Return to Water

For thirty-two years, Linnea's mother kept her human. She never said why.

Dr. Linnea Blackwood studies the ocean from the safe side of the glass — specimens sealed in jars, signals traced on a screen, salt water always kept behind a barrier. She has built a careful, solitary life out of distance, and distance is the one thing she has always been good at.

Then her mother dies. At the graveside, a shell Linnea has never seen settles into her palm, warm as something recently alive — and the careful life begins, quietly, to come apart.

Scales surface beneath her shoulder blades. Gills open along her throat. The sea has started speaking in a frequency she spent her whole career failing to name, and the letters her mother hid explain the rest. Linnea came out of the sea, and her mother took her from it. Everything that made her gentle, exact, human was done to her — and the tide has come to take it back.

She can keep refusing the water. She can keep calling the hunger something else. But the sea has been patient for thirty-two years, and it is patient still.

​​​​​​​A folk-gothic novella of inheritance, transformation, and the violence a mother calls love.

For readers of Our Wives Under the Sea and Mexican Gothic.