The Waters & the Wild Read Online Free PDF Page B

She just wanted to be near him, listening to him recite poetry, maybe holding his hand, his eyes transforming her into something magical. It wasn’t much different from what she wanted with Sarah.
    But her friends wore halos. She had, if onlybriefly, belonged. The world she had never loved before had turned to gold.
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    Under the ground seep the toxins of the population that lives above. If you have to, you will eat roots and earthworms. It is always night. Candles burn in lanterns made from tin cans. When it is nighttime up above, you can crawl out, but only for a little while. You feel ashamed of your matted hair, your torn clothes, the dirt on your face. Who would want to speak to you? They are all shiny and pretty. They have parents and houses with gardens. What do you have? The earth. Whole handfuls of it. The lizard people with their slit eyes and scaly skin. Your loneliness. Your longing.
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    The girl missed her mother in a monstrous way. She missed her with a fanged longing, azombie ache. Not having her mother was like not having a soul. She was sure that she had a soul somewhere, but it did not feel that way. Maybe she did not have a soul at all. Maybe it had been taken along with her mother, along with her entire life.
    The girl watched her mother as she slept. Her mother’s mouth was a rosy bow, like the ones on top of the changeling imposter’s birthday gifts.
    The man lying next to the girl’s mother had gray hair and needed a wheelchair to get around. He sat with the imposter in the garden and spoke gently to her. He valued what she had to say. Smiled proudly at her. Even though she was not related to him by blood, she was his.
    The girl was nobody’s. Except her mother’s and her mother did not know it yet.
    Now there were two other people that the girl needed to watch. One was a badly dressed overweight girl with dark skin and a musical voice. The other was a skinny boy with a stammer and broken glasses. The girl doubted she would have befriended these two outcasts. She imagined herself as one of the popular girls.
    She turned and watched her mother sleep. She had an impulse to touch her olive-toned, lightly freckled skin, to smell her dark hair. She knew it would smell even more of lavender oil if she just leaned closer….
    But in the other room the imposter moaned in her sleep. And the girl slid out the open window, back into the wilder night, where she had never belonged.

test for a changeling
    cook my dinner in an eggshell
    see if i say a word
    bathe me in foxglove poison
    repeat the lord’s prayer
    place steel on my bedsheets
    whip me drown me shove me in the oven
    then you will see that i am not a piece of glamorized wood
    not a sullen hairy beast with a venomous bite boils on my skin
    blood between my legs
    only a girl trying desperately to grow
    into a woman

11
Test
    I n her dream, Bee was walking along a road that wound through a canyon. The eucalyptus leaves leaned down, silvery green and medicinal-smelling, trying to shelter her, kiss her or clutch her, she wasn’t sure. Every once in a while a car sped by, dangerously close, blinding her in its headlights, and she pressedherself up against the dirt where wild evening primrose bloomed pinkish lavender by day, but now it was night and they slept gray in shadow. The ruins of an old castle crowned one ridge. The crumbling stone balustrades, balconies and cupolas, the foundation overgrown with weeds. She wandered up there, knowing this was the place, though not sure how she knew, or what place it was.
    Among the castle ruins was a low stone bench covered with vines. These she knew to part like hair. She peeked through into an opening, a small tunnel just big enough for her to enter on her belly.
    The earth smelled dank, and she heard the murmur of distant water. She slithered through the opening, down, down into the darkness.
    â€œThere you are!”
    Bee turned her head so fast that her hair whipped her