She turns back to the mother and pushes her long fingers into the woman’s hair. “I can’t send her back. She’s been here too long. She’s full of water now.” Genny lowers her mouth to the mother’s. Strings of algae shoot into the woman’s mouth. Her throat bulges with it. A fountain of bubbles flows up from Genny’s kiss, and when she pulls back, Kyle’s mother’s mouth is a gaping O. The green-tinted whites of her eyes are stretched with red. She floats, rocking in the soft current of Genny’s laugh.

***

My ears pop and fill and pop again as I ascend. Tiny fish with barbed mouths follow me, drinking from the red that flows from my ankle.

The sun is down, so the surface catches me by surprise—a shock of cold air, then a thousand knives of starlight.

I kick toward the shallows, reaching, till my toes brush the thick slime of the bottom. I grasp at tall reeds and pull myself to land.

I lie there—the long grass bent under my back like feather knives. I hear a hiss.

I open my eyes wide and round as a fish’s, drink in the moonlight, and search the shallows.

It’s Kyle’s mother. Her hair wraps dry reeds, pulling them with the lap of the tide. Her lips are the color of the sky.

I pull her hair off the weeds and tuck it around her face. “Is it better now?”

“Yes,” she says, though it could be a frog croaking.

“You’re not meat,” I say to her red eyes. “You could almost be a Genny. You could almost be a mother for us all.”

She laughs, or it might be a night bird.

I smile. “You’re too tough. Too tough for meat, and too tough to be a Genny, I guess.” I pinch the heavy eyelids shut.

“My son,” she says. And it must be her. I peel her eyes back open.

“Your son is gone.”

“My son.”

“You need a son. If you had a son again, could you be a Genny? A Genny that still knows how to weep? Could you be my Genny?” I don’t wait for an answer—can’t still the tide in my ears or the waves in my heart. “I can get you a son.”

***

There are tires in the bog—ones full of fish spawn and snails. A perfect shelter—dark like the black mud and tucked away from the current. If you hold your ear close, you can almost hear the life teeming inside.

The hum of wings is much louder. I can hear it from the street. Small black bodies drift around the tire, each on its own subtle current of air.

Their sting is less sharp than Genny’s barbed fingers.