I get home & the sun splits into something buttery & slick, leaking its yellow onto the concrete. Ba is sitting at the dining table in front of his beat-up laptop, shoulders folded. There are no lights on, making the house feel catastrophic. I picture smashing the laptop, just enough to make him look at me, just enough to rearrange his face. But then I don’t & the not-doing makes the act feel heavier. I think about going to Mars someday. But my parents & I talk about it like it isn’t even there. Maybe Mars is splitting, too, pulling itself into two puddles of Arizona. I close my eyes & see the moon. But the moon isn’t splitting; it’s peeling itself slowly, like a clementine, too delicate to be touched by a blunt edge. For a moment, it becomes a silvery girl, iridescent, pressing the peel back into her skin. Ba is still staring at his screen, at his desktop image of the solar system, everything orbiting something else. The stars have dimmed, like our subscription has been cut, or maybe he forgot to pay for it. You never know with him. I lie down on the dining table & feel the cold wood against my back. I am thinking about Mars again. It will never be one click away.

Jump into the pond with me. We will wear lotus leaves as hair and grow water lilies as faces, and they will not know we are gone. There is light here — not nearly enough, but much more than the sliver of moon we have at home. It pools between our shoulders, clinging to the soft handle of the throat. Out in the open, we have it all, silvery plate breaking a seam, silvery mouth opening a crevice. The water, its ripples teaching us to swim by loosening our bones, eroding our teeth into little gasps of fallen leaves. Along the hedge, children lean forward, reaching their lanky arms just close enough to grasp our pearly eyes, the papery skin of their ankles already tainted with mud. They call out to the shapes we used to take, giggles vaporizing into whispers of inky sky. We answer by sinking further down, letting the water take its time with our outlines, digging its slippery tongue into our flesh. Below the surface, everything finally slows into sense, and when we rise again, dawn has broken. The evening has moved on without us.