Pike drew close enough Marlowe could see her fevered reflection in those round, unblinking eyes. Swollen, red veins lined her own chest above her low-cut tank top.
A webbed hand rimmed with acid and slime trailed up her leg and a whine left Marlowe’s throat. Her knees, drawn to her chest, drifted apart.
A plea snagged on Marlowe’s rot-slicked tongue. She wanted. She needed.
Marlowe’s hips rutted against nothing, aching, begging. Her hand dripped onto the floor, and she wanted to taste Pike again, needed to be consumed by the lake.
She blinked, and Pike was gone.
The acid bloomed oily yellow. The tile, bare, except for smears of filmy brown. Marlowe fogged the cracked finishas she lowered herself to the floor and licked up the last taste of Pike, flesh and worms and decay.
Her body ached, empty.
Marlowe pressed her face against the cool tile, easing the blurred pressure in her head.
In the cratered center of her hand, algae wept in green, stringy ropes.
Marlowe bared her teeth and staggered to her feet, catching the sink, the walls, steadying herself from the terrible pounding in her head, in her cunt.
The porcelain sink cracked and strained as Marlowe leaned on it and dug her fingernails into the red veins webbing across her chest. Words jumbled together in her mind.
Heather. Cabin 13. Pike.
She couldn’t lure Heather here in her condition. The phone seemed so far away, the cord writhing up the wall. She was running out of time before Heather called Mercy Hospital, before Heather realized what had almost happened that night, before Heather didn’t need her anymore. Before Heather didn’twanther anymore.
Marlowe had to go back to Pike’s Lake.
She was out of time.
Mouth Like Stones
Marlowe scraped her tongue against her palm, sucking a mouthful of rot and dead, putrid things, and spat at the shoreline. “You wanted me. I’m here! Couldn’t leave me the fuck alone,” she growled, pain cutting her words into blistering points.
The world spun in shades of gray and truck headlights. Tucked under her arm, a lobster raised rubber-banded claws. Marlowe dimly remembered plunging her arm in the tank, water glossing the dull supermarket floor. She didn’t think she’d paid.
Frogssloopedaway from her, slick in the rancid shoreline. Worms wriggled in the mud, and leeches suckedat the sides of her sandals. Marlowe cut the claw bands away with her knife and nudged it in the direction of the water’s edge, bristle-spine claws digging into the flesh of her forearm. The lobster slipped into the water with a softplop.
Mist wreathed the lake and coiled in the headlights.
Itchy wool stabbed into her knees as Marlowe knelt on the cigarette-burn-and-plaid blanket pulled from the backseat of her truck. Her heart thumped against her ribs in a painful rhythm, almost knocking the oxygen out of her.
She wanted this to be over. Marloweneededthis…thingwith Pike to be over, so she could focus, so she could do what she needed to leave this town forever.
In the middle a ripple curled to life, breaking the surface and surging toward shore.
There. Gone.
Mud clouded the empty space where the lobster had been.
Grimy bubbles spiraled to the surface—green, gray, brown—and shimmered with an oil-slick shine.
The back of Marlowe’s neck prickled. The lake stilled.
Stringy bulrushes creaked together near the windless shore. Two golden eyes cracked open and locked on Marlowe with predatory focus. Gray tendrils writhedamong lanky strands. Marlowe swallowed at the memory of their musky taste slipping across her tongue, of the lake-rot remnants she’d tasted in the palm of her hand.
Pike stared, unblinking. Their eyes glittered in the headlights.
“You must’ve liked the lobster.” Marlowe brushed her hand against her knife sheath for reassurance; even though she wouldn’t need it. This was progress, however small.
