Excerpt from my new short story, "Snake's Tongue"

It’s later than usual, she realizes, the light fading out behind the trees, branches melting into violet sky, everything blending together. Like water. “All this water connected,” her father once told her and her sister Daisy. He used to be a ranger at the state park, and he liked to talk about rivers and sloughs and backwaters, how one water became another and another. He had a whole collection of maps of all the rivers in the country. His favorite one, Mississippi Rivers, Streams, and Lakes, still hangs, framed, on the wall in the den above his chair. Skinny blue lines of the rivers, like the map’s veins, pumping watery blood.

“See,” her father said to Daisy and Iris. “I work there.” He pointed to a spot on the map. “North of us, before the river forks.” He moved his finger down an inch. “See the fork?” His fingertip hovered in the air above the glass. “Right by us, where we live.”

Iris squinted at the map. So much water, all those squiggly streams and rivers, like a child’s scribble, like the pictures she and her sister used to draw that, later, their mother would stick on the refrigerator. Meaningless scrawl. But sometimes, when no one was around, Iris would stare at the map so long all those lines would blur together, become one glimmering water she could slip down into, so cool, so blue. She would imagine herself emerging from it, shiny wet, her eyes dark with some secret knowledge.