“Oh, for crying out loud! Why did you do that!?” The woman took the news of the coat rather hard. “Of all the coats in the world! But leather! Leather won’t protect you from wind or cold! Leather itself is cold. It’ll burn, too, and it’s not dressy. You’ve got to think about enhancing your looks—why, at your age, you already have eye-wrinkles. Buy a coat, Frances.” The mother hung up.

Frances returned slowly to the kitchen, daydreaming, sitting, recalling the delicious fraud many years ago of feigning illness for a year to avoid school. During that time, she had stayed on her narrow bed for long hours, playing a game of her own invention with cardboard and needles, which had no human opponents and no ending. The plaited silence of the house would thicken; the afternoons were restful and ominous in a way Frances never bothered to ponder.

Once during that year, Frances ran inside the house after watching a low storm move in like a sea. She saw her father sitting at a rough wooden table, eating a freakishly large apple, his head in half-shadow. Then the father stood, winked at her, and went on a trip to a distant city.

When the man returned, his body forming a silhouette in the bright doorway, Frances squinted. He carried a jar filled with green water and small water-creatures from a once-famous lake. Pouring the jar’s contents into a tank, the father showed Frances and her siblings the stiff tadpoles, miniature eels, and other tiny fish, explaining that the creatures were known as “foolers,” for they were too little to count as real fish at all. The creatures had no organs, and appeared mysteriously in puddles after rain, the father said, simply beginning their existence wherever they saw fit. The fish were eager to live, it seemed.

Frances’ mother did not care for the creatures and said so, standing against the hall telephone table. Then Frances and her siblings left the house to sit on the street curb at twilight, waiting, while inside, the mother slowly began to rail against the little fish, building up force, and finally hollering while the father listened, burying her fists in a sofa cushion again and again, repeating that the fish were too wild, too germy, and likely to produce odors. The mother finally put herself to bed while Frances’ father dozed in a woolly chair; after supper, Frances woke in her room to see her mother grasping the edge of the doorway with raw, sudsy fingers. “Dammit!” the woman whispered. “I told you I hate those damn fish!”

“Are you afraid?” Frances asked.

“I am not afraid!” the mother shouted, while immediately adding that she feared losing control of herself that night, which she hated, but the fish provoked her as strongly as an allergen, and she could sense them even when she was standing on the roof.