He thought drowning would feel blissful. Scary at first, the panic of breathlessness, but then pleasant and mostly serene. He had already decided that, when the time came, he would be eclipsed from this life with a mangled Manfred quote: "It is not so difficult to die, after all."

It was not peaceful.

The salt stung the inside of his torso, his ribs turned to knives that sliced him open. His very blood felt like an attack: an enemy of his own making. He swallowed mouthful after mouthful of seawater. His throat burned, his stomach distended to bursting. The sound of the ocean filled his ears: a beast, roaring with aquatic laughter. Manfred? Who's Manfred?

Cass can't bring herself to watch her brother burn. All the websites say you should, and that you should also watch as they scrape the ash up and put it in the urn. That you should not take your eyes off your loved one at all.

She doesn't understand how anyone could follow that advice.

She stays in the waiting area, sitting in one of the hard plastic chairs. There is a bereavement room with a couch and a small table where people can sit and weep in something closer to comfort, but to Cass it feels too small and... full. Full of sadness and confusion and the ache of stale loneliness. Her grief needs more space. Her grief is bigger than a small room already crowded with painful echoes.

It starts as superstition, like touching wood when she hears the word accident or never slicing into an orange. Then she tests it. Eight Saturdays in a row she drives to Hoban Point, crying her eyes out while the radio pours forth blue.

Years of drought. And then rain, every time.

It isn’t a coincidence. Noemi’s car radio controls the weather.

“I know you said you don’t like kids.” Lingwei doesn't look at me as she brings her half-smoked cigarette up to her lips, leaning against the half-broken fence I sit on top of. “But Aisha needs a sitter. Just for today. And I can't do it.”

Her hand wanders to her back pocket, feeling for her cig packet. She takes it out, shakes it—there can't be more than a handful remaining—and shoves it back in with a sigh. I can almost hear her lungs deteriorating in real time.

[Exhibit 1: Scientific betrayal, witnessed in an illegally inhabited shipping container.]

My stolen satellite reception sputters, but not enough to hide the truth. I would know her face behind the fluttering colors of an ineptly stolen signal; I would know it dirt streaked in the dark over any hundred pilfered graves.

The soil is parched beneath her feet. The word ‘drought’ hangs in the bare trees and weaves silently through the dead grass. It follows her, close and curious about the life and magic in her. Water, the landscape seems to murmur. Water. Water.

But there is none. Hasn’t been for years.

I wasn’t there the day that Glenda’s daughter Misty found a stray hen wandering along the gravel edge of Monstrance Street, because I only come out at night. I heard about it through the shadows of the ivy that grew in through the cracks in Glenda’s walls and all along her ceiling, hanging in gravity curves against the plastic tarp that kept the insulation dust from falling on her bed at night. I heard about it from the hen herself, in the pen that Glenda and her boyfriend Henning made from scrap they found around the commune grounds. She clucked softly in the twilight hours and wondered where her freedom went.

You cannot tell a person how to love you. You can only decide if you will accept their love.

First, there was Adeh, broad, dark, and bearded. At the beginning of the world, he taught me what love was, and how to accept it. I imprinted on him like a chick on a hen and followed him into a tomb. No matter. The next love brought me out of it.

There’s something wonderful about drinking during the peak of the summer heat back home—the way my skin beads with sweat and raucous laughter hangs in the air like a cloud. When we gather to talk about the old days, huddled at the benches outside the Wandering Leaf, I almost start to forget that I ever left Calathede, and I wonder what it would’ve been like to spend all of my young adulthood within the walls of the castletown. A different world where I hadn’t touched parchment or ink and instead, like everyone else, married the first person I kissed and squeezed into a home filled with the squalling of little ones and peals of tiny laughter too. A whole lifetime that flickers and dies in the span of moments, somewhere in the depths of my idle imagination.

So you travel to another world, save the kingdom, and get the girl. Except, because you’re queer and this is a dragon-haunted world, your girl’s a guy, and he’s an elf. And when it’s time for you to go home, he insists on following. So back you go, hand-in-hand with your new elf boyfriend, to a drafty apartment in Boston, Massachusetts.

The first few days in your world, he’s so excited he barely sleeps. He laughs as he opens and closes the refrigerator. The first time you take him on the MBTA’s “big iron worm” might be the best day of his life. No one has ever found a trip to Dunkin Donuts so edifying.