What’ve you got besides a mysterious journal? You take stock every morning, as if it might change. Because it might. You might have less. You can’t afford less. A depressing inventory. A backpack, and inside a Walkman with a mixtape in it that skipped. From an old boyfriend, before you roamed so much. A sawed-off baseball bat. An antique lipstick case that was your mom’s. Old bread you stole from a dumpster behind a grocery store. A can of tuna, but no can opener. A knife in your pants pocket for emergencies. A candy bar, also for emergencies. A gallon jug labeled “milk” filled with stream water.

A salamander, which hangs around, even as the weather cools. Message received, or not received. When you check the mud bank, there’s just a swipe or swirl in response, the message gone.

A broken, polluted body.

Pale, unnatural men still creeping through the forest.

The salamander grows larger. Almost as you watch. Because you watch a lot. From underbrush. Behind trees. Peering around an empty barrel. You spy. You surveil. Waiting. For what? Drifting, receding, coming back into focus. The salamander’s shifting skin changed from green to red hot, the hazy sheen of a burning shed. The way of it, the weight of it, the patterns in the water. The feeling of being engulfed by a monster, yet not monstrous. Is there a map to lead you out of this? Or are you stuck?

You call it a salamander because that’s all you know. From days as a kid getting lost in the woods and following the stream to get back. Always thought of them as slow, small, fragile.

But this creature in the river, this salamander, is so large now and churns the water, the swirls a teasing hint of its form.

But the eyes are perched on its head in a way unlike a salamander.

But it has serrated teeth.

But it has a tail with notches and fins to help stabilize it.

Can swim so fast it’s here and then gone again. You watch it cut through the river, go deep then shallow, more like a shark might. The humid, close smell of the river fresh as the water parts. Fresher. Like it did once. Before there was a town.

It gets dark that day, but you can’t stop watching. Belly full of thick dumplings made of cheap bread and a fifth of vodka someone left in an alley off of the main street. A test you either passed or failed. Let the demons in because the demons are already here. As some insect blinks and glows across the water and the salamander slides through, snuffs the light, brings it back again. A holy gloaming. Swiftness, the sharp intent … you don’t have that. Maybe because you are not as new as this thing, or because you are not as new to this place.