[System]
Craft a Ten page narrative for adults with these guidelines:
Use ideas to improve the story including dialogue, conflict and challenges, and character development.
TYPICALLY IT GOOD TO FOLLOW THIS:
Introduction
Rising Action
Midpoint
Climax
Resolution

In a well-told story, elements like the climax, resolution, and midpoint shouldn't need explicit mentioning; a discerning reader should be able to identify these moments through the narrative's progression

Use adult themes if specified.
Start uniquely, avoiding clichés.
Adult content is permitted.
Make the story captivating, possibly humorous, and thought-provoking.
Begin each segment with "Page x:" for each page.
FOUR FULL LENGTH PARAGRAPHS
Do not generate a title.
generate ALL 10 pages,
Example Response Format
  'Page 1: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 2: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 3: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 4: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 5: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 6: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 7: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 8: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 9: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 10: (4 full-length paragraphs)'

[User]
Brief Overview: In this romance turned mystery, Zayyan and Cecilia's seemingly storybook love unravels as ancient secrets and dark enchantments cast shadows over their marriage.

Pages 1-2:
- Zayyan meets Cecilia on the first day of university, an encounter that seems like destiny, but Cecilia later reveals they had actually met months before.
- Cecilia studies English Literature with a focus on fairy tales, bewildering Zayyan with her choice of books on magic and witchcraft.
- They bond over meals Cecilia prepares, with Zayyan finding her passion for otherworldly tales endearing.

Pages 3-4:
- Zayyan's brother, Farhan, expresses his disapproval and suspicion of Cecilia, particularly her interest in witchcraft.
- Despite initial hesitation from his parents, Zayyan and Cecilia marry and start a family, having two boys.
- As Zayyan's perfect image of Cecilia begins to crack, Farhan arrives with his own marital troubles, further straining the situation.

Pages 5-6:
- Zayyan's concerns deepen as he observes Farhan's attraction to Cecilia and he begins to notice inconsistencies in his wife's behavior.
- Moments of his perfect marriage memory sour, and Zayyan becomes suspicious of the food Cecilia prepares, finding evidence of witchcraft-related material after snooping through her possessions.

Pages 7-8:
- The shock of his discoveries leads Zayyan to flee to New York under the pretext of helping Farhan while he processes his disillusionment and the true nature of Cecilia.
- As he steps back from the situation, Zayyan becomes more aware that his ideals of Cecilia do not match reality, facing an internal conflict about what his marriage has become.

Pages 8-10:
- Farhan, apartment-hunting with Zayyan, faces his own acceptance of an unsatisfactory marriage, and they both grapple with the idea of moving on from their past relationships.
- Zayyan returns home unsure of his feelings but confronted with the stark truth that Cecilia is not the woman he thought he married.
- Despite Cecilia's attempts to rekindle their relationship, Zayyan's discontent forces him to confront whether he deserves more from love and life.

[Assistant]
Page 1:

Zayyan meets Cecilia on the first day of freshman year. He does not believe in love at first sight, but he does believe in the scientific method, and what is this moment if not empirical evidence of the former? She is like no one he has met before. Black hair pulled into a messy bun, bare arms laden with books, brown eyes ardent as a summer storm.

They bump into one another on their way into Woolsey Hall, sending Cecilia’s books and papers scattering, and by the time they’ve picked everything back up they’ve exchanged phone numbers and made plans to have dinner the next evening. It’s the perfect meet-cute. A storybook moment that Zayyan will retell many times, to friends and colleagues and chatty Uber drivers, until it becomes a dog-eared page in the narrative of his life. Cecilia will confess, years later, that this wasn’t actually the first time they’d met.

Months prior to bumping into each other at Woolsey, they were paired up for an icebreaker event during Bulldog Days; they exchanged names, hometowns, favorite movies; they even sat next to one another at lunch afterwards. When she describes these things, Zayyan will insist that she’s mistaken. He remembers that encounter but feels certain he was paired with a different person entirely, some dull girl with a braying laugh and desperate eyes. He studies physics.

She studies fairy tales. English literature, technically, but it’s fairy tales that she loves best. They read together in the library stacks. She brings her own books, with titles that bewilder him: East Asian Magic, The New Grimoire, Ancient Witchcraft for the Modern Woman.

Page 2:

He has never given much thought to anything without a disprovable null hypothesis, but he finds it endearing that she does. When he brushes a strand of hair out of her face, she glances up, her eyes dreamy, her mind far away. When he teases her about the things she believes in, she graces him with a laugh that sounds like tinkling bells. She cooks for him often, even though they both have unlimited meal plans in the dining halls, and so Zayyan now has access to dishes that the dining halls don’t provide: Persian food and Chinese food and often some fusion of the two, which he either loves or hates.

They eat together in his dorm room while his roommate studies a few feet away; in her dorm room while her suitemates play drinking games around the table; on Old Campus, autumn leaves falling around them. He associates Cecilia with liminal spaces, in-between places, like the sunbaked line of sand between the sea and the road, or the illegible scrawl of time between waking and dreaming. Something about Cecilia always makes Zayyan feel like she is too good to be true, and the only response he knows is to hold on tighter. He proposes to her the week after graduation.

His parents are hesitant about the cultural gap between their two families, but to Zayyan’s surprise, his older brother Farhan is the only one who strongly objects to their engagement. “It’s just that you’re moving so fast,” Farhan tells him over the phone, the day after their engagement is announced. “If she’s really the one for you, there’s no harm in waiting.” “We’ve been together four years. Mom and Dad only knew each other two months before they married.” “That was different.

With Cecilia . . . I just feel like there’s something off about her.

Page 3:

Take all that witchcraft stuff she’s into. That stuff gives me the creeps.” Zayyan tries to keep his voice calm. “She’s my future wife. You don’t have to like her hobbies, but you can’t call her creepy.” Farhan doesn’t bring up his concerns again, and soon their relationship smooths back to the easy banter it’s always had.

Zayyan pushes his brother’s worries to the back of his mind. Farhan has always been overprotective; he spent years defending Zayyan from their parents’ unhappiness at home. Of course he would see a threat in Cecilia, too. After the wedding, the newlyweds move into a small apartment in Boston where they can both start their careers, Cecilia at a small publishing house and Zayyan at a research lab.

They have two children, both boys, one right after the other. Cecilia wants a third, but Ali and Asim keep her so busy already that Zayyan sees no need to sign up for more. She takes to motherhood the same way she’s taken to every challenge in the past. She prepares special meals for the growing boys; she chauffeurs them to one extracurricular after another; she reads storybooks to them every night, all three of them falling asleep together until Zayyan comes to wake her.

Each time he looks at her, he feels so lucky he could burst. There are moments. A night when he opens the bathroom door, unaware that she’s inside, and sees her reflection in the mirror, makeup smudged into the creases around her eyes. A week when he goes on a business trip and comes home to a woman older and crabbier than the girl he fell in love with.

Page 4:

Still, over the course of their marriage, his brain becomes adept at lying to itself, patching over these inconsistencies. Whenever Cecilia isn’t around, his mental version of her solidifies further, congealing into the romantic ideal of a woman. His love for this perfect woman never wavers, from their perfect meeting to their perfect wedding to each perfect anniversary that follows. He could have lived his whole life this way, tracing a constellation from one storybook moment to another, if not for the summer when his brother Farhan comes to visit.

Farhan arrives unexpectedly one afternoon with a suitcase in each hand. The only explanation he gives, with a stoic kind of misery, is that his wife Noor has filed for separation. Zayyan has always been used to Farhan being the strong one, the capable one, the one who sang silly songs to cheer him up whenever their parents were fighting in the other room. He doesn’t know how to switch roles.

“Do you want something to eat?” he asks tentatively. Farhan nods. “That’d be great. I’m half-starved.” Zayyan checks the fridge.

The only thing ready-made is half a pot of the ash reshteh Cecilia made last night, his favorite noodle soup. He microwaves a bowl for each of them. Farhan downs most of his in a few slurps. “This is delicious.

Page 5:

What’s your secret ingredient?” “Turmeric, probably.” “That’s not a secret ingredient, man, that’s part of every ash reshteh recipe.” “You’ll have to ask Cecilia, then. Want seconds?” Farhan grins. “I thought you’d never ask.” Cecilia comes home, humming to herself, both of the boys in tow. Ali and Asim run upstairs, loud and boisterous as always.

She smiles politely when she sees the two men sitting together at the dining table, but her smile darkens when she sees their empty bowls. Zayyan clears his throat. “Farhan needs to stay with us for a while. I’m sorry it’s so last minute.” “Of course.

You’re welcome to stay as long as you like.” Zayyan watches the way Farhan’s gaze follows Cecilia across the room. He’d expected to see distrust there, he’d been resigned to it even, but instead what he sees is something more like open desire. “What are you looking at?” “Nothing,” Farhan says, a little too quickly. “You’re a lucky guy, that’s all.

It’s rare for a woman to look even better at forty than she did on her wedding day.” The hunger in his brother’s eyes makes Zayyan uneasy. “Hey. Back off.” He has never seen Farhan ogle a woman this way, like he can’t help himself. Perhaps he’s been jealous of Cecilia this whole time; perhaps that’s why he objected to their engagement.

Page 6:

But something about that theory feels wrong. For the first time, Zayyan feels a seed of doubt take hold in the back of his mind. Over the next few days this seed grows roots and begins to sprout. Zayyan stops eating the meals that Cecilia serves him, spitting each bite back into his napkin when she looks away.

He sneaks down to the halal corner store once or twice a day to buy pre-made sandwiches and packets of jerky that he devours on the walk home. When Cecilia discovers one of the receipts in his pocket, she seems to find it funny. “Thirty dollars’ worth of snacks in two days? You’d think I haven’t been feeding you properly.” He chuckles nervously.

“Of all the marital problems we might someday have, my love, that one’s last on the list.” She lets out a braying laugh. Now, for the first time, he sees her clearly. All his memories of their storybook relationship fall apart upon closer examination, a silver thread unspooling. That night, when Cecilia takes the boys to soccer practice, Zayyan searches through her belongings.

Her nightstand, her wardrobe, her purse. At last he tries the bookshelves in their small home library. It feels like an intrusion, his being here, even more so than looking through her things. This has always been Cecilia’s space, not his.

Page 7:

He finds nothing unusual. After so many years working in publishing, most of her books are mainstream and respectable, novels and biographies and little about magic or witchcraft. It takes him a while to find them. All the books she read in college are hidden in the back, behind the books she reads for work.

He thumbs through them. There are pages she’s marked up and highlighted, in one book after another, a pattern impossible to refute. “Ancient Persian Love Potion Recipes.” “Concoctions to Bewitch and Beguile.” “How to Make a Man Love You.” The story of his perfect marriage shatters like a bottle smashed against concrete. When she comes home that night, he can’t bring himself to look her in the eyes.

Looking at her, trying to love her, hurts like trying to pick up broken glass with bare fingers. He doesn’t know what’s real and what’s false anymore. He needs time away to think, to plan. He leaves the next morning, while she’s asleep, and calls her from the airport so he won’t have to see her face.

“I’m on my way to New York for a couple of days,” he says. “Sorry for the late notice.” The static on the line blurs her voice. “New York?” “Farhan wants to go apartment-hunting. He needs my help.” “I wish you’d told me earlier,” she says, her voice unreadable.

Page 8:

“I would have cooked you something for the trip.” The thought gives him chills. “We’re about to board,” he lies. “I’ll call you when I land.” In New York, Zayyan fills his hours following Farhan to single-bedroom apartments. They visit Brooklyn brownstones and Manhattan high-rises, spaces filled with fake fruit and used furniture.

One night in New York turns into two, then three. Away from Cecilia, his thoughts become legible. He pins down their flapping corners, forces them to hold still so he can examine them properly. Cecilia isn’t real.

Not his version of her, anyway. The thought makes no sense to him, and yet he knows it to be true. This isn’t what he’d wanted. This isn’t what he’d thought his marriage would be.

He wants to ask Farhan for advice, but he knows his brother will never forgive Cecilia once he knows what she’s done, and Zayyan isn’t ready, not yet, for so permanent a fallout. Farhan doesn’t bring up Noor either. The last open house they attend is full of couples who comment incessantly to their partners, and the two brothers stand out in their silence. The real estate agent, a chirpy woman wearing lipstick too pale for her skin, ushers them from one room to the next with a rush of effervescent chatter.

Page 9:

The place is exactly what Farhan has been looking for. The stainless-steel kitchen, the red-brick walls, the bay windows. In the bedroom, one of the women whispers to her husband, “This place is a steal.” “I heard someone died in here a few years ago,” another woman says. “That’s why the property value went down.” The real estate agent appears behind her to interject quickly, nervously.

“There was an unfortunate incident, yes. But it won’t affect your experience here. The house is in perfect condition.” A few of the couples murmur in discontent. The first woman takes her husband by the elbow and walks him out.

Zayyan watches as Farhan looks up the incident on his phone. “I kind of wish I didn’t know about this,” Farhan says after a moment. “This place was really growing on me.” “At least you can make an informed decision now.” Farhan shrugs, puts his phone back in his pocket. “Informed about what?

Not knowing wouldn’t have hurt me.” Zayyan pauses. “Then forget you heard it. Focus on the stuff that matters. Could you see yourself being happy here?” “Yeah.

Page 10:

I think so.” Farhan furrows his brow. “I didn’t realize it until now, but I think I’ve been unhappy for a long time.” They’re both silent for a while. “Maybe it’s for the best that Noor left me,” Farhan says. “We both deserved more.” Zayyan stares out at the Manhattan skyline.

He has not been unhappy, not the way Farhan has been. But maybe he deserves more, too. He would be well within his rights to leave Cecilia and start over with someone new, someone with whom the magic would be real. Someone simultaneously perfect and true.

When Zayyan comes home—for he does, eventually, come home—Cecilia has ash reshteh waiting on the table. She’s turned out the lights and lit the candles, the expensive ones they usually save for birthdays and guests. Now, of course, he sees her as she really is. She is plain, dull, uninteresting.

He sits down at the dinner table but doesn’t touch his food. They speak of his trip, the kids, her week at work. The conversation begins to crumple in on itself. In a transparent attempt to save it, Cecilia shows him pictures of their friend’s newborn daughter, a red-cheeked creature with enormous eyes and a pink bow tied across her forehead.


[System]
Craft a Ten page narrative for adults with these guidelines:
Use ideas to improve the story including dialogue, conflict and challenges, and character development.
TYPICALLY IT GOOD TO FOLLOW THIS:
Introduction
Rising Action
Midpoint
Climax
Resolution

In a well-told story, elements like the climax, resolution, and midpoint shouldn't need explicit mentioning; a discerning reader should be able to identify these moments through the narrative's progression

Use adult themes if specified.
Start uniquely, avoiding clichés.
Adult content is permitted.
Make the story captivating, possibly humorous, and thought-provoking.
Begin each segment with "Page x:" for each page.
FOUR FULL LENGTH PARAGRAPHS
Do not generate a title.
generate ALL 10 pages,
Example Response Format
  'Page 1: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 2: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 3: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 4: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 5: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 6: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 7: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 8: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 9: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 10: (4 full-length paragraphs)'

[User]
Brief Overview: A soul seeking redemption inhabits the body of a psychiatrist to resolve the unfinished business of other trapped souls in a mental hospital. The story blends psychological horror and supernatural elements.

Pages 1-2:
- A spirit narrates their plan to assist other souls trapped within patients in a psychiatric ward.
- The spirit, which has possessed Dr. Sophie Green, reflects on the suffering and ineffective treatments they previously endured as a patient.
- Dr. Green, under the spirit's influence, begins to connect on a deeper level with the patients, sensing the trapped souls within.

Pages 3-4:
- The spirit gains access to patient files through Dr. Green, searching for clues to fulfill the unfinished business of fellow souls.
- Dr. Green consults with a patient, Wilson, who has a fixation on a past house fire, and the spirit urges Dr. Green to dig deeper into his background.
- Sophie is conflicted as the spirit pushes her to confront the possibility that what she considers delusions may hold significant truths.

Pages 5-7:
- The spirit reveals its identity as a recently deceased patient and makes a compelling case to Dr. Green about the reality of unresolved spirits needing closure.
- An emotional encounter between a patient, Laverne, and a visitor, Felicity, results in the release of Laverne's possessing spirit.
- Dr. Green becomes more attuned to the presence of dybbuks and starts differentiating between mental illness and spiritual possession.

Pages 8-10:
- Sophie introduces new, unconventional treatments based on the spirit's guidance, and other staff members are trained to recognize dybbuk possession.
- A complex case of a dybbuk seeking revenge is approached with creativity, leading to tragedy and raising ethical questions.
- The spirit reflects on its own unfinished business, realizing the need for acknowledgment, and prompts Dr. Green to visit its grave for closure.

[Assistant]
Page 1:

I am not an illness. I’m a soul with a goal. Everyone on this Everyone on this floor is here for intrusive thoughts, ideations, risk of harm to themselves or others. What society used to call possession, they now call neurotransmitter imbalance or schizophrenia or obsessive compulsion. Society forgets that sometimes it really is possession. I see my counterparts behind their eyes, muted by their medications, riding sluggishly in their host bodies. It pains me to see them this way.

They’ve been lulled into forgetting their final tasks; without completing their unfinished business here on earth, these souls will never pass on. I died on this hospital floor, hoarding my pills, taking them all at once in a swift and defiant act. The full schedule of group therapy, art therapy, music therapy, solo therapy, pharmaceutical therapy . . . all of it is theater. None of it spoke to my PTSD, my anxiety, the chronic physical and emotional pain that clung to me from the abuse I suffered as a child and a teen.

Doctors wanted me to rehash the details of the assaults time and again, button by button, but it always felt as if it was for their own sick fascination. Never for me. If these souls could only rest, their hosts could resume their lives. All of this is bullshit. None of it brings anyone, or the souls that ride them, any closer to wellness, to release, to freedom. But I will. Because now I’m riding Dr. Green.

I pick her because of the Magen David she wears on a gold chain around her neck, because she’s the one who prescribes the pills, and because she was the nicest to me when I was . . . whoever I was. She’s old enough to have had a bubbie to tell her the old stories, young enough to be healthy and sound. I plan to lay low for a few days, observing her, waiting to see if she notices me. It’s beautiful to be in a body unclouded by pain, a mind unclouded by darkness.

Page 2:

Day One, she doesn’t seem to detect me. I know just from sharing her body and mind that she’s strong-willed and follows the same routine every day. She keeps kosher at home but not when she’s out. Her first name is Sophie and she’s ashamed of it. She thinks it’s an old lady name. She has lost her mother and one breast to cancer. I’m maybe halfway in love with her, but maybe that’s just what it’s like to be so close to someone, to share hands and eyes and heart with them.

I wish I could ask the others, but they’re buried too deeply in their hosts to communicate with me. I didn’t mean to come back or be a dybbuk and I don’t know how all this works. All I know is it’s a chance I’m not going to waste. I mean to lay low, but that first night when she’s brushing her hair in front of the bathroom mirror, I borrow her voice. “Sophie is a beautiful name,” I make her say. Her thoughts hit me instantly, a rote response: It doesn’t even have a good nickname. She stares at herself for a moment.

“Sophie is a beautiful name,” she repeats, tasting the words as if wondering where they came from. As if they’re a drop of rain on her lips from out of a clear sky. Then she shrugs, disbelieving herself, and reaches for the bottle of cleanser to wash her face. Apprehension fills me as we enter the ward. Despite the fact that I’m the one with the ID badge now, the antiseptic smells are the same, the people are the same, as the place I’ve been trapped for the last few months. I remind myself that I have the power now. I can leave at the end of the shift.

None of these people are here to hurt me or help me or evaluate everything I do. As staff, I’m invisible to other staff and to patients in a way I wasn’t before. The patients wear their own clothes. I appreciate this in a new way now. I see how it helps the staff see them as potentially rehab-able people, when they’re not shambling zombies in open-assed hospital gowns. I can see their personalities and get a sense of their style in how they dress, how they attend to their hygiene. Another facet of behavior I hadn’t realized they evaluated, back when I was me.

Page 3:

Dr. Green pulls up the inpatient files and I get a peek at all of them. Save my own, of course, since I’m not a patient anymore. I’m in the morgue by now. It doesn’t even bother me to think about. That body was just a flawed, tired shell. The real me is here, alert, and focused. I see the scoop on all my friends from group therapy.

Laverne, for example, is on tranquilizers because when she isn’t, she rants about how she needs to get to Mrs. Felicity Ann Torvinen of Harrisburg and tell her she was right. I copy down the name and do a little online searching. There’s only one Felicity Torvinen living in Harrisburg and I open her blog. It’s a sweet site about life lessons she learned while teaching at the YMCA, with occasional recipes and crafts. I make a call. Wilson Hayes, who sat next to the old me in Art Therapy, is obsessed with fire safety. He can’t enter a room, even for the hundredth time, without counting the sprinklers and the number of exits.

He draws dogs really well, but they’re always trapped behind glass. The house he draws always has the same house number on it. His file says that when he started his current medication, he was able to calm down about fire and start to draw other things. Streets, cafes, still life scenes . . . but that 11007 number is still incorporated in all of them.

Dr. Green meets with Wilson at ten o’clock for their weekly consultation. He wears a soft blue flannel shirt and pale jeans, bleached almost white. His hands are clean, his nails manicured, his skin vibrant brown, but his face is soft, his eyes mousy brown and lacking focus. He glances up to the sprinkler in the middle of the office ceiling before he sits. On his feet, clean blue socks, the kinds with the grippy nubs on the bottom. Sophie calls him Wilson and asks him how he feels and whether he’s noticing any side effects from his medication. She likes him.

Page 4:

She thinks he’s a kind man, but tortured. I see his dybbuk as a sleepy presence in his eyes. I try calling out to it, but it doesn’t hear me. “I don’t have as much energy as usual,” Wilson says, “but maybe it’s just that there isn’t much to do here but think and talk, and think some more.” I move to Sophie’s face and pretend to check her files, then I use her mouth. “You do seem fatigued and listless lately. The staff has noticed. We’re going to try adjusting your medication.” I type with her hands, halving the dose.

Her knowledge tells me it’s not safe to cut it to zero all at once. I don’t want to hurt him. “Tell me about the house in your artwork. What’s the address there?” Sophie is startled by the question. He looks as startled as she feels. No one’s thought to ask him this before. His brow furrows in thought for a minute, and he actually rubs his palm across his forehead.

“11007 . . . ” I prompt. “11007 Chestnut Way, Aberdeen,” he blurts. Then he seems surprised at himself, like he doesn’t know where it came from. After our short appointment, I do some more research online.

“What is going on?” Sophie whispers, watching her fingers move on the keyboard, reading the article that appears on her screen. “You help people,” I answer back, in her own whisper. “You want to help people. But sometimes you can help them better by listening to them. Sometimes what you call delusions have meaning.” She revolts, tensing and fighting me for control of her body. I subside and let her win. It is still hers, after all.

Page 5:

I don’t want to be an impolite guest. “I’m not here to hurt you,” I tell her, “but to help them. When we help them, I can go. When we help them, they can go, too. Do you see?” She’s smart. I picked a smart one. She makes the connection mostly by herself.

The patients who hear voices. The patients with memories that aren’t theirs, with compulsions that seem random. “Felicity is real. Wilson’s house fire is real,” she whispers slowly. “Exactly. They’re not theirs, but they’re real. What happens if Wilson Hayes gets to see that the dog survived?

What happens if Laverne gets to talk to Felicity? Would it really be the end of the world?” “No, but—” “So why do you fight so hard against just letting them have this?” Sophie sees my point. “Who are you?” she asks. “I died yesterday. But I have unfinished business, and this—helping these people—is it.” She doesn’t connect me with the death on the ward, but she does seem to accept this. Tentatively. It makes as much sense as anything else.

She knows, or insists to herself that she knows, that she isn’t delusional. You see how it feels, knowing your own truth, knowing no one’s going to believe you, just pump you full of pills? I think at her. Then I let it go. She’s putting it together well enough on her own. I retreat while she works and ponders. That’s our time for today, Dr. Green.

Page 6:

I’m sure you’ve got a lot to process. Two days later. There is no weekend break for inpatients, but the weekend is when Felicity Torvinen’s son can drive her down from Harrisburg. It’s not far, so hopefully this strange errand isn’t too much of an imposition on them. Sophie chats with them a little, then has them wait in her office, and there they sit when Laverne comes in for her appointment. We’ve agreed to titrate her dose down, too, and I see that the dual presence of her dybbuk is more aware behind her eyes. I’m showing Dr. Green how to recognize it, too.

Laverne is a soft-figured white lady. She looks about fifty, with graying hair tied back in a ponytail and a simple long-sleeved floral tunic shirt and solid-colored yoga pants. Her moccasin bedroom slippers shuffle on the tile in the hall but are silent on my carpet. Felicity doesn’t recognize Laverne, of course, but Laverne recognizes Felicity at once. She brings her hands up to her face, not covering her eyes as they fill with tears. She goes to her knees, taking Felicity’s gentle, wrinkled hands. “Oh, Mrs. Torvinen.

It’s me, Amelia. I’m in here. I wanted to thank you, I can’t believe I get a chance to thank you.” Felicity plays along, transferring one of Laverne’s hands to both of hers, patting it softly. “It’s all right, Amelia. What are you thanking me for?” “You told me I had the talent to be a top figure skater. You believed in me. You were the first one to ever believe in me.

And I made it, I made it all the way to the Olympics and then my plane crashed on the way home and I never had a chance to thank you.” Felicity stills. Her eyes go wide. Her son looks at her curiously. “Amelia . . . Jackson?” she says, taking in this body, this stranger, at her feet.

Page 7:

“Yes!” Laverne’s dybbuk crows. She has such a beatific smile, like the people in art who are about to receive the rapture. “Yes, it’s me. I couldn’t be at peace without thanking you. Those lessons at the Y, growing up, they meant everything.” “I always followed your career,” Felicity says. “I was always proud. I’m .

. . still proud.” Sophie doesn’t need me to see the change come over Laverne’s eyes, but I make sure she doesn’t miss it. The woman left behind is lucid, serene, and a little embarrassed. She gets to her feet. “I feel tired all of a sudden,” Laverne says. “Can I be excused to lie down a while?” Patients are supposed to remain out on the floor during the day, participating and being sociable, or at least engaged in tasks.

But Dr. Green and I can see the weight that’s been lifted from Laverne, and the shock of being suddenly alone in her mind and body. “Of course,” we say, and make a note in her file that we allowed it. “When was that plane crash?” I ask Felicity once Laverne has left us. “Oh, that was two or three years ago,” she says. “Two,” her son confirms. “We saved the newspaper with the headline. Mom was crushed.” In the file, Laverne Monroe’s outpatient treatment started two years ago with “agitation and fixation” and hearing voices in her head.

Outpatient treatments were unsuccessful. She’s been a resident here for six months, one of the longer-duration patients. Dr. Green doesn’t need me to tell her that Laverne’s symptoms will all have abated by the time she rises from her nap. Though she’s astonished and doesn’t know how the hell she’s going to write it up, she sees what just happened. She understands. “They’re not all like that,” she whispers to me later, in the car. “They’re not all possessed.

Page 8:

Letting them act out their fixations, it’s not always going to be an easy fix. Neurodivergence is real. Chemical imbalances are real. Mental illness is real.” “All those things are real,” I agree. “But so are unfinished souls. Can you tell the difference yet?” She’s silent the rest of the way home. It’s a companionable silence, though.

It’s hard to tell if she likes me, but I think she’s used to me. The following week, Laverne is discharged. Sophie and I haven’t made as much progress finding Wilson’s dog. The family that died in the house fire is a matter of public record, but what happened to the dog isn’t. It’s taken a week for Dr. Green to track down the firefighter who rescued the dog and get him to return our call. He tells us he turned the dog over to a local shelter. The shelter won’t give out the adoption information.

I feel stuck, but Sophie doesn’t. “Do you have a photo of the dog? The one you used to promote him for adoption?” Dr. Green asks. They email it to her later that day. It’s date-stamped and everything. It’s perfect. Wilson thinks it’s perfect, too.

He hugs it and he breaks down and cries. He keeps asking if it’s real, but he knows it is. Dr. Green watches him, awe spreading through her. This is real, too, she thinks, recalling my words. I couldn’t be more proud. New patients come. She gets better at spotting the dybbuks.

Page 9:

She trains the staff on fixation-fulfillment as treatment, or “getting the obsession out of their system,” and teaches them to spot the signs. Even if they’re wrong sometimes, if what the patient wants isn’t dangerous, does it really hurt to try? Lara Berk is admitted on a Wednesday. She’s one of us. Sophie and I spot her at once. She’s had a complete personality change after a car accident, though her brain scans show no damage. She is a young woman, wire-taut, home on break from a New England college.

She no longer cares whether she goes back for the spring semester. She wears the same clothes every day. Stringy-haired, she declines the opportunity to shower. Her unfinished business is revenge. We can’t just give it to her and let her get it out of her system. Sophie is adamant about that. “Is the cure worth it if it comes at the cost of other lives?” she demands.

“What if she only thinks she needs to kill because she’s too angry to conceive of getting revenge some other way? Could your team help her through her anger so she can find a non-violent solution that would satisfy her?” I counter. Sophie actually meets with her colleagues on Lara’s case and they form a strategy. They look at who else was in the accident. They investigate the other fatalities. They listen to the patient’s story. Whose story is she embodying, if not her own?

Lara’s art is violence and death. Her music is the honking of horns and the crash of cymbals. Even if they think it’s merely her projection, they still help her put the pieces together. They medicate to soften the edges of her anger instead of drugging the whole situation into a paste. They treat the dybbuk, not the host. She calms. She accepts.

Page 10:

She heals. After her discharge, we get word that Lara has killed her brother. He was the driver in the accident. The dybbuk got its revenge. Lara’s personality changes again. Now she is a well of grief and remorse. Grief and remorse respond well to outpatient treatment while she sits at home on bail, awaiting trial.

Dr. Green has started handling all her patients the way I’ve taught her to handle the dybbuks. She listens to what they want, what they say they need. I’ve made someone a more compassionate human. I’ve helped trapped souls. So why haven’t I moved on? I expected it at that first reunion, when the skater got a chance to thank her first teacher. I expected it when the fire victim learned his beloved dog had survived.

I expected it when Sophie identified her first dybbuk without my help. If those things aren’t what I want, then what is it? And then I know. I need to be seen, too. Even if I don’t know who I am. Sophie knows who I am. She knows which patient died that day.

On her next day off, I ask her to go to my grave. There aren’t supposed to be visitors for a full year, according to tradition, but I think it’s okay to be non-traditional about this; I’ve certainly taught Sophie to be non-traditional about everything else. There’s no stone yet, just a plot of dirt that still shows signs of its recent overturning. “I wronged you. I wronged other patients. I misdiagnosed them because I didn’t understand,” she says out loud to the grave. Waits.


[System]
Craft a Ten page narrative for adults with these guidelines:
Use ideas to improve the story including dialogue, conflict and challenges, and character development.
TYPICALLY IT GOOD TO FOLLOW THIS:
Introduction
Rising Action
Midpoint
Climax
Resolution

In a well-told story, elements like the climax, resolution, and midpoint shouldn't need explicit mentioning; a discerning reader should be able to identify these moments through the narrative's progression

Use adult themes if specified.
Start uniquely, avoiding clichés.
Adult content is permitted.
Make the story captivating, possibly humorous, and thought-provoking.
Begin each segment with "Page x:" for each page.
FOUR FULL LENGTH PARAGRAPHS
Do not generate a title.
generate ALL 10 pages,
Example Response Format
  'Page 1: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 2: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 3: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 4: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 5: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 6: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 7: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 8: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 9: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 10: (4 full-length paragraphs)'

[User]
Brief Overview: A haunting tale of domestic horror that unravels the story of two women connected by the same abuser—one living and one dead—as the apparition seeks vengeance and the abused finds courage.

Pages 1-2: In the apartment, a ghost observes a woman caring for dying chrysanthemums. Her abusive partner, Shaun, loses his job and takes out his anger on her and the flowers. The tension between them is palpable, and the ghost reflects on past abuse from Shaun.

Pages 3-4: After Shaun leaves, the woman attempts to salvage the flowers while hiding her injuries from a concerned neighbor. At work, she finds a brief respite with a thoughtful supervisor. Back at home, Shaun gifts her a new flowerpot, trying to conceal the cycle of abuse with moments of kindness.

Pages 5-7: Work offers the woman an escape, but she is trapped by Shaun's manipulative behavior. At home, the dark pattern continues as Shaun's mood swings and violence escalate to life-threatening levels. However, an unexplained supernatural force begins to intervene, breaking Shaun's guitars in a display of spectral rage.

Pages 8-10: Facing the consequences of her ghostly protector's actions, the woman is left alone after Shaun abruptly departs. In her isolation, she questions reality and her survival. The story climaxes with the woman on the roof, where the ghost begs her not to succumb to the same fate. The ghost's past intertwines with the woman's present, revealing a cyclical pattern of abuse and a cliffhanger that leaves the woman's final decision to the imagination.

[Assistant]
Page 1:

The chrysanthemums are dying. The yellow flowers face downward, stems wilting at the neck. Their petals curl and brown at the edges like burning paper. You lift one of the ragged blossoms up, as if to try and help it support its own weight. You keep the flowerpot on the kitchen countertop right by the apartment window where it can get the most sunlight, but it doesn’t seem to be enough. I sit on the countertop beside the flowers. My mangled legs dangle in the air, one shoe on, one foot bare.

Blood drips from my toes, still oozing from where my splintered shin bone punctures through the side of my calf. Each drop fades into nothing before it can reach the linoleum floor below. I watch you water the chrysanthemums. You keep your eyes on the soil, your head bowed. Shaun laughs bitterly from the living room behind you. “I’m late just a couple times and now you’ve got it out for me?” he sneers at his phone. He paces in front of the wall where his guitar collection is displayed in three rows of wall mounts.

His half-laced boots make his footsteps heavy and forceful on the hardwood floor—he’d been just about to head out when he’d gotten the call from his workplace. “Whatever. Bet you’re doing this over the phone because you knew I’d fucking deck you in person. You’re lucky I—” Shaun stops, staring at his phone in disbelief. “This is such bullshit,” he snarls at the “call ended” screen. You keep very still as he stalks past you to the fridge for a beer. He wrenches the can tab open so violently I half-expect him to rip it clean off.

“Do you want to talk about it?” you ask as he gulps down half the can. He wipes his mouth and gives you a withering look. “Why? It’s not like you can do anything about it.” “I’m sorry,” you say. Shaun exhales through his nose and sets his beer down on the countertop. “I thought I told you to throw these away,” he says, reaching over and grabbing the flowerpot. “They’re a fucking eyesore.” Shards of terra cotta and dirt explode around your bare feet as he smashes it on the floor.

Page 2:

He looms over you, his fists clenching and unclenching. You stay rooted in place. You’re so still, I can’t tell if it’s because you’re breathing very shallowly, or you’re not breathing at all. Have you ever thought about how whenever Shaun “loses control,” he only breaks your things? Somehow in his “blind” rage he’s never accidentally smashed any of his own belongings. It’s awfully convenient, isn’t it? “I’m sorry,” you say again.

Shaun rakes his hands through his hair, yanking strands of it loose from his ponytail in the process. Then he smiles, his demeanor switching back to good-natured. “You know what? This is good. I’m better than some shitty tech job anyway.” Your mouth curves into a smile to match his. The rest of you remains perfectly still. “Yeah, you’re right,” you say.

“I should be spending my time on music and the band. That’s the career that actually matters,” he says. The two of you are barely getting by as it is, and Shaun has too much credit card debt to be relying solely on a career he hasn’t even started—he and his old college friends haven’t even decided on a name for their band. Maybe you’re aware of this, and your silence is out of a feeling of helplessness. Or maybe you’re not even allowing yourself to think about it, keeping your mind just as still as your body. Some of the shards of pottery have cut into your feet. I watch the blood pool around your toes, but you don’t seem to notice.

Shaun hasn’t noticed either. Blood trickles down my face. Shaun goes over to his guitar collection and retrieves the Gibson you bought him for his birthday, just after you’d started living together. It’s a Les Paul Standard and Shaun’s favorite. Even now, he lovingly strokes its bourbon burst finish before he starts packing it into his padded gig bag. “I’m going to get the guys together for a practice session today,” he says as he hefts the strap of his amp case onto one shoulder. “Okay,” you say.

Page 3:

The apartment door closes behind him. Only then do you move again. You kneel, gently collecting the chrysanthemums from the remains of the flowerpot. You scoop up what dirt you can salvage from the floor, collecting it in a small pile. You’re not throwing them away, even though Shaun told you to. I’m glad. I don’t think you should give up on them either.

There is a knock on the door. You flinch, scrambling to your feet. Even if Shaun has his own apartment key, he hates having to stop to unlock it when his hands are full. But when you go to answer it, it’s your neighbor from the floor below. You’ve passed her on the stairwell on your way down to the laundry room on more than one occasion. She’s wearing a university hoodie that’s two sizes too large, and what look like blue-light glasses, judging by the yellowish tinge of the lenses. “Sorry, I was just studying in my room, and I heard a pretty loud crashing sound?

I was wondering if something might have happened.” She is looking at you very carefully. “Everything’s fine,” you say. “I just dropped something.” “You’re bleeding,” she says. You glance down and realize you’ve left a trail of bloodied footprints across the floor. “I’m fine,” you tell her. She doesn’t seem like she believes you. I wouldn’t.

I don’t even know if you believe what you’re saying. “I’m sorry about the noise,” you say. “Good luck with studying.” You shut the door. You return to the kitchen and pull an old takeout container from the recycling bin, cutting some slits in the bottom. You place the chrysanthemums inside, along with the dirt you managed to collect. Even when you have everything settled though, the flowers still look mangled. You place the makeshift planter back on the kitchen countertop, in the spot with the most sunlight.

Page 4:

I watch you retrace your steps with a wet cloth to clean up your own blood. You crawl on your hands and knees to avoid making any more of a mess with your still bleeding feet. You brought the potted chrysanthemums with you from your old place when you moved in with Shaun. I stood in the doorway as you brought your boxes of things and I said, Get out. Don’t let him do this to you too. But you didn’t hear me. When I was alive, I used to go up to the roof of our old apartment building with my lighter and a box of tissues.

I’d pull a tissue out and light it at the corner, gazing at the glowing orange tongues as they consumed the feather-soft paper. Just before the flames could lick at my fingers, I’d let go. The burning paper would float down and disintegrate. Then I’d pull out another tissue. For each one I burned, I made a wish. It was easier than waiting for the stars to fall out of the sky. And it was easier than trying to leave him.

Your supervisor embodies a unique harmony of workaholic efficiency with a very laidback demeanor. They have a tiny button pin with the words “they/them” attached to their lanyard, along with an employee recognition pin of a smiley face with vacant eyes and the words “Above & Beyond.” You acted timid around them at first, but then came that truck day where it was just the two of you—the rest of the truck team called out—and you had to unload almost 15,000 units of freight together. At the end of the night, they gave you a fist bump. Now, your face lights up when you arrive at work and see your supervisor is still in the store. Their shift should have ended two hours ago, according to the schedule, but I’m not surprised they stayed later. “Hey,” they nod at you. “Just got done putting those shelves up again in housewares.

Fingers crossed these brackets hold better than the last ones did.” You wince. That last endeavor ended in a very dramatic structural collapse. It was so loud it startled even me. “I’m closing tonight, so I can keep an eye on things and make sure no one tries to put any merchandise on them yet,” you offer. “Thanks, that’d be great.” They stop and squint at you for a moment. “Aren’t you also scheduled to do price changes tomorrow morning?” “I am,” you laugh. Closing the store will have you out by 11:30 p.m. at the earliest.

Page 5:

Then you’ll have to be back here by 4:00 a.m. “Maybe I can hide in the backroom and just sleep here.” “Yeah, at that point why even bother going home? Just live here,” they say. Your supervisor’s tone of voice is dry by default, everything they say sounds a touch sarcastic, but I wonder if they’re also being partially serious. Sometimes they look at you like your downstairs neighbor does, carefully and assessing. Whenever you’re working an overnight shift together and you have to stop to send Shaun a selfie to prove that you’re where you say you are, they always look like they want to say something. “I could use the overtime,” you say. “Shaun just got fired.

And I heard from a manager that we have payroll to burn.” Your supervisor hums thoughtfully. “You could bring him here,” they suggest. “Fourth quarter’s coming up. The store will take literally anyone they can get.” “Maybe.” You smile. “I don’t mind the extra hours though.” I think you’re happy working fifteen-hour days because some part of you would rather be here than at home. I think, deep down, something in you realizes everything isn’t fine. You get home from work to find a brand-new white ceramic flowerpot sitting on the kitchen countertop.

Your face lights up when you see it. You look so happy and overwhelmingly grateful—even though it was Shaun who destroyed your last flowerpot in the first place. “Welcome back,” Shaun yells from the living room couch, his guitar cradled in his arms. “Check this out. We started putting together this new song today at practice. Come here and listen.” His eyes are bright with excitement as he meets your eyes, quirking his eyebrow playfully. You go sit beside him.

I stay by the door, standing on my shattered legs. Shaun flies through an energetic sequence of chords on his guitar. The sound is rich, even though some of it comes out disjointed as he fumbles between some of the trickier hand positions. With a little more polish, it could be the start of a solid rock song. The problem is that Shaun doesn’t like to practice. He never has. He’s always about the next new thing, never sticking with any project long enough for it to go anywhere.

Page 6:

You applaud. His exuberance is infectious. “That was awesome,” you cheer. “I know! I’m thinking of calling it ‘Fire Me,’” he snickers. “That’s perfect.” You hesitate for just a moment before you lean into him, bumping your shoulder against his. “Can you play that song?” you ask shyly.

Shaun feigns a long-suffering sigh. “I guess,” he teases, already strumming the first of the familiar chords. And just like that, I can see you forgetting all about how terrified you were this morning. The day you gave him the Gibson, he improvised this song for you on the spot. He used to do that for me too. It’s hard not to love someone who makes you feel like he can play music from your heartstrings, singing softly in that warm voice of his all the while. Blood seeps from the split skin of my face, rolling down my cheeks.

He hasn’t actually apologized. You don’t seem to realize, or maybe you don’t think it matters. You just want to bask in this moment. Suddenly the kind and playful person is back, as if he never went anywhere in the first place. All you want is to believe he’ll stay for good this time. I remember what that was like. I used to live with him too.

I used to tell myself, Maybe it really will be different this time. And, This is the most I’ll ever get. I can’t leave, who else in the world would love someone like me? I kept telling myself that, right up until the day he killed me. • • • • Sometimes, I think about those crime procedurals endlessly running on TV. Episode after episode, characters fight tooth and nail for justice and insist things like, “He can’t get away with this.” But he already did. He told everyone I committed suicide and they believed him, just like that.

Page 7:

You get home from work to find Shaun on the living room couch with the bottle of whiskey. You freeze in the doorway. I whisper, Don’t go in. Just turn around and leave. But you’re already closing the door behind you, trying and failing to keep the door hinge from squeaking too loudly. “You know, I thought we were in this together. Me and the guys,” Shaun says, in that familiar, slurred drawl.

“Turns out none of them care about doing this seriously. It’s like everyone’s just moved on.” He forces a laugh. “But who needs them anyway?” His eyes are watery and red. You go to him, your heart aching. “I’ll buy my own equipment, do all the parts myself,” he says bitterly. “And I’ll help,” you say. You sit beside him on the couch.

“Anything you need.” He snorts. “A keyboard or six-piece drumkit to start. Or hell, how about everything I’d need to set up a private recording studio here in the apartment?” You smile shyly. “Well, fourth quarter’s coming up. If you came to work at my store, we could team up and go for the overtime and overnight holiday season bonuses. We could save all the money you’d need in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales,” you say. “It could be fun.” He stares at you.

“You want me to work retail? Like you?” Your eyes widen. “I didn’t mean,” you stammer as you rush to explain. “It’d just be for the season. Equipment’s so expensive, but this way, we could get everything for you to get started right away—” He grabs you and gives you a rough shake, like you’re a toy that’s making an annoying sound. “Shut up.” “I’m sorry, I was just—” “I said shut up,” he snarls. “Shaun—” His hands wrap around your throat and your voice cuts out.

Page 8:

You grab at his fingers, tugging at his wrists. Your legs kick weakly against the floor. No. He doesn’t get to kill you too. I scream. No one hears me, but this time, pressure builds in the room. I keep screaming and even though I don’t have a body anymore, I can feel my bones shift under the strain, all the broken pieces grinding together.

The walls start to creak. Shaun doesn’t notice. He never does. But then his Gibson topples over from where he left it leaning against the couch. Shaun stops, staring at the guitar. He loosens his grip on your neck like an afterthought. You suck in a desperate breath, a sob ripping out of you before you clamp a hand over your mouth in terror to muffle the sound.

Your body trembles beneath him. He gets off you, going over to his fallen guitar. He mutters curses under his breath as he turns it over, examining it for any damage. I wrench his Fender Stratocastor from its wall mount. It drops straight down, landing butt first, the neck swinging down as it clatters on the floor. He stares. The Telecastor falls next.

Followed by the Ibanez, the Charvel, and the Starfire V. The J-45 is from the top row and the headstock snaps clean off the neck as it smashes into the floor. Shaun’s face drains of blood. It’s his turn to have his belongings destroyed in a “blind rage.” I slam my hand into the wall, and his last four guitars all slam into the floor in a synchronized cacophony. The room goes quiet again. There is only the sound of your faint, strained breathing that you’re trying to muffle with your hands. Shaun still hasn’t moved. There is a knock on the door.

Page 9:

Shaun stares blankly for a long moment before he shuffles over to answer it. “Yes?” he says. It’s the neighbor from downstairs. Her eyes widen when she sees it’s Shaun at the door and not you. Her eyes skate past him and rove around what she can see of the apartment’s interior over his shoulder. You are hidden from view, still lying on the floor behind the couch. “Yeah sorry, I live in the apartment below, and—” She swallows.

“I wanted to see if everything was all right?” “Oh, yeah,” Shaun says dully. “We were just trying to set up some shelves. But the brackets didn’t hold.” A smile quivers on your lips. That must remind you of your supervisor’s shelving struggles at work. Tears spill from the corners of your eyes, rolling down the sides of your face. “Do you guys need any help?” the neighbor asks. “Everything’s fine,” Shaun says.

He shuts the door. The neighbor lingers for a little while longer in the hallway, but eventually her footsteps echo down the hall, back toward the stairwell. I move to stand directly behind Shaun and lean in close. Get out, I hiss. His shoulders tense. He doesn’t turn, doesn’t react like he heard me, but he stumbles over to the living room table to collect his phone, keys, and wallet. He shoves his feet into his boots, not bothering to lace them.

He glances one last time at the apartment, his eyes sliding right over me, instead gazing hauntedly at the wall of empty guitar mounts. He closes the door behind him. You don’t get up from the floor for a long time. Maybe you think he could be back any second now, so you just lie there, too afraid to move, just in case he doesn’t want you to. You don’t go to work. You crawled up onto the couch from the floor but haven’t moved since, staring listlessly at your phone. You can’t seem to make yourself dial the numbers to call the store.

Page 10:

Your supervisor sends you a text asking if you’re okay. You try to draft a reply, but you only get as far as typing “I’m sorry,” before you stop, drawing a blank. The chrysanthemums are dead. They’ve been dead for a while now. You stand in front of them, holding a measuring cup of water. It takes you a while to realize you’re looking at a shriveled pile of dead leaves. I watch you crush the pot to your chest, holding it tight.

The leaves crinkle like newspaper. Your breath shudders, your sobbing restrained, stifled into frail gasping sounds as if even now you are afraid of being heard. Then, you go quiet. You turn and go out the door, down the hall. I follow you up the stairwell. Roof access is restricted, but the door lock is rusted and broken. You walk to the roof’s edge.

You set the flowerpot down first, balancing it on the ledge before swinging your legs over and sitting beside them. Your feet dangle in the empty air as you settle yourself, sitting comfortably. You look out at the sky. Please, I say. Don’t do this. But you don’t hear me. I was up on the roof too, when he killed me.

We’d had a fight, so I wanted to get some air. He came up after me. He got more and more furious until he grabbed me by the front of my shirt and by my hair. Then he shoved me, and I went tumbling backwards over the edge. I fell fifteen stories, but I landed feet-first, so I didn’t die right away. I can’t even remember what the fight was about. Don’t let him kill you too.


[System]
Craft a Ten page narrative for adults with these guidelines:
Use ideas to improve the story including dialogue, conflict and challenges, and character development.
TYPICALLY IT GOOD TO FOLLOW THIS:
Introduction
Rising Action
Midpoint
Climax
Resolution

In a well-told story, elements like the climax, resolution, and midpoint shouldn't need explicit mentioning; a discerning reader should be able to identify these moments through the narrative's progression

Use adult themes if specified.
Start uniquely, avoiding clichés.
Adult content is permitted.
Make the story captivating, possibly humorous, and thought-provoking.
Begin each segment with "Page x:" for each page.
FOUR FULL LENGTH PARAGRAPHS
Do not generate a title.
generate ALL 10 pages,
Example Response Format
  'Page 1: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 2: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 3: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 4: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 5: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 6: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 7: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 8: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 9: (4 full-length paragraphs)
  Page 10: (4 full-length paragraphs)'

[User]
Brief Overview: In this survival fantasy, a wolf struggles against its own failing body and a peculiar encounter with a supernatural entity as it pursues a symbolic stag, grappling with hunger, identity, and the inevitability of change.

Pages 1-2:
- Risha, a starving wolf, follows a distant stag through a harsh icy landscape.
- Risha collapses from exhaustion and pain but is motivated to continue hunting.
- A mysterious and impeccably clean white dog appears and speaks to Risha, hinting that Risha was once human.

Pages 3-4:
- The dog claims to be everywhere, witnessing Risha's futile pursuit and offers it an alternative source of food.
- Risha hunts a dying rabbit and experiences a surreal and satisfying feast that dissipates the rabbit.
- Wether, Risha's recurring mate, returns and Risha finds it can only eat from the living now, changed after the encounter with the white dog.

Pages 5-7:
- Risha dreams of being a young doe confronted by a stag bound to a decaying corpse.
- The white dog continues its cryptic conversations with Risha and compels it to consume what it hasn't before.
- Risha complies and hunts a range of animals, still driven by a relentless hunger.
- Eventually, Risha feels that it is 'eating' not-real versions of its mate Wether, leading to despair.

Pages 8-10:
- Risha deals with the horrifying birth of its pups, which are lifeless and grotesque.
- Risha's reality blurs between its dreams as a doe and its wolf existence, both fixated on a stag.
- Risha is lost without Wether, which seems replaced by unnaturally ash-scented wolves.
- Risha struggles with an unfulfillable hunger and a desire to revert to its previous form, envisioning itself following the stag into perpetuity.
- The story ends with Risha reflecting on the shared fate of itself and the stag, entwined in a ceaseless journey.

[Assistant]
Page 1:

Risha follows the limping stag. It is so far away that Risha can hardly see it, but Risha drags itself forward anyway. Toward the starkly black beady eye. Toward the musk stench. Risha’s limbs grow heavier with the passing days. Its jaw hangs from its face, swaying with each step.

It can’t remember the last time it ate; it is as if the fire inside of its belly, gnawing on itself, has been there since the day Risha was born. Risha doesn’t know how it will kill the stag, but it smells meat, so it shambles onward. To deny the pull, to lie down in a bed of leaves, is the same as dying, and Risha will not die today. The icy ground cuts furrows into its paws. Its pelt hangs from its ribs. The stag will save it; the stag is all Risha has.

Risha will not die today. Risha takes another step; its leg shudders and it collapses. Pain slithers across its face, but it still digs its claws into the ground, pulls. Risha will not die today. Between the leaves, there is a rustling of white fur and blue eyes. Risha’s hackles prickle, but only a dog slinks out from the brambles.

It walks with a catlike silence. It smells like nothing at all. The stag. The stag. Risha tries to stand. The stag is gone.

Page 2:

“Dear wolf,” the dog says. “Rest awhile.” The dog leans down. There is a sense of wrongness in the way that it moves: fluidly, as if it were swimming. There isn’t a single speck of dirt on its bright coat. “In another world, you are a man,” the dog says, “I see it in your eyes. When the hunter shot your jaw off, you were meant to wrap your hands around his throat and squeeze.

To lie on top of him until the warmth of his body faded away. But instead, you are here. Your suffering is an affront to nature. Why were you born a wolf?” A low, gurgling sound escapes Risha’s throat. Its chest heaves and its tongue trembles as it tries to speak. White foam dots its lips.

“Oh,” the dog whispers. “I can hear you. Even when you can’t speak. It’s alright.” My voice . . .

“I know.” I had a beautiful voice, once. “I know.” What— What are you? “I am these things today: the dirt beneath your feet, the eye of a wasp, the cypress needles floating in the pond,” the dog says. “I am everywhere, and I saw you stalking a stag you cannot eat. Why?” Meat. The dog circles Risha.

Page 3:

The strike of its paws against the ground is as hypnotizing as pelting rain. “I don’t smell meat,” it says. “I smell death.” No. “I do.” NO. “Do not fear death, wolf.” The dog smooths down Risha’s hackles with its tongue. “Those touched by my hand never die.

What is it that you desire?” Salt heat blood offal fur skin fat bone— The dog stops in front of Risha and sits, head tilted to the side. Leaning forward, it presses its nose to Risha’s tongue, and Risha imagines how good it would feel to clamp his jaw shut around that snout and drink and drink and drink. “Dear wolf,” the dog says, “you may eat.” Risha follows the scent of meat to the river, but it does not find the stag. Instead, a wounded rabbit picks its way across the rocks, old blood matting down the fur on its flank. Saliva drips from Risha’s lolling tongue. It traps the rabbit underfoot, its paw sinking into the softness of its stomach.

Risha remembers the sticky warm rabbit taste, and the crunch of bone, and the sweetness of marrow, and as it remembers, the rabbit shudders, goes still. Its skin splits open and its insides wriggle out between the blades of grass until one by one, each piece wilts like a flower in the summertime. More and more, as the rabbit wastes away, a warmth fills Risha’s belly. In the spring, the yearling pups roll in a valley of wildflowers. They were only weanlings when Risha met the hunter and the white dog. Their pelts are black like Risha’s, their faces slender, vulpine like their sire Wether.

Risha has taken many mates in its lifetime. It has sired pups by red-coated bitches and carried the mongrels of dogs, and while these may come and go, Wether returns. Wether carries a fox in its jaws and drops the carcass at Risha’s paws. It does this every time it hunts. When it prods the carcass with its nose, it is asking, “Would you eat? Please?” It has not seen Risha eat since its return; this sharing ritual, performed with the utmost care time and time again, is how Risha learned that it can only eat from the living.

Page 4:

And now there is the beginning of a worry, needling its way into Risha’s mind, that this is a body that it cannot understand, fit with a wrongness that makes Risha’s hide itch if thinks about it for too long. After all, it didn’t ask what the white dog wanted in return; it didn’t even ask to heal. It has taken the whole season for its jaw to sew itself together with boney callouses. It no longer sways, locked now in its terrible grin. Risha presses its head against Wether’s, and Wether lets the yearlings pull the fox apart by the legs. They fall over each other in a tangle of gangly limbs.

They yelp, and whine, and sneeze. When Risha returned, it sought out Wether first—and first there was fear. There is no word for ghost among wildkind, Risha has since realized, but there is an understanding that death is not the end for all things: mold eats the fallen tree, which burrows deep into the earth and emerges again as another oak, and so too do the dead sometimes walk. So Wether approached, low to the ground and its eyes white-rimmed, as it took in two long breaths. Risha was acutely aware of how its scent had changed since it met the white dog, strange and familiar all at once, a bit like something left to rot in the sun. But familiar enough, it seemed, because Wether sprang to its feet and licked the space between Risha’s eyes and together they bounded through brambles and nettles and slept that night in a bed of moss.

“You are my Risha,” said Wether’s teeth when they nipped and tugged at Risha’s hide. “Not moss, not fungi, not meat,” said Wether’s tongue when it cleaned the space between Risha’s toes. In Risha’s gut, there is the stirring of next season’s pups. In the budding heat, Risha’s tongue dries to leather. Its cheeks dry and crack. With each exhale comes the perfume of decay.

Dirt collects in the spaces between its teeth, and when it sleeps, little bugs pick their way across the mountains and valleys of its canines. It wakes to worms digging furrows into its tongue; to something wriggling into its lungs. It scrambles to its feet, hacking and digging at its mouth. Out from its throat springs a ball of rotting meat, slick with mucus. Wether presses its weight into Risha’s side and looks on with big eyes, soft ears. Risha digs and digs, but its paws only leave more sand, loam, silt on its tongue.

Page 5:

Tear it off, Risha wants to say, tear it off of me and bury it at the foot of an oak and let no wildkind eat it, but it can speak to no one but the white dog. In its dreams, Risha is not a wolf, but a doe. A new doe, not even two years old. How long has it been since Risha thought of its own youth? It is a new doe, twig-legged and gauzy, and it can remember with startling clarity when it fell from its mother’s womb, and how cold the air had been that day. And now, in its gut, there is a sick, hot pulling that came with the autumn, so strong that the doe is terrified by the sensation.

The stags fall so quickly to violence. The thunder-crash of their duels echoes on and on through the woods. A shadow falls over the doe: a stag, whose head is pulled down to the earth. The antlers of another stag, long dead, just bones and leather now, are tangled up in its own—and these antlers, Risha realizes, are not antlers at all but the gnarled, moss-dripping branches of a gray birch. With each limping step, the stag pulls itself and the corpse forward. There is a burning fervor which keeps it from collapsing into the dirt.

It exhales in deep, foggy plumes, as if a furnace sits deep within its chest. It is beautiful. The doe backs away, knees shaking. It wishes with every part of its being that it were a fawn again hidden by the flank of its mother. But Risha is filled, suddenly, with the knowledge that it has seen the stag before, and that is why it visits Risha now, in its sleep. “Wolf?” a soft voice calls.

Risha opens its eyes and finds two blue ones staring back. It swings its head around—Wether is deeply asleep. It is not even dawn. “You called to me in your dreams, dear wolf,” the dog says. Risha stands, shaking. It is so close to the dog, and yet, no heat radiates off of the dog’s moonlit body.

Page 6:

“What is it you desire?” The yearlings can’t stand the smell anymore. I cannot speak. The pups make me ravenous. I miss the stag. Part of me is dying. I am full of things that are not me, and I want to kill them.

“Wolf, wolf wolf—” the dog whispers. “What is it you desire?” Risha waits until its breaths come more easily. Water. “You may have whatever you ask for,” the dog says, “but you must keep eating—remember this. You must eat what you have never eaten before, and then you must keep eating.” Risha’s mouth drips with rainwater, its throat finally quenched. It stands and stretches in the morning air and finds that its tongue can move again.

It slicks down the fur on Wether’s back. Its chest rattles with wetness, pooling at the bottom of its lungs like the murky surface of a lake. It is overflowing. There are leaves floating inside of it. When it eats, the water is stained pink with squirrel’s blood. And it must eat.

To make the water, it must eat. It has never been so hungry. So it eats: squirrel and chipmunk, a lynx and each of its kittens, a songbird’s eggs, three adders, a doe swollen with twin fawns. The taste of each meal rolls down Risha’s tongue with the rainwater. When it tastes blood, it can almost remember the snap of bone between its teeth, the euphoric act of chewing, grinding, swallowing. It aches to hunt as Wether hunts.

Page 7:

It eats: a fox and a lost dog, a vulture full of rotting meat, and a band of stags—arrested by Risha’s eyes, they are already on their knees as it approaches, and their hides are already unknitting themselves—but somehow, Risha still hungers. It returns to the burrow it shares with Wether, but the smell makes it pause. There is a gray wolf curled up in their bed asleep. Its face is slender and its feet are snowy white. There’s a scar on its left haunch where it was once gored by an elk. It is Wether but not-Wether.

Its smell, like ash, makes Risha’s hackles stand on end. Head low, Risha stalks into the burrow, and the ash-smell surrounds it. Risha is filled with fear, now, because of this thing that has replaced Wether, and filled with hunger—always hunger. It feels as empty as it was when it was dying. When it puts its nose to the wolf’s fur, there is the faint smell of meat. It salivates, twin trails of water and blood.

It lets its claws sink into the wolf’s belly. The wolf lets out a strangled whine. Why is that call so familiar? Why does it make Risha’s body ache? Just as quickly as the wolf cried, it goes silent again. Risha eats well for the first time in weeks.

Risha looks for Wether in the woods. Wether. Wether. Wether. It follows wolf trails where packs have pissed and scratched their signs into the trees, but when it finds them, they carry the same ash smell. All of these wolves taste the same.

Page 8:

Risha tells itself that it could never kill Wether. Never. Something has stolen Wether from it, and somehow, searching day after day, Risha still cannot find its mate. Even in Risha’s dreams, it can’t smell Wether—it can’t smell any wolf at all, not its mother nor its sire. Ash-smell is food-smell now and food is ash. It wants to tear the woods apart until it is wrapped up in Wether’s warm oak smell, but instead it claws at its stomach until its skin glows red and blood beads between its fur.

It throws itself against the trees and cuts the skin between its teats with the sharp stones that jut out of the earth, but still, the pups writhe. Wether. Wether. Wether. It can’t be dead. Risha remembers the ash-scented corpse and how it cried with Wether’s voice.

Risha smells Wether in its own piss, but it is a warped kind of Wether: the Wether of amnion, rotting wood, the Wether that haunts the living. Wether. Wether. Wether. The pains come in the middle of the night and Risha finds that it cannot even cry, It knows it lost its voice so long ago, but never has it wanted to snarl and whine and growl more than it does now. Instead, the water in its throat bubbles over, froths like the waves of the sea, and as its belly heaves, bile makes the water cloudy, then the blood of its last meal, and then tufts of gray fur.

Wether. Wether. The taste of Wether. There is something sick about this pain; never has whelping felt as if they were clawing their way out. There is no relief when it is done. The pups smell like Wether, but they don’t look like Wether: they are all black and their jaws are stretched open and they don’t breathe.

Page 9:

In its dreams, Risha is always a doe, and there is always the stag who carries the dead. Risha watches the stag with a strange longing. It remembers its waking body, the wolf who should have died in the winter, and how it would have dragged itself toward the stag until the end of time if it had to. Once and only once, the stag mounts Risha the doe and then the spring rains come and the fawn drops—a fawn with two heads, with saplings sprouting from its forehead, dead—and Risha curls up around its cold body, waiting for daylight to come. When Risha wakes, there is nothing by its side. It startles to its feet.

It paws at the ground, then it digs until it hits tree roots. There is nothing buried here. The fawn must be here, somewhere. When it tries to speak, water gurgles out of its throat. Put me back inside the doe. It needs the white dog.

Where is the white dog? Put me back. Put me back. Put me back. Rainwater fills the hole at Risha’s feet. It paces around its new little pond as a gnawing hunger eats at it.

It has not seen another wolf in weeks, and it no longer pretends that anything can sate it other than its own kind. It slinks into the depths of the woods again until it finds a flash of gray fur. Risha stalks forward; it finds that it can’t breathe. In a grove of willows, a wolf rakes its claws down a tree trunk, its head sloping gently into its muzzle, its toes tipped with white. Risha is forgetting what Wether looked like, but it thinks that Wether may have looked like this. No.

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The wind picks up: this wolf smells like ash. It has been so long since Risha has eaten a deer that it nearly ignored the smell, the pinprick eye hidden between the leaves, until it heard it—not the gentle cadence of a doe’s lope, but a shuddering, limping gait and the crash of broken branches as the great beast hauled itself forward. Risha follows the limping stag. It follows the stag for days. The sun bites at Risha’s back and the night closes in. It follows the stag through forest, swamp, and grassland.

It feels its own muscles wilt against its bones. It shudders with every breath. What happens to a body that cannot die? It will walk until it is no longer a wolf, and then it will keep walking. Each day, when the sun rises, it can just make out the stag’s silhouette on the horizon. It is so tired that sometimes the sleeping world and the waking world merge into one.

In dreams, it sees the stag as if they are a hairsbreadth apart. It witnesses the change, the becoming of the stag who carries the dead. The clash of antlers and strike of terror—each stag realizes, suddenly, that they are not two beasts, but one. There is nothing that can untangle their antlers. In the frantic battle to escape, Risha’s stag breaks its leg in two. The stag was never meant to walk like this.

On three legs, with the weight of a skeleton pulling it to the ground. Now the muscles on one side of its body are overgrown and as knotted as the trees that crown its head. It doesn’t move like a stag is supposed to move; in its ugliness and wrongness, Risha sees itself. Its future. In a century’s time, it is warped and still walking. Waking, Risha returns to its body to find itself pressing onward, carried by legs which can hardly stand, breathing through a throat gone dry.


[System]
Craft a Ten page narrative for adults with these guidelines:
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Rising Action
Midpoint
Climax
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[User]
Brief Overview: A dark fantasy story about two siblings, Greta and Jack, who encounter a wondrous candy tower and an ominous house owned by giants.

Pages 1-2:
- Greta and her brother Jack discover a magical tower made of sugar, surrounded by insects drawn to its sweetness.
- Greta warns Jack against consuming the sugar but is tempted by a staircase on the tower.
- They begin their ascent, avoiding the clustered bugs and spiders.

Pages 3-4:
- They find an archway leading to a lane ending at a large, peculiar house.
- Greta considers returning home but ultimately decides to explore further.
- Jack discovers the paving stones are chocolate cake, but Greta stops him from indulging, worrying about cleanliness.
- They approach the house, made of candy and icing, and Greta has reservations but continues on for Jack's sake.

Pages 5-6:
- They are confronted by the house's owner, a giant woman with a deceptive sweet voice who seems interested in fattening them up.
- Jack's hunger pains become intense as they are captured and taken into the giant’s home.

Pages 7-8:
- Inside the house, they meet Conrad, the giant woman’s companion.
- The siblings are placed in a basket and observe the giants prepare for a “feast.”
- Greta clings to protective instincts towards Jack amidst their grim situation.

Pages 9-10:
- Greta watches helplessly as Jack gives in to the temptation of the pastries presented by the giants.
- The concerning transformation in Jack's demeanor and the giants' sinister intentions are fully revealed, embodying Greta's worst fears.

[Assistant]
Page 1:

Don’t feed him, Greta. We can’t afford to feed him! There’s not enough to eat! We were lost when we found the tower made of sugar that stretched up into the sky in endless red and white spirals. A sea of ants milled at its base.

Fat dollops of sugar dripped onto the surrounding trees, candied the leaves, and brought curious bees to hover. The grove hummed and buzzed with the sound of hundreds of insect voices, and their lazy, hypnotic thrum lulled me into taking my eyes off my brother. He reached out and popped a leaf in his mouth, just as quick. I heard the crunch of the dried sugar as he bit down, and I immediately reached out and smacked him hard on the back of the head, so he’d spit it out. He wailed, then quieted as I pointed at the lee of the giant candy tower.

Just visible from where we stood was a staircase, hacked into the tower’s far side. My brother made a strange little grumbling sound when he saw it. I readied the back of my hand. Fat little Jack, with his constantly rumbling belly and his licorice-drop eyes, too dull to be sweet, as our stepmother said. I thought he was cute, cute enough to eat.

The village grannies called me dusty gray Greta, a sour old woman at the age of twelve. But Jack they chucked under the chin. They filled his hands with candied treats that our stepmother snatched away before they could start melting in his palms. He was a handful to look after, a handful of rocks painted silver strewn on the path back home, a handful of sugar-candied leaves melting in the sun. Still, he was mine.

Page 2:

If Hilda didn’t want us and Father couldn’t change her mind, I’d keep him. If they couldn’t find what to feed us, I would. Our mother would have wanted it. Not sugar, though. That much I knew.

No good for a growing boy. Not yet, anyway. Jack squatted and began to whine. “Greta, my stomach hurts. I’m hungry.” I shushed him and inspected the staircase more closely.

Someone had cut it into the thick sticky spirals with something sharp. An axe, perhaps. I put one foot on the bottom stair, and my bare toes sunk into it. I called to Jack. “There’ll be something good to eat up above.

I’m sure of it.” He pouted and whined and struck his growling belly with his round little fists, but eventually I persuaded him to come round the candy stalk and join me on the staircase, our feet leaving sunken syrupy prints as we slowly climbed. Ants crawled hither and to, up and down in endless tracks and roadways. Bees whirled past our heads, buzzing cheerily. Where there are ants and bees, there are spiders, hanging in the dark spaces where the candy stairs were hewn more deeply. Jack and I rushed past these as quickly as our toes would let us.

Page 3:

When the heat of the day began to cool and the drip of sugar down the sides of the tower began to slow, we came to a curious place. The cane had been hacked straight through, creating an archway. It opened onto a broad lane paved with dark stones. At the end of it, some small distance away, stood a very large house, red and white with little bell-shaped towers and pointy spires. We stopped to stare.

Even from a distance, the house seemed weirdly huge, and I could not understand what it sat on, for the ground was far below us and the melting tower’s top behind us. For a moment, I thought of turning back, leading my brother back down the slowly melting staircase and returning to my father’s house. I could apologize to Hilda, and do what she said. My brother whined when he was hungry, but perhaps I could learn to sleep through it, if I tried. Don’t feed him, Greta, my stepmother’s voice said in my mind.

There’s not enough for him to eat! I frowned, looked behind at the tower top and its archway, then ahead to the land that rested beyond, on clouds and air, for all I knew. My toes were glazed white and pink and my legs spotted with clusters of crystals. My brother’s cheeks were decorated with sugary crusts where he had scraped secret handfuls from the floor and the walls. I couldn’t always catch him.

Such small bites would cause no trouble, I hoped. I took my brother’s hand and led him down the lane. We had not gone far when Jack wrenched his hand from mine and took a few thoughtful steps in place, feeling the ground with his bare feet. He called my name and suddenly bent down, his nails scraping at the white mortar between two of the dark stones under our feet. He pried a corner of one up and put it to his mouth.

Page 4:

By reflex my hand lashed out and struck it from his grasp. He cried out, stunned, tears in his eyes. “Greta! It’s cake! Just taste it!” I lifted my own sugar-glazed toes, then bent and pried up a chunk of stone for myself.

My nails were longer and the stones softer than they should be, so it came up quickly. Forcing myself not to think about strange feet and endless ants, I put it to my mouth and took a small bite. Jack had already lifted another one and was munching away happily, his face smeared brown and white. “Chocolate, Greta! It’s chocolate cake!” He was right.

I spat it out. I’ve never had much of a taste for sugar, myself. Not good for a growing girl. I took the cakestone from my brother and threw it into the grass, then covered his fingers with my own, like I used to when Hilda used to yell and my father let her. Instead of calming, he grumbled at me and squatted in the middle of the road like a frog, blinking his dark eyes furiously.

“I’m so hungry! Why won’t you let me eat? I’m starving—” He would have worked his way from grumbles to howls, had I not pulled his wrists sharply and brought him to stand. “Wouldn’t you rather have some nice food, over there?” I nodded at the big house ahead of us, not far at all now. “See, this is all full of ants and grass.

Page 5:

Who knows what’s been walking on this road, with what on their feet? If the people in that house can make all this cake, I’m sure they have nicer food in there. Clean food.” Jack glanced around himself, then peered ahead at the house. Perhaps his eyes saw something I didn’t, but I saw them narrow, then glitter, and he snatched his hands away from me and walked on without another glance at the cake. He was getting taller, my little brother.

He would be quite big someday. That was what had made Hilda worry so—the thought of feeding my brother as he grew. I wondered who fed the people of this edible land in the clouds, for they were surely not normal sized. They were large, impossibly so, for the door of the house was giant. The lintel was higher than ten of me, and I was tall for my age, as Hilda often said.

The house’s size was a worry, but its makings were a wonder. What I had thought was red tiling was slabs of hard candy that glistened in the high sun. Enormous amounts of it had been used to form the walls of the house. Although it was far above my head, the roof looked as though it was made of ginger biscuits. The same pure white icing that held the chocolate paving stones together had been piped across the house in cunning little designs.

More standing canes of sugar formed the fences, smaller versions of the one we had climbed the stairs through, although striped in different, darker colors. There were glass windows, and I guessed they must be some sort of confection as well. I reached out and gathered both of my brother’s small hands in my own, ignoring his whimpers. I wanted nothing more than to run away, but my brother began to twist and squeal. “Let .

Page 6:

. . me . . .

go! I told you I was hungry, I been telling you, you’re just as mean as Hilda and . . .” With every word he pulled a little harder. If it hadn’t been for the sugar on both of us, he would have slipped from my grasp like an eel.

His squeals soon disappeared, first under a long, loud creak like a giant spoon scraping across the bottom of a very large, very old barrel, and then under an enormous chuckle that came from somewhere far over my head. I dared not peek over my shoulder to see who—what—it was. I only clutched Jack’s hands so tight within mine that I was able to feel that his fingers were getting longer as he grew, and I willed him to stay quiet and still. I felt rather than heard footsteps and shut my eyes, willing this to be a nightmare, a dream brought on by heat and sugar. My brother whispered my name and I lifted one eyelid just the barest sliver, the width of an almond slice, to peer at what was watching us.

I saw an eye, first, although an eye so large and unblinking I thought at first a deep black well had come to meet me in the air. As I opened my own eyes all the way and turned to gape at the house’s creature, I saw that the eyes—for there were two of them, both round and sheeny black—were small for the face, which was huge and square-jawed. In a face so huge, the big black eyes seemed almost piggy, set deep above sallow cheeks, high and flat as tablelands and salted with lines that would have been fine on a much smaller face, but were as wide as garden paths on hers. This face was roofed by a thatch of poorly kept grey hair that stood up at odd angles like a scarecrow’s straw. A lipless mouth split the bottom half of it, and the teeth were sharp, jagged and dark.

Page 7:

I clutched little Jack’s hands even harder. The lane, the house, the candy stair—they were all owned by a huge and horrible giant with a face as ugly as a sow’s. But, oh, her voice was lovely. It sounded like the sugar that dripped from her windows and sweetened even more at the tears in Jack’s licorice drop eyes when he snatched his fingers from mine. I reached out to catch him again, but he whined that he was hungry, as though we weren’t but a heavy breath away from being eaten ourselves.

The giant leaned lower to peek at us both with one gruesome eye, then spoke, basting our ears with honey. “Well, look at us closer, dearies, why don’t you? Look at us good before we catch you and fatten you up, poor sad skinny things. Give us a peek, then maybe speak up a bit and let us know that you’re a good little girl and boy, and not nasty, sour things, all full of worms and old milk.” Jack’s whines and whimpers quieted, and he stared, his lower lip trembling. I finally found my voice.

I greeted her, softly, and thought to try it again louder, not sure those giant ears, hidden by shucks of grizzled hair, could hear me. They did, and the giant gave a great hiccupping laugh. Her hand swept down, the nails bitten and grey. Before I could say “Jack, be quick!” my brother and I were snatched up into a palm as hard as stone. We were carried into a huge dark hall beyond the cookie doors, and I curled up around my brother to keep him safe.

We nestled tight into the palm of the giant’s hand as she sped deeper into the house, walking at a pace that was probably slow and ambling-old for her but seemed like flying to us. She stopped, cupped her free hand over us protectively, and began to call in that strange, sweet voice. “Conrad? Conrad, lovey, come and see who I’ve found. Mumma would be proud, she would.” We felt Conrad before we saw or heard him.

Page 8:

A rumble rushed down a long dark staircase made of gumdrops and licorice ropes, and Conrad followed after it, huge and feckless, rosy where his sister was grey, although they had the same unkempt, rudely hacked thatches of hair. His eyes were the same black pits as his sister’s, too. He peered at us narrowly, and his pink blubberous lips smacked and quivered, a thin stream of liquid dangling from the plump center of the bottom one. It danced and shimmied, catching the little bit of light there at the bottom of that huge and dark staircase. I forced myself to focus on it to avoid his limitless eyes.

I wrapped my arms tighter around my brother, and the giant woman reached one finger out and petted my hair. She was gentle, but I still shuddered. “See what I’ve found, Conrad,” she said in her syrupy voice. “Such a treat. Let’s get them ready, have a feast, won’t we?” Jack’s shoulders squared in my embrace, and his voice rose in a thin wavering wail to meet the giant’s.

“I’m HUNGRY!” She only chuckled and said, “I know you are, pet. Let’s get you sorted.” She took us to the kitchen, a room so large I couldn’t see properly to the other end of it. Conrad followed us. She dumped us into an enormous yellow hearth basket, flat with low sides. It smelled of goose feathers, although it felt clean enough.

A giant’s apple would have rolled off of its edges, but Jack and I, small as we were, landed on its large heavy loops and lay there dazed as though we’d landed on the roof of our own house. When I sat up, my brother was in the center of the basket, curled into himself, arms wrapped around his round little belly, cheeks red, breath puffing. “I’m hungry,” he said, and then repeated himself again and again until it ended on a howl. I’d seen him like this only once before, the night that Hilda took our father aside and held a hushed and frightened conversation, one that began with a sideways look and ended with me, a path full of rocks, and Jack’s sweaty little hand tucked into my own. We can’t afford to feed him, Greta.

Page 9:

Especially not sweets. You take him into the forest and leave him behind. Leave him behind and run back here so he can’t follow you. You’re a good girl; do what you’re told. Don’t let him eat.

Over the shallow rim of the big basket, I could just see the giant woman moving her big body to an empty wooden table set in the middle of the room. She mumbled and waved her hands over an ebony circle burnt into the center of the table’s streaky yellow wood, and smoke began to rise from it, green with golden sparks. She murmured and mumbled a bit more, and the smoke began to shift and spin, the color changing to pink. Her hands spun around the cloud of smoke, and then she leaned over and puffed air through her lips, wafting it all away. Something shiny and domed stayed behind.

The giantess reached out a thumb and forefinger. In a delicate grip as sweet as she said she’d treat us, she plucked the thing from the table and carried it over to us. It was a serving dish, as big around as Jack and I sat together. The giant witch carefully slid the dish, snugged tight in the web of her thumb and finger, into the space between me and my brother. Then she watched us, waiting.

Jack stopped wailing at the smell of food. He hopped to his feet like a boy much lighter than his size and stumbled to the huge dish as though he hadn’t eaten in weeks. He’d eaten at our parents’ house, I was sure. I’d seen him, and also seen him chew as many candied leaves and secret handfuls of stair as he could sneak before the flat of my hand found the back of his head. The dish was wide, but its cover was light, and Jack made quick work of getting his fingers under the edge and heaving it away.

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It fell with a hollow, tinny crash. The platter underneath was piled with pastries. There were all sorts, lying in heaps—iced white, dripping with sunset-colored marmalade, topped with sugared cherries, glazed with fragrant chocolate. I had never seen some of the things waiting for us on the platter, but I distrusted giant food, and witch food doubly so. It was too much, too soon, and too quick.

Jack waited for less than the space of a blink before plunging both his fists into the pile and stuffing whatever they found into his mouth. Don’t feed him, Greta rang in my ears. By reflex I rushed to the edge of the platter, my hand open in preparation to strike. My brother, my hungry little brother, snarled at me. I jerked my hand away from his white teeth—I had never noticed how sharp they were.

He snapped them at me, twice, as if for good measure, then sank them into an éclair the length and thickness of his own round arm. I gazed at him in horror, then jumped and whirled at the sound of a very large tut. I had forgotten the giants. Conrad’s voice rumbled through the room. “Oh.

So soon?” The giant witch answered him, laughing. “Oh yes, my love. See what your sister has found in the garden today!” Her twinkling eyes were on my brother. My stomach twisted. Don’t feed him, Greta.