The salamander burbles at you once, twice, then, ponderous and huge, plunges into the river and is gone.

When you write the word demon in the journal, it means something different. It’s like the blood snuffs out what the word means. But, also, there is something peering out from the page that wasn’t there before.

Some part of the salamander lives in the journal now.

You’ve never begrudged your maker the daily pain, the lack of comfort. Lack of care. The cold. The heat. The things you have to do. It isn’t easy, but it isn’t hard, either. Because you have to. The way you live. You can’t remember another way. You can’t forget.

Does it matter to the forests or the smokestacks or the sky? Does it matter to the salamander or the strange pale men or the mice in their meadow, the deer in their field? Does it matter to the course of the river or the street or how the town expands or contracts or fills up with drones? Does it matter?

You don’t know where to look now, after the encounter with the salamander. You don’t know what to do. The eye of the salamander confronts you. Challenges you. The words it spoke to you in the language you’ll never understand. You can never ask it what it wants or what it needs. All you can do is try to understand what exists in the body. Try to feel what it’s like to live in water. What it means for a body to communicate with the world so intensely, so directly, for the world to be so up against you that you and it are the same thing.

If you’re born to it, if you’re like the salamander, it must be like heaven, as if heaven were on Earth. The hell must be that no one will leave you alone here in heaven. That people hunt you and people kill you and people just cannot be still in their own bodies and listen and watch and hear but must somehow escape the beat of their own hearts by ever being in motion, even when they come to rest.

As you have come to rest, frozen, pinned by the intent in the salamander’s gaze. There is prophecy there. What it means. How it means. Why it means. When it is meant.

As you write in the journal, the pain is less. Your headache is gone. Your rash is gone.

<<Her past happened to another person. Another girl. Drab, dull, ordinary. She thinks of it as a fairy tale with no point. Once, as a child, she had lived in a cottage at the edge of town, in sight of the smokestacks. With her mom and her stepdad, this girl she was.

Even then, she’d known there was something in the house, something under the house, just could not put a name to it. Depending on her mood it was benign or horrible. But it was always the thing under the house that caused the arguments between her parents. It was the thing under the house that made her real father leave.