Wooden wheels crack against the dirt road, warning me of the owner’s approach. His journey up my hill is slow. The cart fights its way through the brambles and wildflowers that have made the path theirs in the four decades since he left.

After all this time, I didn’t expect anybody would have the gall to breach my gates again.

Moonlight filters through hundreds of pupillary openings in my geometric jali windows as I train my gaze to the front entrance. The homeowner ties his bull to the gatepost, jostles the cracked sign with my name—Shiuli House.

The sound of my locks falling to his keys makes my thorns bristle. I hope he pricks himself on the thistles I send creeping toward my doorway, but he kicks them aside.

“Shabdhan.” He extends his arm, and I realise with increasing ire that he’s not alone. “Don’t trip on these vines.”

A woman clutches his elbow and stumbles off the luggage-loaded cart. Crimson fabric shrouds her dark hair. Her face, turned to take in the overgrown tree branches weaving through my stone façade, is painted prettily in the white and red dots of Bengali bridal shaj.

Not only does this man intend to take up residence within me, but he dares bring a second person along.

This place is all mine. All me.

“It’s a little untended,” he says. “Nobody’s been here in almost half a century.”

His assumptions, as ever, render him foolish. I’ll make myself known soon enough.

His bride is young, barely in her forties. Mortality lingers at the hollow of her throat, in the shallow breaths escaping her parted lips. A darling doll. There’s no gold jewellery adorning her neck, so the homeowner must not have married her for her family’s riches. He needs something else from her.

“The house will fall into good shape with your domestic touch,” he says. “We’ll live comfortably enough.”

Her mehndi-decorated fingers reach toward the petals blooming in a bitter charcoal shade along my unkempt garden. “Are these shiuli flowers? They’re not white like the ones growing by the road.”

He catches her waist when she bends to take a closer look, stopping her before she can nuzzle my blossoms. They reek of rotten flesh, of stale blood. The things that have fed them.

“They used to be white once,” the homeowner says. “Don’t touch them, Chhaya. They might be poisonous.”

She unrolls two mattresses in the old bedroom. They lie separately, no chance of a wedding night even without my interference.

The yellowed tiles have warped over the years, uneven like teeth, strings of vegetation growing between them. I dig the sharp edges into the newlyweds’ backs, holding them in my maw. I scrape branches against windows and howl nightmares into their sleep, filling them with visions of insects within skulls and mouths wrenched open in agony. They toss and turn till dawn, minds reeling with distasteful thoughts of mine in their not-quite marital beds.

The bride rises first. For a minute, I think I’ve triumphed, ruined her rest. A few more nights of this, and they’ll lose their minds. Then I’ll slip inside and bend the homeowner to my will. Force him to abandon my premises for good.

But she just washes her face and cleans her mouth, then changes into a salwar kameez, lights a small fire outside, and brews a pot of tea. Her husband wakes to a steaming cup of cha pressed into his hands.

To a scene of domestic bloody bliss.

She lathers shaving cream over his face. Her hands sweep a razor along his jaw, comb coconut oil into his white hair. When she’s finished, he hangs a mirror on the front door and smirks at his pampered reflection.

As if this house was built for him to live in.

I slam a heavy bough into the door. It smashes, taking the mirror and his smug reflection with it. That’ll leave a bruise—but it’s worth it.

The bull startles awake, yanking against its restraints. The bride rushes to soothe it, hiding her own distress to murmur gentle words of comfort.

Meanwhile, her husband surveys my figure. His eyes rove over my untrimmed hedges, pausing on soil rendered barren by weeds, staring at cracks and wrinkles in my exterior. “We have much work to do.”

He disappears with the cart and returns in the afternoon with an axe.

The curve of my hill shudders at the impact of his blade against a tetul tree trunk. A gash opens in the wood, my pain oozing out with the resin.

This arrogant cad. He knows I’m wicked; the time for subtleties is gone. I curl a root around his ankle, toppling him.

He curses and reaches for the axe. For a sexagenarian, his reflexes are quick. The cold iron embeds itself in my grip, prying me loose. He doesn’t stop. Lifts the weapon and delivers blow after blow until my roots become splinters.

When he’s done, he wipes his brow and turns to the fractured front door. “Chhaya,” he calls, “help me tame this beast of a house into something habitable.”

She takes the axe and begins on the next tree.

I watch them sullenly as I nurse my wounds.

During a break from chopping my wood, the bride serves her husband a thala of dal bhat in the yard. She draws his attention by saying demurely, “Shunun,” asking him to listen instead of directly invoking his name the way he casually takes hers. “Perhaps this house is too far gone to be lived in.”

My doorways creak ajar in interest, eavesdropping. I’ve terrorised this woman’s fragile nerves to their breaking point; I want to witness her admitting it to him, urging him to pack up and leave.

“We’ve no other options,” he replies gruffly. “You know they took everything in the city when my business went bankrupt. This old house is the only possession I have left.”

I rankle at his insult, dark shiuli petals fluttering in a gale that isn’t there. He can cut down my trees and discard my debris, but I’ll be no possession of his.

Her eyes flit to my flowers before drifting back to him. “With the—the state it’s in, I’m concerned we’ll become overwhelmed—”

“Do you have somewhere else to go, Chhaya? Your parents passed and left you nothing. Nobody else will take you at your age, when you can’t even bear them heirs. This house is your last resort, too.”

She bows her head.

“Is it too much, this roof over your head? Do you not want what I’m providing for you? Won’t you do your side of the work to make our home?”

“Yes. Of course, I will.”

After the meal, she sweeps my dishevelled floors with a jharu, even as I blow more dirt in through the back door. She notices, sighs deeply—and keeps going. As if we’re playing a game. Performing a dance. Her mouth twitches once, though surely not in a smile. A pout, maybe. She doesn’t give in as easily as I expect her to. But I don’t let up, either. I’d almost feel sorry for her, if I didn’t want her and her husband out of here.

He naps while I chase her around this way. I toss him a nightmare or two, but my efforts are wasted on him when she’s the one mopping my cobwebs and scrubbing my tiles: shaving me, combing me, in the same meticulous way she did her husband earlier that morning. I itch under her ministrations, scoured by the first touch of a human I’ve endured in a long time.

Her lips curve again.

When she boils water for her evening bath, my walls tingle in anticipation. Here comes a moment that will strip her bare, render her completely defenceless.

That’s when I’ll strike. And show her what I truly am.

The bathing room is a simple chamber, empty save for the bride, her bucket, and a narrow canal that drains to the outside.

And me.

She dips a mug into the water. I focus my consciousness into it, concentrating on the thrill of manoeuvring a person into submission, of them tossing their head back in horror and screaming.

Her fingers curl around the vessel to tip it forward. I slide over the rim with the warm liquid, sluicing over her face. Her skin is a deep bronze, tapered around her onyx lashes and soft over her flat nose. The contact throws me into frenzied excitement. I vibrate with it, dripping down her neck and submerging her in my terrible essence.

She gasps. She feels me, senses the rush of adrenaline I elicit from her body. Fight, flight, and fright war through pliant flesh that reacts to my fluid embrace. Her nipples pebble beneath my downpour. Her back arches.

Quickly, she spills another mug over herself. I have her in my thrall, draping myself over her trembling form. I gush down between her legs. She makes a sound in the back of her throat, free hand slapping against the wall to maintain her precarious balance.

A third mugful and she’s begging for my mercy. “Please!”

I consume her, feel her muscles clench. Power surges through me. Her neck curves back, teeth bared in a grimace, a moan in her mouth. Just like I wanted.

“Oh, god,” she prays, sliding to the floor.

But there are no gods in the room. Only me, the monster.

She should flee from the bathroom after what she’s observed of me. Instead, she whispers into the darkness, “Will you reveal yourself? I want to know you.”

The air between us thickens with confusion. Her confession upends me and sends me sprawling. The door bangs open, making her jump. She scrambles to pull her clothes on and creeps back into the bedroom.

Where her husband sleeps on his bedroll.

He would find my actions disgusting. I remember the familiar way he pulled her back from my shiuli flowers when they arrived. He would consider my touching his bride an atrocity, something to fight with everything he has.

But he cannot ruin me now. Not when this house is all he has left. This time, I’m indestructible.

If he wants me to leave her alone, he’ll have to take her far away.

Chhaya, I breathe from the darkest corner of the house.

She hears me and looks up from her bucket of laundry. A flash of interest sharpens her expression, interrupting her monotonous task.

A sideways glance at her husband tells her he didn’t hear me call her name. He has warned her several times: “Don’t wander by yourself. Stay where I can protect you.”

She bites her lip. Perhaps she’s come to her senses in the light of day and developed a healthy fear, after all. Nobody should entertain the idea of pursuing an interaction with me. I’m dangerous. She needs to be sheltered from the likes of me.

“I’m going to hang these to dry,” she tells her husband. But when she leaves the room, she climbs up the staircase instead, disappearing into my ominous mist.

She opens the door to a room that’s been untouched for forty years. Before she was born, it belonged to another lady. A former bride. The ageing wood of the jamb groans threateningly, ready to collapse upon Chhaya at the slightest provocation. She should leave. We both know it.

Dust billows under her advancing footsteps. I slide into its slipstream and reward her transgression with a caress of her ankle.

She hums. “There you are.”

I drift higher, moving up her petticoat. Waiting for her to change her mind and retreat.

“What are you?” she asks breathlessly. “How do you make me feel these things?”

In the stillness of the uninhabited room, she looms excruciatingly clear. The perfume between her clavicles draws me closer, until I can taste each drop of moisture on her: the dampness of sweat at her temples, on her tongue, between her thighs.

“Oh, god,” she says again, in some sort of twisted worship that cannot belong to me. “I can see what you’re thinking.”

I press into her, wanting for a second to show her more of me, and she shakes.

“Can you kiss?”

Her words still me. I’ve been here before—a kiss that leads to doom. I see them again, the rotting skull, blood washing down the drainage canal. A fleeting vision of a young woman with a sharp mouth and mischievous eyes hovers in the air. Memories that no longer exist.

I wipe them away, but Chhaya holds on.

“Who’s that?”

She doesn’t know what I am. If she did, she wouldn’t ask me to kiss her.

Her keen gaze cuts through the haze in the room, falling on the fading portraits lining the wall. She touches one. “Is that her? Was she here before me?” Her fingers begin to quiver. “Did you—did you kill her?”

And here, finally, is the fear. It snakes between us like a venomous viper and turns the room fragile. The frame slips from its precarious fastening at her touch, crashing to the floor.

“Chhaya?” Her husband thunders up the stairs. “Are you up there?”

He skids into the room like a hero from the legends, axe raised to defend his bride. His eyes take her in—flushed face, swollen lips, dishevelled clothing—and narrow. “Is there someone in here with you?”

Now he knows what I can do to her if he stays in my house.

A rope of ivy bursts through the window, wrapping around the hilt of his axe. He wrenches it away, stumbling into his bride. One of my thorny plants drags against Chhaya’s cheek.

Immediately, I retract the braided stems.

The homeowner’s gaze swings between her and my receding attack. “What’s this?”

Chhaya presses a palm to her wounded face, eyes luminous with shock, and leaves wordlessly. My dust flutters by her feet as I attempt to follow, before I quash it back down.

The owner doesn’t depart so quickly. He patrols the room, stopping at the fallen frame. He picks it up.

The wave of anger that lashes out of me surprises us both. The sketch flies from his hands as I snatch it away and pull myself into the cloudiest corner of the room. But I’m not fast enough.

He sees me.

Not as I am now, but the way I used to be. Sharp mouth, mischievous eyes. Feminine figure and a voice like ghungur bells.

His expression clears, confusion vanishing.

I don’t want him to perceive me that way. It isn’t who I am anymore. My shape follows the blunt edges of the building and the slow rise of the hill it sits upon. I am the flowers that soaked up the blood draining from my body so many years ago, the tetul trees whose roots my remains were concealed under. I’m the house that won’t surrender to him.

Yet the homeowner won’t regard me as I am. He sees what he wants—his property.

“Don’t come near my wife again,” he says.

He might brandish an axe to keep me in line, but there’s a boundary even he won’t cross. He cannot cut down my structure nor tear down my walls. Without me, he’ll have nowhere to live. He can’t overpower me in my true form.

I remind him of this by slamming my doors.

His jaw tightens. He moves to the window to peer down at the yard, where Chhaya hangs the wet laundry.

“I should think twice before burning you to the ground,” her husband concedes. “But I can do anything I want to her.”

It shouldn’t matter.

My gaze bores bitterly into her back. From the moment I first saw her, I intended to use Chhaya to manipulate the homeowner. He can’t wield her as a weapon against me.

She isn’t mine to protect.

When night falls and the homeowner should be sleeping, the stairs creak. Someone searches for me in the cover of shadows.

I gather my thorned vines, preparing for a confrontation.

But the person who enters my room is Chhaya.

My plants writhe, frenzied and panicked. She mustn’t be here. Not with me.

“I don’t think you’ll hurt me,” she says, albeit hesitantly. She turns her face to the moonlight, a small welt on her cheek. “You couldn’t even stand to scratch me.”

The sight of the injury fills me with revulsion. I’m a demon. I always have been. Only something wicked would do that to a person.

I howl a gust of wind through the hallway, trying to coax her out of my room.

“Why won’t you come near me?” Her expression, still illuminated, crumbles.

The image of the skull looms between us again, a warning to drive her away.

She doesn’t retreat this time. Her hand reaches out. She touches me, my memory grasped in her palm. And the surrounding details fill in the rest of the picture. The clavicle bones and ribs. The tetul tree roots cradling the skeleton. Shiuli flowers sprouting from the remains.

“Oh,” she breathes, “this is you.”

The vision dissipates, but she won’t let me go.

“Tell me how it happened.”

She talks to me like there’s humanity somewhere inside these walls. As if my monstrosity isn’t the entire story. I can’t tell her what she wants to know without curdling the way she looks at me, without revealing the terrible truth about myself that has evoked the homeowner’s scorn for decades.

But if I don’t show her, she’ll keep coming back.

I could do it. Keep her with me for as long as we’d have. Let her be ruined by her husband in order to preserve myself in her eyes while she lives. After all, I’m depraved.

Chhaya’s eyes glitter in the silver light.

The fog around us thickens. I sink into my past. And she, still watching my thoughts, comes with me.

I’m in the same room. My room. My father stands with me beside the window and tells me this house will be mine one day. I ask him if that’s a promise, so he names it after me to prove it: Shiuli House.

Then I’m just over twenty, and he arranges my marriage. He secured me a good match, he tells me, because of the dowry he offered in exchange. I ask him what it is. Shiuli House, he answers. The house that was meant to be mine. It is as mine as can be, he insists, since I will go with my husband.

My parents leave, and my bridegroom brings me back to my own home like I’m his guest.

I’m not the sole woman he invites into the house. There’s the tall one married to the town doctor, and the milkman’s daughter with the rosy cheeks. My favourite is the lady who goes from door to door selling flowers. She always saves me a shiuli, free of charge, because she likes my name. It’s not the only thing she likes about me.

My husband catches us kissing. He tries to hit her, because she’s his special friend and I’m his bride, but I throw myself at him. She runs because she’s afraid. He strikes me instead, telling me I’m dangerous and disgusting and that he must punish me to protect the flower girl from my corruption.

I don’t believe him, at first. I scream in protest. But when the neighbours don’t stop him, and my father scolds me for disobeying him, the truth begins to seep in.

I must be evil, if this is the treatment they collectively condemn me to. They can’t all be wrong about me.

He punishes me until there’s more blood outside of me than in. He cleans himself in our bathroom, scarlet water pouring down the drain and to the flowers I planted outside in the garden. He buries my body, because arranging a public cremation would raise awkward conversations in the village.

The house that should have belonged to me in life, and that I belong to in death, preserves my memory.

When he leaves for the city, nobody stops him.

Because I was the monster. And everyone agrees I made him vanquish me.

“I told you to leave my wife alone.”

Chhaya whirls around to face her husband. I’m too spent from revealing the very worst of myself to prevent his approach. He stands in the corridor, lit by the sunrise.

Her expression shutters, and she moves toward him. I want to put myself between them, to hurl myself at him before he lays a wretched hand on her.

Before I can react, she says, “I know the truth.”

His mouth thins. “Do you?”

She nods. “The thing in this house, it wants to corrupt me. But you’ll protect me from it.”

Her censure scorches through to the depths of my being. I have to look away. Even after all these years, shame still makes a monster out of me.

The homeowner studies her. “Then you’ll be pleased to know I found somebody to sell this property to. We can leave. Start over.”

She bites her lip. “Aren’t they all too afraid to come here?”

“They won’t be, after I’ve burned the house down. The farmer along the road is willing to expand to this land if we remove everything on it.” He turns to the darkness. Toward me. “It gave me the idea.”

“Oh.” Chhaya nods slowly. “Yes, I think that’s for the best. A deep cleanse to rid this place of its sinful creatures.”

Her husband relaxes. “Pack your things. The farmer comes today.”

I could chase her down the stairs with my vines, rattle the doors and windows to force her to listen to my pain until I’m nothing but a pile of ash—for even my stubborn memories cannot withstand a cremation.

But if also Chhaya, after seeing all of me, believes me a demon—then I should just let her slay me.

They prepare logs for when the farmer arrives. Together, they’ll set me ablaze, and the farmer may rest easy knowing the conflagration will have chased out any lingering evil spirits.

Once the necessary arrangements have been made, Chhaya brews her husband his cha. She’s the perfect bride I never was. She combs his hair with coconut oil. Smooths shaving cream over his jaw.

“I’m glad I know the truth,” she tells him as she grooms his beard.

“Yes,” he agrees. “Justice will be served at last.”

“Indeed,” she says, and digs the razor into his neck.

The house thrums as its owner splutters.

Chhaya takes a step back and watches her husband collapse to the ground. With this vanquishing, she carves me a new narrative, deep into his pliable flesh. Blood gushes out of his throat, and the uneven tiles beneath him drink thirstily. Her affection imbues my limbs with soft relief, with overwhelming tenderness. I feel almost shy, like a newlywed on the first night.

“Help me, Shiuli,” she says.

My trembling vines drag his corpse outside. The pile of logs welcomes him, a deathbed waiting to ignite into his funeral pyre.

When the farmer arrives, Chhaya informs him of her husband’s unfortunate shaving accident. “His hand slipped.” Her voice quivers, though her eyes remain dry. “It was awful.”

The farmer faces her downcast countenance and tuts sympathetically. “Do you still want to sell the land?” He glances around the haunted house nervously.

“Me? I’m not the owner.”

“You’re his widow. The house belongs to you now.”

A muscle in her jaw twitches. “Then I shall stay a while. I, too, belong to it.”

The farmer, still perched safely outside the gates, gives the building another uneasy look. “You want to live here by yourself, madam? That doesn’t seem safe.”

“No need to worry.” Her fingers brush the blackened flowers growing in the yard. “I won’t be by myself.”

Copyright © 2026 by Ayida Shonibar