–I best get this in the bath before the stains stick.

But I was well forgotten by now.

I don’t know if Father ever realised how this story spread in the town. Cures couldn’t grasp that a baby could leave its mother without being birthed, could wind up so far away and be discovered by me. As though plucked out of the air. It made more sense to them that I’d killed the Sharpe baby and given her parents a changeling – a strange little creature like myself, who would someday do my bidding.

For years, I wondered if it was my dream of a cradle that called her to me. This was better than thinking that Sister Eel Lake was simply where too-soon babies go.

Always when we met he’d have some quick greeting ready. The third time we saw one another, the day after we put Miss Lennox to ground, he said –You get on better with the heat.

It was the first time I’d gotten into the front of the truck. The edges of the passenger seat were stained a deep brown. He had Cure music playing and it seemed to gather speed as he turned corners and cast backward glances at the road by way of the little mirror between us. The bottom of the window had the usual hillside pattern of dust thrown up by wheels and missed by wipers.

We came to Sister Eel Lake and he looked at me.

–Keep driving.

I was surprised he’d been willing to stop there. Almost everyone was cautious of the lake and believed the story of the cannibal serpents. Those giant, gorging eels grown during the war to kill enemy soldiers who stopped to bathe and swim. It was well known how they’d gone hungry some weeks into peace-time, and so began to swallow one another whole.

When only Sister and Brother Eel remained they watched one another until the brother fell asleep, and it was his fear that shook me, his fear upon waking. Thrashing in the tight dark that was his sister, engulfed even as he stirred from sleep.

It was Sister Eel who had years ago eaten most of Christopher Plume, a slim and freckled child, when he was nine. Father worked on him a great deal, out of courtesy to the family.

–Are you afraid of your father seeing us?

Driving under a willow tree whose branches snagged around the windows.

–Father doesn’t really leave the house.

This was part of a lie we kept afloat. Cures would scare easy at Father’s animal tendencies, blame him for livestock gone missing, though he never hunted anything that wasn’t wild.

We kept going and came to wider, more unkempt corners.

–I heard that. I didn’t think it was true.

–He doesn’t feel the need.

We came through a brief density of trees and the road straightened.

–But you do.

–I like the change in air.

His thighs clenched inside of his trousers. I looked out the window, said

–There’s always a lot of smells in our house.

He was swallowing from thirst. I stopped talking. We came to the river.

–How about here?

He left the truck parked by a high bush grown up straight and thick like a wall. We’d arrived by the main road, not the back paths I usually walked down. The trees on the river’s far side were maybe fifty feet tall and the branches reached out to criss and cross with their neighbours to make a cool, echo-filled chamber high up in the air. I got out of the truck and shook out my dress, walked toward the reeds. I heard him following me, making the long grass crackle. I said –I like the river.

–I’ve never seen you here.

–Father doesn’t like me to be seen outside the house.

–Why’s that?

–I suppose it’s not so important now. It was more for when I was a child and Cures weren’t sure what to make of me.

–Cures? he laughed. That’s what you call us?

He was walking alongside me now and I watched his vest catch at the top of his trousers, twisting and releasing with his long high strides. We reached the shade and it felt like stepping through a wall of water. I felt him looking at me. My smock, hanging free of one shoulder, was clinging to my stomach and the short prickling hair on my groin.

–Were you really so strange?

–There were certain things about me.

By which I meant my girlhood, constant and unceasing.

A Cure could live their whole lifespan and never notice a change in me, and so, to them, I seemed a girl of sorts forever.

Later we rested beside one another in the grass. I kept looking up at the knotted branches and the thin slivers of blue where they let through the sky. I touched his head, his too-soft curls. He was tired, half-dreaming.

–I was a long time in the desert.

And then he laughed at himself. But I knew what he meant.

It was late at night two days later when we went out to fetch Miss Lennox. When the air hit her she turned hummingbird: finger-tap, tremble-knee. Father carried her into the kitchen and we laid her out again. It took time enough to open her, with her being stilled so long in The Ground. The skin was all stiff and cold.

–She’ll scar, I said, and Father nodded.

I went to fetch the lungs. They rocked and swished slowly inside of the bowl, their mucus sticking to my fingers and wrists. It sometimes happened that the halted stillness worked into a Cure and their parts coloured the air around them. It generally went unnoticed by Cures themselves, but it was possible to see on occasion a slight slowing of time – a wound appearing in some soft flesh but not colouring with blood. This was why the skein off Miss Lennox’s lungs took its time in rising and its time in falling. Where it touched me it left behind a cringing, grizzly sensation.