It's Charli's Body, You're Just Living In It by Gwendolyn Maia Hicks
2100 words, ~10 minutes reading time
Issue 8, Summer 2025
This is what you remember about death: a benevolent darkness, expanding. Memory and anger condensed to specks the size of stars. Your name and all its burdens slipping out of you and into infinity. A pair of hands lifting your head, palms cradling your temples, power radiating from them into you, seeping downwards, remaking you. A silhouette, thin and angry, bending closer, eating away the dark. A voice, familiar and not: Harriet, come on, it says, so close that it could come from your own throat, don’t go dark on me now. And all of it ending, just like that: life, jutting back into you. The taste of iron. Then the sudden vibration of light.
You knew, same as your mouth knows how to eat, that it was Charli.
Necromancy isn’t hard if you’ve got a certain kind of personality. That’s something Charli tells you, long after. When you ask them to elaborate, they just tilt their head sideways and grimace, like they really hoped you weren’t going to interrogate their bullshit. You’ve been Charli’s only friend since high school—since the day the two of you found the rippling portal underneath the bleachers on the soccer field. You learned to interrogate their bullshit before you learned to drive. Before you learned to wield Eissalot, the Sword of Six Winds. Before you learned to die.
“You could do it, too,” they say. The noonday sun sketches their outline in light; if you closed your eyes, the afterimage of their body would stick to your eyelids. You’ve seen something like that before. “That’s all I mean.”
You are not in high school anymore. You are twenty-two and in a park, drinking boxed wine from Charli’s cooler, watching the living world riot around you, knowing you have not been a part of it for a long time—not in any way that matters. You wonder if Charli ever feels that way.
You hadn’t asked them to do it. In fact, you explicitly told them not to. It was always meant to happen like this, you’d written in mechanical pencil on ancient parchment. The life of a god for the life of the land. It’s only fair. You tucked it between Charli’s bow and quiver, careful not to wake them as they slept in their royal bed—careful, even in the dark, not to look at them. Of course, you had never been gods—just a soccer player and a stoner. But the prophecies of Oblidar had said otherwise, and so you both learned the parts.
“I wouldn’t want to do it,” you say, tilting back your paper cup of sub-par chardonnay. “I wouldn’t do that to anybody.”
Charli turns their head, silver eyes flashing like arrowheads. All these years, they expected you to be grateful, and you never told them about the darkness and the kindness it held.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I wouldn’t put somebody through that,” you say—the sentence slurred with truth, your eyes fixed on a pair of kids with a hula hoop across the lawn, the clumsiness with which their bodies create infinity. “That’s all.”
You remember Charli in high school. That’s the Charli you remember best. Back then, they wore their hair long, horse-girl long, and hadn’t started bleaching it yet. They always wore black, and their huge brown eyes were deep and dark and wholly observant. Their thin, awkward body was in a perpetual state of leaning forward: over a book, over a bass, over a joint. You used to see them in the hallways, hunched over like that, and wonder if they were going to pitch forward into a place no one in town could ever follow them. Your best friend, Vera, with her arm slung around your neck and her soccer uniform smelling of powdered deodorant, would follow your line of sight and snort. Oh my God, she’d say. It’s like the Night of the Living Dead.
You don’t talk to Vera anymore.
Oblidar was an accident. Wrong place, right time. That feels stupid to say now. If you hadn’t gone to hide out on the soccer field under the bleachers to cry that day because the lacrosse player dumped you and you hated yourself for being happy about it, would Charli have jumped into that portal alone? Or if it had just been you—if Charli had gone home on time that day, skipped lighting up at their usual spot after school—would you have listened to your gut and walked away? Or was it always meant to be the two of you, from the very beginning, your fingers gripping Charli’s wrist as they took a breath and leaned forward until there was no leaning back?
Those are the kinds of questions you thought your mind would get sick of stirring around after four years, but if anything, they’ve only gotten louder. There are mornings when you wake up and think you’re still in Oblidar; that aching, dying, beautiful land, begging in a voice like rustling blood for you to save it. Then you remember. You did save it. You gave it everything. Charli did, too. Everything except you.
You are aware of it on the subway, in the kitchen, at your cubicle. You are aware of it in your therapist’s office. You are aware of it in the arms of a lover. You remember reading about how cardiac surgeons can keep the heart beating with just their hands, pumping that vital muscle with about as much force as you might squeeze a lemon. That’s what Charli’s magic is doing to you, every minute, every day. Charli is in you, hand to ventricle, moving you around, flapping your mouth. Are your words and thoughts Charli’s, too? When you look at the lover in your bed and say I love you, is that just a kind of ventriloquy?
You can’t tell the lover about the rolling, rocky hills of Oblidar, or the hilt of Eissalot blistering your hand, or the sight of Charli on a battlefield, hair streaming, eyes open. You can’t tell the lover about the throne you abandoned, or the addictive taste of incantations, or the sight of a dead unicorn in the mud. You can’t tell the lover about the day you and Charli came back, hand-in-dirty-hand, crawling out onto the soccer field from a world that no longer needed or wanted you. You can’t tell the lover much of anything. When your phone buzzes and the text from Charli reads, hows it going? you almost write back, heart throbbing falsely: Don’t you already know?
Eissalot talked to you a time or two. It was a beautiful sword, with a chunk of abalone in the hilt, stuck in a sacred grove that only you and Charli were allowed to enter. The first time you touched it, you were suffused with an accumulated sorrow that dragged you to your knees. On your feet, god-girl, the sword said, echoing behind your lungs. The weeping will come later. Charli rushed to your side, hooked their hand under your elbow, and pulled you up. Not even that was something you managed on your own.
Years of therapy have not managed to unravel what happened to you. You have given up on talking about it, and instead found ways to tell it slant. The Battle of the Valley becomes a car accident; the gnawing thirst for incantations becomes a problem with whiskey; the journey back to that soccer field becomes release from intensive care. But Charli remains Charli. And Charli is your friend? You try not to laugh. Charli is my sight. Charli is my owner. Charli is my gallant, my secret-keeper, my gravemate. Charli is the only one who would see me at the grocery store and know that it’s a lie, everything, all of it. Some nights you still go to Charli’s apartment on Taraval, close to the ocean; and the two of you get baked out of your minds and stare at the shadows of branches on the ceiling and try to make sense of what Oblidar did to you, and of what you did to each other. You talk about the blood in the sedge. You talk about the breaking of the trees, the black sap of an ancient hate oozing from them. Tonight, for the first time, you talk about the altar where Charli found you.
“I won’t apologize,” Charli says, eyes half-lidded, mouth half-open. “I wanted you back.”
Your gut aches in that dull, familiar way, a mortal wound echoing through time. You sling your arm across your eyes and let the darkness make you honest.
“I didn’t want to come back, Charli. I was ready.”
You were so young then: as you stepped closer to the sacrificial altar, you indexed what you would leave behind; your parents, your dog, your soccer team. Late mornings. Mown grass. Strawberry milkshakes. You leveled Eissalot at your middle, clumsily. You asked the sword if it would hurt.
Eissalot never lied to you. Not once.
There is a sudden movement next to you, and then a hand gripping your wrist, uncovering your face. Charli stares down at you piercingly, their thumb stuck to your pulse, and you stare back, terrified of the world to come, terrified of what they’ve given you.
Your memory lunges back to the night that the two of you swore the blood oath, twin bodies under Oblidar’s twin moons, Charli to pour their fealty into you and you to take it. Your wrist shook when you cut open Charli’s palm, hurried, apologetic. Theirs didn’t shake at all. They took their time and cut deep.
“I’m still ready,” you say, quietly.
You haven’t the kind of personality Charli’s got. You weren’t made to fight for the things you want. You’re not even sure you can define them. This morning, you passed a dead bee on the sidewalk and you are thinking of its crushed little body now, never to be remade. This morning, you read about a genocide in another country.
The raw edges of your throat scrape together. The feeling swells behind your eyes—those, too, functioning by Charli’s grace. You start, messily, brutally, to cry.
“I was supposed to die,” you say, realizing for the first time just how deeply that truth has rooted itself in you. “It was supposed to heal Oblidar, it was supposed to mend all misery. Remember? But what can I mend here? What am I for? Paying taxes?”
Charli—your best friend, Charli, who wore all-black in high school and spoke to no one; Charli, who left you behind in that opulent palace to learn the ways of valley magic; Charli, who followed you down into the netherplace and kept you from all harm; Charli, whose dirt-streaked face you imagine every time you hold somebody else—Charli now grips your hair in their right hand and leans closer and kisses your forehead and your cheek and your eyes and your mouth. When they throw parties in this house, you never know what to do with yourself except look at them. When they seem okay, you force yourself to be okay, too. When you want to die, you want it to be by their hand.
“You don’t have to be for anything,” they tell you when they pull away. Their eyes are like wet steel, gleaming in the dark. “I didn’t bring you back so you could be for something. That’s missing the whole point.”
“But you didn’t even know me,” you sob.
“And then I did.”
You screw your eyes shut tight until it hurts. For a second, you see Charli’s outline again, the same as you had when the spell dragged you back, the same as you do in the middle of the night, when your secondhand heart forgets its way home.
“Come on,” Charli says, tugging gently at your arm. “Let’s get some water.”
You take a moment to wipe your nose on your sleeve—sloppy, careless, alive. Charli helps you to your feet. When your eyes meet in the ordinary room, something passes through you and into them and back again, the knowing of a world you’re still not sure was even real, a story the two of you can never tell. A handmade power, seeping into all your organs. Charli tilts their head, bending the current. You swallow and nod. Charli nods back. Tomorrow you will go to work. You will read about the world and its wounds. You will mend what you can. And Charli will, too.
“Follow me,” Charli tells you, so you do. You walk beside them through the darkness, expanding.
