Mother said she had no photos of the girl’s real dad. But once the girl went through some drawers looking to borrow a pair of her mother’s socks and found an envelope of old black-and-white photos of stern-looking people with narrow, pinched features and severe, sharp black clothes. She knew they weren’t their family or her stepdad’s family. They looked like no one she would ever have wanted to meet. They looked, upon reflection, in their reflections, like demons. As stiff and pale as the demons she watched become the town.

Not long after, her mother slammed open the girl’s door, breathless, shouting: “You did it! You did. You’re the demon. He left because you’re a demon. I wish you’d never been born!”

In the morning, her mother becoming Other had forgotten bursting in, forgotten that her daughter was a demon. But the girl remembered.>>

– 1 –

The dark bird cries out in pain, lost in the forest, wing useless from the salamander’s attack. Cries of alarm distant from the factory, as if the dark wing is a beacon. From your place by the river, beside the salamander, who is changing again. Not from wounding but from choice, from life cycle. That much you understand.

The huge body beside you, engulfed by a river grown urgent, tugs at the creature. Tugs away at the strings, the knots of its body. As you watch, the salamander begins to disintegrate, the tail becoming a slow miracle of thousands of tiny writhing salamanders where one had been.

The limbs and torso fall like living red sand into the river, taken by the swirls. Until there is only the head and the eyes that stare at you, until the erosion of self takes them too, and it all crumbles into the water and the river is awash with motes of life.

Such joy in the sight. So much joy you feel that the pain leaves you for a time. To see a river that is full of wriggling red bodies. Tiny eyes so bright, staring as one at you, and then swept downriver. Changing the river, changing this world. A river aflame. Dispersed and disbanded and yet ever stronger in that fragmented state.

And the thing you didn’t know at first: The dark bird is coming closer. You’ve lost a lot of blood, the wound too deep, too poisoned for the salamander to repair. Not and save itself. But it has a plan, a plan it whispered to you. A plan you’re willing to accept.

Nothing left to do. Nothing you can do. For what could you do. This has all already happened.

<<A hot spring day, the leaves dying on the trees and no one could guess that they were the reason. The girl came home from school, walked to the back porch, found her mother there, pacing, agitated.