(Excerpt from The Watery Girl)

PROLOGUE

Something awful filled the world. It flapped, a wet fluttering, floated and bound to everything dark and terrible, cleaved to the fear that created fear, burbled and warbled and laughed across dead pools of nothing; flashes of color mixed with the fear, blurring its edges, and the air colored brown-red, then deep red, but soon faded to rose, then lighter, lavender, then twilight blue, a glowing beautiful blue, and it stayed like that, the color of the sky before dark, the day’s last color.

Misting around me, a profound stillness: all life, all breath, all potential had fled, and on the bed--the body, draped in a lady’s silvery dress, vastly too big. The scrawny chest, no longer lifted by the in and out of life, collapsed, as if unsure what would come next. The uninhabited body had forgotten everything. On the dress, a silver fabric flower bloomed low in front, decorating the child’s torso. Another flower, a rose of blood, plumed from the drape of the skirt, spreading down its silvery surface. Swells of bruise remade the strange terrain of the skull. Skin shimmered with pearly death surfacing. Bruises hollowed the cheeks, so soon sunken, eyelids blanketed in the powder that the skelly man had pressed on them, the color of cornflowers. Underneath that hue was a blue less fancy, a mean, dead blue-black, the absence of vision, a putrid color brought on by looking out, or looking in, at nothing.

Then I heard the skelly man, stomping up the stairs.

The closet, like a cave, beckoned. Deep and inviting, it would shelter. The door was bowed and drifted open so I pressed against the wall to hide. It was dark inside the closet cave, but the wall inexplicably burned with light, and colors, like sunlit glass. Fluttering panic spread in my chest, he would see, he would see...

The skelly man came in to the bedroom, dirt-covered hands, arms, and shirtsleeves, his good shirt darkened with perspiration, and an unabashedly foul odor snaked off him, emanating from his being. He stopped on the other side of the bed, facing the bed, facing the closet. How could he not see me?

He looked at the body on the bed, and made a peculiar sound, like barking, and scratched himself. His breath slid from the pit of him, snaked over the bedclothes, whispered across the cold silver dress, threaded through the room, even the cracks where the wind had stopped sneaking between the walls and windows, for the wind itself was scared of his low, serpentine breath, a breath flicking at fear, no sound, licking the silence, then, the world stilled to listen to the skelly man’s song, which curled from his lips and took the shape of a peculiar dog, sad, fearsome, cruel, wounded...

Dreamed I saw a velvet chile,
All full of green, and wild.
Her breast begat a deathly love,
All chill and empty balm.

No longer ripe, cold turned to stone.
Tore open the earth, and dug it deep,
So she’ll be near her final sleep
Alone and not alone.

The words circled, echoing the path of the snaky breath that had sullied every surface of the bedroom, filling the space with lurching emptiness.

He moved to the bed, slung the body, so small, over his shoulder, and carried it from the room and down the stairs. I crept across the landing to Nana’s bedroom window and looked out at the back yard. The skelly man carried the silver-draped body toward the apple tree, toward the place where he’d buried Nana just yesterday. Next to her grave, there was a new hole. He slid the silvery body into the second hole and tossed in a handful of dirt, then a shovelful, and another, and onward until the hole became a low mound. A dark, fresh bruise on the earth.