The fumes came in the night. Filtered through the cracks in our windows, the creaks in our floorboards, like malignant moonlight. And the roaches dropped dead mid-scuttle, and the lizards that shuffled across the whitewashed walls unleashed their tails, believing they would regrow them. Our cats crowed, their throats crackling to resemble human vocal cords, and we woke, briefly, in the night, but smelled nothing, heard only the softest thuds of insectile and reptilian bodies falling to the ground.

We found them in the morning, the linoleum littered with flesh and bone.

‘By the Buddha,’ cried our mother, ‘throw them away.’

She handed us a broom and a dustpan, and we swept the floors and served up the bodies on a tray for the crows to eat. Quickly they dried in the swelter of the Burmese summer, and we sat by the veranda door watching the birds peck at our offerings.

‘Stay here,’ said our mother, ‘I’m going to the market.’

‘Bring us mangoes!’ we cried, our voices petulant with hunger.

‘If there are mangoes,’ she responded, wrapping her fingers around the handle of a wicker basket. ‘Don’t open the door for anyone, you hear?’

We nodded, locking the door behind her. Then, staring at each other’s moonlike faces, we began to speculate.

‘Maybe it’s a plague,’ my brother offered. ‘Maybe it’s the end of the world.’

‘Maybe they ate something they shouldn’t have,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s poison.’

‘Maybe there’s something in the walls,’ he said.

‘Maybe we’re next,’ I said.

‘Maybe you’re next,’ he said.

And I punched his bony shoulder, and he mewled, summoning our cats. We smiled at their sharp eyes, their languid tails. We fed them and kissed their little heads and made them promise they wouldn’t die.

But they were cats, so they didn’t promise anything.

It was late morning when someone rapped on the door. The sound reverberated throughout our house and shook the walls. Whoever it was had delivered three swift knocks, each harder than the last. Our hair bristled on our skin. We ducked under the windowsill.

‘Who is it?’ I asked, always the more fearful of us.

My brother’s eyes widened. Ducking back down, he turned to me with an expression warped with terror and awe.

‘Belu,’ he hissed.

I ventured a glance. Sure enough, an ogre stood at our door—tall and intimidating, his green face matching his green shirt and pasoe. I stared at his fangs, protruding out of the corners of his mouth, slick with saliva. He shifted his head and I retreated from view, clamping my hand over my mouth and my brother’s—and we steadied our breathing, not daring to make a sound or move a muscle.

When the ogre spoke, it was in a voice like boulders tumbling down a cliff, like the clang of pots clattering onto the floor.

‘Is anyone home?’

We said nothing, held our breath—our hearts thundering in our ribcages, our eyes almost watering. The ogre stood there for a few more minutes, eyeing the door, the window, the pale-yellow walls, the ceramic pots crammed with devil’s ivy. Then he lumbered off our front steps, each footfall easing the stones in our stomachs. We waited a while longer before we dared to peek out of the window to confirm that he had really left.

We sat in silence until our mother returned, her basket full of lentils, eggs, dried fish, tea leaves, and two golden mangoes. But she hurried through the door, locking it behind her, her ashen face reflecting our own, and she set down her basket and ran towards us, wrapping us in her still shaking arms.

‘Are you okay?’ she whispered, her breath ragged. ‘Are you okay? Did anything happen?’

We blinked at each other, and began to speak at once.

‘There was an ogre—’

‘—he had these fangs—’

‘—he was at our door—’

‘—we didn’t let him in—’

‘Oh, Buddha, Buddha, Buddha,’ cried our mother.

Taking us by the hand, she rose, and obediently we followed her up the stairs. We didn’t need to ask where she was taking us; we already knew.

Upstairs, we knelt in front of the shrine, where a wooden Buddha sat in his enlightened peace, his fingers poised gracefully in front of him. Our mother had filled little silver cups with water, and we would peel and cut up our mangoes later to offer it to the Buddha first before we consumed them, the juice sticking to our fingers. Earlier, too, we had picked jasmines from our garden and placed them in his grasp—offerings, all, in return for protection and for safety.

Beside the Buddha sat a framed picture of our father. We didn’t remember much of him—all we remembered were his cracked palms, the way he brushed our hair out of our faces; his glasses, propped up against his nose. In the photograph, already waning with the years, he held me, barely a year old, while he smiled beside our mother, graceful as a young gardenia tree, holding my brother, only a newborn then. Not long after this photo was taken, our father disappeared as if into smoke. Our mother believed he was arrested for attending a protest in the heart of the city—she had begged him not to go. ‘What will happen to us if you’re killed?’ she’d cried.

We never told our mother, but we believed that he was dead. That he had been murdered in cold blood on the streets of Yangon, shot in the head by a military soldier spilling with hatred, his body burned with the thousands who fell that day. His bones enmeshed with the hundred who came after, until middling, middling, the bodies that moved in this city—in an act of defiance or cowardice, we were never sure—moved out of the line of fire, deciding instead to live their own lives, despite the military taunting them, despite their knowing that their lives would not be truly their own until that government was dismantled.

And so things were quiet. The country fell into a complacent rhythm: mothers walking to the market, fathers driving rickshaws, and children playing kick volleyball in the streets. But there had been a drumming, a murmuration in the earth, a message carried in wrapped banana leaves and seeping through the rain to the steady beat of it’s time it’s time it’s time. We felt it in our bones—a remnant, we thought, of our father’s dreams of democracy, of wanting a life devoid of fear. We were young then, but not too young: when our mother began to snore, we would face each other on our straw mattress and whisper, ‘What if? What if? What if?’ We dreamed of protesting, of stepping out on the gravel, all the while knowing that we needed only to look over at our mother’s sleeping figure, her hair greying in the starlight, to understand that we could never do to her what our father did.

Now we knelt beside her in front of the shrine, pressed our palms together, and closed our eyes. She took a breath and we emulated her: prayers spoken in the quiet tandem of our voices, each overlapping another, until we settled into a breath, a silence. We bowed our heads to the floor, whispering our deepest desires to the Buddha.

‘Protect us,’ she said when the prayers concluded. ‘Protect us and Zeyar from these monsters.’ Then, turning to us, she whispered: ‘Make a wish.’

We knew what our mother wished for, every time. She wanted our father back. Some days she would suggest to us that we should wish for his return too, and we nodded and pretended to, but we understood that death meant there was no coming back.

No. No, we wanted to know about the ogres.

We interrogated our mother, after the mangoes had been peeled, offered to the Buddha, and eaten. Together with our cats, we sat on the wicker chairs in our living room, each of us recounting what had happened to us in our hours of separation.

‘Tell us what happened,’ we begged.

Our mother sighed, and told us her tale: she had left the house and made it safely to the market. At first everything seemed fine; she bought the lentils, the fish, the mangoes, the tea leaves. She met a friend of hers that lived in the neighborhood and chatted with her about their lives, asked after her parents, her children. She said she told her friend about us, how well-behaved we were, waiting for her back home with the door locked. Her friend had cooed, ‘What lovely children you have!’ and our mother had nodded, in the way mothers do when they know they’ve successfully conflated obedience for happiness.

Then they heard the gunshots. At first the sound was muffled, as if a cloth had been draped over the marketplace, as if the bullets, striving to wade through the humid air, found resistance in the atmosphere itself. Then the gunshots were accompanied by screams—and men and women began wrapping up their wares as quickly as their hands could move, and our mother’s friend grabbed her wrist and led her up the stairs to her apartment not ten yards away. In the chaos of fire and smoke, they watched a small army of ogres, fanged and armed and staggering, march through the market, their rifles aimed at innocent civilians. Our mother watched a young woman stumble over her tamein and fall in front of the ogres—and raising a hand to their rifles, her mouth trembled in a plea or a prayer or both—but to no avail. An ogre shot her where she knelt. She bled out in the street.

Our mother told us this, her voice faltering as she spoke. She told us that the ogres marched through the market, kicking at wares, stealing bags of rice, until they disappeared in the distance. After thanking her friend for offering her shelter in her home, our mother muttered prayers under her breath and wove her way home.

‘Do you think the ogre will come back?’ we asked her after we’d told her our story.

‘Get me a bowl of water,’ she instructed.

We filled a silver bowl with tap water and brought it to her. For the next hour, we sat in silence as she counted her rosary beads and muttered mantras into the water. When she was done the water shimmered—or at least we thought it did—with some power that we were awed our mother possessed.

She poured the water into two other cups and handed one to each of us.

‘Go around the house,’ she said, ‘and sprinkle it on the walls, on the windows. Go. Quickly.’

We split up. I took the rooms upstairs while my brother took the rooms downstairs, and our mother circled the house, smattering the prayer water on the walls and the doors. Solemnly, I moved from room to room: the bedroom trailing with mosquito nets, the veranda teeming with our mother’s orchids, a study room we never entered because it was our father’s. His eyes seemed to follow me from where he sat on the shrine, as if appraising my efforts, almost nodding in approval, almost furrowing his eyebrows in displeasure. I could not read him, so I turned away instead to the bamboo trees in our backyard sighing in the afternoon breeze. I wondered what kind of life was in store for us now, in a city swarming with ogres.

I thought again about the ogre at our door, his grotesque face seared into my memory, to be revisited in night terrors. How green the delineations in his wrinkled skin. How strings of darkness pulled from his scalp. How his gnarled knuckles had hammered at our door.

I raced down the stairs, the water sloshing out of the cup I held. My brother looked up from where he sat on the floor, playing with our cats, having finished his task. Our mother was still outside—we could see her silhouette bent over the jasmine hedges.

‘He knew where we lived,’ I blurted out.

Arkar blinked at me. ‘So?’

‘Who else knows where we live?’

‘Maybe it was an accident. Maybe he was just looking for any old house.’

But we knew that couldn’t be the case. Our house was tucked away, down a street, then down an alley, and down yet another alley. Any ogre casually seeking a house would have stopped somewhere else along the way, but this one—this one had come here. Had knocked on our door.

‘Who do you think it is?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, and shuddered. ‘I don’t know if I want to know.’

‘Maybe he’ll come back. And if he comes back, we’ll know—’

What we would know we never quite found out, because at that moment our mother returned and we clamped our mouths shut.

Over the next few days, neighbors stopped by our gate to discuss with our mother the strange phenomenon that killed the roaches, the mosquitoes, the flies. The lizards, they said, are crawling on our walls without their tails. Our mother told them about the ogres; and they clicked their tongues and nodded, as if they had seen too much now to be surprised. Then, inevitably, the topic moved to more mundane topics. Husbands who started wearing long-sleeved shirts, despite the blistering weather. Children who developed rashes on their skin. Did our mother know of any lotions that might help? When she said she didn’t, they shook their heads, wished her well, and went on their way, to ask the doctors with clinics near the market if they had any remedies.

The next morning, our veranda floor was littered with feathered bodies. Every bird that frequented our strings of wheat, our water bowls—sparrows, mynahs, crows, all—had dropped dead on the rusting floorboards.

My eyes settled on the tray of dead roaches and lizards we had set out a few days ago.

Of course.

I gathered them all—their tiny, brittle bodies—into a basket, and stole out into the garden. Grey mist clung to the emerald leaves of the gardenia trees, settled on the boughs of the frangipani tree. Faint golden light streamed from a corner of the sky, washing our little house in an amber glow. I dug the birds a shallow grave and swept the soil back into place.

Something glinted in the ground, half-shrouded in fallen bamboo leaves. I crawled over, my knees digging into the dirt, and pulled out a small spherical metal cannister. Raising it to the quickly growing light, I made out a number, the Burmese lettering curving into a compressed crescent: ၁.

One.

I spun the canister around for more information—anything that would tell me what had been in it, why it might have killed all the roaches and the birds that ate them, or how it arrived in our backyard. But the canister was clean, except for the numbering.

Pocketing it, I stumbled to my feet just as my brother waved me in from the kitchen, holding up a plate of rice and chicken curry that our mother had made us.

It was time to eat.

Our mother was away most of the day, doing secretarial work at a law office downtown. We had begged her not to go, especially with ogres roaming our streets, but she was adamant.

‘We need money,’ she told us, ‘and I’ll be careful.’

Every day she left us a set of chores: cleaning the house, feeding ourselves, reading our textbooks so we didn’t fall behind when school started again, and keeping our door always locked in case the ogre came back. We didn’t tell her—didn’t even quite admit it to ourselves—that we almost wanted the ogre to come back. Wanted to know, if nothing else, why he chose our door to knock on.

When the ogre returned, we almost didn’t recognize him. It had been raining all day, shaking the bamboo leaves from their thin boughs. In the pelting grey, he looked different: more haggard, his hair sticking to his face, the corners of his mouth drooping like a willow branch. When he knocked, the sound was drowned in thunder. We didn’t look up from our textbook exercises.

He knocked again, harder. We stood, alert now.

‘Haymar!’ he cried. ‘It’s me!’

Slowly we stumbled to our feet. Haymar was our mother’s name, this we knew. What we didn’t know was who this ogre was—who the me was supposed to be.

‘Open this door!’ he called. ‘Let me in!’

I pressed a finger to my lips, and my brother nodded. Quietly we tiptoed as close as possible to the door.

He knocked again. And this time, fainter:

‘It’s me.’

‘Who is it?’

My brother had spoken. I slapped his shoulder and mouthed, What are you doing? He only shrugged.

The ogre paused. He hadn’t expected a response—or at least, not a response in a boy’s voice. My brother had lowered his register, but it did no good. He still sounded like a fifteen-year-old.

‘Who are you?’ asked the ogre.

‘You’re in front of our house,’ responded my brother. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Zeyar. I used to live here.’

‘But you’re an ogre,’ I said, even as we recognized our father’s name, mangled on the ogre’s tongue. We shook our heads. We mouthed, It can’t be.

‘Is Haymar there?’ he asked. ‘I want to speak to her.’

‘She doesn’t want to speak to you,’ we said, knowing better than to divulge the fact that we were alone in the house. ‘She wants you to leave her alone.’

‘Who are you?’ returned the ogre.

‘We’re not telling you,’ I said, sounding offensively petulant. ‘You’ll hurt us.’

‘I’m not going to hurt you.’

‘Then why are you an ogre?’

We heard shuffling at the door. A neighbor’s voice cried out, ‘Belu!’

‘I’ll come back tomorrow,’ said the ogre. ‘I’ll tell you everything.’

Then the gate clanged and he was gone. We turned to each other, the wind slammed out of our bodies, and we crumpled to the floor, our textbooks forgotten. Outside, the rain, unseasonal but necessary, pelted down on our tin roof, in a symphonic clamor that swallowed our voices until all that was left of us was breath.

We didn’t tell our mother about the ogre’s visit. We decided we didn’t want to worry her, especially when she swept through the door, drenched in the torrential downpour, she shook the raindrops out of her hair and began to yell about our textbooks, still haphazardly strewn on the floor, the dishes we had left unwashed in the sink.

After she changed into dry clothes and we offered her a cup of green tea, she calmed.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘The ogres showed up at work.’

Our hearts clattered in our chests, but we kept our voices steady.

‘What did they do?’ we asked.

‘They took the men.’ She cradled my brother’s head, holding him close. ‘Took the boys who got our tea and made copies of our legal papers. When we tried to fight them, to ask them why, they only roared. One of them fired a gun into the window.’

‘Don’t ogres eat people?’ I asked.

She shot me a look so stern I wished I had kept my mouth shut.

‘No one’s eating anyone,’ she said, still hugging my brother. ‘We’re safe in this house.’

‘What if the ogres come for us?’ he whispered. ‘What if they take us when you’re not here?’

Our mother sank in her wicker chair, exhausted. She kissed his forehead, reached across and tucked a stray strand of hair behind my ear.

‘We’re protected,’ she said. ‘The Buddha will protect us. Do you remember the water? That means you’re safe.’

We didn’t fully believe her, but we stopped asking questions. It was best to leave our mother to her beliefs, even if we didn’t know how true they were. When she left for work the next day, we shut all the windows and huddled by the front door. For an hour afterward, we argued about what to leave out for the ogre—after all, wasn’t he a guest at this point? ‘Guests usually don’t want to eat us,’ my brother pointed out, so I gave in, and instead retrieved a bag of sunflower seeds from our pantry. We sat quietly, cracking open the shells with our front teeth and retrieving the seeds with our tongues.

And we waited. Now and then fear bubbled up in our throats, and we rose to check the locks on the doors—but the longer we waited, the more impatient we became, our fingers tapping against the floor, our legs trembling restlessly. I retrieved a small knife from the kitchen and clutched it against my chest.

‘You don’t need that,’ Arkar said. ‘He won’t hurt us.’

I watched my brother’s face.

‘You don’t know that.’

We heard the ogre long before he arrived at the door. He could not hide the thunder of his feet, but when he knocked, it was light—so light we wouldn’t have heard it if we hadn’t heard his footsteps first.

‘Go to the back door,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t want the neighbors to see me.’

We heard him lumber through our garden, bending grass and crushing fallen bamboo leaves. We held our breath until he settled.

‘Yesterday,’ we began, ‘you promised to tell us everything.’

‘It doesn’t work that way,’ said the ogre. ‘For every thing I tell you, you must answer one of my questions. Otherwise, it’s not fair. Do you agree?’

We nodded—my brother more readily than I did.

‘We agree,’ we said.

‘Well, then,’ said the ogre, ‘what do you want to know?’

‘How do you know this house?’

‘It was mine,’ the ogre said after a pause. ‘Mine and Haymar’s. We bought it many years ago. We were married in this house. Our children were born here. My memory isn’t what it used to be, but my feet remembered what my mind didn’t. It brought me here.’

We thought about our mother’s prayers, her dream that one day our father would return to our doorstep. It was almost too good to be true.

‘But you’re an ogre,’ I said. ‘How do we know those are your memories?’

‘I wasn’t always an ogre,’ he sighed. ‘I’m still not fully an ogre.’

‘Did you kill anyone?’ my brother asked.

He was quiet for a long time. And then:

‘Yes.’

‘Who did you kill?’

‘Enough questions. Answer one of mine. Where is Haymar?’

‘She’s not here,’ we said truthfully.

‘Where is she?’

‘Who did you kill?’

‘It was a long time ago,’ he said finally. ‘A long time ago, there weren’t any ogres. Just men. Just men who followed orders, men who were cruel for cruelty’s sake. I killed one of them.’

‘And that’s how you became an ogre?’

‘Where is she?’

‘She’s at work,’ my brother offered at the exact moment I asked, ‘How did you become an ogre?’

‘There were . . . fumes. We didn’t know where they came from. But when we awoke, the roaches in our cells had died—and for a moment, we were grateful.’

I thought then of the gas canister I had found in our backyard.

‘Where were you when it happened?’ I asked now.

‘In Insein Prison.’

Our breath caught. The syllables fell like the clanging of steel bars—and we were young, but we knew about Insein Prison, steeped in our growing consciousness as a threat, a shadow made form. There were tales about the conditions there: men forced to crawl before rabid dogs, the lack of drinking water, the torture the inmates—mostly political dissidents—had to undergo. In the face of all of this, amid prison explosions and mass shootings carried out by the military junta, it didn’t seem too farfetched to us that part of the torture in Insein Prison consisted of some form of transformation of turning men into literal monsters.

‘Why were you in Insein Prison?’ we asked.

The ogre didn’t answer.

‘Why are the ogres taking boys?’ I asked.

He was quiet for a moment. We heard him sigh, the sound like the hush of the bamboo leaves, like the gush of a river.

‘To train them,’ he said finally. ‘To turn them into ogres. The military wants an army. They want to stay in power forever.’

I watched my brother’s face turn pale. He slumped against the wall, clutching his knees to his chest, refusing to say anymore.

But I wasn’t done.

‘Is that why you’re here?’ I pressed. ‘To take one of us?’

‘No—you’re my—you’re my children—’

We fell quiet, our minds whirring with a thousand thoughts, and suddenly the dangers of the afternoon dawned on us: we were conversing with an ogre who claimed to be our father who knew we were alone in the house, who could easily break down our door to tear at our flesh. The ogre tried to get us to say more, but we weren’t in the business of conversing with dead men turned monsters claiming to be our father. Already we had said too much; divulged too many secrets, entertained a creature we shouldn’t have. Later we would laugh—nervously, tentatively—about how we considered leaving out food for the ogre, how we almost treated him as a guest when we should have screamed and scared him away.

‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ said the ogre. ‘And tomorrow, you will let me in.’

‘There’s more of them now,’ our mother said when she returned, more fatigued than we had ever seen her. ‘They took the boys from the tea shop across the street. My taxi driver today told me they took his son on his way to school. And the men—the men are acting strange. As I was coming in, I swear I saw U Htoo’s face turning green.’

U Htoo was our neighbor who had started wearing long sleeves. We sat with her and rubbed her feet.

‘Do you think he’s turning into an ogre?’ Arkar asked.

‘Why do you think this is happening?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she replied, massaging her temples, answering both and neither of our questions. ‘But it’s not good for our country.’

Her voice sounded strained, like someone had taken her vocal cords and pushed them through a sieve. If we listened carefully, we could almost hear the blood vessels in her throat swelling.

‘What if,’ my brother began, ‘the military is creating an army?’

I elbowed him in the side, more roughly than I intended. Our mother sat up, her shoulders tensing.

‘Where did you hear that?’ she asked.

‘Nowhere,’ I interjected. ‘Nowhere. He’s just making it up.’

‘But what if,’ my brother continued, ‘what if the ogres didn’t eat the men? What if they were men?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said our mother.

‘For example,’ my brother went on, to my deep chagrin, ‘for example, what if the ogres were imprisoned men, like the ones in Insein Prison?’

Then he reeled back, the mark of our mother’s hand searing scarlet on his cheek. I noticed the tears pool in his eyes, but he remained defiant: he stoppered them, refused to let them fall. Instinctively I moved in front of him, apologies spilling from my lips like water from a drainpipe.

‘He didn’t mean it,’ I whispered. ‘He didn’t mean it. We’re sorry. We’re so sorry.’

‘Don’t you dare say nonsense like that again,’ said our mother, sagging back into the chair. ‘Go upstairs and play.’

I grabbed his wrist and dragged him up the stairs, until we settled down in a corner of the veranda, just out of the view of nosy neighbors, with only the bamboo-riddled sky above us. Once we were alone, I balled my fingers into a fist and punched him squarely on the shoulder.

‘What were you thinking?’ I cried. ‘Do you want her to find out about the ogre? Do you know how much trouble we’ll be in?’

My brother looked hurt, but he only sniffled and raised his chin.

‘When he comes back tomorrow,’ he said, ‘I’m letting him in.’

I began to tug at my hair.

‘You can’t,’ I hissed. ‘You don’t know what he’ll do.’

‘He’s our father,’ he said, as if that were the only argument he needed.

And maybe it was. He had named the thing we had been dancing around: us and the ogre, each knowing the other, but failing then to articulate the truth when it stared us in the face. Or rather, when it seeped through the cracks in the door, an understanding even the bolts could not keep locked.

‘You can’t let him in,’ I repeated, as if saying it again would somehow convince my brother to weaken his resolve. ‘What if it’s a trap? What if he takes you? What if he refuses to leave?’

‘He doesn’t want us.’

‘Then who does he want?’

But I knew the answer. The answer was currently snoring on the wicker couch, her elbow propping up her head in lieu of a pillow.

‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘No.’

‘He just wants to talk to her,’ said my brother. ‘Doesn’t he deserve to talk to her?’

‘She won’t want an ogre in the house.’

‘Maybe—’ His eyebrows furrowed as if deep in thought. ‘Maybe we can change him back before she returns. Maybe he can be a man again.’

‘But how—’

‘I don’t know. But tomorrow, I’m letting him in.’

‘I think,’ said our mother when she awoke, ‘I’ll stay home with you today.’

‘No,’ we said together.

She shook her head, and lay back down, draping a thin blanket over her feet.

‘Get me some green tea,’ she instructed. ‘I’m not feeling well.’

I shot a furtive glance at my brother, the light from the window shading his neck a garish gold, and hurried down the stairs to put the kettle on.

She ate a little, then retreated to her bed. The sun climbed higher in the sky, but she wanted darkness, so we closed the curtains and left her to rest. It was just as well, we thought, because not an hour later we heard the all too familiar footsteps of the ogre stomping through our garden.

He didn’t knock. We knew he was there.

‘Let me in,’ he said. ‘I need to come in.’

‘Promise not to eat us,’ said my brother.

‘Don’t tell him she’s here,’ I hissed.

Deftly my brother unbolted the door, swinging it open to reveal the ogre—still green, still fanged, still hideous—but somehow, somehow, his features had softened. I noticed the wrinkles around his eyes, the wisps of beard on his chin: details I hadn’t thought to look for when he first came knocking. He had doffed his military green shirt and pasoe; instead wore a tattered vest and a brown pasoe, ragged at the edges. When he moved, he moved slowly, carefully, as though his body was still unused to his ogre self.

Now he bowed his head as he stepped over the threshold. Instinctively we stepped back into the parlor. The ogre remained in the kitchen.

‘You’re so big now,’ he whispered, which came out as more of a growl. ‘You used to be so small.’

Then he sniffed the air and his eyes narrowed.

‘She’s here,’ he said. ‘She’s here.’

‘She doesn’t know,’ I said, ‘about any of it. Please. She can’t see you like this.’

‘Tell us how to turn you back,’ said my brother.

Our ogre father stopped and reached out a green hand, now yellowing. My brother took it.

‘I’m sorry,’ said our father.

I frowned. ‘Sorry for what?’

Then: thunder. Footsteps like falling stones thudded past our devil’s ivy plants, over the white and crimson tiles of our front steps, and with a heave and a crash, our front door tore off its hinges and slammed onto the floor. In the threshold were the all too familiar fanged faces of green-skinned ogres, each holding a rife, each surveying our sparsely furnished living room.

‘Is this him?’ one of them grunted, pointing at my brother.

I saw it now—so clearly and too late. Instinctively I moved between Arkar and the ogres, my arms outstretched in an effort to protect him; but the ogres only waited while our father pinned his son’s arms to his back and pushed him forward. I screamed for our mother, who was already running down the stairs, the weight of slumber banished from her eyelids.

‘What’s happening?’ she cried.

‘Traitor!’ I screeched, grabbing my father’s wrists, pushing him away from my brother, even as the stranger ogres spun him in their grasp.

Arkar was weeping now, his every defiance squelched out of him.

‘Turn me back,’ begged our father. ‘Turn me back and leave us alone.’

The biggest ogre fished out a familiar looking canister from his pocket and opened it. My mother began to cough as the fumes filled our living room, as they stuck to the wicker couch where we sat together in the evenings, as she sipped her green tea and we played with our cats on the floor, as they rustled the curtains at our windows and shook our doorknobs. She coughed and fell to her knees; our father fell with her, his blistering hand at her back.

I turned towards my brother, fear beating against my lungs. Arkar was changing, the corners of his mouth pricking with sharpening enamel. Even his skin, once the same almond shade as mine, was sprouting the hue of banana leaves. Now his features began to distort, like worms wriggling in the depths of his cheeks, until they subsided, permanently disfiguring his face.

And on the floor with our mother, our father—now no longer ogre, now a shaking fifty-six-year-old man, cowering with his face in his hands, his lips twisted into something between a laugh and a cry.

‘What’s happening?’ I screeched. ‘What did you do?!’

I remembered the canister I’d found. How it must have had a slower effect on humans even if it killed our roaches and the birds that ate them immediately: how it had been turning our neighbor green, who must have been a military sympathizer. Of course he had tried to hide the changes in his skin, wearing his long-sleeved shirts in the heat. But these fumes were stronger, for the transformation to be almost instantaneous—

But the fumes had also changed our father. Turned him back human. How?

‘Ama,’ said my brother, his voice strangling. ‘Sister—help me—’

I looked again. The canister the ogre held was also numbered: but three digits stared out at me. Whatever iteration of the gas this was, it was far stronger than the one I’d found.

Our mother saw her husband as if for the first time.

‘Zeyar?’ she gasped, grasping his hands, her face drenched with saltwater tears. ‘Zeyar, what did you do?’

‘I’m sorry, Haymar.’ His breath was ragged, his voice a thousand shards of glass. ‘I’m sorry—it was the only way to get back to you, the only way—’

Fumes returned ogres to their former selves, for a price. A sacrifice. My brother. I imagined military officers, turbaned and pinned with medals, laughing in their marble palaces. What would we give, those who had given so much, for the ones we loved? What could we give except ourselves?

I pressed my palms into my weeping brother’s hands. His fingers were swollen, bursting with green pus. Only his eyes, deep-set in his goosebump flesh, remained something I recognized.

‘Help me,’ he whispered.

‘Turn him back,’ I cried. ‘Take me instead. Turn him back!’

The ogres pushed their way out through the threshold where our door used to be, Arkar limp and helpless between them. I spun towards my parents, still crumpled on the floor, clinging to each other, their faces wet with tears. For a moment, I wanted the house to collapse, for the veranda to crash into the garden, for the second-story floorboards to deteriorate, to fall on our heads. I wanted the portrait of our father on the shrine to snap clean in two, for the blotted photograph to be buried beneath the rubble. Wanted us all to be buried with no hope of resuscitation. Wanted us—but mostly him—dead.

But the house remained intact, its walls still warding off the wind and the sun. It was too small to hold me now. My rage was bigger than its pillars, its rusting floors.

I locked eyes with my mother, whose face had crumpled, dark with distress and terror. My father fixed his gaze on the ground, his final cruelty.

I moved through the space the ogres had occupied. The gates clanged behind me. Barefoot, I kicked up pebbles and dust behind me and ran.