Sophia built her first shrine when she was six years old. She took a fragment of a fallen bird’s nest, decorated it with dandelions and acorn shells, and surrounded it with a circle of stones on the surface of a tree stump in her backyard. The tree had come down very recently, and she’d been staring out the window at the place where it used to be. No one had taught her to build this shrine; she had no word for what she was doing.

The water began to rise from the soil three days after the storm passed. By then, the rest of the valley and the neighboring town had become feverish again with the heat of early summer, and all remnants of rain had completely disappeared.
It was a thing of magic, the townspeople said when they finally drove the five miles into the lowlands of the valley to see it with their own eyes. Water seeping from the depths of the earth.

Eileen can feel the heat on her neck and smell the group of sweaty teenagers sitting five seats ahead of her on the city bus. They speak in a lingo that mocks her thirty-six accumulated years of practicing proper grammar. One of them stands in the aisle with his legs spread out for balance and talks about escaping the matrix. His friend, wearing a gigantic hoodie, looks around the bus, glances at Eileen and then looks to the side as if to roll his eyes at his friend.

The one-way bus ticket eats up a big chunk of his earnings and leaves him with just enough cash for a quick fix when he gets home—something to take the edge off while he figures out what to do about his stolen car. His mind is clouded with these thoughts as he climbs on the idling coach under the cover of the late November afternoon gloom. The driver pays him no mind, but a pair of elderly women near the front make their displeasure known, clucking their tongues in unison as he shuffles past. He gets it.

I’ve always been afraid of the dark.
It’s strange, I know. Mermaongs are supposed to be adventurous. We’re meant to love every part of the ocean—from its glittering surface to the rotting hull of a drowned ship, to the thrill of the Deep Dark, where the blind fish and the shadows with teeth live. There is always some measure of dark: the shadow of fish or sharks, a cloud passing overhead, the shape of something in the distance.

Outskirts of a mining town in northern Minnesota
August 1990
A ten-year-old girl named Ursula Dahl chases after a porcupine behind her mother’s trailer, her frizzy red hair sparkling in the late-summer light. The animal escapes through a wild raspberry patch, but the child refuses to give up.