Mother wrapped me in a long piece of linen and laid me in water not deep enough to be dark, but deep enough. The sky was low and worried, and the tall grasses wove their shadows over me like a blanket. It was Genny that found me and took me for her own—raised me up in a world of weeds and wet and swamp rot.

When I was old enough to follow directions, but still young enough to follow directions, she named me Laura Leigh and sent me back to Mother.

“Bring me meat,” she said, and tied a tangled fish line around my ankle. “Girls have to eat, and mothers should feed their daughters. It’s the way of things. Bring her to me, and she shall feed you, as she always should have done. Bring Mother to the water and you shall have meat.”

But the memory of Mother’s face was rippled with green water.

“Any weeping mother will do, if the tears are ripe,” Genny said.

When Genny laughed, her teeth rattled like bone dice in a horn cup. She softens the sound with slick packs of algae pressed into the dark spaces of her mouth. It roots there, multiplies like weeds in a garden.

“Hurry, girl. Bring me gristle to clean my mouth.”

She said it shouldn’t take long. “All mothers weep,” she said. “That’s their secret. Find one whose secret is dark like the center of the water. Find one with eyes like a river. Dark meat—stringy meat—that will clean my teeth.”

The line around my ankle is tight enough to squeeze, but not to cut. It whispers through the tall grass behind me.

The kids hear it drag across the ground, but the mothers don’t. The kids call me Laura Leigh Hiss on account of it. None of their mothers weep. Their meat is too soft for Genny’s teeth.

Every day I spend away from the water, the line on my ankle pulls a little deeper.

***

“We don’t see you in school, Hiss,” the boy called Andrew says. His voice is not unkind.

“I don’t go to school,” I say.

“You have to go to school—it’s the law. Or your parents get in trouble.” He kicks a trench in the sand under the swing. The deep sand is wet, the way anything deep is always wet.

“I don’t have parents,” I tell him, and he stops his swing mid-kick.

“Oh,” he says. He digs deeper, to even wetter sand. “Do you want to see how high I can go?”

I say yes and he soars over his damp sand pit, hair straight back and bare knees kissing the sky.

Andrew’s mother hardly ever weeps. Her meat is soft as snails.

***