There is a fourth woman with them now, a young woman with blue toenail polish and long, dark hair. Their bodies hummed like tuning forks as he carried her through the tall grass, arranged her like the rest with gloved hands. The rhinestone in her nose sparkles in the sun.

The marsh is supposed to be protective, a buffer between the land and the sea. It’s where things transition, where water and land slide together into one. Blue claw crabs scuttle through the murky water, sometimes finding their way back to the ocean. Birds raise their young here, where there are fewer predators and plenty for them to eat. Egrets pick their way through the mud with elegant care. But for the women, it’s purgatory. Nothing in the marsh is either/or, water or land, lost or found. Their bodies are starting to become something else as their tissue softens and the blood pools in their limbs, something not bound by muscle and skin. They’re not women anymore, and yet they aren’t free and light like spirits. Free to float away, to rise above the marsh like ghosts.

They sense the shift in the wind during the final stretches of July. They know that this new month will bring warmer water, longer nights, cooler breezes. Then, the ocean will brew storms, hurricanes that surge their way up the coast. Wind that tears at the grass, tides that could scatter them, wash away what’s left. They think this means they’re running out of time. Time to tell their stories, time to be heard. They plead again for someone to see before it’s too late.

CLARA

IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG to see how quickly a person’s code could crumble, how easily the world would wear away at your rules. Des had told me I wasn’t supposed to meet anyone she hadn’t found. At first I listened, content to scrounge money from the ones she approved of with an extra sticky-sweet smile, an extra kiss. But then, one afternoon I lifted a porcelain doll from the gift shop at the Borgata and was walking to Zeg’s to see what he’d give me for it, when a car pulled up, the window cracked. The driver asked me if I felt like going for a ride. I could only see his sunglasses, which made me nervous. But the math won out. After paying Bill, I was back to $250 again.