Running my hand up the back of my neck, sliding it into my hair. Then, remembering myself,

–Have you?

–No.

Adjusting himself in the seat, trying to lessen contact with the sweating leather,

–But Olivia and I, we used to play a game, if we were ever near the lake.

Which was when their parents were in the fields, before their parents died. Before they went to live with their aunt and slept together in the small creaking bed.

We’d come to the river. Samson turned the keys to make the engine hush and then hunched toward the steering wheel. His vest had left a glistening copy of itself behind so that his skin was shining where the droplets sat on his body, thick as tears.

–We’d pretend that we were Brother and Sister Eel and Olivia would chase me, trying to eat me.

His eyes closed. I looked at the cloth of my dress, sticking to me. I lifted it and watched it fall, landing again with a twirl.

–One day we ended up on opposite sides of the lake. Olivia was jumping up and down and saying I’m gonna catch you and I’m gonna eat you!

He swallowed and it made a loud, clicking sound. He closed his eyes tighter and the skin of his brow bunched toward his eyes.

–I was ducked down in the rushes, and I heard a splash and thought Olivia had fallen in. I saw the spray of water from the ground.

He laughed to himself, said

–Some of it landed in my mouth. I thought I’d die.

Opening his eyes, moving again in his seat.

–So you went looking for Olivia?

–Yes.

He was tense now, like he was bracing against a chill.

–I found her, and she was standing with her hands in her pockets, rubbing her feet in the dirt. Said she’d seen one of the humps, breaking up the water, and then the tail. The tail looked mad, she said. It was the tail that had made the splash.

His eyes were on my knees. Already I felt the scratch of the gorse and grass we’d walk through.

–And Olivia wasn’t afraid?

He laughed, moving quickly now, opening the door and swinging his legs outside.

–Olivia doesn’t get afraid.

–Not even as a child? Not even of Sister Eel?

–Olivia was never really a child.

Turning back to wink at me.

–Kind of the opposite to you.

And then we were wading in the waist-high grass.

Tabatha Sharpe

Only time I met her was when I was born.

Nothing wrong with me my whole life, ’less you count my red-dust-haze. I see red when it rains. When I look at any kind of water – a river or a lake or a stream: Red

Red

Red

And when people go swimming or stand out in the rain, afterward they’re all dripping red.

I didn’t realise water wasn’t red for everyone else ’til I was ten and Mother was reading to me from a picture book. I asked her why the rain in the book wasn’t red and she was frightened but she kept her fear on the inside like Father can never do.

Just asked me what else was red, and I pointed at her red mouth and her red shoes, and that seemed to calm her.

We never go swimming in the summer, though. And I’m only allowed quick showers, never a bath, and Mother pulls the curtains every time it rains.

Like I said, I was young when Father started feeding me stories and warnings about The Ground.

–The Ground is cruel, but with tilling and culling we can make it useful.

Sitting at the kitchen table, flicking my tongue against the back of my teeth.

–Why only such a small part for burial?

–My father and I worked a long time on taming it just so, so that the ground would cushion a body and yield it again. Only a small patch can be handled at a time. It takes huge strength. When you are older, we will try rein in some more. And then, when you have a child, you’ll try for more again.

–We don’t live here to fix Martha Jacobs?

Miss Jacobs was the pale wisp of a Cure he had seen to that day.

–No, Ada. Had Miss Jacobs lived in a different town, she would have gone unfixed.

–It’s about to rain.

A high wind came through the trees. A half mile away I could see the dust on the road shooting up a foot high. Samson said

–We’re due a storm.

I was sitting against a tree and he was lying on his shirt.

–Olivia can always tell when rain was coming.

–That right.

Cures often believed themselves a little bit magic. It got tiresome.

–From the smell in the air. Sometimes as far as two days away.

–I see.

–She used to love playing in the rain when we were little. When all the other kids would run inside.

I looked at my feet. Looked at Samson’s calves, the left one marked by one long, thin scratch that was filled with wet-dry red. It moved through his fine blonde hair with a serpentine twist.

–Anyway. She can tell you about that herself.

I stretched out my own legs. Started thinking about my walk home.

–When would I meet her?

–She’s having a baby. Didn’t I tell you?

I looked at his face, the side of it not hidden by his arm.

–No. Your sister is pregnant?

–She’ll be giving birth soon.

He sat up then, quickly, almost knocking me aside. I pulled my dress toward me while he squatted in the shade, his buttocks made pink and crimson by the brittle twig shards on the ground.