Matilda is dying. All night we can hear her screaming, a long sound like wind off the surface of floodwater, or oyster shells cracking, but it’s too bad this week to make out it to her, and I get the feeling that it doesn’t really matter, and the rain is just an excuse for something already long decided.

She had a bad time with her foal. I wasn’t allowed to see it, but everyone said it was bad. When it finally came, it was big and soft and full, but Matilda didn’t look right, she looked like she had lost all her insides with the baby and was made up only of skin, like she had left her skin to go do something and was going to return soon and climb back into it. Now she is dying, and I think it is the same as my mother, because everyone is suddenly very quiet and chews much more slowly and keeps their eyes down, and Marcus says that probably it’s a good idea to not even drink bottled water right now, so we are drinking only beer.

It’s hard not to drink the water, though, because the water is everywhere. It’s up to the windows and likes to bring us things: DVDs and microwaves and horseshoes. Once an orange pair of child’s converse, laces tied together. Another time, a whole shelf of bees. Some were even still alive, and Marcus wanted to call the newspaper or something to tell them we found real alive bumblebees, but my father said this was a stupid idea, what would be in it for us anyway, and no one had ever actually cared that much about bumblebees. So Marcus didn’t call anyone, but he kept those five little bees on his bedside table, right up until they died. The bees were probably the best thing that came to us. Also, we are barely ever hungry, because fish from the old ocean come right up to our doorstep now, and they are always already dead.

Matilda and I are the same age technically, fifteen, born only a month apart. We used to lie in the living room together, when she was small enough to still be allowed in the living room, and she would roll around with her hooves in the air and Marcus, who is three years older than me, would throws balls for us to catch and bring back to him across the roof, as if we were made of the same thing. Before I could talk, I think I thought I could talk to her. I would grab the sides of her wide donkey face and press my head hard into hers, and we would talk. They let her sleep in my bed until my father decided it was time for her to have babies. She will probably die tomorrow. It is too bad.

She dies tomorrow. When I wake up, I realize I have been biting my lips in my sleep and there is blood on the pillow, and it is thick like mold. Downstairs, Marcus and my father and Clara who is my father’s wife and Eli who is my very little brother are standing at the window and it is quiet, there is no more crying, and I know she is dead. The water crawls up the side of the house, licks at the bottom of the windows. In its mouth I can see the remains of a woman’s blouse, white with purple flowers, formless. Marcus asks am I okay and I say yes I am okay. Marcus says do I want to see her and my father says no I don’t want to see her and Clara says really I shouldn’t see her and I think I want to see her.

We take the blue boat. The oars rotted away a long time ago so now we use tennis rackets with their holes patched up with jeans and plastic. Marcus remembers when there wasn’t any water. He tells me about cliffs, which I have never seen. They are mountains that end, they just disappear, and then there is space and sky. He still remembers where they start and tells me when we’ve rowed off the mountain. “Now this is sky,” he says.

I’m thinking maybe I don’t actually want to see Matilda, but we are already there. My bones are pressing against the insides of my skin. It is warm and wet outside. The wood on the barn is soft to the touch and the blue Marcus and I painted on its walls one dry summer a long time ago is washing away, making the water look painted, like it was made up. Matilda’s skin is on the floor of the loft. I don’t know where the rest of her is. The foal is standing at the window; she is waiting for us. For some reason I feel better, because it really looks like Matilda isn’t there, and this makes me think that maybe she is somewhere else, and her skin is just a gift she left for us. We gather it – the skin – in cheesecloth and I carry it in my arms, and it is empty and warm. We help the foal into the boat. She is careful and still, as if she is thinking.

“You name her,” Marcus says.

“What?”

“Whatever you want.”

But I can’t think of any name. We bury the skin in an old suitcase at the top of the mountain where it’s still dry, near where my mother is. There are some poppies growing here, and sometimes there are racoons. We cover it in mud and wild grass, next to a bench which has been there for as long as I can remember, unevenly splattered in peeling white paint, and a little gold plaque: For Rose, who sat here every night and watched the ocean. I hope she will be able to find it, when she comes back for it.

This used to be a place called California. Now, it doesn’t have a name. It was very big and very dry, so dry that sometimes there would be no rain for years. My father told me that it had some of the oldest trees in the world, and everyone loved music. There were cities, where people lived. Where we are now used to be a place called Pacifica, which apparently wasn’t really known for anything except one time when a family’s car fell off a mountain cliff and later on everyone found out that the dad had done it on purpose. In California, something was always on fire. There were a great many birds of prey. There was a place called Sacramento, and a lot of serial killers. There were rattlesnakes and strawberry fields and oil in the ocean. I think in some places there were rivers, but they always ended somewhere. There were shores and shores of oysters, and so much empty sky.

One day it rained, and it didn’t stop raining for many months. The drought was broken but the earth couldn’t breathe. The earth started disappearing and the water had nowhere to go but up. The water took everything, and it got very bad, because on top of all the usual things – houses and cars and refrigerators and tree trunks – the water also took the gas and the oil and the fuel. That’s basically how everyone got sick. The sickness was slow. It crept up on us.

There are all other kinds of stories, about what the water does. Stories about salmon with five eyes. Babies with shark teeth. Conjoined jellyfish twins. There are some claims of ducks with plastic webbed feet, but I think this one is made up. The water is bad water. That’s all there really is to know about it.

Marcus says I should name the foal. I can’t think of any name. He says why don’t I just name her Matilda if I’m so hung up on it but I don’t want to do that. I look at her all day long, but I can’t find a name. The sun goes down, and she sleeps in my bed, and I pray that my sleeping might bring something back to me.

The next two days are rain, and we catch it in buckets and boil it. It makes the whole world water, and I sleep and sleep, but still nothing seems to come. When it stops the foal and I go out in the blue boat to see about Matilda. The hill is green with clean water, and there is even some jasmine beginning to show. Also, there is a girl there sitting on Rose’s bench. She has long dark hair that is very wet and the way the light is coming down makes the underside of her skin look blue and moving for a minute, but it changes, and there is no blue anymore. The weirdest thing about it is I’m not surprised to see her. I even rack my brain for some surprise because logically I understand I am meant to be surprised, but I’m not surprised. She is sitting really still, as if waiting for something, and she’s wearing basketball shorts dripping with algae and a yellow tank top that has Betty Boop on it, and pink socks. She turns her head to look at me and her eyes are deep black-blue and there is something wrong with them and I start to feel sick. I keel over until my stomach settles. When I look up, she is pointing at the foal.

“Who’s that?”

“No name yet.”

“You should name her Ana.”

I am suddenly cold. “But that’s my name.”

She nods. “Oh, right!”

“What’s yours?”

She smiles, and her teeth are pointy and straight. “Where did you come from?”

“Same place as you.”

“California?”

“I don’t know who California is.”

We stand there, the foal and I, looking at her, and when I look at her, I feel like I will never be thirsty again.

“Come and sit with me.”

“Okay.” I sit with her, and I think I am sick, my head is all full and moving, but she takes my hand and I am not so sick anymore.

“Do you miss her?” she whispers, and her voice sounds like rocks knocking against waves.

“My mother?”

“Matilda.”

“Yes.” And I don’t know why I ask it, don’t know how I know to ask it: “Is she coming back?”

She shrugs. “Maybe. It depends.”

“On what?”

“On the water.”

I take her home with me. Our knees knock together on the boat, and hers are cold and soft. She runs her hands through the water as if she is not afraid of it, as if it is nothing but blue. She changes into my jeans and shakes hands with my father and tells him she lives underneath our house and then laughs a lot and says she is just kidding. Marcus thinks it is funny, but I can tell things haven’t started off very well. She lets me try and wring out her hair, but it seems there is always more water trapped in it, and it leaves little secret glimmers wherever she goes that Clara hastily cleans up after her.

“Why would you bring water in here?” she hisses at me when the girl has gone to lie down, gesturing widely in her direction as if she herself is water, and for a moment I get confused.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“It’s a bad sign,” Clara says to my father.

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

“The water stays with her. It’s a bad sign.”

She eats dinner with us. She tears the bread with her teeth in quick and clean cuts. When Clara brings the salmon out to the table, she starts to cry. She covers her eyes and buries her face in my shoulder and inside me is a rising tide, all warm and bright and tingling. I whisper into the top of her head that she doesn’t have to eat the fish if she doesn’t want to, and she seems to feel better after that.

She is allowed to stay the night, but only if she wraps her hair up in two sets of towels. With them piled on her head, she looks like a queen, or an ancient tree about to fall. In my room, we sit on the bed and now I think her eyes are getting bigger in the dark or something, they suddenly seem to take over her face, like their blue is about to spill over everything, and I remember when I first saw her, how her skin looked like it was moving, like it was made of something rising.

“Did you know my name earlier?” I ask.

She smiles. “Only a little. Wanna see something cool?”

“Okay.”

She takes off one of her socks and stretches open her toes and in between each of them is this kind of layer of skin, almost like jellyfish skin, and it is so blue it is almost black.

“What is that?”

She shrugs. “I was just born with it.”

I am wide-eyed, kind of freaked. “Do you think it’s from the water?”

She laughs, river stones. “Probably.” She looks down at her toes, stretches them open and shut again, and is suddenly not laughing anymore.

“Why are all of you so afraid of the water?”

“What do you mean? Because the water is bad.”

“But why?”

“Because the water killed my mother. The water took everything away from us.”

She is staring at me. “But do you think it was yours to begin with?”

“What was?”

“Everything.”

We fall asleep facing each other and her hands are so close to mine and I stay awake a long time, watching. Her lips are thin and ripple with her breath. I feel like I am floating.

I must fall asleep because suddenly I am awake again and she is not in the bed. She is standing at the window, and on the other side of the window is a big brown bear. Its face is pressed hard against the glass. It must be floating on something, because otherwise I don’t know how it could be there. Her face is pressed against the glass too and her mouth is all scrunched up in concentration, as if she wants to eat the bear.

“What are you doing?” I whisper.

“She’s cold.”

“What?”

“She’s cold. She needs to come in. She’s so cold.”

The bear is dripping wet. Water runs down the front of her face and off her nose and pools onto the window. The girl looks like maybe she will start crying.

“We need to let her in.”

“What? No.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s a bear you can’t just let it in!”

“Yes, you can. You just open the window and you let her in.”

“This is insane.”

She turns to face me and tears the towels off her hair and then there is water everywhere. It bleeds down her back and starts to make a pool at her feet, silver in the scattered moonlight.

“Touch the water,” she says, and her voice is cold and calm. Behind her, the bear presses a wet paw on the window, sighs a cloud of warm on the glass, and floats slowly, sadly, away.

“What? Why?”

“Just do it.”

She sinks to her knees as if she is about to start praying, gathers the water up into her hands and drinks it, slow and long, and while she does, she watches me. It drools from the corner of her mouth, spills down her chin. She swallows. It looks like maybe it is sweet, maybe it is good. Someone makes a sound, small like a whimper. I think it is me.

“Drink it.”

“No.”

“I came to get you. I promised to bring you back. Drink it.”

“I don’t understand.”

She drinks more of it, fills her glorious mouth with it, and her skin begins to burn blue, like when I first saw her. And then she is coming closer to me, and her steps are etched in blue, almost all of her is blue, she is disappearing into it. She touches my cheeks, and her hands are wet and cold. She kisses me, and it is like she was always going to. It’s like it has happened before, and the water flows from her mouth into mine and I swallow it, and it is warm from having been inside her, and it is sweet, it is good, beating through my body like a heart.

It takes me too long to realize I have closed my eyes. When I open them, she is out the window. From where I stand, she seems to melt into the water. She opens her mouth, as if about to shout, or sing. And then she is gone, and I am in the pool she left behind her, water breathing at the back of my mouth, alone in a rising blue.

She is not here in the morning. The sky out the window is sagging and gray, and the water is loud and writhing, like it wants something. I have a taste in my mouth, salty, thirsty. Downstairs, Marcus asks where is the girl from yesterday and is her hair still all wet and I say yes, yes. He is standing at the table opening a can of beer and I suddenly want to tell him, I really want to tell him, how thirsty I am. Because I am so thirsty; my bones are stammering with it and my tongue is heavy in my mouth like sand. I am aching with want for water, the backs of my eyes trembling, my hands opening and closing as if they are trying to speak. And I am thinking about Matilda and the warm wet of her breathing on my nose in the early morning, the shelter of her skin, and where can she be now that her skin is empty. And what the water did, how it took her from herself, ate up her insides until all that was left was this little child, standing on shaky legs, haunted always by the memory of her mother, who I know is never coming back.

I open my mouth to tell him, my dry and useless mouth, and I know all at once that I will never tell him. And I don’t know how to explain it but also, I know that I am going, and there is no way around it anymore. I watch Marcus. He is slicing potatoes, his dark hair hanging limp over his eyes.

“I’m going to go see Matilda.”

He looks up at me and then, as if talking to a child: “She’s dead, Ana.”

“I know she’s dead, you idiot, I mean I’m going to where we left her.”

“You can’t. The water is too angry today.”

“It’s not that bad, I’ll be fine. Watch the foal for me.”

“You never named her.”

“You name her. Name her after one of the missing things.”

“Like what? Oak?”

“Oak is good.”

“Coral.”

“Pretty too. Or California, maybe.”

He smirks. “Too on the nose, I think.”

The water really is angry, or maybe just hungry. It has lots of limbs, and they crawl into the boat, grab at my ankles. By now, all my skin is thirsty, and it fills me, irresistible. I keep my hands tight on the oars and try to ignore the blue slowly filling the corners of my eyes, the fish-like flapping of my tongue, so stuck in my mouth.

And she is right where I first found her, on Rose’s bench, like I knew she’d be, only this time she really is blue. She’s coated in it, dripping. Something lies on her lap, limp and grey. I stay in the boat a minute, staring up at her. When she talks, water spills from her mouth, as if it has come from her.

“You’re blue.”

“It’s just leftovers.”

“I drank the water and you left me.”

“I know.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t want to make you.”

I am getting closer to her now, and I can see that the thing on her lap has a head and a stomach and a tail. It’s a seal. What used to be a seal.

“What are you holding?”

She raises her head, and I am swimming deep in her eyes. “My skin. Yours is waiting for you.” And I understand.

“How long have you been here?”

“A long time.”

“Longer than me?”

“Yes.”

“Than my mother?”

“Maybe.”

“So you were here when California was here?”

She smiles. “There was never such a place.”

“But Matilda didn’t come from the water. She can’t swim.”

“That doesn’t matter anymore.”

“How can it not matter?”

“It just doesn’t. Once everything came from the water. The water made everything.”

She wraps her arms around the sealskin on her lap and holds it. She watches me, eyes dripping blue, water rushing the ends of her hair, the crevices above her collarbones, her hands. There is a whole film of blue over my eyes now, making everything ripple and sway. The sun is going, slipping down the sky. It will be gone soon.

“So?” She says. “Go and get it.”

I do. I use my hands, which look so far away from the rest of me, to uncover the suitcase. I unzip the sides, gather up the soft folds of Matilda, the cave of her skin. It is blue, or maybe that is just how I am seeing it. It trembles to be returned to me. I get the feeling that what I’m holding in my hands is all that is left of another world, lost a long time ago, one I’ll never see. I turn, and the girl is rebecoming herself, legs lost in sealskin, eyes expanding so quickly, turning black like the bottom of the earth. She is not speaking anymore; she is a water thing now. And then, as if I have blinked, a seal resting on a burned-black rock watches me and opens its mouth, revealing teeth sharp as the tops of faraway cliffs. It beckons its head and dissolves into the water, which tumbles and sighs, as if it has been waiting.

And I am alone on the top of a used-to-be mountain, wind shuffling in my ears, Matilda’s skin hollow in my arms. I step into it. Inside, it is warm and beating, and I can feel the space between my eyes get bigger. My body sighs to be broken from itself, to be finally returned to her. Below me, the big blue ocean opens its mouth. I can feel, in its writhing, how much it wants me, and I do what probably I was going to do all along. I give myself to the water. I forget about my breath.