He calls us his little birds, his little doves. We do not call him God. He tells us this.

Once, she turned to stone mid-stroke and suddenly sank to the bottom of the lake, where whitefish darted between her arms like children running an obstacle course.

In the days somewhere between one winter and another spring, the night kept calling us to the sewer.

There is an unspoken fear that a daughter’s innocence, hence marriageability, would somehow be threatened.

Beatriz feels alarmingly soft in your hands, and you graze her body with your palms the way you would pet the long grass by the river where you live. She tosses her dark hair aside, wraps her hand over yours, and clenches down on her own flesh.

In therapy, I was used to experiencing myself as a sieve, a bum mirror, a talking machine. My body language was typically involuntary. “Scared?” I said, though that sounded so much more specific. Around us, potted plants offered oxygen.