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.

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?