Her daughter was not normal, this was the thought of a young mother, whose hands wereburied wrist-deep in a muck of mud just a little bit off from their little hobble of a home thatgathered around with their own cohorts, houses swallowing each other up and forming towns,roads that spontaneously manifested themselves over the period of years made with coarse drysand unburied from somewhere inside a cave, her musing continued as she watched herdaughter.

  A child, of maybe four summers, or three, she hadn’t particurly kept a calendar on her wall ora bone keep in her dwelling to track the movement of stars, with strange yellow-bck hair thatcrosses each other off in strange unnatural streaks, hair that nobody can quite manage topinpoint the origin of, she didn’t have such strange yellow hair, her husband didn’t have suchstrange yellow hair, neither did her mother’s and father’s and his mother’s and father’s, buteverybody saw when they both fucked, when they both conceived, when she bore the child.

  Her daughter wasn’t particurly a looker, didn’t have anything out of the ordinary for a child asfar as appearances went, and yet her skull seems to always think marginally brighter thanothers in the vilge, she wasn’t quite sure where that came from, but her mother did soprocim pridefully that it was “All those years of cultivated wisdom” finally shining through intheir blood unlike “her misfortune”, Nobody could tell what she meant by that when she gazedout with almost blind eyes at the river reeds.

  “However unlikely it was, if there is a imp in the river then there is a imp in the river”, as her mother would say with her craggly old lips, spouting loose old wisdoms between her skulls outof her head.

  She press her hand into the mud further, reaching, searching, and press a hand as sheunearthed it with a quick slip, A conch shell, she twirls the sharp stone in her hand and beganslowly grinding, bruising the meaty bits out of the shell, crushing and dragging it out with apracticed patience as she watched her daughter frolick at the river with a hum.

  She wasn’t particurly sure why she chose to have only 1 daughter, really, her mother had six,and her grandmother had four, she would be a outlier in this case for having just one daughter,“Putting rats in a wicker cask” as her mother would say with a ugh, somehow complimentingher in the same words that damned her faintly, having 1 daughter was a risky choice, but shecouldn’t expin why she chose it, was it the strangeness of her daughter?

  The way that when she was born, she did not wail nor cry but eyed the world with a glimmer of strangeunderstanding?

  Or was it the fact she didn’t think she could survive a second birthing?

  She wasn’t trained in the Tracks and Tricks as the secretive magi’s were, or maybe she was making excuses, justifyingthings to make sense internally to herself.

  She throws the mollusk flesh down a basket, watching as it writhe in a pile of many, and shechucks the shell down with it, gently, valuable currency was valuable currency and conch shellshad a inherent value to them, she idly checks the amount in the basket.

  32, more than enough for the day, she gets up, letting the slop of mud trail down her knee asshe steps off with light feet honed from many many failures as a child of falling in the reed mudsand wailing as she realize she can’t get out by stamping harder, many, many more failures oftrying to walk just fast enough to walk and not too fast that she overreach and fall in the mud likethe child she was.

  Ah, such fond memories.

  Almost made nursing all those horrid wounds and exhaustions worth it, Just almost.

  Almost.

  Do daughters always py in the water like hers did? Methodical, oddly so, seeminglyscrutinizing something in the water and reveling in it with a sense of enjoyment that does not fita child, it was not simple, it was not— routine, it was not so and yet it was all she has everknown her daughter to do, and that.

  Scares her, deeply.

  “Mama! Where does this water go?”

  The child asks, oblivious to her inner turmoil, or perhaps not, but she refuses to entertain thenotion of a empath super-child that can deduce her thoughts with a gnce as she gets up fromkneeling in the mud, walking off to a dry shore of dirt and sand in a river of mild gravel and seamoss.

  “Up there, to the mountain”

  She points with a muddy finger.

  Her daughter curiosity seems sated, for now.

  She dreads the day it cannot be.

  32 conch shells was enough to buy today’s meat from the hunter, enough to buy the powdereddust herbs that soothed her husband fears, enough to offer to the ever far-too visceral divine’sthat lived up above, enough to make into medicine for her father slow declining health, enoughto sustain their meager existence for another day.

  That was all she can do.

  Sustain, preserve, keep aloft, that was all she could do with her meager skills, fishing out conchshells and mud fish, trimming reeds into baskets, weaving grass and drying the racks on stone,preparing food, this was all that she could be and not a single more than she can be.

  The soup was fine, for all intents and purposes, it was edible, they could not hope for muchelse.

  Her daughter seems ever curious still, horrifying as it was in normalcy, strange as it was in theway it just barely fits that seams of normalcy of what a mother-daughter retionship should belike, would be like at all, a daughter being curious about her mother was a normal thing, shewas much the same herself when she was young and five and barely a day older than it.

  And yet.

  It was foreboding, abnormal.

  When her daughter was three, she never did anything but walk, she never tried anything butglimpse the world in her own way, in her own strange way that feels strange and off and scary—and yet she couldn’t, for the life of her, tell anybody why she felt so horrified by what isadmittedly a good omen, a prodigal daughter born from a normal mother, such a tale wouldhearten anybody else that wasn’t her and yet all she could scream, if she dares, was a simplephrase.

  Why couldn’t you be normal?

  She felt, horrible, for that thought.

  She was her mother, but she had never been a mother before she was a mother and how couldshe try when she knows it in the way her daughter stares, ever stoic, ever slow, ever patient,when she was five and witnessed her screams at the deepest lowest depths of her mind.When she screamed at her daughter and asked for her, pleaded, for her to be normal.Her daughter, ever dutiful, obliged, in that uncanny ways of hers, Are children’s always thisunexpressive, or were they always this expressive? Did they express happiness in the way oftheir wary lip twitches? Did they express their sadness by the slight sags of their ears andeyebrows? Did they jump and frolick when euphoric? She couldn’t tell of course, she couldassume, but assumptions always had a way to sp her down when it came to her daughter.

  Her daughter looked at her, in that uncanny look of knowing.

  “Do you enjoy the soup?” Of course you don’t.

  “It’s okay”

  It’s always okay.

  That word was pulling more weight than it ever should.