“A fellow family disappointment,” Yuki says. “I took out a bunch of loans I keep deferring, and now I’m a waitress with a radio show.” She grabs her notebook and turns away, making small notes in the margins. “No sob story, I told you.”

Grace watches her, her fellow lonely creature. Whereas Grace looked up and thought, This is where I belong, Yuki looked into the past and thought the same thing. Now they’re both sitting in an old radio station, reaching out into the unknown dark.

“Now, I have a show to start,” Yuki says, firmly closing the subject. “Are you ready?”

Grace leans forward. Yuki’s handwriting is atrocious. “What are you talking about tonight?”

“You’ll see,” Yuki says. She pushes the sleeves of her flannel shirt back to reveal the tattoos that run up her wrists. Blooming flowers wind around her forearms like ivy around an old, haunted house. She has one behind her ear, too, a small cluster of petals that reminds Grace of the first signs of life after winter. Little buds peeking through thawing dirt and melting snow. She puts her headphones on, and it gets covered up. “I need to have some secrets.”

Blue raps on the window and gives Yuki a thumbs-up. She presses a button, and the control panel turns orange and green and yellow.

It is like magic, and Grace feels goose bumps.

“Good night to my fellow lonely creatures out there, waiting patiently in the dark. My name is Yuki. Are you there? I hope you’re listening.”

Grace holds her breath.

“I’ve talked a lot about loneliness,” Yuki says. “We are lonely creatures in a big, big world.” She tucks her hair behind her ears, and though she speaks of loneliness, she is on display here in her little, dark studio, an open book. “Loneliness stems from a lot of things—uncertainty, self-preservation, fear. But what about loneliness that stems from something different? What about the creatures relegated to the dark because of deviation?” Grace curls up in her chair and watches as Yuki weaves her dark tale.

“I’ve told you there are a lot of monsters that lurk in Japanese culture,” she says. “When we used to visit home during the summer, my grandmother always told me stories. She told me once about the Yamauba. They were old women pushed to the very edges of society and forced to live in the mountains.

“Even as a child, I wondered why so many of the bad things, the scary things, were women. I asked my grandmother once, and she told me it was the way of the world. Sometimes monsters became women, because women who deviated were monsters. I didn’t understand that until later.

“But the Yamauba, these were horrifying monsters in the shape of women. They were old and childless. They lured young pregnant girls up to their little shackled homes, promising safety and warmth, and then they ate their babies. They saw these crying, red, screaming creatures that stormed into the world, these things the Yamauba could never create themselves, and they ate them.”

Grace leans forward, mesmerized. Yuki is able to find humanity in monsters, or maybe she gives monsters their humanity back. She says here is a terrible, horrifying thing, and holds it up like a mirror to anyone listening.

“There were more stories. The Yamauba would sneak down from their homes and eat children in the village when their mothers were gone. It is strange that the Yamauba, old and barren and childless, seemed so enamored with children. It is strange that one whose belly has never stretched is still so eager to make it full.

“But this is not just a story about women and their expectations. This is not just a story about monsters, born from being unable to contort and fit into the small box we have given them and suddenly are afraid of what they have become.

“This is a story about how deviation from the norm can create scary, monstrous things. What my grandmother didn’t know was that years later, society would still create Yamauba. We would still be seen as dark, terrible things simply for refusing to fit a particular narrative. Perhaps the truly terrifying thing is to step away from what you’re supposed to do and what you have planned. Perhaps you, the monster that you are, find yourself feeding on what you could not bear yourself.

“Perhaps Yamauba were created because we did not want to name something we brought forth with our own hands,” Yuki says. “Perhaps flesh-eating monsters are simply people who break their molds and their boxes, and find themselves demanding all they have been denied.”

Yuki motions at Blue and Grace blinks, eyes aching, like she is waking from a terrible and deep sleep.

“My name is Yuki,” she hears. “Good night, my lonely creatures. Are you listening? Are you there?”

I am here, says the darkness inside Grace. I am listening. It takes shape. With each rejection, each uncertain move, each deviation from how she is supposed to fit inside the plan that has been made for her, it twists and contorts. It consumes itself.

It has become very ugly, indeed.

“Are you there?” Yuki asks as she signs off.

I am here, the darkness says. Its voice sounds eerily like Grace.

Twelve

Some nights, Grace falls asleep to the sound of Agnes and Ximena murmuring in her ear. Those are usually the nights Yuki has to work late, so it is just Grace in the room that smells like burnt embers and luck oil. Yuki’s roommates have odd, disjointed schedules, so she never knows who might be home or out in the city. Sometimes, she prefers the solitude. She hides under Yuki’s covers and listens to her friends talk.