Serene sticks out her tongue in the shower. Spirit saltiness in her mouth makes the sprinkles taste like seawater. It takes a while for the aftertaste to freshen. She hugs her finger with each curl in equal measure, afraid to play favorites, another holdover. When she emerges, towel-wrapped, Charlie, lanky and dark and already dressed for work, stands stiffly in the thin hall. In bed, they stick to one another, skin to skin, as the feeling seeps out. Upright and bashful, they can barely make eye contact, even though her skin is still magnetized by sensory memory. She starts, lifting her chin to speak.

“Heading out,” he says. “Have a good day at work.”

She nods. He takes a half-step towards her. She resists, raising her hands in defense, but he opens his arms and embraces her. Dropping his head low, he presses a kiss into the top of her head. She is afraid to move. She has to clear her throat to speak. “Are you still…?”

“No, I’m just me.” He pulls the corners of his mouth into a line and clears his throat.

Each Sunday night, the two of them are mounted by deities, loa, from the other side. Star-crossed lovers, La Sirene and Chango, that meet on this plane by borrowing their bodies. In the beginning of the ritual, La Sirene and Serene struggle for control. La Sirene tears into her. When the struggle ends, La Sirene takes over completely, and the hours are lost time.

By Monday morning, the hosts are once more strangers, dry and cool.

Her hair drips water on her shoulders, and she wonders if love could rub off through a transitive property. She liked that kiss. When she confides in Caroline and Yanet about the morning encounter, her friends fear that the boundaries are fading.

It started, for the second time in her life, at a club. She had been a feather-plucked chicken gyrating in the graffitied mirror of the one-stall. No, a duck, with lips kissing nothing. Relieving herself of the bathroom, Serene breathed out into the pheromone-infused air of Ritual, the newest venue in Downtown Oakland, to find herself inexplicably inebriated. Bulbs emitted smudged starlight and heart-beating drums synchronized with a place inside of her. Individuals coagulated and curdled into unbounded groups. Through the thrum, she caught Caroline’s kinky straight black hair swaying. Yanet twisted her long neck to wave Serene over. Two lattice-haired men had descended upon her friends. She loathed being a fifth wheel due to its frequency, and excused herself.

Serene should have been cautious. Club attendees always displaced collected anger into one kind of passion or another. A man shoved her. A hard brush that solidified her unseen-ness. She swiveled over her stinging shoulder, as if pulled by a string. Sweat stuck a button-up to the man’s chest. He shifted, strangling a bottle of rum in one dark hand. As she trailed him, she felt thin-fingered phantom caresses on her arms. Seduction before the seizure. Then, she felt a gripping of her shoulders, like a looming father detaining a misbehaving child.

The man feathered white rum over the head of a nearby woman, ensuring drops fell into her hair, and poured onto the ground. The offering. Serene, possessed with fear, ran into the center of the circle. When she pulled at the bottle, the slickness of it slipped it out of his grip, and out of hers. It shattered on the ground. One inconsequential shard flew into her shin and fell out fast as it went in. A spot of her blood infused into the rum.

Dancers’ feet swiped across the floor, but black-lit, glowing inscriptions beneath them—scrawled beneath a glass layer—did not wipe away. Her stomach experienced a splitting. A Voudou ritual had begun. She backed away in fear and fought, but fighting looked like dancing, fluid and free. The man, possessed, watched her. Mischievous designs appeared angelic on the lwa’s handsome host. She suffered a mortification, a little death of self. She wanted to push him away. No, she wanted to pull him in. She turned around, slid against him, making one being of their two bodies. She lost, then. She welcomed La Sirene and chomped on a salted bit. La Sirene turned their body back around. The man whispered in Haitian Creole, “mwen te manke ou.” Missed you.

He held Chango. Chango’s core was seduction and La Sirene’s was beauty and together they had corrupting influence. Through thought, La Sirene gifted Serene the full truth of Chango, and so was gifted, secondhand, Serene’s first love. This love was in the wanting; all love was in the wanting.

Charlie’s given her the code to his apartment, a twenty-fifth-floor apartment inside the glass building on Broadway. The den is sinfully modern, sleek white and dark grey where it isn’t. She lets herself in the next Sunday evening. He texts running late sorry, so she uses the time to snoop. He has on his walls pictures of a small, affectionate family. Because La Sirene is a mute, she has never asked him about his own past: if he has any knowledge or prior participation in these rituals.

Charlie, entering, has a neutral responsive quality, like a sparse clouds on a hot day, passing the sun by. She refrains from asking why he is late because of unspoken limitations on accessing his unpossessed time. Unprompted, he tells her he dined at his mother’s house. He brought her a plate. She typically wouldn’t eat before coming. A stranger would be seeing her naked body. Of course, by the time La Sirene took control there was no such insecurity.

She chews while he watches. He probably also thinks she’s less attractive when she’s just herself. Quiet on La Sirene is mysteriously sexy. Quiet on her is an absence of goodness. She wants to be a word wizard, to enchant people, trick them, but instead, she trains herself in finding things to say. That’s why she’s a meteorologist for ABC7 KGO. People love talking about the weather.

He asks her about her week. She complains about Bay Area microclimates, even though she likes the complications. It’s raining this week, she says, a lot. Apparently, the apartment is nice when it rains. He describes the sound of drops on the windows. The daytime darkness. She wants to see, but it’ll end by Sunday. He tells her to come by Thursday. She asks him about his work. He hates programming, especially because he corrals a team all over America. He must be more authoritative there. In here, he lacks a commanding presence. That came from Chango. It’s one of the things that she and La Sirene love. Chango has the force of a cyclone.

Charlie drinks the rum for the summoning. Serene drinks white wine. She looks over the town and at the city, partially shielded from the fog. She knows La Sirene is mounting her when the bay itself calls to her. La Sirene’s first thought is that Chango is a fool for taking them into the air when they were close to the water. La Sirene cannot speak this, but Chango understands it anyway. The fiendish deity smokes cigarettes two at a time, and then Chango, having mounted Charlie, hugs her from behind. In Charlie’s body, Chango is seductive as all hell. She relishes in the solid feeling of him. He kisses her neck. She shrugs him away, at first playfully, and then she doesn’t. He breathes smoke into her. She wonders if he can taste ocean; if it’s Atlantic or Pacific.

In the morning, she tries to leave his bed, but Charlie pulls her back in. She ends up flush against him with her on top. He looks at her through sleepy, hooded eyes. She wants to kiss him. She wants to go further. She has to push herself off of him. “It’s the deal,” Charlie says, and when she looks at him with her head tilted, he says, “It’s part of my deal.” She lets her head loll down onto his chest. They lay there for thirty more minutes before she pries herself away.

That night, humidity saturated the club’s air, and she sang along to Keyshia Cole. Caroline approached to ask her if she’d been drugged, but La Sirene was a mute. Attempting speech was coughing up coral. Caroline pled over the warbling Hyphy music. A brackish part of Serene, one that resented her sidelined designation, suspected Caroline was jealous of Chango’s attention. La Sirene shook her head for her. Chango threatened Caroline. Serene was afraid. La Sirene had a way of snipping at the bonds that form love itself. When Chango swept Serene away to Charlie’s apartment for the first time, from her eyes’ peripheral limits she saw Yanet chasing after her, pulling desperately at the car handle, knocking against the window. They tracked her down to his apartment and knocked on the door until La Sirene felt compelled to answer. The last time she’d been so at the edge of herself, the three girls had taken a trip to Jamaica, the closest to home she’d been since they left.

Feet dug into blue sand, Serene focused on the thin strip of moonlight that bisected black water of the night, like a path to home. She took off her bikini as she went in, leaving the pieces to float. She swam towards her naked friends, and then she kept swimming. Ripples in the water were created by her body cutting through tension. She kept swimming. She felt compelled, by memories of the last time she felt real, to stand, and walk into the ocean, the way she had when she was a kid. She would not be able to return to her aquatic self without sacrificing her physical form. She would perish, but there would be resurrection.

“Salty girl!” Caroline jumped onto her back, laughing, and pulling her out of the reverie.

She teased her about going too far and tickled her neck. Serene questioned, “Salty girl?”

“You know you smell like sea.” Yanet, feeling left out, joined them. “We love it.”

Serene cherished her friends; their moonlit brown skin; their apple cheeks pulling into wide smiles. Their happiness made her happy and her happiness made them happy, and it was in this way they vaulted each other into happiness.

In the bright hall of the building, it was for her friends more than herself that she returned to normalcy. Serene visualized the corrupting hand of La Sirene and lifted the fingers. They were unforgiving, clamping like iron and bruising her. Seawater touched her lips. Yanet surged forward and pulled her into an embrace. Caroline joined them. Serene negotiated with La Sirene—let them go. La Sirene was amused. It was not she who drew them nor who compelled them to stay.

Serene knew no one the way she knew La Sirene. With all others, their interiority was inaccessible. Serene felt that distance, both from the actual matter of their thoughts and also the cues to clue her into them. With La Sirene, both barriers were overcome. She knew La Sirene, unfiltered by speech or acts. They bargained. La Sirene requested to walk with her once a week. Yes, yes, I will. Serene’s knees buckled, and the weight of her pulled her friends into the floor of the hallway.

Caroline, Serene, and Yanet, three socialite geniuses, powered through college. They had been freshmen roommates by chance, though only Serene was random. The two of them were high-yellow and big-eyed and often mistaken for twins. They were two glass marbles, with the layered veins of color at their core, coming down a gentle slope and clicking together. Caroline, the chef, smelled like cracked pepper, and Yanet was sweet as honey. Caroline liked to shuffle cards and Yanet liked to deal them. Before her possession, she hid from Caroline and Yanet her past, afraid if they found out, they would shade her in all wrong. Serene had been the marine layer that hovered just over the Pacific, dense and turbulent, and likely to cause June Gloom. Of course, Serene’s past slipped out and Caroline asked her who Eliza was and why she spoke in Creole in her sleep. Then, they learned the full truth that night months ago.

They take her to dinners each Thursday night. This Thursday, Yanet is clear: “Don’t spend too much time with him. La Sirene could mistake it as permission to spend more time using you.”

Serene frowned. “That’s not the agreement.”

“She barely acquiesced to once a week,” Caroline points out.

His apartment sways from the storm. She’s sure the windows will shatter. Their voices swim under the rain. She tells him she used to want to be a field reporter. A tornado tracker, or the person in the eye of a hurricane getting battered. She’s too shy for it. She isn’t on the air much, but recently, she’s been assigned to the atmospheric river.

“It feels weird to be here without any threat of sudden ghostly possession.,” she says, though they both know they aren’t ghosts.

“Really?” he asks. “I wouldn’t know. I’m here all the time without any threat of sudden ghostly possession.”

They’d been sober for so long. She releases a shaky breath. “Yeah. Now you’ll see that my possessed moments are my most normal.”

In the dark half-reflection of the floor to ceiling window, she sees him raise his eyebrows. “I find that…easy to believe.”

“Hey!”

He nudges her from the side. “Is that why you do it?”

“That and childhood trauma, like all things.”

She wants to ask him if it’d started for him when he was a kid, but he gets a text that upsets him. His inability to disguise his dismay reassures her about all the other times she’d been curious about his internal disposition.

His eyes trace thoughts juggling in the air. She asks him, “Is everything okay?”

“In a sense.” He pauses, then continues. “But in another sense, no. I don’t think so.”

She, surprising herself, asks, “In what sense?”

“My sister just sent me a text about our father’s upcoming nuptials. She is saying she won’t be going.”

“Why wouldn’t she go?”

“My father wasn’t supposed to be getting married.” His hand puffs on his hair. “I’ve never even heard about this. He called her today, apparently.”

“And not you?” She touches the tip of her nose, her own nervous tick.

“He doesn’t have my number.” He puts his phone away. “He expects us both to go. Small, quick thing, I guess.”

“Would you?” Serene is catching onto the gambit. They are not connected to each other in any mundane way, so he can tell her anything he wants to.

He smiles weakly at her. “He’s sick. Really sick. Bipolar. I am worried, of course. He has phases. You know the first time I was…. At Ritual, I thought that was what was happening to me. Suddenly confident, manic, happy. I thought it was happening to me, but it was just Chango.”

She breaches their boundary to give him an awkward hug. He puts his hand on the small of her back and nuzzles into her hair. Sensory memory. To correct the vulnerability imbalance, she confides in him. “First time for me, I was just a kid. I didn’t fully understand what was happening. I was mounted for months. Sometimes, I worry…that she leeched something out of me. Like the person I am now was the lesser twin in the womb.” She can barely even speak most of the time, a lifelong holdover from having her tongue taken.

“I don’t know how much Chango conveys to you. Did you know they wanted to have us for good? I bargained for once a week,” she tells him.

“You did?” he asks.

“Is that upsetting? I know I didn’t get your permission. I didn’t think about it. That I had a say, and you didn’t.”

She fears that the possession, and the cessation of it, will irreparably damage him. She has to remind herself that he’s not an impressionable child being forced into the corner of his own mind. Not the way that she was.

His hand is still on her back when he tells her to stay the night. It’s late, and she shouldn’t be out and about. They get ready for bed, like it’s normal, but when they approach it, she waits at the periphery. He laughs at her as he pulls her wrists and folds her into him, like butter into dough, like it’s normal.

Nestled in the swing of his elbow, she is restless. Serene doesn’t know how he can stand being around her. He could be craving La Sirene and settling for her. She could be like a star, one to wish for La Sirene upon. She should think of him as little. Their arrangement could be forcing him to stay single. She guesses he could also not be single. That triggers a possessiveness. Leftover from La Sirene.

It started, for the first time, at an outdoor church service by Red River, though the river in Lenbe had been more maroon. Serene’s name had been Eliza. At seven years old, the lwa, deities from the other side, found an anchor for earthly existence upon Eliza’s back. The mountings were an easy coming-together. Priests would guide the process. Drums would beat; time between her breaths would condense; speech and sound descended. The loa Linto would use her body to waddle or babble; or Erzulie would take her body to dance in-beat. The loa would leave her swift as they gripped her. Her family had been relegated to the outskirts of the commune since revolution. In repayment, the loa blessed her family with health and success and honor.

One dark day, her mother threw her over her knee for being too mouthy. The pain confused her. Eliza tried to rebel, protesting attending the congregation. Her mother twisted a burn into her skin until she cried. During the ritual, La Sirene tempted her by kissing her tender forearm. In relief, Eliza allowed her to mount. When she was mounted by La Sirene, her teeth coated themselves in brine. La Sirene entranced her and forced her into cohabitation, waiting for her lover, Chango, to join them. She growled at anyone who would refer to her as Eliza. Bitterness overwhelmed.

After a few days, Eliza found herself on the beach. She walked into waves as if water were air. Her form dissipated into an aqueous state. She swam across seas and down rivers. She watched the light cut and scatter in shallows. Seaweed rolled on her tongue, ever furled. She giggled at passing fish, found coves to hide away in. In the depths, with the weight of a thousand worlds upon her, she danced with Agwe. In the deep she sat at sea bottom, in the absolute silence and in the absolute dark. In that blackness, she knew true loneliness. She knew the nothing of absence. In the water, she could sing.She could even sing whale song.

Eliza came back to Lenbe with no real understanding of the time that passed, though a year did pass, more and less than expected. Her mother dropped to her knees when she saw her. The last time Eliza saw her mother cry, it had scared her that adults could feel big emotions. This time, Eliza felt nothing, even when her mother dug her nose into her hair, shaking her.

Granme made offerings to the loa Mama Wata to remove the spirit. Mama Wata wrung Eliza’s soul and let the water of La Sirene drip out. La Sirene’s tender fingers left loving indents. Language returned to Eliza slow. She felt fragile as a Mango bird and hollow as their bones. Salt stayed on her lips and flavored each of her words. Mother had enough hate to take a half day flight to the wrong side of the United States. Bodies of water looked different from above.

She lost La Sirene, but she kept the name—Sirene—which was anglicized in the move.

Charlie calls her to tell her he’s seen her on TV. She filled in. The weather today was a product of quiet patterns. She asks him if he liked the broadcast, and he says she’s a different sort of possessed. He likes it. He likes her when she’s any kind of possessed. They text all week. Wellness checks, pulse checks, temperature checks, and barometric. She isn’t afraid to relay this to her friends to ask for their opinion. They think it’s cute and that it’s weird, and they are right that it is so weird, but everything will be weird for her, with or without Charlie.

They are out of routine. She came over Saturday night instead because Sunday is the wedding. Serene kisses Charlie in the amorphous time where she and La Sirene are negotiating her body, and she tries with everything in her being to express to Charlie that she’s there, too, before the time is lost.

In the morning, she asks how’s he feeling about the wedding.

“Not very good. Not the worst.”

“You act so ambivalent when what you actually, really are is unhappy.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she attests.

“Yeah,” he confirms. When he asks her to come with him, he doesn’t even have to be convincing. Like with all other things, she submits. They stop by her house on the way to the venue. She dresses while he peruses her messy room. The opposite of his place, even in class. He expresses surprise. He really doesn’t know her all that well.

“These are your friends? I remember them,” he says as he picks up their photobooth print out. She gets anxious when men comment on her friends.

She asks him something she’s been meaning to: “What are your memories like? Of that time when you’re with Chango.”

“Very clear,” he says. “Very. I remember meeting you.”

“Same. I feel like all of their time, our time too, I guess, makes me feel closer to you than I actually am. Blurry lines.”

“I feel exactly as close to you as I should be,” he says. “I can tell you from La Sirene before you even speak.”

“Well…” she starts, preparing to argue that he couldn’t possibly even want to know her, let alone succeed, but she’s busy trying to zip herself up in the closet. It’s nonsensical to change away from him, especially when his memories are very clear, very. “Actually, can you help me?”

She avoids looking at him. He is wearing a nice, tailored suit. She gets flustered as he approaches and turns her around. He holds her hair up with one hand and zips her up. Before he releases her hair, he pecks the top of her neck. She flinches.

He says, “Sorry, I don’t know why I did that,” but she does.

His father had a courthouse ceremony, so the two of them attend a cozy, close-knit dinner in the backroom of a nice restaurant. She really hadn’t expected his father or his father’s new wife to be white. Charlie doesn’t have to say anything for them to assume she’s his girlfriend, and he doesn’t seem to mind. If she hadn’t known about the estrangement between father and son, she would never have guessed it, though she did see Charlie putting in his phone number in his father’s phone.

With family, childhood impulses, worn down by adulthood, flare. Serene likes being able to observe someone as the nested version of themselves. Charlie is never this charming with Serene. But then, she thinks, from Charlie’s inquisitive manner, animated way of being, despite his discomfort, he kept them entertained. Placated them. That’s why Chango chose him. Charlie can make his own gravity the way that Serene can make herself quiet and put herself away. His sister speaks in short bursts, and then is overcome with a self-consciousness. His sister teases her for staying silent, despite being a TV personality. He speaks for Serene: “You guys are making her nervous.” He says this even though he has spent hours with a mute La Sirene, and Serene is slow to speak.

Later, when she corrects him on it, all he says is, “That’s not you. You can speak. You have a nice way about the things you say. How does it feel, during the ritual, when she takes your voice?”

“It’s so hard for me. Like I’m pushing something out. And my mouth is salty as the dead sea.” She continues, “And when she’s not around, it still feels like I’m pushing something out.” Except for with Charlie. Talking to him is less like pushing and more like holding him close.

“Like she’s conditioned you.” He pauses. “Have you ever considered that everything you say is actually really nice and that every moment that you aren’t speaking is a disservice to us all?”

He does listen. “I should’ve asked your sister if you are this much of a flirt with everyone. It’s hard to tell with you.”

“Just because I’m flirting doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

Unlike warm fronts, cold fronts come on unexpected. As she sleeps over for the second night, she has a certainty that frightens her. She wants to be held by him as they sleep. To sleep in his arms without kissing, then to kiss him, so she does, on his temple. It’s his temple; that’s why she kisses him there.

He can’t possibly reciprocate her wants, not purely. When he wakes, something ugly inside of her lashes, and asks, “Do you ever think about the fact that we can never truly know one another? There will always be this big thing between us that clouds and softens us to each other.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like for me. La Sirene makes me feel like I’m in love with Chango. I might be. I can’t even tell the difference.”

“You can’t?”

She realizes now that she’s been speaking for too long.

She worries he may take her to mean she can’t differentiate them. The seductive timber of Chango, his casual confidence, are afterimages that follow Charlie around. Echoes that she can’t help but project into his body. He is stiff underneath her, and she turns to check his expression, but he is looking away. “Well, I can a little.” She regrets that she’s not mute full time.

He doesn’t respond, and gently plucking her off of him, he slides out of bed. Abruptly holding herself up, she says his name, but he rushes to shower. He is cordial with her for the rest of the morning. She tries to broach the subject. She is at a disadvantage, which is that she already hates speaking. She tries bringing it up one more time. “About earlier, I just meant—”

“I know what you meant. It bothers me and it doesn’t. Don’t worry about it.” He looks her right in the eyes as he says, “Just let me take you to work.”

She doesn’t realize that Charlie had been indulging her by being so open. Fog descends.

Atmospheric rivers carry as much water in a thin string of storm as an actual river, flowing up until they drop it all on the city. She shakes through her news segment even though the winds have yet to pick up. The Bay Area isn’t built to handle this much liquid. Nowhere in California is. Her entire adolescence took place during the drought. Those who grew through it are like desert flowers, unprepared for an onslaught of flooding. Serene expects Charlie to break the silence first, as she had been last one to be dismissed, but he doesn’t. She pretends to be busy. She can’t stop talking about it. Caroline and Yanet feel sorry for her. They tell her he’ll cool down, and it’s up to her what she wants to do. She feels like her response is entirely outside of her. Above her. She can’t sleep. She convinces herself she’s overthinking it out of guilt, out of friendship. It’s a low-pressure system.

He comes to his own home late on Sunday, having already been drinking elsewhere. She smells the smoke before she sees him. She doesn’t want him to have to drink himself into being around her, but before she can say anything about it, the ritual has already started, and she’s mute. When they kiss, she wants to stop and discuss, but she can’t.

The next morning, sitting in bed, the bitter mineral scratches her throat as she forces herself to say, “That was unbelievable."

“This was your idea, remember. Your compromise. We give up this part of our lives.” He reclines and averts lidded eyes, pretending not to care or actually not caring.

“You know I want to talk to you,” she protests.

“Well, why do I have to do what you like? You can’t even tell me apart from an evil spirit who really doesn’t give a fuck about much, not even La Sirene,”He is sitting up now, blankets gathering around his waist.

“Chango doesn’t love La Sirene?” But Chango, he controls La Sirene. Her thoughts, her feelings, her motives, and means. Chango has more completely possessed La Sirene than either of the deities had possessed their hosts. The vessels, she and Charlie, retained had their own reason.

She realizes he’s noticed which detail she’s hanging on to. He looks away.

He mumbles, “I’m sorry. I know that must hurt you, too.”

La Sirene has heard his admission, but for Serene, it’s only a prick of a feeling. “No, that’s not it.”

“I can tell you apart. I just couldn’t sift through all the love, the lust, she has for him. I was overwhelmed. This is overwhelming. I assumed you were struggling in the same way. That you’d been thrown these conflicting feelings because of the arrangement.”

“For me…” He turns to her. “Chango doesn’t love La Sirene. He just likes to mess around. Maybe that influences my dislike for her, too, I don’t know, but I really don’t like her. I don’t like what she did to you when you were young, and I don’t like that she steals your body now.”

“But—” La Sirene repurposes her. Anyone would be grateful.

“—When we started to get to know each other, it was easy for me to parse out how I felt. My feelings are uncomplicated. I like you. Specifically.”

“But you hardly know me. You don’t even know.” Serene doesn’t even know herself. Then, again she doesn’t know him, either. Abstract, unknowable places exist in him, likely where deities take refuge, but she likes him. He’d already grown by the time he became a host; she contorted around the experience. For the long years where she was alone, she twisted. He doesn’t even know. She believes he believes what he says, but he says it because he doesn’t know any better. She struggles with her own logic. She retrains her eye onto Charlie. “You just give me attention.”

“But it’s you I like to attend to.” He pulls her across the expanse of bed and holds her to him and whispers in Creole, “mwen te manke ou.”

Since 2008, Serene has dreamt only the nothing of deep sea. A nothing that burrowed into her, ate away. In this one, she’s at the edge of something ancient and wrinkled, the ocean. Water laps at her feet, sparkling and warm, so she knows she’s nowhere close to San Francisco. She kicks it up. She marvels at bright hues swirling around each other like atmospheric circulations. It’s an acid trip, spilling, and fusing with her. Distracted, she doesn’t even notice when a cool strong hand grips her by her bony ankle and drags her in. It doesn’t qualify as screaming if no sound comes out. She is pulled into a vortex by the being, a disorienting slide, and finds herself upright once more in a cave of mirrors. La Sirene is seated nearby, a dark beauty with her purple tail stretched out, meaty and scaled like fish on ice at the market. Serene takes a watery seat on a rock as eroded as she is. La Sirene can’t speak, even in dreams, but she looks at her, and Serene understands her meaning. La Sirene has come to her to confirm that Chango doesn’t love her, and she sees what she needs to in Serene’s mind. Serene tells her you almost ruined me. La Sirene conveys to her that she won’t be needing her anymore. But La Sirene had needed her. Serene can feel the dream start to slip away but she won’t let it. Whose body is that? Who else did you steal? Serene mouths voicelessly. Mine, La Sirene thinks, slipped out of chains and poured over the ship’s ledge and joined something older than me and we became this. Upon waking, relief falls into dismay.

The following Sunday, Chango comes when prompted. Her breath is spiced by rum, but her throat never closes. When Chango nears to her for a kiss, she is able to say, “Stop.”

He rears his head, “La Sirene?"

“She isn’t here. She’s not with me. She will no longer walk with me,” Serene says. It’s different from when she was a kid. She doesn’t feel empty. She had been crowded out, and now she has breathing room.

“For what reason?” he demands, trying to use his height as leverage, in a way that Charlie never would. He uses his arms as braces around her, squeezing in.

“She can’t speak. How would I know?” she says, even though she does. “She’s broken the agreement. That means this deal, this weekly ritual, is off. Please. You need to leave.”

Chango scrutinizes her, and then releases Charlie. Intensity is exorcised and gives way to something soft. In a moment, Charlie’s hands maneuver loosely to her hips. She clears her throat. They both laugh. Their first kiss is softer than she expected. His hands are gentler, too. It’s sweet, a cool breeze until it isn’t. Then, it’s weather whiplash, and it’s a tornado, and she’s a storm chaser, after all.