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Her fingernail was a hangnail and it was bloody. The girl sucked on it to soothe it, to put out the fire around it. She sucked her own blood. She remembered the bloodsuckers in the lake when she took the rowboat out, how they latched onto her feet. Terrified, she screamed for her mother. Her mother poured baking soda over her feet until one by one, they dropped away. The girl ran scalding water over her feet, scrubbed them for a very long time. At night, she would dream about the blood sucker’s burrowing into her skin. Leeches crept out from her pillowcase. At such times, she sucked her thumb. The more leeches that appeared the harder she sucked. Before bedtime, her mother rubbed pepper oil on her fingers to keep her daughter’s thumb from her mouth. This did no good because the girl sucked off the oil. Night after night her room became the lake where the rowboat journeyed. The oars slurped as they dipped under.
The girl wondered how deep the lake, how vast the watery world. Hadn’t she heard stories of her cousin snagged in some underwater tangle, his mouth blowing empty bubbles, his arms feathering water? At night when she was not dreaming about bloodsuckers, she was dreaming about him, captive of the deep. They’d once worn goggles and swam out past the drop-off. She never liked being in a place she could not see beneath. She imagined a king bloodsucker wrapping its cold body around her as though she were an arm for the leech’s bold bracelet, her blood backing up, her eyes bulging. None of her relatives knew for certain what took her cousin, although she heard them talk of strange sightings. Ever since her cousin’s demise, the girl never swam past the drop-off. She imagined stars sifting freckles onto her cousin’s face, how his watery world would shiver, his cuticles, small crescent moons at the bottom of the lake.