But the next morning all the fish were floating at the top of the bucket. Amy was really upset. She started slapping herself. I told her to stop.
“They’re just fish, Amy,” I said. “We can fetch more.”
“But I killed them,” she cried. “I didn’t mean to.”
Later that day, she asked me to go to the woods with her. I watched as she hefted the bucket full of dead fish all the way into the forest, then lit a small fire in a clearing. She was agitated, her face still red and puffy from crying. She reached into a pocket and pulled out a large white stone with a red symbol on it. A rune.
“This one is rebirth,” she said, and I looked over the series of crosses and arrows grooved in the stone. The stone was quartz, she said, and was as old as the earth.
“What’s the red from?” I asked, pointing at the stave carved deep into the stone.
“Birth blood,” she said, sniffing. “For hundreds of years, each woman in my family has given of her blood each time she’s birthed a child.”
I wiped my hands on my shirt.
Then she set the stone in the middle of the flames.
She made me hold hands with her over the fire, and we had to sit awkwardly so we wouldn’t get burned. She closed her eyes and said some words in a language I didn’t recognize. I remember the wind picked up and I felt dizzy, but nothing happened. Except, of course, all the fish came alive.
“Look! Look!” Amy shrieked, bouncing up and down and pointing at the bucket. “It worked!”
I tell no lie—those fish had been floating before and now they were all swimming around. I made her pour one out into her palm to show me, and it flopped around, its tiny mouth gasping until she plopped it back in.
I was stunned, but above all, I was happy for her.
I wasn’t yet wise enough to be terrified.
LUNA, 2021
I
Luna swims to the surface of sleep and lurches upright with a gasp.
She had the dream again. The one about her mother killing her.
This time her mother made her sit in the lantern room of the Longing, the sky outside dark and sequined with stars. On the ground, a silky plum-dark liquid swirled around her feet.
“Hold still,” her mother said, and she squeezed her knees together as she had a hundred times before, when her mother braided her hair and ordered her to sit still. Only this time, her mother wasn’t braiding her hair. She was smashing Luna’s head with a hammer. The liquid on the ground was her blood.
The tapping sound of the hammer continues, seeping into her conscious thoughts. She realizes she didn’t dream that part at all—it’s coming from the front door.
She gets up awkwardly, cradling her stomach with a hand as she moves one leg at a time over the side of the bed, the roundness of it fitting neatly into her palm. Up until twenty weeks she’d had no bump at all, no proof of her cargo. She fretted about it, mostly because her pregnancy app depicted a cartoon of a woman with a neat round melon and all she’d developed was a kind of spare tire around her waistline that sagged over her jeans. Somewhere around week twenty-four her belly had seemed to erupt. Now she can’t go an hour without peeing and could eat beefsteak tomatoes until the cows come home. She eats them like apples, letting the sweet red juice run down the sides of her mouth, seeds corralling in her cleavage.
The knocking continues. She pulls the door open to find Margaret standing there, their neighbor from the flat upstairs. Margaret’s in her seventies and generally aggrieved about something or other. Today is no exception.
“I really do think I’m a very patient neighbor, but this really takes both the cake and the biscuit!”
“I’m sorry, what?” Luna’s eyes fall on the object that Margaret is holding in front of her like evidence of some sort. It’s a limpet shell.