with dread. I quicken my pace, swinging across every corridor, looking through every bend. “Matty!” I scream now, my voice sharp and high as a sewing needle. “Why are you leaving me here, Matty? Didn’t you tell me that you would stay with me today?” The scent of applewood grows. A satisfied growl escapes my mouth as I run faster. I can smell him. My brother. Two years ago, he left for the Great War. He left with tears in his eyes, kissing his girlfriend Maria hard in the monsoon afternoon and hugging me until my bones felt like they would burst. He had decided to come back today, at last, to see his little sister he was supposed to love, and he leaves me in this dark dark place, all alone forever? “You stopped sending me letters, Matty,” my voice is cold and cruel now. I have no patience for dead-beat brothers and dead-all-around skulls and cold, cold catacombs. My torch sweeps around in a deadly arc and a row of skulls crashes to the ground at my feet. “I wrote to you every day. You said you’d be back soon. Were you just lying to me?” Silence, silence. I bury my heavy-toed winter boot into the nose-hole of a skull, listening to it crack. My voice shakes. “Of course you’d lie to me. You’re a liar liar liar. Just like Mama. Just like Papa. Just like our stupid old granddaddy and his stupid cologne.” He is taunting me. I know he’s there. My eyes water with tears. “Why do you want to hurt me?” My voice shatters. Another skull fractures under my heel. “You never even loved me, is that it?” Down, down the catacombs go. Bones and bodies and blood bubbling from my gnawed lip and from my knees and from my throat, and everywhere around me. It burns like copper down my esophagus. A raw scream of rage tears from my throat and the ivory white of the skeletons is tinged red, red with fire. Then I remember myself and the fire dies. Still shaking, I take a seat on the cold stone floor, making sure to tuck my long gray skirt underneath me as I cross my stocking-covered ankles over each other elegantly. There is no more rage left in my heart because there shouldn’t be. Marty is just joking with me. I’m overreacting and he doesn’t love me if I overreact. I gnaw on my lip some more. Blood is starting to bubble from my teeth. Marty would always tell me off when I chewed on it so badly, and he’d wipe my face with a little red rag and tell me that I was too pretty to hurt myself so much. Maria had done it for me, after he left. Her face had been scrunched up so tightly and she had reminded me that I was a young woman now, and young ladies didn’t succumb to such silly feelings. Then she cried so long I could do nothing but hold her in my arms. She is waiting on the surface now, and I must remember. “I am a young woman, am I not? Don’t you think I deserve some respect?” I tilt my head up primly. A tear traces down my jugular. “Grandpa said you can’t play with me like I’m a boy anymore. We’re too old to play hide-and-seek.” A yawning chasm. Another tear falls from my eye. My torch burns tantalizingly by my knee. Perhaps I am allowed to be less than proper here. My voice cracks. “I’m scared.” That’s when I hear it; a small, choked whimper. A laugh bubbles out of my mouth and the smell of applewood becomes heady as relief fills my gut, warm, swarming, infectious. I pick up the torch and swing it in front of me. He’s right there! Right there behind that left curve and that right curve the one I swear I looked at a hundred times. I can smell him, hear him, and I’m so, so close to seeing him. “There you are!” I crow. I stumble to my feet. My scraped knees twinge. “Marty, this wasn’t funny!” Another cry. Like a baby. Footsteps patter away from me. I giggle as I run faster. “Marty, why are you crying? It's me! Lizzie. You know, your baby sister?” As I go, I watch the skeletons crumble by my feet. They must really love me, if they even bow when they’re dead. Almost as much as Marty must. I pump my legs and kick off my black flats, the ones my mother gifted me. I’ll come back for them. All that matters is- My breath catches in my throat as I skid to a stop. A dead end, and there he is, curled at the end of it. His eyes are caught alight by the fire, black and beady like a mouse. He lets out a strangled whimper. The surrounding darkness became denser and denser. My breath catches in my throat. It wouldn’t be long before the shadows overtook him completely, and I had just got him back. Desperate, I wave my torch in front of his face and he gleams in the flame. I bite my lip. Blood runs down the front of my chin. He looks different, somehow. I wave the fire in front of his face. Old, old wrinkles mar his soft skin. His eyes are set deep in his yellowed skin, like old scripture paper. His wrists shake and I can practically see through to the bone. His head is almost barren. He is wrapped around a black cane that he points at me. “You’re…not Marty,” I growl. More blood, fast-flowing and cherry colored, drips on my dress. “Where’s Marty?” His face crumples. “Lizzie?” “Marty?” I whisper, and it’s him, I know it is right then. Those eyes…how could I ever forget them? “Marty, what happened? Why do you look like…” I take a step forward, and he cringes back. “Get away from me,” he orders. His jaw trembles. “You’re not Lizzie. You’re just pretending.” I look up at him and he looks down at me. “How can you be so cruel? It’s my birthday, you know.” “Shut up shut up shut up!” he screams and all I can hear is red red red. “You’re not Lizzie. She died, she did. Sixty years ago.” This isn’t funny. My lip quivers. “Stop it.” “Maria wants me to come down here every single day of the anniversary-” “Marty-.” “She thinks I have some care left for that girl.” “I said stop.” “She thinks that even after sixty years she’s still down here somewhere-” “Please.” “That she died looking for me and I have to help her find her way back.” “You’re lying to me, please just-” “It’s not my fault she was so idiotic to come down here. Ha, as if I would be hiding, like we were kids-” “Shut up shut up shut up-” “And now I come here because I think its the last year I can and my mind plays tricks on me-” “Stop it, stop it!” “Can’t we just let old dogs lie?” I let out a hallowed scream and without thinking, my torch swings forward like a sword. He howls as it slams him in the chest, melting like a candle to the ground. Blood is drip dripping from my neck, from my dress, rivulets and streams of warm crimson soaking into the cobblestones. My bottom lip is fleshy and broken. A moths wing, torn. A sob wrenches out of my throat. “It’s my birthday!” I cry. The old man on the floor shudders at my bare feet. “You mustn’t be so cruel.” He shakes with a yelp, and I hit him again, hit him and hit him until my knees are scraped and my stockings are dirtied and the old man’s eyes glaze over, nothing but pitiful whines of pain escaping his fleshy orifice he called a mouth. I drag a clump of my hair out of my eye and shudder. How dare someone pretend to be my Marty? And steal his eyes, too? An idea forms in my head. I lean over the man once more. He watches me through a film covering Marty’s retinas. I reach for his head and that’s when he starts to shake, saying, “No, no,” over and over, but doesn’t he know that he’s a dirty rotten thief and he’s getting what he gave? I dig my nails into the socket of his eye and tear. *** It is a couple minutes before Marty’s eyes are in my hands. I clutch them tight to my chest as I stumble through the rest of the catacombs. The skeletons watch me greedily. They want his eyes but they are Marty’s and I’ve kept them good for him as he would want me to. I can smell the applewood again. A grin splits my face. Blood dribbles from my closed fist. He is here, not too far now. I can smell him again and I am so close to seeing him. I’ll tell him how wrong the dirty little thief did him and I’ll hug him tight and smell his cologne. After all, it’s my birthday. It’s only fair.