So you got yourself a local woman.

It’s their term, a singular that implies the rest. No one else has named them, though it’s not a name. It’s a category, a headline, a support group. They’re the only ones who understand each other, and trying to explain exhausts them. They’ll try to explain if you ask, but that’s what this guide is for. So you don’t have to ask.

Local women are individuals until they’re not. They can be from anywhere, and woman just means not a dude. They’re not necessarily old, but they are the opposite of naïve.

Did you know you could be one, too? Local women can be inherited, and they can be recessive. They can take a while to express. They can be anybody—your wife, your mother, your child, your best friend, your neighbor or doctor or coworker. You don’t know until you know. You’ve seen—maybe even been—lots of them.

It’s okay to be overwhelmed at first. You have questions. Why is it always women? Local to where? The answers will come, but they’ll only prepare you to ask better questions. Local women know what you’re really after. You asked how to care, but what you mean is how to keep. They’ll be honest. They can’t tell you that.

Local women aren’t who or where they seem to be. They’re wily. They’ve been here since the beginning—always local, always women. They exist across time, absolved of parenting and period. A rose is a rose, but a woman by any other name—well, that’s exactly who they are. They’re multiple. They are all the same woman, playing out a million different plots.

Nobody knows exactly what makes one turn and another not. They have to want out, and they have to be willing to go. They share a certain kind of misfortune and a certain kind of invisibility. They’ve been harmed, but they’re not headline material. They understand how to background themselves. They understand entrapment. They’ve learned to love each other and no one else.

Sorry. It’s true.

Not really like a carousel, but they do ride each other. Maybe ride is the wrong word, but the right word isn’t possess. Sort of like tag, sort of like musical chairs. It’s not that they’re interchangeable; they change. Swap out as needed. A transaction: extract a woman from a body, deposit a new one. This is what you should know, and now that you do, you can take extra care to ensure your woman stays your woman.

If it helps you to think of them as souls, go ahead, but that’s not the word they’d use.

I don’t know that there’s a reason for what they do, exactly. It’s not magic. It’s not sci-fi. Psychiatric and religious explanations are too easy. This is how they survive over time. They’ve learned the hard way how to manipulate time and space. Some of them aren’t even aware they’re doing it.

If it helps you to think of them as time travelers, go ahead, but they don’t care for those stories.

They’re a club, a chorus, a collective. Genetic memory. Foresight. The intersection of geography and gender. Bound not by bodies but by knowledge. If there’s a purpose to what they do, it’s to share experience. Log it, bank it, use it to further the cause. Which is survival of the species. Their species.

When they come to claim you, they don’t care about age, or how or who you were born, or what names branded or freed you. They want to know what you know. They want to gather the collective wisdom of every woman surviving on an island, sailing on a life raft, battling a burning house, being surrounded on all sides. They want to experience everything. They want to save themselves, and they’ll wait tens, hundreds, thousands of years to be able to do it.

 

It’s easier to show you. Here’s one now, waking up new. A screened porch, a scraggly cat, a rocker. Someone she thinks must be her mother, looking at her warily. The new woman hates when the old ones leave right in the middle of a conversation, give her no time to play catch-up. You see? She doesn’t know where she is. She doesn’t know who she is.

Watch the new woman. She’s learning that she’s young, more girl than woman, and that whatever happened happened recently. She and her mother seem to be mid-conversation. She knows if she waits, the mother will reveal something she can work with, and she’s right. “Well,” the mother says, “I told you not to go.”

“You did,” the new woman says.

“Maybe next time you’ll take my advice.”

“Maybe,” the new woman says.

The mother stands from her chair, and when the new woman stands too, she realizes her clothes are drenched. The mother has a wet patch on the front of her shirt from where they must have recently embraced.

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” the mother says with difficulty, which helps the new woman narrow the subject. There aren’t many things that happen to young women that mothers find it difficult to feel sorry about.

It must be the curiosity plain on the new woman’s face that causes the mother to narrow her eyes. She walks over and tips her daughter’s chin up. Leans close, searching the daughter’s face. Sighs at what she finds there.

“I should’ve known,” she says. She looks around overhead, though of course the previous occupant is gone by then. “I suppose it’s for the best,” she says. “Come on, I’ll show you around.”

It takes one to know one, of course. Of course, the mother is a local woman, too.

“Can I have new clothes?” the new woman says, and the mother nods.

“You got away.” The mother looks hard at the new woman. “When you hear the story later, remember that. You jumped in the lake, and you swam away.”

The new woman accepts the lie as a courtesy. She wonders how long before the mother will swap herself for someone new.

 

After a swap, people notice the differences, but they blame it on circumstance, the thing that caused the previous occupant to leave. You can call it trauma. You can call it assault. Not every local woman calls it that.

After, the woman might grow apart from her family. She might develop strange interests. She might suddenly fail or succeed at school. She might change jobs.

Her loved ones learn to love the new version, or she gets new loved ones, or she finds the previous loved ones in her new form, showing up on a doorstep and pretending to sell something. The common denominator is always love.

Everything works out in the end, but that’s only because it’s the end, and even tragedies are a way of working things out.

 

We’ve discussed the what. The how is trickier.

They have trouble describing the process, though they’ll reach for metaphor. Imagine fever. Imagine pregnancy. Imagine both ends of illness, the collapse and the recovery. Imagine the first round of a course of psychopharmaceuticals. Imagine a blip, a skip, a distortion that signals this video has been doctored.

Dial up the feeling that you’re not yourself, that you’ve been here before, that you aren’t who you used to be—you get the picture.

Who knows why they choose the bodies they do? Maybe the last one up and left. Maybe she got evicted. Vacancies are advertised in the eyes, so the next time a woman needs a break or a pass or an out, she need only look skyward. Moments later she’ll be relieved of her post. Her replacement perhaps maternal or businesslike, dutiful or playful. Depends on what she’s stepping into. A sordid affair can be a delight, but playing keep-away from creeps? Eye roll. They’ve mostly done it all before, mostly more than once. What’s the good of reincarnation, they think, if not to permanently cross some things off the list?

They know full well it’s not reincarnation. The stories belong to all of them, no matter how many times they’re cycled through. Yes, the same plots keep playing out for different women. Also yes, the same women keep appearing in different plots.

Almost as if someone is trying to trap them there.

 

They’re not accusing you of anything.

 

The women, like pollen, are bad this year. Can you feel it? The air crawls with them. It’s uncomfortable, but you can’t blame them for it. Discomfort never killed anyone, but you know who did?

Don’t answer that. You know. If you think about why there are so many local women floating around and so few bodies to house them, you’ll know.

They don’t believe in innocence.

You tell them what the problem is here. Women elsewhere eagerly await the answer.

 

Everyone has met at least one. If your woman has ever had a phantom ache. If she’s woken exhausted from some exertion she can’t recall. If she could’ve sworn this happened before.

If your woman has any kind of natural talent. If her eyes change color, or she can write with both hands, or she swam, somehow, the first time she touched the ocean.

If your woman seems not to understand you, it may be because she has never met you. If she does things you don’t understand, consider the possibility that yesterday she was thirty years ago. Adrift, aloft, riding time to her next holy shift. Maybe the last body ended badly. Maybe she’s still hurting from something that happened to someone else. Maybe she was punished for talking tough or walking wrong or being alone. For the body she inhabits. For the way she wears it.

For being here at the wrong time.

For getting into conflicts that didn’t belong to her. Because nothing belongs to her, and that’s the way she wants it.

Well, not nothing. Local women have each other.

 

The most anyone can do is care for them. Do that, and hope for the best. It’s easy to mess up. It’s not that they’re against forgiveness; they don’t have time for it. They don’t have to. They can give up without having to break up, without having to say goodbye at all. They can leave without moving. Drop the conversation and look for a better listener.

You have to be patient. Don’t jump to conclusions, and don’t rush things. Don’t say, “Who did it?” or “You’re not answering my question,” or “Please just tell me what happened.”

If you do, she’ll say, “I am telling you. You’re not listening.”

“That’s not fair,” you’ll say. “I’m right here. Listening. Trying to understand.”

“You don’t understand,” she’ll say.

She’s right, of course. Things happen here that no one talks about directly. Here can be any of the addresses people live in or take with them when they leave. It’s the lake she jumped into all those years and bodies ago, and also the lakes before and after, the lies mothers continue to tell, the headlines that obscure what really happened. You’ve seen the news, the same stories spun a million different ways. Sometimes every headline is a way of not talking about the same thing. Behind every funny story about a local man hitting his girlfriend with a pizza or a Pop Tart or a bag of mulch or a box of diapers or a bag of chips is a story about a local man hitting his girlfriend.

Your local woman is someone else’s former local woman, do you see? She doesn’t need to know the specifics. She came with her own story. She didn’t get away, then she did. Now she’s here.

She’s the woman in the headlines, even if she’s not.

 

Now you know you’ve got one, but you’re not sure who you’ve got. What do you do? She says you can’t understand, and she’s right. She can’t understand either. She knows what happened in the lake all those years ago, even if it technically happened to someone else. She knows her mother lied to her because she felt it, the new body passing along its message. And also, the previous occupant called the new woman a year after to see how she was getting on. The memory of the lake exists behind a door that she has been able to open and shut again in her new life. What she’s found, though, is that survival doesn’t mean she gets to escape. What happened happened to all of them. They all know about it. That’s the point. They suffer together, and when the suffering is too much, they swap for a different existence.

Caring for your local woman is not saying I care about you because she has no reason to believe you any more than the next woman. It’s not saying, I understand, and not even I believe you, although understanding and belief are implied in the right response.

The one thing you can know for certain is that the thing to say is: What happened next? Because no matter what story she’s telling, she’s telling the truth. You have to go inside the story to find out who she is, and what happened, and what happened before that, and who she used to be.

Maybe no one has ever listened to her side, not really. Let’s say for sure no one has. Not the cops, not her mother, and no one since. It’s now up to you.

But you know how you can be. You don’t follow directions. You get hot-headed and defensive, frustrated that she won’t just confide in you. “I’m right here,” you’ll say. “I’m listening. Tell me the truth.”

She’ll shake her head. She’ll think: That’s the whole point. You’re right here. And I am still back then.

She’s been swimming in that lake the whole time. Get it? You have to invite her to come out. Remind her of the after. What happened next?

It isn’t easy to let go of chronology, to let go at all. Belief can be downright triggering, especially to the formerly religious. At times, it can feel like a trust fall into culpability. Belief has a way of making perpetrators of us all.

The point is, she’ll only give you so many chances. And then she’ll just—go.

All they can tell you is to start fresh with the next one. Learn your lesson. Take better care.

She’ll sit up straight. Breathe deeply, look skyward. Shiver, though it’s the opposite of cold.

They say a new woman can tell right away what damage has wreaked its havoc—head or heart, bone or dream. When she looks at you again, it will be with mild curiosity.

“What was I saying?” she’ll say.