When we reached the shore, we saw that she was telling the truth.

In the night, dead fish had floated to the surface of the lake. There must have been hundreds of them, all drifting near the shoreline. Their bodies lying together, intimately, flank to flank, open eye against open eye. The waves brought them toward us in a scum of silver corpses.

“See?” demanded Abigail, rocking up on the balls of her feet, straining flower-like toward the lake until my grandfather reached for her shoulder with a firm hand, and pulled her back before she could get any closer. His mouth pinched at the corners, turning down a little. I wanted, embarrassingly badly, to ask him how scared I should be.

Vienna would not look at me. Even when I touched her shoulder, even when I scraped my foot against the back of her ankle. I willed her to turn to me, to laugh, even to give me a fearful look so that at least we could be afraid together. She swallowed and swallowed again, her throat hitching. I was suddenly frantic that she couldn’t breathe. Her mouth hung open a little, showing just the tip of her tongue. “Vienna,” I said, but when I reached for her shoulder again, she shrugged my hand off, and walked a couple yards down the inlet beach, keeping her eyes on the lake all the while. I felt something opening inside me, all my nestled organs shuffling apart to create an empty space. Maybe I was about to throw up, or pass out. Maybe we would both have to go to the hospital, hours down the mountain. Maybe Vienna would tell her grandparents what we’d done. In retrospect, perhaps she worried that I’d tell mine.

We watched the fish wash in, hesitating like driftwood in the shallows, inching farther and farther up the beach. Each wave slid flesh against flesh, bringing them together and apart in little sighs, only to spit a couple soft, silvery bodies onto the sand, and drag the rest back without them.

“Look at that,” my grandmother said, and I nodded. It looked like nothing I had words for, like the end of the world.

Hunting the Viper-King

At the mathematical heart of Dorothy’s father’s RV, at its golden ratio curl, there is a tarot card pinned to the corkboard. The High Priestess; she has been there longer than Dorothy can remember. Worn at her edges, drawn in lines of gold and white and blue, crowned by a crescent moon. She tips her head to listen to the snake coiling up her white throat, whispering in her ear. Dorothy has always loved her, the wisdom writ into her lines, her beneficent gaze on the RV’s interior, the art nouveau spill of her hair down her shoulders.

The acquisition of the High Priestess was Dorothy’s first and last bedtime story. She thinks she will be able to call it up, in all the curves and contours of her father’s telling, for the rest of her life.