Partway

This is the landscape I'm writing about now.

And this is the opening of the new novel:

“To live in this world

you must be able to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go." -- Mary Oliver

Partway

Racina came after the water. She arrived on a cool morning in early September, asleep in a rowboat without paddles as if she knew the lake currents would carry her past the tamarack and black spruce forest, around Bone Island and the village of Sonamarg, across the mouth of the Red River, a fen, and a bog, all the way to Partway and to Hux, who found her on his morning walk to check his lines. Hux wasn’t certain the girl curled inward against a swarm of black flies was Racina until he saw the scar on her cheek, which looked like the leaf of a pitcher plant. Until then, the water had taken lives but had never returned one. Hux waded into the cold, gray of it but stopped at the point where cold met ice and gray met black. Seeing his niece again was what he’d spent thirteen years kneeling to Churchy’s lord for, and yet he couldn’t go to Racina and the little wooden boat floating in the reeds. He couldn’t do anything but stand on the edge of what he was most afraid of.