The first time I noticed something was off was when Nick shoved his phone in my face, raging over a recent Facebook post by his aunt. I refused to read the vitriol, looked past the screen, and found part of his nose missing. Skin stretched tight over a skull-like hole where the fleshy tip and the left nasal wing had been.

Nick! What the hell? I gasped, staggering backwards. He ignored me and went back to scrolling, muttering to himself.

*

A week later, a part of his right bicep went, the muscle sucking inwards right in front of my eyes as if someone had bitten off a bloodless chunk of flesh.

Babe? You have to–

The old folks used to dish out warnings wrapped in intricate tales, oblique references, and euphemistic stories, forever failing to infix the severity of the danger awaiting in the woods, the water, the wilder and untamed parts of the marshland in us.

We went out to dig the vibes of the swamps in the day’s last light, Jonna and I, young and stupid and fortified by a bottle of the good stuff. The sunset darkened the shadows, deepened the silence; the swampland held its breath for a moment – then exhaled what our flashlights didn’t illuminate and our merry songs would not name.

We didn’t see the fog’s tendrils clinging like lace trains to our heels, didn’t notice it following us home and over the threshold. Sleep swallowed us like a sinkhole, cavernous and cold and hungry, and Jonna and I bobbing along like floaters.

We rose late and from damp bedsheets. Our bare feet left muddy footprints on Grannie Mo’s cedar wood floor. Jonna, choking on her coffee, spit out greenish phlegm. It filled the room with the scent of moss and brackish water.

‘What have you done?’ Grannie Mo asked.
“We lived, laughed–”
“Out.”

We went, giggling, back into the arms of the swamp, leaving four moist handprints behind.