You don’t understand.

The salamander throws up all over you. Shock. Then, calm.

A light pink liquid, in that light, which seeps everywhere, holds you in place from surprise and some hidden quality you can’t describe. The liquid cools you. Feels like nothing. Feels like air throbbing against you, thickening and thinning to form-fit you. Smooth comfort. Spreading across your arms and your legs, and any reason to move fades from you.

You laugh, delighted. It smells of bubble gum. The smell of watermelon bubble gum! Which you used to buy when you could afford it. Chew it like food for hours. Fool the stomach.

Again, the salamander vomits, this time over itself, and you see the pink surround it, coursing like an organism. Traveling with purpose. Through the glaze across your eyes. The breathing through your skin that is not your skin. The salamander slides in beside you. A solid, a hefty weight. Its belly is distended as if full of young. Tight fit, and you now looking into its eyes as you both wait for the next thing.

Down in the pit of the hollow, so close to something so alien.

A shadow rises across the lip of the hollow. A familiar shape. The dark bird, the reptilian smirk of beak, the bloodshot eye you can imagine despite the dark. But you cannot even tense up against your second skin. Which breathes for you now as if you are covered in lungs or gills, feeding your body through the skin.

The dark bird stares down into the hollow. The dark bird stares for a long time. You and the salamander are so very still, so very close. Your mind roams, passing through the eye of the salamander and into a world of ripple and wave of endless floating and quick darting motion. Weaving through weeds and bulrushes and over cool stones at the bottom of the river. The thrill of liquid against the body, the constraint of that. The way it reminds you the world matters in a way that breathing air cannot.

The dark bird cannot see you. You’re under the river, scouring the bottom. So very far away from the hollow.

Comes the snarl, an expression of frustration or bloodlust. The dark bird falls away from the edge of the hollow. The shadow relaxes into normal night.

After, you and the salamander wash off in the river, watch as a thin scrim in the shape of you, of the salamander, floats downstream. Faintly luminous. Dissolving.

The salamander writes something in the water. It disappears, then widens. Just exists in your memory, as if you are at the center of the ripples. As if you’re diving through the calm of the center into deep water. As if you are monstrous.

“I don’t understand,” you whisper.

But you do.

Your blood is different now. The salamander has done something to it. You feel rejuvenated somehow, even with smell of gasoline lingering in the wind.