A note to readers

The slip of paper in their mailbox was from the gas company.

“I think they call it flying because it uses all the same muscles,” Anael says. Above, a shout, “Ready! Hup!” and a shadow sails through afternoon sunbeams.

It was a hot July day in the mountains of Virginia. The earth swam in a faint blue haze of heat that rose from river and cliff.

Daniela and I walked side-by-side on a path alongside the train tracks, with scrub brush and the occasional mesquite tree on either side.

For a moment she pictured herself living somewhere else. Somewhere far away where women fixed things in order to live.

Surrounded by distant relatives he’d never met and couldn’t remember, the old surgeon lay wheezing in his deathbed, clutching the small model of a human heart.

It was late in October, and the Carolina mountains were dressed in the gorgeous reds and yellows of autumn.

People had known about the Claw beneath the sea for years, passing its story down again and again.