She tried to kick upwards, push with her hands back up to the surface, she hadn’t taken a breath. There was light, and she swam towards it, coming up just as she was about to explode for need of air. She pulled herself up on the edge of the puddle, but now she wasn’t on her street anymore. The water was salty on her lips and this world looked utterly bright. She pulled herself up, out of the water, onto her knees, and then up to standing.

All she could see in every direction was flat sand, the sun beating down on her. Looking down, she realized the puddle was vaporizing in the heat, already too small for her to fit through. She dropped down and put her hands in the water, as the puddle disappeared.

Then she sat back on the sand, shocked. She held up her neat smooth wrists, both of her hands gone to the other side. She sat still, trying to think. But thinking made her cry, and she cried and cried until, looking down, the puddle was returning. She cried until the puddle was wide, until she could see rainbows in it. Then she dove in.

The next night she couldn’t sleep. Again.

It wasn’t for lack of exhaustion. She was so weary it seized up in the center of her back and dried out her eyes.

It was all the absence. There was nothing she needed to do. There was nothing interesting for her to watch, nothing she wanted to read or listen to. There were just these hours, long dark hours where her dreams worried her sleep and the truth worried her waking.

There were things she didn’t want to discuss: The strange snippets of dreams she could remember. All the ways she wasn’t Kama, or Mama Vivian. Marta, who appeared in her dreams, generally to disappear again. The mold growing all over random spots on her model of Detroit. The death growing all over the city within and beyond her doors.

She let the night become her company. In the darkness she spoke, to herself, to Mama Vivian, to Kama, to Brendon. She told her secret and mundane thoughts.

She tried to feel that she was alive, but she wasn’t sure, not sure enough.

At 3 am, her songs would sometimes show up.

She missed singing for Mama Vivian. Over the last few months, getting to sing for her grandmother, they had had some of the sweetest, most intimate moments of their long relationship. Not in conversation, not in debate and training, not in analysis. Just singing, being quiet, and singing some more. The sweet reception on Vivian’s face, the pure love.