Marnie has a character voice that’s quirky, distinct from the narrative voice. Her statements are declarative, her vocabulary sensuous and sophisticated. In contrast, the group narrating the story has a collective personality that sounds completely different. Plus the first-person plural design of this narrative voice gives the writer a chance to have a little fun: the girls telling the story are not entirely in agreement. It’s clear that people see Marnie a bit differently:

  And okay, we did think she was kind of beautiful, with her shell sometimes blue-green, sometimes black, mottling into purple and tan at the edges.

  What? No, we didn’t.

  Voice is the key to humor, too—when a story is funny, it’s at least partly because of the voice. The matter-of-factness in RISK becomes a vessel for exactly that kind of deadpan delivery, allowing for more layers of absurdity:

  “And honestly, shouldn’t the Vegas be relieved? At least she’s not drinking. At least she’s not pregnant. There are worse things to be, after all, than a lobster. She isn’t shooting heroin. She isn’t spreading STDs.

  “Isn’t she, though?” one of us said, hearing the story. It was clever; it got repeated. Did you hear about Marnie Vega? She has the worst case of crabs.

  RISK is voiciest in its first half. Until we care about the characters and have suspended our disbelief, Hylton’s main tool to keep us reading is that distinctive voice. Once we’re sucked in, the priority shifts—it’s less about the girls deciding what to make of Marnie’s transformation, and more about trying to understand the lobster. The sassy human narrative voice also makes a subtle transition as they, too, become dreamy, become a risk of lobsters.

  Story Prompt: Building Conflict

  Part I: As you figure out who your main character is, ask yourself what they want. (Maybe they want multiple things; for the sake of this exercise, go ahead and pick just one big-picture item for now.)

  %

  Part II: How can you use your character’s setting and circumstances to make it more difficult for them to get what they want?

  %

  Here’s an example:

  •Part I: Your character wants to be with the person they love.

  •Part II: The person they love is plugged directly into the core of the planet and single-handedly powering all existing life, and as long as they are doing so, they will be asleep and unreachable.

  Sweetmeats

  Linda Cheng

  “Such a delicious tale—SWEETMEATS is Grimms’ ‘Hansel and Gretel’ flavored with Guillermo del Toro and a dash of Miyazaki, all wrapped up in a modern-day setting and served with a distinct and compelling voice. I absolutely devoured it.”

  —Heidi Heilig, author of For a Muse of Fire

  The mark is on the inside of our elbows. Marlie’s on the left, mine on the right. Stacked triangles inside a semicircle. The police can’t figure out how we got the brand and neither can the doctors. We weren’t cut or burned or tattooed, but the black outlines on our skin appear to be permanent. The reporters have their own theories—everything from satanic cults to sex traffickers. Most of the headlines say that Marlie and I were taken from our bedrooms.

  That’s not what happened.

  We weren’t kidnapped. We ran away. Right before summer vacation started, right after I screwed up my audition for Interlochen Arts Academy and my mother asked me in front of my violin teacher why I was wasting his time and her money if I couldn’t even bother to try.

  We were running away to New York. I had a plan, and years’ worth of red pocket money collected at Chinese New Year dinners from aunts who told me to save the money for plastic surgery. You should at least do your eyelids, Mei, and maybe your nose, such a shame you didn’t get your mother’s face. The plan was to busk in the subways. While other little girls played house, we played opera. I had to practice violin after school every day, and Marlie would sit with me, harmonizing while I ran scales and drilled études. She didn’t need any sheet music; she did it all by ear. She hates getting on stage even though she’s the best singer in her church choir, but there won’t be any stages in the subway, no spotlights, no one watching for our mistakes, just me and her performing our opera for nonjudgmental commuters. Someone might film us and we could go viral. People get famous like that all the time.

  We didn’t even make it to the Greyhound station before the witch got us.

  “You keep referring to your abductor as a ‘witch.’ Why do you say that?” The detective taking our statements squints at me after every question he asks.

  “Because that’s what she is,” I tell him. “A witch who eats girls. She kept giving us cake and candy to fatten us up.”

  “You said there were other girls with you. What happened to them?”

  “I told you,” I repeat, “the witch ate them.”

  He squints harder. “How did the two of you escape?”

  “The door wasn’t locked that day. We ran out of the cabin and through the woods until we got to the road.”

  I tell him the truth, exactly what happened, but the detective looks to Marlie and waits. She stares at the floor tiles and scratches at her elbow, at the mark. She says nothing.

  “What did the witch look like?” the detective asks.

  “The most beautiful woman in the world,” I answer.

  They tell us we’ve been missing for weeks, but I swear we were only gone for a few nights. We sit next to each other in the police station until our parents show up. Marlie’s father thanks God over and over; mine is silent. Her mother cries and cradles her; mine can’t look me in the eyes.

  Marlie and I have been neighbors our whole lives. Literally since birth. We were born on the same day in the same hospital. Our bassinets were side by side in the nursery, and we were wrapped in matching pink muslins. My mother hosted a joint Zhuazhou ceremony for us when we turned one. It’s this birthday ritual where you line up a bunch of stuff in front of the baby, and whatever they pick up predicts their future. Stethoscope for doctor, textbook for teacher, paintbrush for artist, spatula for chef. Allegedly, Marlie’s parents loved it. They make a point to tell us all the time how they find Chinese traditions “so charming.” I don’t think they realize how many hurtful comments they’ve made about our food—How are you supposed to eat fish that’s looking up from the plate with those giant open eyes!?—or the fact that we don’t go to church. During the Zhuazhou ceremony I went for the toy violin and Marlie started chewing on a karaoke microphone. Born to be musicians, my mother would say when she talked about it at block parties. I’ve probably heard it hundreds of times, but I never get tired of watching my mother tell that story, the way her face glows with pride.

  Neither of us has siblings, but it doesn’t feel that way. We have each other. Boys would pick on Marlie for her large ears, her freckled face, the baggy corduroy skirts her mother dresses her in, and I would get in trouble for kicking those boys in their knees. She’s a few hours younger than me; it’s my job to look after her.

  Marlie hasn’t said the words It’s your fault, but New York was my idea, and if I hadn’t come to her window that night, she never would have put on her backpack and climbed out.

  It’s the first week of high school and there are rumors about us spreading all over campus.

  “Aren’t those the girls who escaped from some serial killer shack in the woods?”

  “Someone should make a movie about them, they’re like, real-life Final Girls.”

  “My cousin said they were being auctioned off to rich pedophiles in Russia.”

  “Did you see the satanic symbol on her arm? They were totally supposed to be human sacrifices.”

  I don’t care about the gossip, but Marlie shrinks whenever someone looks her way. She wears long sleeves all the time and waits for me outside of my classes so she won’t have to walk down the halls alone.

  “Don’t listen to those assholes,” I tell her on our way home. We still hold hands when we cross the street. Her fingers are always freezing.

  “Mei,” Marlie says, clinging to my arm, her nails digging in through my sweatshirt. She’s staring at something on the other side of the road. I look, and my breath stops in my throat.

  There’s a woman standing across the street. She’s in a white dress that reaches past her ankles. Long black hair falls over her face. I can’t see her eyes, but I know she’s looking at us.

  I take a step forward, and the woman does, too. I take another step, and the woman follows. Marlie’s grip on my arm tightens, and I start walking quicker, pulling her with me. Across the street, the woman breaks out into a run after us. Marlie screams. I grab her hand and we sprint, our feet slamming against the pavement, our schoolbags swinging, we run for our lives, the way we did when we fled from the witch’s cabin, all the way up the front steps of my house.

  “Hurry,” Marlie gasps, “the door!”

  I scramble for my keys and pull them out of my bag, but my hands are shaking so much I can’t fit them into the lock. I look over my shoulder. The woman is standing on my lawn now. She reaches a hand up, and pulls all of her hair off.

  It’s Bryan Haywood. He grins and holds up the wig.

  Bryan is a year older than us—rich, handsome, and heartless—a trifecta of qualities that have kept him popular since nursery school. He never got over the fact that I gave him a black eye in the fifth grade for making Marlie cry. His dad is a cop; he must have heard about the witch from him.

  Bryan’s girlfriend, Clara, pulls up in Bryan’s new car, a shiny Bimmer he got for his sixteenth birthday. “Quick, get the door before the witch eats you!” Clara calls out, snapping her gum. Three boys from the lacrosse team lean out of the back seat windows and chant: “Run, run, run!” Bryan whips the wig around over his head like a helicopter propeller and jumps into the car with his friends. They’re all laughing so hard they can’t sit up.

  The next weekend I spot his car in the mall parking lot, and I run my keys down the entire driver’s side from mirror to bumper.

  Marlie goes to her pastor for counseling twice a week, but my mother doesn’t believe in therapy. She doesn’t believe in post-traumatic stress disorder or witches who eat children.

  She doesn’t believe me.

  She thinks if I go back to my routine everything will be normal again. She sits with me as I practice, counting aloud to the metronome, but all I hear are the hard clacks of her shoes as she walks out of my ruined audition. My hand cramps up and I trip over the same series of arpeggios like they’re raised road spikes on the page.

  “Again, from the beginning,” my mother says. “Again. Again. This is your favorite concerto—why can’t you play it right anymore?”

  It’s not my favorite, I think. It’s yours. I lift my bow, inhale, and mess up at the same spot.

  My father was married to someone else once. He was still married when he met my mother. They were both soaring on their respective rising stars, my father an assistant conductor to the city symphony, my mother the lauded prodigy. When I was little my father called me baobei—precious—and sat me on his lap while he worked. We’d share a pair of headphones, one bud each, the cord dangling between us, music pumping like blood between two halves of one organ. He was my refuge when my arms grew weak from stretching in order to reach my mother’s expectations. Until I overheard him yelling at my mother, accusing her of having me despite their “agreement.” Afterward, I noticed he sometimes looked at me the way a child looks at the sheets they’ve soiled. A dirty mistake. I stopped going into his study to sit with him, stopped our ritual of sharing compositions we enjoyed, stopped smiling at him, and then one day we stopped talking altogether. Now he gives all his attention to Xiao Long, the dog he purchased from a breeder in Australia and treats like the son he never got to raise.

  I try to tell him what happened to me.

  “Mei, there is no cabin in that part of the woods,” he says. “The police searched the whole area.” He picks up Xiao Long and coos at him as if he’s trying to comfort the dog instead. “You were taken by a bad person, but you’re home now.”

  He doesn’t believe me.

  I still dream about the night we ran away, the night we met the witch. I dream about me and Marlie walking down the dark sidewalk, hand in hand. It’s almost midnight and we’re heading to the bus station when we hear singing coming from the woods just beyond our neighborhood. A tune we’ve never heard before but that somehow sounds familiar, innocent and nostalgic, like the childish melody we had once cobbled together and performed for our stuffed animals. The song reaches out and lovingly pulls us in, until we’re standing at the edge of the trees. I see the witch so clearly in my dreams, singing to us, a delicate paper silhouette against the jagged black shapes of the underbrush. Long raven hair falling over white lace sleeves. Little pearl buttons along her throat. Her eyes are hidden behind her hair, her pretty pink mouth smiling.

  No more tears, little ones, the witch sings. Come with me, I’ll take good care of you.

  We follow her into the woods, the branches closing up the path behind us. She leads us farther and farther into the darkness until we forget about the bus station, forget about New York.

  Do you smell that? Marlie asks, her icicle fingers curling against my hand.

  I close my eyes and breathe in. I smell fresh-baked cookies and cotton candy.

  The witch leads us through the woods to a little cabin with ivy growing along its brick walls all the way up to the crooked chimney pipe. There’s a layer of white dust coating the roof and sprinkled on the banisters of the front porch. It can’t possibly be snow, because it’s May.

  When I get closer I see that it’s powdered sugar and frosting.

  The witch opens the door for us. Come in, come in, she sings. We step through the threshold. There’s a wood stove burning, and the fire smells like warm vanilla and cinnamon apples. We sigh deeply and breathe in again. This time we smell spiced cocoa and caramel kettle corn. Our mouths water. There are confections everywhere, stacked high on platters, overflowing from bowls, stuffed into colorful jars.

  Eat, rest, the witch says, poor things, you look exhausted.

  We take off our shoes and lie down on the plush cushions spread out on the floor. The witch tucks us in under knit blankets and feeds us chocolate soufflé with blackberry soda. The carbonation tickles the back of my throat. There are other girls there, stretched out on more pillows, some of them eating, others sleeping. The witch takes one of the girls by her honey-drenched hand and leads her out of the parlor and into the room beyond. They don’t come back.

  I look over at Marlie, and she’s eating candied cherries, her mouth and fingers dripping with red syrup. I always wake from those dreams starving.

  Ms. Wilde lets us have lunch in the art room after she sees us eating by ourselves under the bleachers. She tells us about her kitchen renovation project and shares adventures she had backpacking through Iceland. She shows us YouTube compilations of babies getting scared by their own farts, and Marlie laughs for the first time since we came home.

  “If anyone says something to make you uncomfortable, let me know, all right?” Ms. Wilde tells us.

  After lunch, we walk along the grove of trees that marks the border between the school and the neighborhood. We still haven’t talked about any of it. Marlie doesn’t bring it up, so I don’t either, even though all I want is to ask if she has those dreams too, if her stomach churns so loud it wakes her, if she sees moving shadows in the spaces between trees, if she feels like a part of her never walked out of those woods, if she’ll ever, ever forgive me. Watching her light up with laughter made me brave, so I take the leap.

  “Everyone thinks I made it up. Do you think Ms. Wilde would believe us?” I ask, picking at the frayed and split ends of my hair. “She’s probably the only grown-up who will. She doesn’t treat us like we’re freaks.”

  “She doesn’t actually care. She’s only acting nice because she’s obviously desperate to be a mother.”

  I pause in the middle of a step and turn to Marlie. “What?”

  It doesn’t sound like something Marlie would say, because Marlie doesn’t say nasty things about anyone, not even about the spineless bullies who torment her.

  Marlie shrugs and veers off the path, kneeling to study something in the tall grass. I walk up behind her and cringe when I see the quivering body in the bushes. It’s a baby rabbit. Most of its fur has been stripped off and left hanging like an unzipped bodysuit, pink flesh and white tendons exposed. The rabbit twitches, still alive.

  “Mittens strikes again.” I frown. The tabby cat that hunts around the school grounds is relentless in her massacre and happily leaves the mangled remains of her victims for students to find.

  Marlie gathers the skinned rabbit into her coat, holding it to her chest.

  I scrunch my nose. “Should you be touching that with your bare hands?”

  Marlie whispers something into the rabbit’s furless ear. Then she breaks the rabbit’s neck in one smooth twist.

  I jolt back like I’ve been slapped. The shock leaves my mouth in one sharp gasp. Marlie has trouble looking at a paper cut. She sheds tears watching animal shelter commercials. I’ve never seen her crush a trail of ants, stomp a spider, a house centipede, anything.

  She looks up at me, her face remorseless, and for a chilling instant I’m staring at a stranger. The moment passes. Marlie blinks her clear green eyes. “It was in pain,” she says. “I freed it.”

  I dig a hole under the bushes and we drop the rabbit inside. Marlie stands over my shoulder and watches as I push dirt over the body, her gaze boring into my back.

  My playing worsens. My fingers are clumsy and inarticulate, like they’ve been snapped and healed back wrong. The sounds I make aren’t music, just angry screeches and sad wailing.