We play this game every time we meet, and I’ve never lost yet.

Our meetings have become ritual by now: me and Tsing, once every few seasons, or years, or decades, or however long it takes for one of us to buckle from the weight of our individual lonelinesses and contact the other first. It’s a diversion and a challenge—distraction against the slow slog of flesh-and-blood purgatory.

It’s Tsing who texts me first this time.

She knows I’m in town, claims she’d caught a glimpse of a silver-pale tattoo like a coiled chain at the back of a neck before the other person had vanished into the subway train, and because like calls to like and demon to demon, she recognized me for who I was. So why not share a drink, pick up where we left off?

I said yes.

Last I saw her was somewhere an ocean and a several decades away: a nest of undulating bodies, the iridescence of strobe lights cutting through artificial fog, the band lead screeching their head off over pounding drums and swirling electric-guitar riffs. Glitter on the dance floor, heads thrown back, the sour cloy of perfume and sweat and alcohol sticking to every surface like venom without an antidote. We found each other in the dark: her bloodstained mouth and fishnet tights and smudged-kohl eyes and slicked-back waves, my cropped silver hair and dangling chains and leather trousers and SUPPORT THE MINERS t-shirt with the sleeves cut off.

As I said, like calls to like.

I used to be better at the act. It was easier back then to play the human with reckless abandon, talk and eat and fuck and laugh and cry the way they do, before the extent of what they were capable of left a bitter taste on my tongue, impossible to wash out.

The moment I extracted myself from the mosh pit and tumbled out the back door into the chilly silence of the three a.m. streets, Tsing’d accosted me with an arm across my shoulder.

“Shots?” she shouted in my ear.

“Maybe later.” I said, frowning down my nose at the proffered drink without accepting it. “Besides, it’s like you’re not even trying to win.”

“My, Bak. You’re an impossibly stubborn one.”

Tsing slipped her arm off me with a sigh, tossed back the shot. Rolled back her shoulders and cracked her neck, viper-lithe, and winked. Vanished back into the club, into the writhing mass of bodies-in-shadow.

For centuries she’d tried to coax me into revealing my true nature, but I’d never fallen for any of her tricks—so far. Didn’t intend to start now.

She won’t get me to slough off my skin this easily.

I shrugged and said, “Better luck next time.”

Time is never benevolent to the living, but she can be an especially cruel mistress to the tainted ones, those of us sleek and slippery enough to slip between the cracks. We know her little games, we dance to her tune, outwit her time and time and time again, and I suspect this is why she loves us all the more.

I prefer the game Tsing and I play.

After all, it’s a much kinder one in comparison.

A blink of a half-century later. We’re one of the very few customers in this izakaya tonight, holed up in the dry safety of this den-like space from the Aomori summer rain.

I’d booked us a table in the corner of the near-empty establishment, although I can’t help throwing nervous glances at the men at the table close by. Tsing is dressed in a loose clinging shirt of viridian, the rippling silk unbuttoned at the collar and draped on her strong slim frame like an unshedding of iridescent scales, like waves crashing upon rocky coast.

When Tsing first came in and made for our table, she’d leaned down to press a brief kiss on my cheek in greeting before settling opposite me, and the cold touch had made me flinch with the way it felt like a claiming.

What do they think of us, what do they see, when mortals look at Tsing and I?

Lovers. Demons. Freaks. Misfits, broken people.

I’ve been at this for so long and still I haven’t grown out of my skittishness, this baring of fangs at the slightest hint of threat.

We’re on our third bottle of sake. I sip the last drop in my ochoko and set the glass back down: mild and smooth down the throat, nicely crisp, more dry than sweet. Just the way I like it.

Tsing had chosen well, still remembers my preferences.

She pours me some more of the clear drink from the blue-green ceramic flask and watches as I raise my filled ochoko to my lips again. Her eyes are sea-foam beneath a winter sun. The disconcertingly unnatural lightlessness against the sallow of her face is visible only when she so chooses, and only when I choose to meet those eyes.

I catch a faint garlicky trace of realgar before the drink touches my tongue. The glass slips from my hands, shatters into jagged shards all over my boots and the floorboards.

When I look back up, Tsing’s eyes are the warm brown of loam-after-rain once more.

Her small laugh is fond even as I glare at her, shaking broken glass gingerly off my battered Doc Martens. One of the shards has grazed the sliver of exposed skin on my ankle between jeans-cuff and boot-shaft, thin crooked thread of blood that stings more than it should.

“Knew you wouldn’t fall for it,” says Tsing. “But still, it was worth a try.”

The light’s too dim to make out if the glimmer in her eyes is one of malice or merriment or disappointment.

Radio behind the chef’s counter, running list of the night’s breaking news interspersed between white-noise static and ad jingles.

Something within me had calcified in the long years between this game and the last. I’d grown sick of impermanence, watching cities and histories razed at the whims of despots, woodlands crushed and seas rising and the earth sucked dry, families displaced, the extermination of good people and the loss of childhoods even while the world swallows its own guilt and keeps on turning.

Yet—to stay is my choice. Even if this izakaya falls around us and the city along with it, and the rest of the world too, there will be another city, another game, another chance. There will always be us. Tsing and I.

And so we remain.

I bring my fingers down to my ankle and brush at the cut. The blood mingled with what she’d laced the drink with hums faint and electric against my skin. I raise my hand to my mouth to lick my fingers clean.

Tsing smiles, victorious. And I grin back at her, my fangs gleaming as they catch the lanternlight.

© 2025 Ewen Ma