text: "Stop crying already," Aunty May said. "Sometimes it just happens." "I hate it when you say that!" She ran out the door. "Bree! Come back this instant!" “You’re not my real mom!” she yelled. Before Aunty May could come up with a stick, Bree was already down the path, and into the dark forest. It wasn’t till a while later that she began to slow down. She stopped at an old oak tree and sat under it. She ran her hands over the soil, and came across an acorn, which she picked up and rubbed between her fingers, soothed by its glossy smooth coat. She sat there for a while, and found herself nodding off. Nadezhda was alive, and floated down onto Bree’s lap, and she could feel the kitten’s fur under her fingers. But when she awoke, her fingers were empty. She grabbed a fistful of dirt and flung it at a squirrel above her, missing by far, and the dirt fell back down into her eyes and her hair. She blinked and rubbed her eyes hastily, spitting out specks of dirt. She looked up again. The squirrel stared at her. “What are you looking at,” she said. “Go home to your family. I know you’ve got one.” Aunty May and Uncle Son and the kids treated her well enough, but she still felt like an outsider, and not just because of her wavy copper hair, which she kept as short as a boy’s. Nadezhda had been hers. Truly hers. She’d fed and watered and bathed the flea-ridden thing until its fur was clean and white again, and it had been fine till yesterday. Despite her best efforts to nurse it back to health it had died. Aunty and Uncle would shrug their shoulders, not getting why she was crying over an animal, and the kids, content and dull, would ignore her and fight each other. Bree could remember very little of her father and mother. A moonlit flash. Blue eyes as clear as the sky. A taller, rugged form with autumn-colored hair. She had a feeling that was why autumn was her favorite season. The rusty reds and deep oranges calmed her, and she could feel the warmth of the sun in the brilliance of the falling leaves. But it was a gentle warmth, not the aggressively hot and bright kind of the summer. This warmth reminded her of her parents. Aunty said they had died of some illness way back. She wouldn’t say anything more, and when pestered said that she hadn’t known them that well, and that Bree better go on and live a good life and make them proud, and start by washing the basin of the dirty dishes, or there’d be a good whooping for her waiting in the present life. Bree turned for home, but went a roundabout route, till she reached the old bridge by the abandoned mill. They said that no one lived there, but she saw now an old woman, round-faced with skin that was tinged green, and barely taller than her, toddling past her to the frayed wooden bridge that still arched from forest to mill and who-knew-where-else. “Hey there girlie? Would you come and help me cross the bridge?” she said, turning and smiling at Bree, with a toothy grin. She walked over and took the woman's hand. It was clammy and slimy, and smelled of fish and seaweed. Bree made a face, but stood firmly for support as the woman slowly toddled with her across the bridge. The old woman’s walk made her think of Baby Shrimp, just beginning to hoist himself up using the low stools so he could be on all two's. It made her smile a little. The older children treated her friendly but they knew what she was. Baby Shrimp didn’t know. To him, her touch was just as much warmth and comfort as the breast of Aunty May. "Thank you," the woman said. Bree blinked and looked around. They were across the bridge. "You're welcome," she said, as the woman let go of her arm. The woman looked around, feeling in the pockets of her mossy brown coat. "Well, there's nothing I can give you." “Oh, there's no need," the girl said, turning to leave. “Wait!” The old woman stopped digging in her pockets. "I have just the thing," she said, and fished out a piece of what looked like a black gooey lump. The girl stared at the strange black lump. It drew her in, and made her want to hold it. It was pulsing, like the veins on her wrist, but how could that be? She stared at the black void that sucked all color around it into itself. “Just black licorice,” the old woman winked and took a bite. "See? Not poisonous." “Go on," she said. "Take it." Normally Bree would have been more cautious, but her grief and resulting absentmindedness let her reach forward and stuff the licorice into her mouth. She chewed it. It was sweet with herbal notes. As she chewed it she felt a void ballooning up inside her, a void where once had been a friend in her arms. She felt like throwing up. She was going to throw up. Her eyes watered and poured. She wanted to stop but she couldn't. It was like a waterfall was pouring from her very soul. Was it raining? Was that rain on her skin and her forehead? The water rushed around her, soaked through her dress and hair and pushed her down. The woman’s clammy, slimy hand tightened around her arm, leading her down into the torrent of rain. She felt far from her body. A rainbow flashed across her eyes, and the rain cleared. She was underwater. When she swam in the lake with her uncle and dived for shells and edible clams, she could see very little. The lake was then opaque and particle-filled as sand roiled around her moving body. But now, she saw the underwater world as clear as if the water were air. The water stretched around her vast, and the whole world glowed, the sun above, a molten egg sending its rays down into the core of the earth, illuminating the seaweed columns that towered above her like mighty giants, and the sandy bed way down below. Every boulder and stone was sharp and in focus. Tendrils of algae coiled around little clams and sea snails clustered on the tops of the boulders. Hadn't it been late evening when she reached the bridge? Yet it seemed now as bright as the middle of a summer day. The giant strands of seaweed, stretching from the waterbed to the very top of the water hundreds of feet above her, swayed around her like graceful dancers, and in front of her, holding her by the wrist, was a woman, mostly. Bree could see long dark hair like strands of seaweed floating from the woman’s head, but whoever was holding her now was propelling them downward by means of a tail slightly longer than an adult human’s legs, glittering with scales, and ending in a long blue fish’s fan that was as thin and delicate as gauzy silk ribbons. The glittering tail undulated up and down as it drew them down toward the mouth of an underwater cave. Bree felt her lungs felt lacking, and the awareness was terrible and startled her to action. She pulled at the hand, trying to loosen its grip. But the woman was strong, and pulled her down, until Bree’s vision darkened, and her thoughts became murky, then gray. The next thing she knew she found herself bursting out of a small pool. She gasped for air, grateful for the air that rushed into her lungs. As she crawled forward further onto the dark, water-stained rocks, she could see beautiful stained glass lamps, lighting the walls of the cave with brilliant flashes of red, blue, purple and green. The cave itself was as large and vast as a cathedral, the ceiling submerged in complete darkness. On the bottom of the cave stood a stone table on one side, and various other instruments and shelves of things. She lifted her head to look at the woman, who was clearing some space on the stone table. "Who are you?" Bree sputtered. "Where's the old woman?" "Not here," the woman said in a voice musical and bubbling, and stroked her long shiny green hair satisfyingly. Her skin was tinged green, and she had very round cheeks. A faint smell of fish and seaweed lingered in the air. It was the old woman. But leaner and taller. And beautiful, in an unearthly way. Her tail was now a pair of long, slender human legs, ending with two thin, flat feet. A translucent webbing stretched between her elongated toes. “What’s your name?” the woman asked her. “B-Bree,” the girl sputtered. "I’m Mrs. Vodyanova,” the woman said, taking some seaweed and chopping it with a big butcher’s knife. “But you can call me Vodya.” "Are you a mermaid?” Mrs. Vodyanova turned and scowled, her face puffing up like a puffer fish, her odd, eerie beauty suddenly transforming into a flash of anger. "Don't call me that! It's not our fault the mermaids flaunt themselves at every sailor that passes, the saucy...never mind. No, I'm an amphibian." "What's a plebeian?" Bree asked. "An *amphibian* is someone who can live both on land and in water," Mrs. Vodyanova said, deflating, her face returning to normal. "Like a frog...you know a frog?” Bree said, "I know what a frog is." “Well, I’m not exactly a frog. I’m a special type of amphibian, a vodyanitsa.” Bree stared at her. “I bridge two worlds,” the woman said. “On one side land, the other, water.” "So...why did you take me here?" Bree asked. Now that the initial rush was over, and she sat here breathing properly and talking to this vodya-whatever, she felt tired again. This was a weird dream indeed, but she just wanted to go to sleep. She wanted to roll over in bed, pull the covers over her head and never come out. "You cried your heart out," Mrs. Vodyanova said. She took from the inside of her black vest a small red gem, glowing with a feeble fire. "What?" Bree said, and her hand jumped to her chest, "My heart?" "It was a little dirty," said Mrs. Vodyanova, "so the licorice helped you cry it out. Now that I’ve got your heart here, I can clean it. " Upon hearing that, Bree’s heart would have fallen out of her chest, if she still had one. Mrs. Vodyanitsa put the gem on the table and rummaged through some shelves on the side of the cave. She grabbed some glass vials of strange things unknown to Bree's eyes and started throwing them in a cauldron. “Well, make the fire, girl,” she said. Bree complied, starting to take some logs from the ground and stuffing them into the fire pit under the cauldron. “Then can I have my heart back?” she asked, afraid of the answer. “Just a second,” the woman said, throwing a snail's shell and a small human toe into the cauldron. She stirred it. She took the ruby and waved it in the smoke drifting up from the cauldron, and then dropped it into a small glass cup. Slowly, the ruby dissolved into a glowing red liquid. "Drink it," she said. "I flavored it with cherries and a spider’s eye." Bree tilted her head back and gulped the drink entirely till it was gone. She looked at the woman. "What now?" She said, "I don't feel anything." Mrs. Vodyanova took her face, and looked into Bree’s blue eyes with her own yellow eyes, the pupils vertical and alien. “You were born of fire and water. You were born to bridge worlds. Come to me, when it begins.” “What?” Bree said. “What begins?” “Don’t worry,” Mrs. Vodyanova said, waving. “All will become clear in time. In the meantime, be a good girl! Be kind and follow your heart!” Water rushed up from the pool into the cave, and Bree was swept up into the current. "See you soon, darling!" Mrs. Vodyanova’s voice echoed and became faint. Bree slipped out of consciousness for the second time that day. She woke up next to the bridge, the setting sun painting brazen orange and red strokes above the water. Near her feet a brownish-green frog about the size of her big toe hopped into the water. **The Nightmare** Over the next few weeks she had a lot to do. It was harvesting season so she and her cousins were hard at work in the fields with Uncle Son, reaping and collecting the wheat before the winter chill could overtake them. She almost forgot about Nadezhda sometimes. Or rather, Nadezhda became a murky dream, rather than a living pain in her consciousness. There was once when she saw a stray calico in the chicken coop and fell into a trance as her other cousins shooed it away, but for the most part she felt an odd thing happening, called a smile. She had always been a serious child, and once Aunty May had called her cold. Now she smiled, just a little, when she played with Baby Shrimp, now progressing from toddling to running little steps and tripping over himself. She smiled when the dogs came to slobber their affection all over her. And she smiled, ever so slightly, when she was sleeping, and had a dream about her parents. Aunt May saw the change and rewarded her in the middle of August with a slab of apple cake and ushered her to go into the forest and play. “I worry about her sometimes,” she said quietly to her husband, as they watched the child sitting on the porch, eating the apple cake, lost in thought. “She’s not of our stock. And both of them being who they were! What if she ends up-” “It’s too late for her, we would have known by now,” Uncle Son said, looking around furtively. “Hush woman, we mustn’t grow careless. The woods were watching then, they could be watching now.” May bit her lip and said nothing. “With time she’ll be like anyone else here,” Son consoled her. “I hope so,” May said. “For her sake.” "This year looks to be good," Son said, changing the subject. It was a peaceful October day, when the winds were asleep and the sun was just right, and the brown droopy-lipped dogs with equally droopy brows basked in their spot on the front of the porch. May smiled and pressed his hand that was on her shoulder, and they watched their children grow. So the weeks, then months, then years passed, and by the time Bree was tall and grown, entering the first blooms of womanhood, she had forgotten about the vodyanitsa in the lake under the old bridge. Or so it seemed. Something happened that made her remember again. It was on Hallows’ Eve, sometime after her sixteenth birthday. She was lying on the hammock under the apple trees, now stripped of their last apples and with their last leaves falling, and reading a book. It was the only book on the residence of the Nguyen family, and she was the only one who could read it. She’d been taught by a grateful circus family a year back. They’d been passing through, and Uncle Son had let them stay in the barn for one dreadfully stormy night. They’d ended up staying for another week, and then a month, and had proved to be welcome help on the fields during the day and amazing entertainment during the night. The father, broad-chested and brown in skin and hair, had been an expert juggler of knives, and a firebreather. Meanwhile the two girls played music on tambourines and fiddles, and then later the father took over the music, and the girls took a rope in each hand, a rope that ended in a metallic ball of some kind, and lit the ball on fire. They started dancing, and everyone became quiet, for the rhythmic way they looped the fire across the sky and around their bodies was nothing short of entrancing. For days afterwards all the children had found themselves preoccupied with learning how to swing the balls of fire, including Bree, who mastered a few basic turns with the practice balls, made of a softer woody material, by the time the circus family had left. But that was not all they taught her. Bree was quite taken with the man of the circus, and it was for something else than fire-dancing. He also proved to be a great reader, with a deep and sonorous voice, filling both the heroes’ and villains’ voices with just the correct note, and he read every night to the children from a dusty tome that was gorgeously decorated with illustrations of the tales he told. Afterwards Bree had taken to following him covertly around the place, until he’d turned and asked what she wanted, and she’d shyly asked him to teach her how to read the stories. And so he had, in between work times. Beyond that, he taught her about the stars, and how to find heroes in the sky, and lions, and he told her many things from his life that had passed, with his daughters on his shoulders excitedly interjecting about pirates they’d once bribed and taken passage with, and other things she could barely imagine. She liked the daughters too. They were bright and sprightly, slightly younger than her, and taught her a multitude of card games that challenged her and left her hungry for more. They were also brilliant practitioners of fire-dancing, which indeed helped fuel Bree’s admiration. When they all were about to leave, father and daughters alike, Bree found herself immensely sad. The father, by now familiarly called upon by everyone as Ali, called her to him and said, “I want you to have this.” It was the storybook. She stared at it. “Really?” “Yes,” he said. “We have read this book through and through. Now it is for you to enjoy. And someday maybe you can give it to someone else to enjoy.” “Thank you,” she stammered. He smiled. “You’re welcome, Curious One.” Curious One. He’d said it like that, like it was a name. Whenever she opened the book and read, she’d think of him and his daughters and hope she’d have adventures like them too. She’d live a life worth writing about. A year had passed between then and now. She read much faster now, and the words flowed more easily like they hadn’t when she was just beginning to learn. Right now she was reading about a boy trapped in a cave of wonders while looking for an ancient lamp for the evil wizard. The autumn sky was ripening to a warm pumpkin orange with a touch of gray at its periphery, and the evening was cool and gentle with its soft whispering wind in her ear, and the book slowly slipped from her hand and fell quietly onto the ground below. “Mara,” she heard. “Mara.” “Go away...I’m sleeping,” she said, batting at the annoying voice, and letting her hand rest over her eyes. “Mara.” The voice was right above her, loud and resonant, and she opened her eyes. She saw a sky of stars deep and dark, and the moon hanging above her, impossibly bright and white. The moon uncoiled into the silver shape of a dragon, which flew down and came towards Bree. The dragon’s mane was ink-black and glossy as it leaned over Bree, its eyes blue as a stream, looking lovingly down at Bree. The dragon kissed her on the forehead, and behind it was the sun now in the shape of another dragon, as fiery red as autumn copper leaves. The two dragons encircled Bree and lifted her higher into the sky. She felt inexplicably loved and safe as she lay cradled between these celestial giants. Then something else happened. Men crumbled up from the ground. Faceless men stretched out their bony fingers, and Bree felt herself being pulled away and down by human fingers, rough fingers that grasped around her throat and- She woke up choking and gasping, her heart thudding in her chest.