The room was spinning, again, all of it wrapped in a sort of dull blue-gray haze, all of it vibrating along the edges of would-be definite things like blinds and lamps and nightstand corners. The dizziness that had become part of Lindell's existence gave him intermittent nausea, hindered movement to the point of immobilization. He'd been unable to work any of his odd jobs or even his regular jobs, had to cancel or call off the few extracurriculars he'd had scheduled. After nearly a week of debilitating vertigo, Lindell had finally allowed Glory to drive him into town to see a doctor but had refused to go to the emergency room for an MRI or CAT scan, as had been suggested. "It ain't no damned stroke!" he'd yelled at Glory in the car, after their visit. "I told you it's something inside my head! You know how I feel about those quack meds, but I swear to God if it helps—"

Of course, Glory had taken the ranting in stride. If she'd loved Lindell more than she did, she might've worried about him, insisted he get the tests the doctor had ordered, but as it was, she found herself wondering what life might be like for her if he did actually up and die, and the wonderings didn't look too bad. So she didn't push; she just drove him home, letting him vent and whine about vomiting and seeing double.

This had been going on for some time, the woman sighed internally. Not just the dizziness but the seeing things bit. Lindell had always been prone to paranoia and hyperbole; his speckled drug experimentation over the years had usually been the cause of his episodes, though, and as far as Glory could tell, drugs hadn't been behind this recent bout. He'd spent much of his time in the house the past couple of weeks, mostly in bed or on the couch, moaning and groaning about all the flies. At first, his wife had taken him seriously, thought maybe she'd not kept up with the cleaning, needed to clear out the trash more often. But soon enough, Glory had realized that one of them was making stuff up, and she was fairly positive it wasn't her.

When they returned to the house, Glory made sure Lindell got inside to their bedroom (he swore and grumbled the whole way) and then went out into the backyard, where Miss Mariana sat smoking away in a plastic chair, watching the children dig for worms.

Old Mariana had lived next door to the St. Jameses since they'd moved in over twenty years earlier. A fixture of the area, the old woman had existed for as long as anyone could remember. While many residents ignored her or had only a surface understanding of who she was and seldom crossed paths with her, everyone knew of her. The little old woman's age was difficult to guess, and though she'd been in Surette longer than memory itself, it seemed, she'd always been alone. No one could recall sisters or brothers, nieces or nephews, children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren, really anyone ever visiting her. Rather, those who interacted with Mariana did so typically to seek her help with their own families. She'd been known as a capable midwife for decades, and in fact Glory had relied on her for that purpose in the birthing of her younger children, after Lindell's distrust of hospitals and doctors had flared to the level of conspiracy. Mariana had also been a godsend in regard to childcare, especially after Kim and Cassidy had been taken out of commission. The old woman, bent and wizened as she was, had miraculously kept her wits about her as she'd aged, and in spite of some physical limitations when it came to speed and lifting, she was surprisingly sturdy, as well.

"You got a minute, Mariana?" Glory approached her neighbor.

Mariana glanced back at the woman approaching her, noting the lack of attention to her appearance. She nodded her grizzled head of hair, thought briefly that Glory might look better in the shapeless blue caftan and rubber sandals she herself wore. "Course, my dear. It's your place, ain't it?"

Glory dragged over a cracked plastic chair and settled into it next to Mariana, startling only slightly when the legs sunk about an inch into the damp ground. She watched her children, for a moment: all three were half-naked, Trent and Mae shirtless in their shorts, and Maggie in her diaper. Trent had comandeered a large bucket, which they seemed to be filling with discoveries, bits of plant and worms and small stones.

"Stone soup, momma!" called Mae, catching sight of Glory.

Glory half-nodded in recognition, forced a smile, lifted her eyebrows slightly. "They been good for you?"

"They always are, hon," Miss Mariana crackled, her voice tinged with a sound like the crinkling of saran wrap. She brought her cigarette to her lips, quiveringly inhaled, and shook a bit of ash into the grass.

"They usually give me hell," Glory remarked, adjusting the belt of her pants.

Chuckling, Miss Mariana curled the gnarled fingers of her free hand around the end of the chair's armrest. "They've been through a lot, poor little things, and without Kim here to help, it's been hard on you." She turned to Glory, looked at her full-on with her one good eye while the other rolled off in the direction of the bayou. "Living here, on the edge like this, has its price to pay."

That pale whitish, uncontrolled eye was something Glory had forced herself to get used to, yet even after all the years of encountering it, the sight of that wandering thing still creeped her out. Sometimes she was reminded of a story she'd read way back in school—or at least something she thought she'd read or heard about—and fleeting notions of smothering the old woman shot through her mind. But Glory was always immediately horrified by her ideas and pushed them aside (and also, she was fairly certain that Mariana's gross eye would stay open, even if the old woman were dead).

"You mind watching them just a little more? I need to go into town and pick up some medication for Dell."

Miss Mariana took another drag of her cigarette. "He home?"

"He is." Glory pursed her lips, stared straight ahead at the children.

The old woman read between the mother's lines. "Sure, honey. You go right ahead. It ain't like I got much else goin' on."

"You're an angel, Mariana, you know that?"

"No, no. God wouldn't make no angel out of me. Just one of His little pups trying to make its way."

Trent suddenly shoved Maggie, who fell to the ground and began to bawl. The little boy yelled something about putting the wrong kind of meat in the "stew," and Mae, having witnessed the affair, stood up for her sister and tried to push Trent, who was twice her size, with her fat little hands. The children's voices rose, tears threatened, and Glory took that as her cue.

"I'll be back in about half an hour, Mariana. Thank you for everything."

The old woman laughed. She'd expected no less from Glory and didn't quite mind being left alone with the children once more. Calling from her place on the chair, she wrangled the little ones with her words; her non-nonsense persona convinced them to still their argument. Soon enough, the three were back at their muddy task. Mariana stubbed out her cigarette on the arm of her chair and tossed the butt into the yard; then she lit another. She considered waddling indoors for a beverage—to her house, not to the St. James's house, of course—but ultimately decided against it. As much as she'd come to rely on her "treats" as she called her smokes and her drinks, her body sometimes conspired against her, and the process of actually rising from her cheap chair and hauling her bag-of-bones into her house only to return seemed a defeating task. Plus, she had a sort of sixth sense that something was going to happen, that she needed to keep a particularly close eye on things. The children's father was an aggressive, erratic man. Mariana had never liked Lindell, never felt he was good for Glory, whom she thought of almost as a daughter. A sad, wayward daughter, to be sure, but a daughter all the same.

Truth was, Mariana knew, Lindell St. James was nothing more than a royal POS, and everyone was aware of it. He'd been lucky to find anyone at all to marry him, with his overt record of whoring and boozing. Everyone knew the man valued making a dollar above all else, and it wouldn't have surprised her if he hadn't exploited his own family members to get what he wanted. Could be he prostituted his own wife—wouldn't have shocked Mariana. She'd seen from time to time a black eye or bruise on Glory that the woman had been too abashed to discuss, and as a church-going woman herself (never missed a Sunday or holy day all her life, she proudly claimed), Mariana felt no love for that devil-of-a-man.

Glory was far too kind, going into town to get Lindell medications. Better to buy him poison! Let the man rot in his pain, Mariana thought. Would do him good to be ignored for a while. She slivered her eyelids just a bit, stared at the happily heathen children. Even though those babies knew enough not to pass the hem of their yard into the cypress forest beyond, one could never be sure that a gator might not wander a little too far inland, especially after the rains had saturated the forest floor to the point those critters might confuse once-dry vegetation for bayou.

Inside the house, Lindell suffered as much as the old woman in his backyard wished he was. His wife had led him into their room, helped him lie down. She'd even gotten him a cup of water and a cool cloth to place over his eyes and forehead. But it didn't seem to matter what he did; the dizziness kept his world spinning. The frustrating thing (well, all of it was frustrating, but the particularly weird thing, if Lindell had to say) was that the spinning wasn't all-encompassing. It wasn't bad enough to make him fall or pass out, like he wished it would, but it was enough to make everything blur a bit, spin at the edges, and take his stomach on a ride.

Damned doctor, he thought, telling him he might've had some goddammed stroke or something. To hell with that. He knew it wasn't any kind of stroke or heart attack. It was the fucking flies! They'd bit him or something. Lindell had tried to explain it to his wife, but she'd only laughed at him. She hadn't done it out loud; he would've hit her if she had, if he'd been able to. No, Glory would never outright mock him, and yet he knew she'd been doing it in her head, thinking he was going crazy. And that was the worrying bit of it all, wasn't it? He knew it—the notion that he might be losing his damned mind.

Pills. He just needed some pills. As adamant as he'd been about avoiding medicine over the years, he was at his wit's end with the vertigo and ready to take whatever he could get. Some sort of anti-nausea med, he thought the doc had prescribed, and something to help with his inner ear, whatever the hell use that was.

Ugh. Too much, all of it, too much to think about. He squirmed uncomfortably on his back atop the wrinkled sheets of the unmade bed. Glory had been sleeping on the couch for at least a week, now, unable to put up with his thrashing about. That pissed off Lindell, but he hadn't had the wherewithal to argue with her about much of anything, lately, except for the flies. They'd been everywhere, not as bad as when he'd been in the gas station a few weeks back and thought he'd seen them coating everything and everyone—no, he'd chalked that up to an aberration, some weird stress-and-bad-weed-related hallucination. He'd not seen the flies in such numbers since that event, and yet they were always there, those fat black specks, hovering in the corners of his eyes, over the trash or at the windows, always just out of range and always darting away when he attempted to catch them in the act. Why Glory couldn't get rid of them, he didn't know; she'd seemed game enough at first but had grown testy about the bugs as of late.

Fucking women. Never much help, were they? Not when it mattered. Maybe he needed to visit Christine. No sexual favors (he was in no shape for them), just a listening ear. Dammit, he'd even pay her to listen, this time!

Some sound came to him as he lay there on the cool mattress, sweating in spite of the oscillating fan on the bureau several feet away and in spite of the cool cloth on his forehead. Lindell wasn't quite sure what he was hearing, even after he became quite sure that he was, indeed, hearing anything at all, but at some point, he sat himself up, inducing a fresh, intense wave of nausea. For a moment, he was forced to lean over the bucket by the side of the bed, but vomit never arrived, and so he slowly, slowly sat back up. The sound, anomalous to the present surroundings and yet somehow innately familiar to Lindell, touched some chord within the man, vibrated with a certainty that felt more real than anything he'd ever experienced.

He had to find its source.

When Lindell stumbled down the wooden stairs at the back of the house, the commotion caught the attention of Miss Mariana and the children. Fortunately, the man managed to catch himself by grabbing the railing before he actually hit the ground, and he took a minute to regain his balance.

"You all right, there, Lindell?" the old woman called, her neck wrinkled and contorted like that of a tortoise peering out of its shell. The man looked a mess, that was clear. In fact, his affect put Mariana on edge. If he'd been drinking or was high on something, there was no telling how he'd behave.

But Lindell just stood in his dirty beige sweats and brown t-shirt, barefoot on the damp earth, inhaling and exhaling the moist atmosphere. His breath clouded not from cold meeting warm but from mingling with the water in the air. He peered past them all, deep into the forest, as if he saw something, and the hairs on the back of Mariana's arms and neck prickled.

"You want me to call Glory?" she tried again, knowing there was no way she could make that call but hoping the words would at least wake the man from his stupor.

He said nothing at all, though, only began walking forward, his path slightly irregular at first but then straight as an arrow. He passed Mariana in her plastic chair, and she could only gaze at him curiously, and then he passed his children, who continued their play even as they turned their nonplussed little faces toward their daddy. Whatever Lindell had latched onto, that noise or something he saw, it pulled him toward it like some kind of magnet. His eyes were his own, and yet they saw amidst the shuddering, spiraling tree trunks and cypress knees and draping moss and plant life some clear goal, some end only he could discover. The black earth beneath his feet squelched up between his toes, and his footprints followed him as he drew further into the forest. Liquid surfaced with every step he pressed into the soil; the very space around him, darkening, hung heavy with dew and condensation. Lindell's clothing dampened. His skin beaded. And before he knew it, he'd been drawn into the bayou itself, into the shallows that reflected the pale, mottled skies above like some silvery mirrored tabletop, interrupted by the obsidian fanning bases of the tupelos and cypresses as they flared upward into the canopy.

With only a brief pause, his mind buzzing ferocisouly as it questioned what its body was allowing, Lindell did as the sound commanded and walked into the murky, mosquito-infested waters.

On her plastic chair in the St. James's backyard, Mariana had kept both eyes firmly aimed at Lindell until he'd become obscured by the shadow and distance. Maybe it was time for that drink after all, she thought, her pale eye drooping back into lethargy. The old woman rose, cringing at the expected aches and pains. She'd not tell anyone, not just yet. There was no point in it. She'd heard the howling, too, and knew the man had met his time.