TALL GRASS, SHALLOW WATER

Mothers say “Stay clear of the water.” At least the good ones do. The kids say “Dip a toe in and Genny will grab you.”

Maybe some Gennies grab. Maybe some Gennies have to. But my Genny never did. All her daughters were gifts. All her girls were given.

The other mothers say nothing; they put their daughters in the water.

Mother wrapped me in a long piece of linen and laid me in water not deep enough to be dark, but deep enough. The sky was low and worried, and the tall grasses wove their shadows over me like a blanket. It was Genny that found me and took me for her own—raised me up in a world of weeds and wet and swamp rot.

When I was old enough to follow directions, but still young enough to follow directions, she named me Laura Leigh and sent me back to Mother.

“Bring me meat,” she said, and tied a tangled fish line around my ankle. “Girls have to eat, and mothers should feed their daughters. It’s the way of things. Bring her to me, and she shall feed you, as she always should have done. Bring Mother to the water and you shall have meat.”

But the memory of Mother’s face was rippled with green water.

“Any weeping mother will do, if the tears are ripe,” Genny said.

When Genny laughed, her teeth rattled like bone dice in a horn cup. She softens the sound with slick packs of algae pressed into the dark spaces of her mouth. It roots there, multiplies like weeds in a garden.

“Hurry, girl. Bring me gristle to clean my mouth.”

She said it shouldn’t take long. “All mothers weep,” she said. “That’s their secret. Find one whose secret is dark like the center of the water. Find one with eyes like a river. Dark meat—stringy meat—that will clean my teeth.”

The line around my ankle is tight enough to squeeze, but not to cut. It whispers through the tall grass behind me.

The kids hear it drag across the ground, but the mothers don’t. The kids call me Laura Leigh Hiss on account of it. None of their mothers weep. Their meat is too soft for Genny’s teeth.

Every day I spend away from the water, the line on my ankle pulls a little deeper.

***

“We don’t see you in school, Hiss,” the boy called Andrew says. His voice is not unkind.

“I don’t go to school,” I say.

“You have to go to school—it’s the law. Or your parents get in trouble.” He kicks a trench in the sand under the swing. The deep sand is wet, the way anything deep is always wet.

“I don’t have parents,” I tell him, and he stops his swing mid-kick.

“Oh,” he says. He digs deeper, to even wetter sand. “Do you want to see how high I can go?”

I say yes and he soars over his damp sand pit, hair straight back and bare knees kissing the sky.

Andrew’s mother hardly ever weeps. Her meat is soft as snails.

***

Three days in, and my foot below the fish line has turned the color of deep water. I lie in a trench of cool sand under the swings, wiggling my fingers into the earth, seeking moisture, seeking home.

Andrew comes over, kicking sand up behind his heels. His cheeks are pink from the sun. He slips his legs over the swing and kicks away from the ground.

His dry-eyed mother stands in the shade of a tree, tapping at a phone.

“Do you really not have parents, Hiss?” Andrew’s voice whips across me as he swings past.

“Well, I did once, I guess. Not now, though. I’m looking for a mom. But she has to be a sad one.”

“Why sad?”

“Genny says they’re stronger.”

“Who’s Genny?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“You sound like my mom.” He leaps from the swing as it arcs forward and lands in a splash of sand. I squeeze my eyes shut as the grains rain down on me.

He looks to his mother, grinning, but she’s still staring at the phone, the glowing screen broadcasted in the reflection on her glasses. Some brightly colored game.

“Do you live here at the park?” He bends to re-tie his shoe.

“No. Maybe, for now.”

“Is it cold?”

“Not as cold as the water.” I pull the long linen strip around my neck closer, tuck it into my collar.

“Ya know, Kyle’s mother is sad.”

I lift my chin from the stained linen wrap and pull my fingers from the sand. “You know a sad mom?”

“I guess she’s not a mom anymore.”

“You can’t ever be not a mom anymore. No matter how hard you try. That’s what Genny says.”

“Well, she cries a lot.”

I rise from the sand and walk to Andrew. The line at my ankle tugs. Andrew backs up a step. Leaves his shoe undone.

“Where is she?”

“The red house. On 5th. The one with the new tire swing out front.”

“Which way is that?”

Andrew points past his mother, out across an overgrown soccer field.

“Tire’s still got all the white paint on it. Never been used. Mom won’t let me on it.”

“You should ride it anyway,” I say.

Andrew’s mother looks up at me as I pass her. Could be she hears the hiss of Genny’s line. Maybe she smells the fen. But her phone beeps and she turns back to it. Lights are seductive, in the bog and in the hand.

***

Kyle’s mother’s house is only mostly red, and partly the grey of old wood where red used to be. The swing hangs from the tree, limp as Spanish moss. Wasps hover around it, darting in and out of the dark hollow of the tube.

The door knocker hangs from one hinge, the other fallen loose as if someone had knocked too hard—and then no one had. I pinch the narrow bar and tap it against the metal plate, and wait.

The whole house seems to creak as movement comes alive inside. Filaments of spiders’ webs fall away as Kyle’s mom opens the door.

Her eyes are wide and brown, with golden sclera and heavy red lids. Her dark hair wraps her ears in wild wisps. She drops her gaze to mine and thin lips pinch shut over yellow teeth. She pulls a heavy sweater close against the late August heat.

“Yes?” Her eyes rise over my head and scan the street.

“Are you Kyle’s mom?”

Her eyes shoot back to me. The bottom lids tremble and fill.

“Yeah,” she says, “I’m Shannon. Were you a friend of Kyle’s?” Her eyes spill over and her voice hitches. “I don’t remember you. I’m sorry. Kyle’s gone.” Her hands rise to cover the collapse of her face.

My ankle throbs. I step up to the weeping woman and raise my arms to her. She pulls her wet hands from her face and wraps her arms around my shoulders.

And Genny pulls.

Kyle’s mother screams.

And Genny reels us in.

***

I smell the rot of tall grass in shallow water. The water parts against my back and washes the sting of daylight from my skin. The squint of my eyes relaxes as the sun disappears behind the wall of deepening green.

Kyle’s mother’s scream turns to foam against my neck.

We settle in a cloud of silt at the bottom of Genny’s bog. Genny anchors us with long reeds as soft as leather.

“Welcome home, Laura Leigh. And what meat have you brought for me and your sisters?” Feathers of algae wave in the current of her words.

I look to Kyle’s mother. The tangle of her hair rivals Genny’s, and through the blue of the water her teeth look almost green. Her eyes, though, look darker, deeper even than the water where we stand, and wetter.

Genny bends her long neck and leans in close to the mother. The woman flinches back from the soft touch of the weeds flowing from Genny’s mouth.

Genny’s long tongue, dark as bog wood and rough as stone, emerges from the soft green center and presses against the woman’s eyes. The stream of bubbles from her mouth wreathes Genny’s face.

Genny runs her tongue across the mother’s eyes, lingering at the corners, probing the lids. She pulls back and turns to me.

“This meat won’t do.” Dark slime rises around her as she advances on me; tattered bits of weed fall from her mouth as her angry words shred them. “You brought me the wrong kind, girl.” Her hand, slick and firm as driftwood, grips my jaw. “What sort of mother is this?”

The water around me grows colder, darker, and my thoughts slip back to the warm sand of the playground. “She wept. I saw her. I have her tears, here, on my neck.”

The hole in Genny’s face where a nose would be presses against my collar. The net of her hair wraps my face. Her cold lips clamp against my skin, her slick teeth raking me, scraping at the fine brine of the mother’s tears. The pull of her mouth hurts as ice creeps into my fingers and toes.

She pulls back with a pop; water spins like a drain between us.

“Yes. She wept. But they were the wrong tears, girl.” Genny turns back to the woman. “You never thought to bring him to me—that it might be better for both of you?”

The mother’s brow lowers over her dark eyes, and her lips pull back from her teeth—definitely green, under the water. “What are you saying? I should have drowned my son?”

Genny waves her long fingers, sending small currents off into dark water. “You could have ended his pain. And wouldn’t it have been a relief for you? You destroyed yourself caring for him—and for what?” Genny sucks a strand of algae through her lips and chews.

The mother’s fists release into claws. She moves slowly against the heavy water toward Genny, kicking up clouds of black mud in her wake. “I loved my son. I loved every last moment we had together.”

I can almost feel the heat of her face warming the freezing water around us.

Genny spits out the chewed string of algae. The pieces drift around the mother, landing in her hair.

Genny turns to me. “You see, Laura Leigh? She weeps for her son, not for herself. She weeps for the mother she wanted to be, not the mother she is. She would never have brought me a son—even when she should have. Her meat is old wood. It would pull my teeth straight from my face.”

“I’m sorry, Genny.” I dig my toes into the cool mud. “Send us back. I’ll find another.”

“I’ll send you back, yes. Find us a mother more like your own.”

She turns back to the mother and pushes her long fingers into the woman’s hair. “I can’t send her back. She’s been here too long. She’s full of water now.” Genny lowers her mouth to the mother’s. Strings of algae shoot into the woman’s mouth. Her throat bulges with it. A fountain of bubbles flows up from Genny’s kiss, and when she pulls back, Kyle’s mother’s mouth is a gaping O. The green-tinted whites of her eyes are stretched with red. She floats, rocking in the soft current of Genny’s laugh.

***

My ears pop and fill and pop again as I ascend. Tiny fish with barbed mouths follow me, drinking from the red that flows from my ankle.

The sun is down, so the surface catches me by surprise—a shock of cold air, then a thousand knives of starlight.

I kick toward the shallows, reaching, till my toes brush the thick slime of the bottom. I grasp at tall reeds and pull myself to land.

I lie there—the long grass bent under my back like feather knives. I hear a hiss.

I open my eyes wide and round as a fish’s, drink in the moonlight, and search the shallows.

It’s Kyle’s mother. Her hair wraps dry reeds, pulling them with the lap of the tide. Her lips are the color of the sky.

I pull her hair off the weeds and tuck it around her face. “Is it better now?”

“Yes,” she says, though it could be a frog croaking.

“You’re not meat,” I say to her red eyes. “You could almost be a Genny. You could almost be a mother for us all.”

She laughs, or it might be a night bird.

I smile. “You’re too tough. Too tough for meat, and too tough to be a Genny, I guess.” I pinch the heavy eyelids shut.

“My son,” she says. And it must be her. I peel her eyes back open.

“Your son is gone.”

“My son.”

“You need a son. If you had a son again, could you be a Genny? A Genny that still knows how to weep? Could you be my Genny?” I don’t wait for an answer—can’t still the tide in my ears or the waves in my heart. “I can get you a son.”

***

There are tires in the bog—ones full of fish spawn and snails. A perfect shelter—dark like the black mud and tucked away from the current. If you hold your ear close, you can almost hear the life teeming inside.

The hum of wings is much louder. I can hear it from the street. Small black bodies drift around the tire, each on its own subtle current of air.

Their sting is less sharp than Genny’s barbed fingers.

I scrape the papery nest from inside the rubber tube. The wasps stab at me, wriggling against my skin, driving their venom deeper. It feels like heat, like life. Like the burn of sand baked in the sun.

I’m careful not to scratch the paint. “Goodyear,” it says in perfect white letters. But it hasn’t been a good year. Not for this swing, and not for this street.

I roll it ahead of me, chasing it as it bounces to the playground. I have to push it through the sand. Even the smallest dune knocks it over.

My hands are swollen with wasp venom and black with hot rubber. They smell like oil and summer.

The tire falls to its side in the trench under the swing set. I wait.

It isn’t until the next afternoon that Andrew comes skipping across the sand, his shoelaces trailing behind him like my fishing line.

“Hey, Hiss,” he says, as he dives stomach-down across a swing. He sees the tire in the sand and stops himself mid-swing. “You got Kyle’s swing!”

“Yeah. This is it.”

“His mom just gave it to you?”

“Sort of, yeah.”

“So is she your mom now?”

“Almost. She will be, soon.”

Andrew grins. “Great. That’s good for both of you, then, isn’t it? You get a mom again and she gets a kid.” He reaches and pats himself on the back.

“Yeah, it’s good. It’s almost great. She wants a son, still.”

Andrew nods as though he understands, and resumes his stomach swing, arms outstretched. “Where are you going to put that swing? Shoulda left it on the tree.”

“It was full of wasps.”

“Oh, that’s gross. Can I see?”

“I scraped them out. I think I’ll take it to the pond. Set it up over the water.”

Andrew’s face lights up. “That’s the best idea, Hiss! You can jump off it right into the water.” He leaps backward off the swing and lands on his behind.

“You want a ride on it?”

His face is pained, though not from the fall. “Can’t.”

“It’s my swing, now. You can tell your mom it’s okay.”

“Naw, it’s not that. Can’t swim. I’m not allowed at the pond.”

I reach down and take his hand, pull him up from the ground.

“That’s silly,” I say, “the water’s shallow.”

“My mom says it only takes a few inches, if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Yeah. True.” I can almost see her face—just a few inches of water between me and Mother. “But I know what I’m doing. You’ll be with me.”

“I dunno.”

“Kyle’s mom will be there. Look—the paint’s still fresh. It still has all the little rubber hairs on the tread.”

His face splits into a smile. Two teeth are missing. “That’ll probably be fine, then.” He turns and shouts over his shoulder. “Mom! Can I go visit Kyle’s mom?”

She turns from the group of blonde mothers and nods, hardly making eye contact before turning back to her friends and their conversation.

I feel a tug in my heart, not unlike the one at my ankle. “Go give her a hug.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s your mom.”

He shrugs and jogs across the sand, into the grass and shade where the moms gather like driftwood. He circles her neck with his arms, and she smiles, kisses his hair.

Andrew helps me lift the tire from the sand.

“Heavy,” he says. “Aren’t these supposed to float?”

“They don’t,” I say. “They go straight to the bottom.”

***

“Hiss, no way that’s gonna hold.”

I’m wrapping my tangled fish line around a tree branch. “It’s made to catch river monsters. It can handle you.” The tire swings from the other end of the line.

“Monsters?”

“Like really big fish.”

“Oh, I caught one of those.” He waves his hand, bats away a few flies. His shoes are tied together by the laces and tossed over his shoulder. His jeans are rolled to the knee, but already starting to slip. Brackish water wicks up the fabric, creeping up his legs.

I can see, from up the tree, the flash of Kyle’s mother’s sweater hidden in the reeds of the shallows. Andrew doesn’t see her. He only has eyes for the swing.

He splashes through the shallow water and steadies the swaying swing. “You’re right about the water. Not too deep at all.”

“Genny says it’s hardly even a pond.”

“What is it, then?”

“She says it’s a drain.” I hadn’t understood her when I was younger. I do now.

Andrew shakes his head. “Naw, it’s a puddle.”

“Puddles dry up. And you can’t lose things in a puddle.”

“You lost something, Hiss?” He bends down and peers into the water. “My dad says I can find anything.”

“Not me, no. Some have, though.” The knot is tight enough. I pull on it, testing the line. It slides sharp across my palms.

“What did they lose?”

“Everything.” I leap from the branch into the water.

The splash soaks Andrew. He spits out brown water.

“Hiss, gross!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Fish pee in this water!”

“There are worse things in this water.” He’s staring at my face, and I realize I’m smiling.

“Your teeth are green,” he says.

I cup a hand over my mouth.

“Don’t you brush?”

I shrug. “Got no one to make me.”

He nods and resumes picking at the rubber of the tire.

“Are you ready?” With my ankle free of the line, I can feel the blood rushing back into it. My toes almost feel warm.

“Been ready all summer!” He starts to climb into the tire ring.

“Let me go first. Then you aim for where I land. That way we’re in the same spot and I can grab you if I need to.”

He nods. “Your swing, your rules.”

Rings of ripples spread across the water. Something in the shallows is moving.

I slide my legs into the center of the tire.

“You’re doing it wrong, Hiss,” Andrew says. He’s shaking his head; his mop of sandy hair sways across his brow.

“How, then?”

“You’d have to let me show you. I’d have to go first.”

“Fine, you go.” I slide out of the swing. The ripples on the water have passed the center of the pond—the dark middle where the shallows drop away into Genny’s pit.

Andrew stands in the O of the swing, his toes curled over the edge of the tube, the fish line gripped in his fists. “You have to be standing to get the best jump.” His toenails are too long, and dirty. He leans his narrow shoulders back and kicks his feet forward. The tire swings, brushing the tips of tall reeds.

He pushes it higher—farther out over the rippling water. Closer to the pit.

The branch above is bending and swaying with the momentum. Leaves fall around us, raining into the water. They float along the surface before getting snagged in dams in the forest of reeds.

“Watch me, Hiss!” The swing arcs forward and Andrew releases it. He soars over the water. His gold hair blows back from his face—a mask of rapture. He thrusts his arms forward like Superman.

The water below him is churning, a soup pot beginning to foam.

Just as Andrew reaches his apex and tips toward the dark water, pale hands and sodden arms stretch up from the center of a widening whirlpool. Andrew’s arms clutch at the air, his legs kicking, as he lands in Kyle’s mother’s arms.

Her hands fold over him like reeds in the wind, and they disappear below the surface. The water stills.

I stare at the dark mirror of water. I should have gone first. I should be with them.

The swing arcs back and knocks Andrew’s shoes from my hand. They splash into the shallows. The sound breaks my stupor.

I drop into the water and slither, gliding like a water snake to the center, and I dive.

***

The water at the bottom of the pit is clouded with black silt. Currents race across each other as if a dozen storms rage overhead.

At the center of the swirling curtain of sand is Kyle’s mother. She holds Andrew close, his head pressed against her neck. His eyes roll toward me slowly, his lids half-mast. Bits of algae and torn reed circle them.

As I approach, the woman pulls Andrew closer and turns away from me.

My throat is tight. I loosen the strip of linen around my neck. I reach out for the woman, and she hisses over her shoulder. Her teeth are green—greener than when I last saw them.

I draw my hand back. “But you said—”

“I promised nothing.” She sets Andrew down in the mud, and stands in front of him.

“But I brought him to you. I brought you a son, like you asked.”

She smiles. “You did. He’s beautiful.”

Andrew’s head hangs, chin to his chest, hair drifting over his eyes.

“But you love kids.” I want to take Andrew’s hand. I want to lead him to the playground, let him get warm again on the hot sand.

“I do.”

“And you took a child. You’re a Genny now. You should be my Genny. I helped you!”

“I didn’t take him.”

“You did! You pulled him under!”

“He was a gift.”

The cold of the water hits me all at once. I shake, and the floating silt trembles away from me.

My Genny steps through the curtain of reed and silt. Long ribbons of algae twist around her face. She laughs, and small fish startle from the bramble of her mouth.

“Cherish him, Shannon. They grow so quickly,” Genny says.

The woman nods and wraps her arm around Andrew’s shoulders.

“But do it elsewhere,” Genny says. “This drain is clogged.”

Shannon lifts Andrew and walks away, out of sight past the tumbling detritus in the currents.

I’m frozen everywhere but my eyes, which burn as though the sand were salt. “She loved her son so much. I thought she’d love me, too, if I were hers.”

“I loved my daughter, too,” Genny said. “But you are not she.” Genny’s face is hidden by the mass of weeds, but her voice sounds choked with sorrow.

“My mother didn’t want me. Kyle’s mother didn’t want me. Why wouldn’t she take me?”

“Because she can’t.”

“Because I’m yours?”

“You aren’t mine anymore.”

The dark mud of the fen bottom slides between my fingers as I drop to the ground. The floating silt scrapes my throat as I howl—a twisting cyclone of bubbles reaching for the sky.

Genny’s barbed fingers press against the underside of my chin and raise my face to hers. Somewhere, through all that green, I sense her coal eyes.

“Laura Leigh, you are your own now. You have grown. You are a Genny.”

The current strips the words from my trembling lips. Genny pulls me to my feet.

“You took a child. You drove him into the water to calm the rage of your own loss. You are a Genny now.”

“But it didn’t work. The rage is still there. The loss. It didn’t work.”

“It never does. But you’ll never give up.”

My hands are still clutching fistfuls of mud. Genny wraps her driftwood fingers around my wrists and squeezes until I release the grains into the churning water.

“But you must go elsewhere, too. This pond is mine. This is where the mothers know to bring my gifts. Find a bog, find a river, find a sea—find your family.”

Genny tucks a strand of algae behind my ear and turns away. I watch her vanish into the dark water—the closest thing to a mother I’ve ever known. Closer than the woman who wrapped me up and drowned me. Closer than the moment where Kyle’s mother held me and wept against my neck.

The water no longer feels cold. It feels empty. The currents echo.

I pull my linen strip tight around my throat and push myself forward through the water.

There’s a river in the woods. There’s an old mill there. A tree that drips vines over the gurgling water. The stepping stones are slick. When it rains, the water roars.

They say not all Gennies grab, and mine never did. But some have to. Sometimes, it’s the only way.

Not all children are gifts.