I began to grow my gills one week after my first menstruation, right on time.
My father was horrified, but my mother flexed her own gills nestled behind her curtain of curls so like my own, and he went as silent as the nighttime sea.
“Par for the course,” she told him, not bothering to hide it from me like she never bothered to hide anything from me. “This is a child of mine. You knew that when you stepped into my fjord. When you bathed in my song long ago. You’ve always known.”
My father mumbled something unintelligible into his beard and headed into his workshop to bang his tools around loudly enough for my heart to twist inside my chest.
The Drowning Bones by A. R. Frederiksen
You Came for Goodbye by Rajeev Prasad
The Last Day of Autumn by T. R. Siebert
For the Price of One Nightmare by Natalie Kikić
The Back of the Hand to Everything by James Parenti
Pillow Talk in the Tempest by Gretchen Tessmer
Sestainability by Rebecca A. Demarest
Queen of the Underworld by Connie La-Huynh