Some of the images in the journal remind you of the real world. A page has a thin figure on it like a druggie named Hal whose face had been cut up by a bottle in a fight. He weighed all of ninety pounds. Probably didn’t last the winter. Talked for hours about his former life. Husband. Homeowner. Programmer at a software firm. All that done now. But he kept reciting every detail for the three months you knew him.

You never talk about your past with anyone. Talking just releases memories into the air, and they aren’t really yours anymore, or they become changed or other people capture them and hold them prisoner. You want to keep them. The bad ones might infect someone.

Scribbled in the margin, almost a plea or an order: “You have to open your heart to as much as you can. As much as you can stand. No matter the cost.”

Such treacle. The sentiment is more surprising than finding sentences you can read. A few more like that, almost like greeting cards, until you wonder if it means something different. Wonder if this was some strategy for combating horror. But who created the horror? If you’re reading this right.

“Everyone should have a magical garden. Everyone should know how that feels.”

You skip and skim, unsettled, glance back at the fox from time to time. But he’s no help.

Toward the end of the journal, you find sketches of a creature like what you glimpsed in the river. In a globe of light, like the fox on the cover. In a more scientific sense, carefully labeled, splayed, with eyes x’d out. A diagram. Resembles a salamander. A large salamander. Almost but not quite.

Like the languages you can’t understand, the creature doesn’t map to anything you’ve seen or read about. More English, but only to support a delusion. A made-up language again. A salamander language?

Maybe you study that page for days, for months, for years. Maybe seconds. The page splits your brain into before and after. Becomes meaningless to gather meaning to it.

This page of a liquid language reminds you of pages from a book you were given, about the coast. In the surge of watery lines. The withdrawal at low tide, leaving spirals of tiny creatures behind. Husks and shadows and evidence of something hidden by the water, revealed.

Nothing like a eureka moment. Nothing except you know the others are coming back soon. So you memorize a simple phrase. What you think is a simple phrase, in salamander language. Put the journal back in its hiding place.

You go down to the riverbank, write in ephemeral, rich mud. Words, you think, or symbols. Of greeting. Of friendship. Of solidarity.

What if it is nonsense? Most days, all you have is reality, which is nonsense, too. The mud feels good against your hand. Soft and cool and forgiving.