[Issue 2025.73]

‘Wishes Slick Like Eels’, Irene Liang

Photograph © 2006 Peter Harrison (CC-BY 2.0)

---

The first time I realized wishes weren’t real, I was crouching over my dog’s body, watching him die. He was one of those long, rangy free-roamers, hair shorter than the fuse he ran on, far too full of coiled energy to remain still and silent. He jumped over the fence every other day, but it was only this one that a truck had been careening its way down the road. My brother Finn, five years my senior, came running to my side and stood there stalwart, silent.

There were no cars on the road anymore—and a good thing, for that’s where I sat, knees digging into the concrete and arms wrapped around the dog. Bucket, we’d named him, which is a strange name in retrospect but made sense back then—he was sleek and steel-shiny as a metal pail, with the same tendency of getting everything wet.

He was not bleeding, but I knew he was dying. I’d found him on that road ten minutes earlier, whining softly, chest heaving in huffs of the dry summer-high air.

“Lonnie,” Finn said, “Lonnie.” Nothing else. I ran my hand down Bucket’s side—still so smooth, so warm from the sun and the old black asphalt, and I felt the hard heave of muscles beneath, the faint shifting of cracked bones. That strong, taut flesh would soften and rot into something so different from this visceral life, those bones aging into yellowed shards, and there was not a single thing I could do about it but cry and wish.

“Lonnie,” he told me again, “look at me.” Finally, I tilted my head up at him, tearing my gaze away from Bucket. The sun haloed Finn from behind, scattering his red hair into strands of luminescent orange. By his side, he held Dad’s old pistol. “There’s nothing we can do for him anymore.”

I stroked his side one more time. “We tell Connor and Quinn that he ran away.”

The twins, three years younger than me. Even that paltry amount made me so much more mature. If they were here, they would be begging to haul Bucket into the old pickup truck and drive him down to the vet, sobbing and wailing and completely unable to understand why Finn was even holding that gun.

“’Course.” Now, he knelt, putting a hand on my back. “You go home.”

“I can’t.” My hand now rested on the dog’s haunch, weighed down by some great gravity, pulling it towards the center of the earth. “I want to…” to watch? To see? To be there is the best description, be there as Bucket left.

“No, you don’t. I’ll handle it. Go tell Dad what happened.”

I saw myself then, against my infinitely older brother—small, sad girl, with mousy brown hair and a face that Mom called owlish, and I finally managed to pull my hand away from Bucket.

“Okay,” I told him, and began to walk back home. I didn’t enter, though—I crossed the corner of the house and paused, not daring to peek for fear that Finn was watching for my form. Stood there, barely shaded by the porch, trying to modulate my breathing into the rhythm of something small and dying—slowly, in, out, and in again.

The gunshot rang clear in the morning air, and like the start of a race, it sent me scampering back into the house. That night, I lay in bed, listening to Connor tell Mom that we needed to go and find Bucket because who knew how sad, how alone he was, and I thought of flesh melting off my bones in dribs and drabs of rot.

---

The second time I realized that wishes weren’t real, I was nineteen years old and standing in the bathroom, brushing my teeth. My phone sat precariously upon the edge while I studied myself in the mirror.

Wide, pale eyes, too far apart and too large for their sockets. I’d graduated from owlish to froglike with the help of puberty. Hair, scruffy and dark, frizzy around my temples. None of it inherited from my parents, all born of something thicker and mossy and glass. I tried to remember some fragments of the stories my brother had spun but was interrupted by the phone’s buzz.

There was a hollow in my gut as I answered, a violent shaking of my bones, and I could almost taste the future on my tongue—bitter and mucous and too familiar.

Mom was sobbing when I answered. I could make out a name, and sputters of words. All wrenched apart by sobs—wide-open window, river, body, gone.

Gone.

After all this time. It did not exactly hit me with a burst of shock, but the hand holding my phone trembled and I tried to remember why I had not expected this.

You’d have thought that I hadn’t known this would always happen. Prophecy writ out in the mud of a riverbank with pebbles and frog eggs. He’d told me as much, in the end, and I suppose I hadn’t ever let myself believe he was telling the truth.

“He’s gone,” Mom gasped again, and I closed my eyes, wishing that I was as well.

---

The third time, the third time requires more context and more magic and more creatures in the depths of the swamp. It all started with a knock upon a hardwood door under the cool whet of autumn’s blade.

When we were young, back before Finn got too cool to hang out with his kid sister, we’d run down to the creek to catch eels with our hands. They were black, sinewy things, slippery like tongues, twisting through the clear shallows. The creek marked the border of Homeland and Marsh; behind it a sea of trees and hanging moss, rife with crickets and raindrops.

Connor and Quinn tagged along later, of course, but for a few, brief years, it was just us; languid afternoons slow and bittersweet as laudanum. When the twins came, they—or Connor, at least—scared all the eels away, and Finn had a way of casting me aside to tend to them.

It was another one of those sunny afternoons that we sat, feet brushing the silted river bottom. We’d been still for so long that the eels had come to accept us as one of their own, and they slid past our ankles easily.

“I don’t want to stay here,” Finn declared. “I want to go to… Paris, or London, or Tokyo.”

“I don’t want to either,” I admitted. There came the tableau of towers that touched the sky, glass and steel shining beneath sunlight. Before it could fully materialize; though, my gaze wandered to the shadowed recesses of the swamp. To the curtains of mosquitoes that hovered above the creek-bed and the faint shimmer of water somewhere deep inside.

Today was an itchy day, in which my skin squirmed and my innards clenched. Almost every day since Bucket’s death had been like this, but it was worse than usual, writhing under the bare layer that held all my mushy parts together.

Besides that, the afternoon was one in a thousand, in ten thousand. I only remember it now because staring up at the house, I’m struck by the fact that Finn ended up here again in the end, and it’s going to be the two of us for the first time since childhood. The riverside jaunts stopped the first day he entered High School, and he left entirely upon turning eighteen.

Except, it will not be only the two of us, and I remember that fact just as the door swings open. Standing there, her face carefully neutral, is Kenna, his fiancée. She’s short, but still somehow stately, smooth dark skin and afro held in a high bun. Painted on the corners of her eyes, glinting from her earrings and her necklace, are accents of bright gold.

“Hello, Leona,” she tells me, schooling her expression into a careful smile. “I’m glad you’re here. How was the drive?”

“Boring,” I reply flatly.

“That’s… unfortunate.” She steps back primly, nodding at me to enter. “You’ve gotten taller.”

I haven’t, but I’ve gotten thinner, which I suppose looks like the same thing. Sometimes, days slip by wherein I do not eat. Without Mom’s chiding tone, without the constant sight of Connor running around holding all manner of food, it slips through my mind without a whisper. Since the call, as well, I have stopped trying to fill the gaps between my bones at all.

So I can follow. So he’ll know I did not give up our dream, in the end.

“Thank you.” I take her invitation and set foot onto the burnished, entirely-too-fancy hardwood. “Is anyone else here yet?”

“Your parents are in France right now,” she says, a sour twist to her lips. “Connor is spending the first half of break with his boyfriend.”

Figures. The age gap between him and Finn was always too large to quite overcome, not to mention all else. I wonder how he’s doing, how his first year away has been. All of us children have flown from the nest, or otherwise fallen away.

I do not think Kenna likes me. The feeling is mutual, though she has reason for it, and I don’t really. Three years ago, when I wasn’t around in the aftermath, she was, and who knows how many of my brother’s tears have soaked into the soft skin of her shoulder? Couple that with the fact that I’ve never been too keen on conversing with her, and you get the tense silence that hangs around us right now.

It shatters when Finn throws his arms around me from behind. “Lonnie! You’re here!”

“As promised,” I reply flatly, but I allow him to keep his embrace.

Kenna turns her tight smile on him, and it melts into something real—something soft and sweet. “Hey, Finn. We were just waiting for you.”

Now, finally, I extricate myself. My brother casts a critical glance over me. I know that not a single thing escapes his gaze—and so I try to tuck the sharp angles of my wrists behind my back, puff out my cheeks to bring balance back to my face.

“Have you been eating?”

“Yes.”

“Right, right. It’s just been so long…” Another up-and-down sweep, before he turns to gesture towards the stairway. It’s the first thing you’d see upon entering the house, tall and carpeted and exuding grandeur. Altogether too big for the room, too big for anything reasonable. Our childhood was one floor, three bedrooms for six people, and I’d bet this one is twice that for two.

“Let me show you your room. Isn’t the house beautiful?”

“It is,” I allow myself. “But I remember when we were kids, you wanted to live somewhere… not here.” We begin the climb. The upstairs is dark, dark enough to swallow the light. It reminisces of that swamp across the creek.

“When?”

“When I was nine. After Bucket.” I bring the dog up because it’s the closest landmark to the moment I can remember. His face screws up in confusion, and then he shakes his head once, giving up.

“You know I don’t remember much from back then. That was a long time ago.”

“You remember Bucket, though, right?” I must clarify—clarify because that day is still so stark in my memory. Every line in Finn’s face as he looked down at me, the exact way that the light shone off of Dad’s pistol, the smell of dust in the sunburnt air.

“Lonnie, of course. I could never forget.” He laughs hollowly. “That was the first and only time I’ve ever shot a gun.”

“Better than leaving him to suffer,” I offer, but the attempt at reassurance falls flat. A moment of awkwardness before Finn leaps into motion again, flicking on the lights and gesturing to a door far down the hall.

The walls are lined in beige, flowers in muted pastel just above the trim. Plain and unassuming, nothing like the old-colonial niceties of the bottom floor. Finn notices the way my eyes skate over the exterior and shrugs almost defensively.

“We haven’t gotten around to decorating it yet.”

“Clearly.”

“You’re cruel, Lonnie. Think of it this way—you get this whole floor to make your own. Until Connor, at least.”

“Decorate? With what?” I swing my duffel bag back over my shoulder, gesturing to it. “All my worldly possessions lie within this sack.”

“I’m sure you’ll find a way. Now come on.”

The room is just as barren as the hallway. Larger than I’d have expected, a bathroom connected to the room beside it, large window inset into the wall. Light streams through it, dappled by the tree right outside. A bed sits in the corner—plain white blanket set over it. All overlaid by motes of dust. The room is so much bigger than the one that I used to share with Connor and Quinn, more so for the absence of them both.

It took me a good few months to get used to sleeping without their ambiance in that first year away. Now, though, I’m unsure if I’d ever be able to share a room with someone else again.

Then again, it would only be half the noise to deal with anymore.

I cross over to the bed and toss my bag down. Finn hesitates at the doorway, but a shout from below yanks his head back—Kenna, calling his name for something-or-other. “I’ll let you get situated. Come down when you’re ready.”

Then, he’s gone, and I’m left with an empty room.

---

Dad used to take Finn fishing every Sunday. I envied him for that, because it was the only time that any of us were let into that area beyond the creek. He was always dodgy about the details, maybe because he himself knew that it was something to be treasured.

He was Dad’s favorite after all, his first boy. Held a permanent soft spot in our parents’ hearts in general, because he’d been their miracle baby after a decade of no success. Then there were Connor and Quinn, their precious twins.

And me? I fit somewhere in between, and sometimes I’d look towards the swamp and believe that I was in fact not their child at all.

They’d pulled me from the waters of the creek as a transparent tadpole, a slip of jelly and vertebrae. Mom kept me warm within her cupped hands, carried me inside an acorn shell—tiny Thumbelina and the Frog Prince all in one. Now, I’m no longer translucent; but sometimes, my deepest bones are still slick and malleable under the looseness of my skin.

The thought of loose skin, of my organs being able to swish around freely, sends twinges drilling through my back. Mom used to make me watch the twins in the bath, to ensure that they didn’t drown—and much good that did, in the end—and I’d watch them slosh the water over the edges. Transpose the image over my stomach, a surplus of blood and acid and all that matter.

Years later, with Quinn, when we would trace our fingers down each other’s stomachs and note where our organs should be, where they would remain after we left—I would recall the porcelain bathtub and feel the waves start to roil again.

I needed to tighten my skin around my bones like a drawstring bag so nothing would ever have room to move except for what I needed.

Of course, I think this all while sitting in the bath, rubbing my arms raw. The bathroom acts as a corridor between my room and the adjacent, able to be sectioned off by doors on either side. Both are open, and the light of my room spills into the darkness of the other.

I lean back in the water. Hot once, cold now, and I didn’t want to run more and deprive my hosts of a warm shower. The chill calls to mind the old creek. Briefly, I want to ask Finn if we can drive back down there, spend a day like the old times, but then I remember why we cannot anymore.

I wonder what it—because it wasn’t him, not anymore—must have looked like there. Slip of skin-sack on the pebble bank, organs spilling out into the water. Where did he crawl from? Crawl to? Where is he waiting now?

Down, down, my head slips, until the water is lapping at the planes of my cheek, bare centimeters away from flowing into my mouth. One final inch.

I slip under.

Is this what he did? Is this why he got to slither out, got to leave it all behind? If I do it too, will I follow, finally follow?

Exhale, and the bubbles pop upon the surface. My lungs begin to burn, poised on the edge of inhalation, when—

Someone grabs my arm and shakes me. I jolt up, shaking water all over the walls, the floor, and Kenna. Her eyes are wide, and at the sight of my revival, she leaps back, spitting out a curse.

“Leona! What were you doing?”

“Bathing,” I reply dumbly. I’m too shocked to be embarrassed by my nakedness, by the fact that she found me dipping under. For a moment there, it did not feel like I was in a bathtub—it felt like the world beneath me was vast and liquid, a chasm deep and roiling. Somewhere I could swim deep and see a pale hand extended from the depths, see those dark eyes, dark hair, and pull myself down.

“No, no. You were underwater, and I thought you were dead, and… and are you okay?”

I blink at her. “Yes?”

She covers her eyes with a hand and backs a step out of the bathroom, still speaking. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to look, I just saw you lying there and… but Leona, is there something… else? I… your body, you’re thin. I know how bad it can get. I had one in high school too, but you really—”

She’s skirting around the subject, unwilling to say it aloud. I smile thinly at her. “I’m fine, Kenna. Maybe it was the water. Can you pass me a towel?”

With a tug, she yanks one off the rack, but she’s not willing to drop the subject.

“I know how it feels to try and hide it. Especially after all you’ve been through—”

“And what have I been through, exactly?” I wrap the towel around my body, closing my eyes for a bare moment to its warmth. Sometimes, I can’t stand these things—on itchy days, the fibers feel rough as sandpaper—but today has been good.

She falls quiet. Doesn’t want to say it.

“You picked at your food at dinner.” Evidently, she’s decided to simply forge forward. “I know we don’t know each other too well, but I care about Finn, and I know that he loves you.”

“We don’t know each other.”

“I know. But he’s told me things. About your childhoods, your brothers and Bucket, and that—”

“Oh, so you barge into my bathroom, throw accusations, and bring up my dead dog.”

This, finally, shuts her up. “…I’m sorry.”

“I’m going to sleep now,” I tell her softly, and after a pause, she walks out, stiff-backed.

My gaze drifts back down to the placid bathtub, but whatever magic the water held is gone now. It’s water, just water, and I’m about to shed the towel when something clicks behind me.

My head turns in increments like the ticking of a clock. It’s not Kenna—no reason why she’d circle around to the room behind me and not even turn the lights on before sneaking up. Neither would it be Finn, for much the same reason.

A streak of dull silver in my peripheral, and I jolt the last quarter in a quick snap. The click was the sound of nails on tile—the nails of a large, lean dog, that sits staring at me, head cocked to the side.

The next breath catches in my throat, lodged thick and gummy. Finn doesn’t have a dog—I would certainly know. This is no dog from the present either. In my mind’s eye, a hand traces over the lean line of its shoulder, over the taut curve of its haunches. My body is blocking the light from the bedroom, but enough falls upon it to see how its sleek fur gleams quicksilver-smooth, the luster of old tin.

“Bucket?” I ask.

It whines long and low in its throat and stands. A quick maneuver sends it turning, trotting out of the bathroom and into the darkness beyond. I follow it, on instinct more than rationale.

This room is emptier than mine and darker too. I fumble down the wall for a light switch, finally hitting something that sends brightness flooding back in. Within that moment of black, the dog has vanished into nothing.

I blink once, then twice. I’m facing a completely empty room—same beige walls, but no bed, no furniture. Across from me is a large window. It looks out upon the back of the house, towards the old marsh.

Strange to conceive that Finn lives now only a few streets down from where we grew up, but this is what truly drives it home. The land beyond the glass panes is a sea of murky black, but I can just imagine what it would look like in daylight. Mayflies hanging around the reeds, rocks warm as ovens. The creek is clean and clear, thin shapes undulating along the riverbed, and for maybe the last time in my life, I felt at home.

The feeling is strong enough to almost make me forget about the wraith that led me here in the first place. Maybe Finn does have some secret dog. So excited for my visit was he that mentioning it slipped his mind. Maybe it’s old, or simply quiet, a well-behaved thing that was dozing in one of the side rooms all this afternoon. God knows that there’s enough empty spaces in the house for a dog to slink off to.

Really, though, I know that it’s not. Finn was the one who begged for a dog in the first place all those years ago, when he himself was nine, and I was only four. Dad came home one day after work holding a silver pup squirming in his arms, caked with dirt, telling us that he’d found it behind the factory.

In that way especially, I think Bucket’s death tore him up. He never asked Dad for another dog. Stopped talking about them entirely, in fact. No, Finn wouldn’t have gotten a dog, especially not one so sleekly gray, smooth as mercury.

The only other rational explanation is that I’m insane; and well, I knew that already.

---

Like I said above, Finn was Dad’s favorite. Mom wanted me to be hers, I think, because I was her only girl. She gave it up by the time the twins were born. Really, she loved Connor the most—little firecracker, always buzzing from one place to the next.

I was three years older than Quinn, but we were peas in a pod in how we were nobody’s favorites. They used to say that he’d stolen all of Connor’s self-control, all of his quietude in the womb, one twin absorbing half of the other.

We were all pale, but Connor and Finn were gingers, built in that classic, freckled Irish way. Quinn and I, we were dark-haired, narrow noses and smooth, white limbs. Only in our eyes did we differ—mine, green-gray like a waterlogged sky, his as dark as tree bark. Set apart from the others, by merit of appearance even more than age.

It was for that reason that, on that singular Sunday, we stole into the swamp.

I’d been thirteen, Quinn ten, Finn eighteen and on one of his last outings with Dad. Connor had been confined to our room for something-or-other, a banal act of mischief that I’ve forgotten by now. All I remember is sitting by the creek with Quinn, when suddenly he stood up and proclaimed—

“Let’s go in.”

I blinked at him. “The swamp?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged and kicked his feet. The eels who’d grown used to our presence stirred into a frenzy once again, flooding silky past my ankles.

“We aren’t allowed.”

“Finn goes in.”

“Finn is old.”

An adult already, so much more mature than the rest of us. Sometimes, after Mom and Dad had sent us all to our beds, they’d let him sit with them in the living room and talk about politics, news, economics. He went out with Dad on that rickety old canoe after church, tackle box clutched in pale palms, to descend into the shadows.

I paused for a moment. Despite my previous pushback—

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yup. Let’s go.”

And without a further word, we walked in.

I only bring this up now because that night, I dream.

Me and Quinn are tramping through the undergrowth. Small frogs flee from our footfalls, water seeping into the indents that they leave behind. Moss catches on my hair and with my left hand, I tear it away, leaving a trail of lumpy muck streaking down my wrist.

“I think this is where he went,” Quinn says.

“Finn?”

“No, Bucket.”

I remember, at this moment, that he still thinks Bucket ran away, fled into the distance. That he didn’t die of a gunshot on an empty stretch of dust.

“There’s nowhere else he could’ve gone. There’s water here. And frogs. And eels.”

“Maybe,” I tell him. Would be no use to say that the only place Bucket’s going to run is deep, deep underground.

Faint beams of light streak through the leaves like weak watercolor on thin paper, vaguely translucent and hardly visible against all else. Yet, where it lands on Quinn’s skin, on mine, it cuts it to the quick—illuminating it with an interior glow, warming our bones. Skin almost translucent and long, smooth dowels running beneath.

I look at him then, see the way that the light brings out motes of green in his dark eyes. Easy enough to imagine the shapes of his bones under his skin—or, not his bones, but some second layer, swimming and sliding underneath.

He turns to me now, and opens his mouth to speak, and I am shocked out of the dream in a sharp intake of breath.

My own. For a long moment, I lay there on my back, staring up at the sloped ceiling. Light, real light, strong light peeks out from behind the curtains.

The dream swims away from me in tattered shoals of minnows, deep into the depths of my mind, but I remember enough to know which moment of my childhood it was. It’s been quite some time since I dreamed it last, but I suppose it’s about time for it to come back.

Someone knocks politely on my door. Hastily, I sit up, try to pat my hair and clothes down into something respectable.

“Leona?”

Kenna. I should’ve known. Finn would’ve barged in immediately, but after last night, I suppose she doesn’t want a repeat.

“I’m here.”

“It’s ten AM.” A pause. “Finn left for work. He thought we could spend today bonding.”

Ten? I hardly ever sleep in until eight, let alone this. The notion lingers that it must’ve had something to do with that dream.

“Let me get dressed,” I call back.

For another ten minutes, I do nothing but remain spreadeagled on the sheets. It’s only when I imagine her face, pinched and tight, waiting, that I pull myself up.

Today’s a bad day, I can already tell as I stand. My skin, my flesh, follows the pull of gravity, dragging down, catching on my bones as they melt. Like ill-fitting clothes, tight around my elbows, knees, chest, but mushy in all other places. My stomach squirms once, twice, pulsating like my heart, except stomachs should not be pumping anything.

An itchy day wherein small fish wriggle through my veins and grass attempts to sprout through my skin. The worn, soft clothes I pull on rub like they’re made of barley cloth.

Kenna stands downstairs, in front of a table of cold food. Bacon, congealed in its own lard, eggs clumped together into rubbery masses.

“Leona.” A smile attempts to work its way onto her face. “I made breakfast.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“No.” Her voice is hard, steel. “Finn told me that we’re going to bond today, and that starts with you sitting down and eating something.”

“I don’t have a disorder,” I protest. Or at least, nothing that she would be able to help me with. She doesn’t understand. Can’t understand. My intestines slither against each other like worms, constricting tightly as the smell of food reaches them.

I grab a glass of water off the table—probably Finn’s, left half-discarded—and throw it down. Its coolness calms them for a moment, enough so that they loosen and allow me to speak.

Kenna plunks a plate and cutlery down in front of me.

“Prove it.”

Slowly, I spear a strip of bacon. It cracks in half under the pressure of the fork, but enough stays that I can lift it to my mouth. The meat is hard, vaguely slimy, coated in its own oils.

Quinn and I never used to eat. We made it a contest of it—staring at each other across the breakfast table, trying to see who could take the smallest bites of bacon, tiniest sips of cereal.

I’d lose, most of the time. Couldn’t resist when faced with the prospect of glistening, crispy meat, with sugary milk and sweeter cereal. Sometimes, I wouldn’t realize I’d eaten until I lay in bed and food was lumps of gallium in my stomach.

Even now, I suppose I’m still trying to catch up.

As I eat, I know that I still lag behind his distant form, each bite sending me leagues back. It feels like my esophagus is tightening, like it’s shriveled small enough so only air and water can pass down through. Kenna watches me until I’ve finished a strip of bacon, a few forkfuls of eggs.

“Okay. Wasn’t so hard, was it?”

I grimace at her. She seems unfazed.

“What should we do today? You know, for bonding.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Hm?”

“I know that Finn put you up to this because he wants us to get along. You don’t need to. Go do whatever you want, and I’ll do the same.” I don’t say the next part. She doesn’t need to because it will be a wasted effort, because she doesn’t need to spend her time with her fiancé’s little sister if that sister will not be around for too much longer.

“Leona, I’m spending time with you because I want to. We can go shopping. Or for a spa day, or to a cafe, whatever you want.”

I take a deep breath. Looks like I’m not going to be getting rid of Kenna anytime soon.

“…Can we go down to the creek?”

---

The walk is short. I know that this sector of the river is not the one that I grew up in—the rocks hold themselves differently, the rushing water whispers different words into the air. It’s all the same in the end, though.

Time has left it strange. No more eels slithering down in the depths nor shallow banks. Must have been chased away by humans or pollution or all fished out of the water already. The reeds droop sadly, thinning like an old man’s hair, unable to cover the stretches of bank anymore.

Beyond, though. Beyond where the swamp looms. This, of all things, seems yet untouched by the rush of years. I want to sprint in—I want to call his name, call him to come swimming out, to creep from the depths. Kenna’s presence, however, is impossible to ignore, and so I simply sit myself down on an outstretching rock.

“So this is where you guys grew up?”

“Not exactly. Close, though.”

“The four—all of you.” She catches herself too late. I can see her eyes shifting, feel her wondering if this will be the thing to set me off.

“They used to call us the couplet. Like a poem, you know? Connor, Quinn; Lonnie, Finn.” The words had a certain sing-song to them, but I’ve forgotten it by now. They come out flatly recited, no rhythm to it.

“Did your parents do that on purpose?”

“No idea.” I shuck my shoes off so I can dangle my feet in the water. It’s cold, but I’m used to feeling chilly. Kenna eyes the action, and I’m sure she’s categorizing it, noting the bony angles of my ankles under clear water.

“I guess it’s nostalgic to you then.”

“A bit.”

“Finn’s told me so much about you. He remembers it all, you know. So many embarrassing stories…” She trails off in a way that invites embarrassed denial.

I admire her for not letting the conversation die, but my gaze has been caught by the marsh. Beyond the trees, something vaguely pale flickers. Lanky, long jawed, and I lean forwards, trying to catch any sort of glimpse.

It’s not Quinn, I realize, as it flickers between two trees once again. Still, that long, loping gait is familiar, the way that muscles shift under a sheet of smooth fur.

“…Bucket?” I whisper. Kenna looks over at me. Her mouth tightens—remembering last night?

“He buried him here, you know?”

“What? In the swamp?”

“A little bit away from here.” Pause. “Do you want to see it?”

I never really considered what Finn and Dad must’ve done with Bucket after it all. My understanding of the dead after death teetered between the stuffy formality of some great-aunt’s funeral and the quick act of flushing a goldfish down the toilet. Sometimes, I’d imagine him as roadkill, see his long snout mirrored in the bodies of birds and armadillos.

But thinking about it, Finn must have buried him in some way. He never would’ve done anything different. It stings somewhat that Kenna knows about it, and I don’t, but then again, I never asked.

“Yes, please.”

---

It’s a simple wooden cross stuck into the ground on the border between marsh and creek. I look at the trees around and wonder which ones of their roots have wormed their way into his grave. Which ones have grown old and healthy on what’s left of his flesh, have wrapped their ways around his bones and sucked the marrow through the cracks?

Wouldn’t matter either way, because the body is a husk to be discarded, for Quinn and Bucket and I. All Finn buried was the waste.

I kneel, not caring that the ground wets my pants.

Quinn told me, just before. Told me that Bucket wasn’t dead.

“I know that Finn shot him. I know about the car,” he said. Another one of those days by the creek. “Connor doesn’t, but I’ve always known. He’s not dead, though.”

He was fourteen years to my seventeen, but we were still each other’s only lifelines.

“What do you mean?”

“I see him. Bucket’s like us, Lonnie. Dad didn’t find him behind the factory. He found him in the river. I saw.”

“You were barely one!”

“I remember.”

I relented, giving up on this line of protest. “Well, why’d he lie?”

“Because he thought Bucket was dead. Lying on the bottom of the river like that. He fished him out because he didn’t want him to pollute the water, had him half-buried in the ground when he started to breathe and kick. That’s why he was so filthy.”

“And Bucket was like us?”

Quinn nodded, eyes bright. “Connor and Finn are Mom and Dad’s. But I think I remember, Lonnie. They found you first, obviously. Then me. And after us two, maybe they checked the river more often, because there was Bucket.”

“I don’t remember any of this.”

“You’re too old. Or maybe I just have a better memory.” He smiled at me. His cheeks were hollow—hollower than mine. The trophy for his victories in our silent contest. “But Lonnie, you know. We’re the same. We’re born from the swamp.”

“And Bucket’s alive?” I did believe him. Do believe him.

“I see him sometimes. On the other side of the swamp. Or outside the window. We’re getting closer, and he’s waiting for us.”

“Closer.” To what we saw in the swamp, to what we felt. That feeling—like there was nothing to stop us from sinking into the earth, sinking away to somewhere infinitely peaceful. Where there was nothing but the everhaze of dappled twilight, but the light that shone from our bones and rushed through our glass limbs.

“Bucket did it in a way that hurt. We have to make it slow. Make it so that we can slide out of this skin instead of being forced.”

The old conversation rushes through my head as I run my hand over the dirt and pebbles of the grave. I think of the dog from the bathroom last night, of the shape darting through the tangled trees. Quinn said that he saw him when he was getting closer, when he was almost there.

It’s been four years, and I think that I’m finally catching up. I’m close. So, so close. Kenna made me eat this morning, but it’s only a bit of progress lost. Can’t afford anymore, however.

I rise. Turn to her and try to smile. “I think I’m tired. Can we go back?”

---

That night, I find it while scrubbing my arm. The skin is pulling in strange, loose ways, and I’m running my fingers across the length of the limb, trying to find the source.

It comes not a second later. Near my armpit, in the soft paleness underneath, my fingers slip into a slit.

A cut in the skin, but there is no blood, no ragged flesh. The edges feel like some sort of costume, rubbery and elastic. What lies underneath is slick with mucus, but smooth and hard, porcelain or glass or bone. My hand lingers there for a long moment while I smile.

After Finn left for college, Quinn and I spent Sunday nights holed up in our room. Connor joined on occasion; but almost always, he was out with friends at the skate rink or the pool or a party. We liked it better that way too—just the two of us.

Usually, we watched old horror movies under a blanket. Invariably, halfway through the film, he’d turn to me and begin to talk about what he remembered.

“The trees stretch deeper,” he’d said once. “Deeper than you can imagine. We came from them, grew from their bark like seeds, or like tumors. Mom and Dad wanted children, I think, and then they had Finn, but it was too late because the swamp heard their pleas. Tried to deliver, but it’s like the ocean washing fish onto the beach. We weren’t meant to live here.” He shot me a reassuring smile. “There are others too, all from the marsh, but we’re not very social creatures. Don’t worry though. When I leave, I’ll find Bucket, and we’ll wait for you. Then we can go to the deep places together.”

I didn’t like the implication that I’d come so much later they’d need to wait, but I nodded anyway.

It was a Sunday night like that when he ushered me into the room, smiling ear-to-ear. Not even bothering to turn on a movie, he lifted his arm. Must’ve been half a year after he told me about Bucket, and we’d crossed the borders into fifteen and eighteen.

“It’s happening!” he exclaimed immediately, lifting his arm to show me. For a moment, I only saw skin wrapped around bone, deep shadows in the hollows. It was only when he tugged his skin that I realized.

“…You’re unraveling.”

“Like a caterpillar,” he said. “When Dad pulled us out of the river, we spun this cocoon out of skin and meat to protect ourselves. We were soft then. And then the cocoon hardened, grew into us, so we could never escape it. It’s why we have to starve the meat husk, make sure we can unstick ourselves from it.”

Tentatively, I reached out and ran my fingers down his arm. I’d seen him bleed before, seen me bleed, but his skin felt different now and no blood emerged from the wound. He was a caterpillar emerging from its chrysalis, and I was the one who was still stuck inside, still floundering.

“…Wait for me?” I whispered. “You and Bucket. I’m coming, I promise, I want to, but…”

“We will,” he assured. “I will.”

---

Kenna meets me at the breakfast table the next morning. I hardly slept—doing nothing but running my fingers over the cut again and again. Quinn’s appeared when he was fifteen, finished when he was sixteen, but I cannot wait a year. I’ve been testing its edges, slowly widening it. Too much, maybe, because now it stings with every movement, and that clear limb beneath is tinged with red.

More than ever, it feels like I’m piloting a machine. It can’t even be called an itchy day anymore—it’s a new type of feeling, the feeling that this skin is a suit and growing more claustrophobic by the moment.

I’m early enough this morning that Finn is still sitting at the breakfast table.

“Lonnie!”

“Leona. Morning.”

Everyone calls me Lonnie. Always has. Kenna’s use of my real name is almost refreshing in that way. Fits her; straightforward, steady woman. I study them—will they miss me, when I’m gone? Finn will, that’s for sure. Kenna? I’m unsure.

A moment passes where I wonder if I should tell Finn. Blurt out in the middle of this kitchen of what I know is going to happen.

But then, I remember Quinn’s old words.

“We can’t tell anyone?” Another one of those Sunday meetings. After he revealed his secret to me. The cut in his skin only growing, come to encompass his entire arm and shoulder.

“Nope.”

“But I think Mom and Dad and Finn, at least—”

“No, Lonnie. They won’t. You know what they’ll do. They already don’t understand how we don’t need to eat, how we absorb the light like the trees we came from.”

He rolled up his jacket, gestured to the cut that spanned around his upper arm. “They’ll say that I did this to myself. Institutionalize both of us.”

And that they will. I tug at my sleeve, suddenly self-conscious of the fact that they hang long around my wrists.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Leona…”

“I ate dinner last night.” Finn looks up from his breakfast to watch us.

“I’m invoking my older brother powers. Eat.”

“You lost those the minute you moved out and I got a chance to be the oldest. I ate.”

I didn’t—I tucked food into a napkin when nobody was looking—but my empty plate was disguise enough.

Kenna fixes me with a glare. “You’d better eat lunch, then.”

“I will, I will.”

The morning passes quickly. Finn finishes up, then rushes to get to work. He’s always been the type to scramble at the last minute, teetering on the edge of late. As he asks Kenna where his car keys are, I frown. Quinn used to say that once we emerge from the metamorphosis, we leave human memories behind as well. Will I know all these old habits, when I’m running through the trees with him and Bucket? Will I want to know them?

Eventually, it’s just Kenna and me again. She brushes her hands down and gestures to the table. “Want to help me with this?”

I nod. She begins sweeping the still-full into one large plate, eggs tumbling onto log piles of sausage. Those empty, she passes to me, and I ferry them to the dishwasher.

“This is what we used to do at home.”

“Clean up?”

I don’t know why I started talking. Maybe some nostalgia is already manifesting itself. Maybe out of the realization that Kenna has not truly done a single bad thing to me, nothing that wasn’t fueled by good intentions.

“Me and Quinn, mostly. Connor and Finn always found ways to worm their ways out of it.” Mostly because we were constantly at home, but I don’t mention that.

“You and Quinn were close, I’ve heard?”

She’s skating on dangerous waters now, but I nod anyway. Quinn. So soon.

“…Very. Not that Finn and him weren’t, but…”

“The age gap. Finn went to college right as he was growing up.”

I nod again.

She doesn’t ask the unspoken questions—do you miss him, why didn’t you come back? The answer to both of them lies in the words that I cannot say.

“I have a sister.” She smiles, clearly bolstered by the acceptance of her conversation. “Two years younger. She’s in med school right now, spending Thanksgiving with our parents.”

“I guess you must really love Finn then.” To spend the holiday away in this creekside home.

“Not if I have to keep cleaning up after him.”

At this, I laugh, surprising even myself. I want to know Kenna, I realize, want to talk with her outside of brother-mandated family time. But I never will because soon I will be swimming among the eels, crawling through the mossy underbrush.

It must be soon. I cannot wait another year like this, caught in the same limbo I’ve always floundered in.

Quinn said that Bucket had transformed in a painful way, in a bloody way. If I cannot do it slowly, then perhaps that’s the way to go.

---

In the night, I stand in the shower once again, running my fingers down the gap in my skin. It’s lengthened since morning by an inch or two. Not enough.

Deep breath.

I dig my fingers in and tug.

It peels easily at first but slows as it hits its first resistance. The water swirling down the drain is a pale, sickly pink. Outside the shower curtain, I might see a shape, or maybe a trick of light and shadows.

Some hunched creature sits outside, and I cannot tell whether it’s man or dog. I close my eyes and pull once again. The limb beneath is hard, clear, something that suggests jelly and sea glass.

Harder. Longer. The ripping makes no sound, but somehow, that’s worse. It truly feels like shucking off a skintight set of clothes, crawling out of a leather jumpsuit that’s been glued to the skin.

I stop when I can take the pain no more. Strips of bloodied skin hang around my elbow, one thin strand connected along the top.

My body, true body, glistens in the shower-light, slick as glass and thinner than bones. Blood coats the surface, cast over with motes of reflected light. I don’t smooth the hanging strips of skin back over, for fear that in the night they will melt back into each other and make my cocoon whole again.

---

I slip into my baggiest sweater the next day. I woke up to dried ribbons hanging around me, wrinkled and brownish on the sheets. My hand slipped off like a glove. The fingers beneath are thinner than winter twigs, tipped with blunt ends.

I remember Quinn’s on a Sunday night, transparent in the dim light.

“They’re made for digging,” he said, “For fishing. So quick, without the skin. The eels won’t see us coming.”

“Will we really stay here?” I asked. “With the swamp?”

He stared at me blankly. “Where else would we go? This is our home.”

“I… I wanted to travel,” I said, “When I was a kid, Finn and I would talk about it.”

“No,” Quinn said. The hardness of his voice shocked me. “Lonnie, we came from the trees, breathed in the river. This isn’t something that you leave.”

I looked down at my feet. We still sat under the blanket together, but now, I felt the inescapable urge to throw it off.

“Is this why you haven’t been trying? Why I’m already leaving while you’re still here, three years older than me? I know that you’ve been eating.” He ran his still-whole hand down the length of the one that had peeled. “You could do this too, Lonnie. If you tried.”

I closed my eyes. Always, I’d known that I would have to tell him, but there was the dim hope that he would take it well. That he would understand. Now, though—it was clear.

“Quinn, I’m leaving in three months.”

“What?”

“I’m going to college.”

His eyes widened. For a moment, he was truly speechless. “…What?”

“Like Finn. I… I need to leave. It’s only four years, then I’ll come back, and we can go to the deep places and catch eels and—”

“Were you lying to me? Everything you promised, whenever you said you were working on it, when you told me about what we would do in the depths? You—you…”

I threw the blanket off, rolling out to stand on the carpet. “I’m not lying. I just want to leave, Quinn, let me leave, for only a few years—”

He threw it off as well. “Leave, then. Leave, and we’ll run among the roots and gorge ourselves on eels, and you’ll be human forever.”

In the end, that was that. No more Sunday night rendezvous. I found more friends, tried to throw myself into those final months at home. Sometimes, after late nights out with them, I would look towards the river—look, and see a thin, dark form hunched there, something long-limbed and rangy lying prone at his side.

I went to college. Could’ve let myself believe that Quinn had somehow been lying, somehow insane—I’d imagined those glassy limbs, been gullible enough to believe his stories.

Until the phone call. That day in the bathroom. When the truth hit me, I suppose—the truth that this is my home, that I was born to run through the trees with my siblings, born to be a spindly creation of spun glass, peeling skin.

Kenna and Finn are bustling around downstairs. No stretch to imagine Finn struggling to gather all his things, Kenna tutting around like a mother hen, both wondering where I am.

I dig my fingers into my upper arm to chase away the thoughts of domesticity. I’m so very close now. In one smooth movement, they slide under the flap of the skin, pulling it away like a wet swimsuit. The ache sets in once again as it reaches my shoulders. My eyes close, mouth tightens, teeth grinding against each other to stop the pain.

Someone knocks on my door just as my shoulder comes free. My good hand is smeared with blood, as is my shirt, and scraps of skin lay discarded upon the ground.

“Lonnie? You awake?”

It’s Finn.

“I am,” I call out, “Give me a few minutes.”

A pause. I try to wipe the blood away, but it does nothing but smear it more.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m naked, Finn. A minute please.”

I tug my sleeve over the glass hand, tuck it into my pocket. A bit of blood has soaked into the sweater, but it’s black either way.

The door swings open. I jump back, cursing the fact that there’s no lock on it.

“What the hell, Finn?”

“I know.”

“Then… what?”

My free, normal hand rubs at the sweater, thickly knitted yarn over the thin bones beneath.

“Kenna told me everything.”

A burst of relief spikes through me. He thinks what I’m hiding is some sort of disorder. I remember Quinn’s old words, remember long afternoons splayed out by the river, limbs spread across the warm rocks. He’d close his eyes and tell me that this sunlight was all we ever needed to sustain ourselves—it was only the human cocoon that wanted for food.

“I’m okay. She overreacted.”

“She says you haven’t been eating. She found blood on your sheets.”

I roll my eyes, trying to seem nonchalant, but the motion is stiff. Inhuman. “I’m on my period. Why is she looking through my room? Finn, really?”

“Too much,” he said, “it was on the pillow. Blood in the bathtub too, on the walls. You don’t eat, you only wear long sleeves. I’m not stupid. This is what… what Quinn did.”

I step back, unable to feign passivity. Of course we’re the same: both of us want to leave, want to abandon these loose, unwieldy human skins, become something more.

He steps forwards. Runs a hand through his hair in that familiar, worried movement. I watch his gaze travel up and down me, then, achingly slow, towards the hand tucked into my pocket. Trust him to notice the one thing I don’t want, to barge in just as it’s finally coming together. I want to reply, find some excuse, but I cannot.

“Lonnie…”

“I’m okay! I’m fine!”

“Roll up your sleeve.”

So, so close. I back away a step, look over my shoulder towards the window. His eyes track the movement. “Roll it up, Lonnie. I love you. I don’t want… I just want to help you.”

For a moment, I truly consider it. I could jump out the window, feel my glass bones shatter, lay there dying on the ground like Bucket all those years ago. They’d mend eventually, and then I could finally rise through the tattered remnants of my fake skin.

In my mind, a scattered mosaic flashes by. Quinn’s words—I never tried hard enough. Kenna’s, her chatter, her attempts to help. Finn, telling me to go back home while he took care of this—what did he feel, shooting Bucket? What did he feel when Quinn vanished, when they found his skin left by the riverside, and I never came back to mourn?

And what about me, the one who didn’t leave in time? Sometimes I used to lay awake at night and wonder why Quinn remembered our origins while I didn’t. I wanted that fantasy, wanted to know the trees and the water as intimately as I knew myself.

“I remember a Heart,” he told me once, “large and red and beating. I think it’s buried under the swamp, and its veins are the tunnels, and the trees took its blood and made us from the excess.”

Later, on my bed, I screwed my eyes shut and tried my best to envision it—fleshy in its grandeur, knotted cords of muscle spread tight with bluish veins. It pumped its blood into the Earth to create us glass-like beings.

Tears are rolling down my cheeks as my head spins loopy circles. My heart, or at least a heart, because maybe mine and the swamp’s are one and the same, beats steadily in my chest.

Slowly, I grab the hem of my sleeve and roll it up. Fingers first, then the sharpness of the wrist, and finally the arm as it gleams. I don’t look at Finn’s face—try to focus on the window and the shadows of the swamp on the horizon and the faint notion of two long, thin things beyond, until the world darkens.

---

That’s where we come to, I suppose, and I’m not quite sure what my third wish even became. The wish of never having left, the wish of succeeding sooner or not succeeding at all, the wish that Bucket had never run onto the road that dusty summer day; Quinn never crawled out of his skin and into the deep, deep woods.

All I know now is that it is Thanksgiving Day, and I am crouching by the riverside. I told them—fainted first but awoke before they could even think to call anyone. Started on that dusty summer day by the roadside and ended now, before Finn saw.

They believed, somehow. Quinn thought they never would. I suppose the inhumanity of my glass limb, the pure proof of supernatural, helped a bit.

It’s not really a satisfying story, I think. Not a story of transformation—only halfway, only my hands. Not a story of revenge, because who would I take it against? Not Quinn, not Finn nor Kenna. No villains here, just a swamp and creature living inside my skin.

There is no ending to this besides me and the river, cold under my fingers. Could be my imagination, but I think the eels are back, undulating in the depths.

I close my eyes. Kenna is cooking up a feast in the house, but I know that neither of them would want food. Reach my river-wet hand out—the glass one. The skin is growing back, bit by bit, without me peeling it. Because I’ve been eating, no matter how tight my throat feels. Water slides down from my fingertips. The eels we used to catch would dart through our fingers if we weren’t careful. Like wishes, I suppose, slipping through your grasp.

Something splashes in the water. I hold my breath. In a slick, smooth motion, a hand clasps mine. There’s dangerous pressure behind it, like it could tug me in at any moment, but I don’t open my eyes.

“Quinn, I’m sorry. I can’t. Not right now. I’ve waited too long.” In that aspect, he was right—he was the wispy, dark one, built for sliding through shadows, while I was made to stick. “Finn… and Kenna, I told them. They didn’t kill me or lock me away. They believed, you know?”

A shuffling in the water. Whether it’s a separate shape, or just this one moving again, I can’t tell. My eyes stay closed because, for whatever reason, I don’t want to ruin it—ruin the mystique of what Quinn crafted in my mind. All those years under the blankets, telling me the stories that he remembered. I imagine our true forms as tall, long-limbed creatures—a smooth plane where the face would be found, hollow bodies filled with gently swaying waves. We barely touch the ground when we run, gliding past in a blur of spindly tips.

Creatures of the river and creatures of the swamp, creatures borne of the Heart that beats ever-neath, and tears slide down my cheek as I realize that Quinn did remember to wait for me, was waiting for the moment when I’d slide out of my skin and into the depths. And here I am to tell him that I’m not, maybe never will.

“They cried for a while, but Finn said that he’d always felt something was different about us. Connor’s here too, you know. Came in around lunchtime. He was the most torn-up about you… you leaving.” Pause to gather my breath. “I know you two were never too close, but you were twins, or he thought you were twins. He thinks that that means he should’ve seen it coming, found a way to stop you. I might tell him, someday, just so he doesn’t always carry this with him.”

The grip tightens. My breathing quavers, but I remain still.

“It’s too long of a story to tell. I’ve talked enough today already. But… but I came down to the river to say goodbye, Quinn. I love you. Always have, but I can’t leave. I’m too slow, never able to slip out, and I tried, wanted to follow, but my skin isn’t sliding off and… and I want to stay.” Stay with Kenna, with Finn, finish college and vanquish the thought that I had failed my brother.

“You don’t have to wait for me anymore. Run off with Bucket, go gliding through the deep places, go into the Heart. I… I might follow, in fifty years or seventy, but not now. I’m sorry.”

There’s another brief pause. In a flash, the grip tenses, and my breath catches in my throat. I know that I’m going to be pulled away, pulled through the roots and the thorns until the last of my skin sloughs off—

But then it loosens again, and I realize that it was a gesture of understanding, not malice. The comfort of something too thin and cold to hug me, who has no mouth to speak anymore. I squeeze back, careful to keep it gentle, and for a moment we linger. “Goodbye.”

Then, quick as the eels way back when, it slips out of my grasp.

I sit there as dry reeds whisper in the wind. Open my eyes after a long moment. All is still. The moon casts crescents onto the river’s waves, and I cannot see the eels anymore.

Must be another fifteen minutes that I remain, thinking, soaking in the ambiance of what I could’ve had. What I could still have in years, many years of who-knows-what. Cool river encasing my feet, ghosts of creatures long and svelte whispering by my skin. The swamp and all the foreign beasts within that I may never know.

They pass in silence, and then, it’s enough. I stand and walk back towards the house. Leave Quinn, Bucket, the swamp, the river full of wishes slick like eels behind in the gloom.

© 2025 Irene Liang

[Issue 2025.73]

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