The girl’s real father had left at birth, all that remained a few toys bought at a dollar store near the honky-tonk a few miles down the road. Where he’d met her mother before she got fired and went to work in fast food. She didn’t want to like any of those toys, but she was fond of a plastic boat her mom called “the ark,” but she just called Boat.

When the girl’s stepfather saw Boat, he told her that he had owned a boat once and lived on the coast. When he wasn’t drunk, he’d told her stories about the tidal pools and wandering at sunset between them, and the treasures found there. He’d shown her photographs and pictures in books. Like he wanted his past to become her future.

The girl would never see the ocean. It was too far away from town. Too far away from the tunnel that became her home. But she did remember playing with Boat in the bathtub, and taking her toys and plastic jewelry and creating tidal pools to explore. She had an active imagination. Her mother always said. Sometimes spat the words. Sometimes punished her for it. Which was when it was important to focus on the sea and the day when she might live in a little cottage on the shore.

Her stepfather’s stories weren’t much, but they meant almost too much to the girl. She knew it, but couldn’t help it.

Once, in a rare bout of kindness, the day after her stepfather left them, her mother had made star-and-moon mobiles to hang off the showerhead, and the girl had piloted Boat across the sea of the tub by the light of those stars.

That was when the dark began to take form, shape in her mind, and she began to call what lived in the house and lurked in the town what they really were: demons.>>

– 2 –

That night. Which night. That one. Or that one. You’re losing track. Of time. Of symptoms. Of the world. But, that night, the dark came down and killed a pale man—and then another. Drags them off toward the factory smokestacks. Sound of their bodies through underbrush silky, smooth, disturbing, as if they move like molting snakes down a soft carpet. But the thing that drags them is rough, harsh, cracked branches and the night does not matter to it. Forces in the world that seem so mysterious are at odds. That it is not dark against light but dark against dark against dark against dark.

Charting the English words through the journal, stitching them together into sense or a kind of sense. Thinking it gives you an anchor, even as each sets you more adrift.

“What if the world were alive, the entire world, every thing in it. What if I could make that world, and each being connected in such intimate ways.”