“I know, Luke,” she said, rubbing his back and feeling the sharp tips of the fins through the cloth. “But just think. The top of the sinkhole is above water for the first time anyone remembers. Maybe for the first time ever. When the lights come this time, they won’t have to shine through the water. They’ll shine straight out into the night. That’s never happened before, at least not in anyone’s memory.”

“I ain’t so crazy about that neither.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “My daddy said them lights made us the way we is, twisted us up, just like it’s twisted the trees and the fish and the bugs around here. And that’s from when they was just shining up through the water. What happens this year when there ain’t no water?”

Semelee felt a thrill at the prospect. “That’s what I want to see.”

The lights had been comin’ twice a year—at the spring and fall equinoxes—for as long as anyone could remember. Her momma had told her they’d kept that schedule every year since she’d been born, and her momma had told her the same thing.

But Semelee’s momma’d said that years back the lights started gettin’ stronger and brighter. And it wasn’t long after that, maybe a few years, that the people livin’ around the lagoon started noticin’ changes in the plants and the fish and things around the sinkhole. It started with the frogs missin’ legs or growin’ extra ones. Then the fish started lookin’ weird and the plants started gettin’ twisted up.

All that was bad enough, but when the lagooners’ kids started bein’ born dead or strange lookin’, the lagooners moved out. Not as a group to the same place, but piecemeal like, in all different directions. Some stayed as close as Homestead, some as far as Louisiana and Texas. After they moved away, they stopped havin’ strange kids and they was happy about that.

But the strange kids they already had wasn’t happy. Not one bit. Not because they was all mistreated by people as they was growin’ up—Semelee hadn’t been alone in that—but because when they all finally growed up they felt like somethin’ was missin’ in their lives.

One by one they all—all the misshapen ones—found their way back here to the lagoon and learned that this was where the itch stopped, this was where they felt whole, where they belonged. This was home.

And home was where your family lived. They came to call themselves a clan, and all decided to stay here on the lagoon.

Yet even with this big family-type gang around her, Semelee still felt a yearning emptiness within. She wanted more, needed more.

“Why do they hafta take our sand? There’s plenty of sand around. Why they want ours?”

“Don’t rightly know,” Semelee said.

“Who is they, anyway?”