"That's why I'm here, love. To help you. To save him."

Oh. Oh no. I suddenly felt tired and old. Whatever my own feelings about seeing her again were, I couldn't let her think her son was still alive, not after he'd been missing for months at the top of Everest. "Dolores, I'm not going to try to rescue Lazaro. I'm going to claim his body. Lazaro is dead."

"No, love."

"Dolores, listen-"

"-He's not," she interrupted. But her expression was not that of a mother in denial; she looked at me pityingly, her mouth sagging with remorse. "There's so much I need to tell you."

She always could be a little condescending. And that helped me remember my anger. I broke our embrace. "What the hell makes you think I want to talk to you? You left me, Dolores. I thought we were going to get married. You left without a trace."

I could see she was about to remind me again that I had burned her note. But instead she metronomed her head to the other shoulder, smiling ruefully. "Do you hate me?"

"I think I do."

"I can tell you don't."

I sighed. "Maybe not yet. I'm still in shock. But I almost certainly will hate you. So let's talk before the hatred sets in and I refuse to ever speak to you again."

She came close again and hugged me to her and stood on her toes, allowing our breath to mix between our noses like a storm front. "Later, love," she said. "First, let's make up a little."

Sea-Level Lazaro's most recent film, The Aphotic Ghost, was nominated for an Oscar in short documentary a year ago. It chronicled a new species of jellyfish over 150cm in diameter, a superpredator by bathepelagaic standards. As it fluttered about the lightless ocean depths, its took on a vaguely pentangular shape, but with its five points rounded off. It looked almost like an undulating chalk outline, and its blue-white bioluminescence made it positively spectral: thus the name.

Lazaro's footage was gorgeous, unbelievably intimate. Jellyfish usually squirt away from lights and cameras as fast as they can, but the aphotic ghost-enormous, tremulous, poisonous, ethereal-let Lazaro swim along with it and gather images that were not only scientifically priceless but commercially lucrative.

It was me he took to the Academy Awards show. When he won the Oscar, the shot cut to me for three seconds. The caption read "Montenegro's Father." Not Thomaston, but Montenegro. By this point he'd taken my surname.

Mountain "Why do you want to climb Everest?" I asked Lazaro.

"I'm always in the water," he said. He went over to the fish tank he'd convince me to get. It was a saltwater tank two meters in diameter specially made for jellyfish: a Kreisel model with a constant flow of water whisking the jellies around like a slow-moving washing machine. That's exactly what it looked like: a futuristic upright jellyfish washer.

I looked up from my book. "So now you want to go to the highest point on Earth because . . . it's the farthest place from sea level?"

He smiled ruefully. "Something like that."

"Seems to me like the ocean's been good to you."

He turned back to the tank and watched the jellies spin. Sometimes the tank looked to me like a bird's-eye model of the galaxies. Other times it made me sad, these small, nearly mindless creatures being infinitely jetted around a tiny glass container for my viewing pleasure. They had no comprehension of the forces that governed them. They had no idea their lives were in my hands. And who was I to have dominion over anything?

"It has," he said finally. "The ocean has been my whole life. But it's also defined me." And then, a little softer, he added, "Limited me."

"Still, Lazaro, Everest is one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. You're an expert when it comes to deep-sea diving. But on a mountain you'll be-"

"-like a fish out of water?" he finished.

No mistaking his tone; he was dead-set. So I smiled and turned back to my book and simply said, "Something like that."

Aphotic Zone Dolores stayed the night. We made love. Because I couldn't keep up with her, she kindly slowed for me.

After, she asked me to be patient. She said Lazaro was alive, but when she told me how she knew, I wouldn't believe her. But she'd find a way to explain so I would believe, and then I would save Lazaro. I didn't know what she was talking about, but my mind was aswim, awash, adrift. I let myself be overwhelmed by her. We entangled ourselves in each other and fell asleep.

When I woke I found she had disentangled herself. A note on the pillow said, "Read before burning." When I opened it, however, there was just a single word. "Bathroom."

One of Lazaro's video cameras was pointed at the bathtub. Taped to it was a note that read, "View before burning. Full explanation!"

The tub was full. Next to it was the freezer's icemaker bucket, emptied, and a box of Instant Ocean, which I what I used to salinate the jellytank water. It was empty too.

In the tub, its blue-white glow refracting through the ice, filling and emptying like a lung, was a fully mature aphotic ghost.

Mountain I climbed Everest. More honest: Roger and the Sherpas climbed Everest and hoisted me behind them. They might as well have carried me up on a palanquin for all the effort I expended.

The search began the day after we arrived at the South Col. The weather was cooperating for now, and forecasts were good. If we were lucky we might get two days.

The cold had sunk an inch down into my body, anesthetizing me, preventing both hope and despair. It was the only reason I could function, this close to knowing. If I failed to find Lazaro, I could try again someday. But if I succeeded, he would be alive or dead. The wave would collapse. I would either eject him from his superposition and bring him back to life, or reify his death.

We searched half a day. I saw many bodies, none of them Lazaro. I wondered briefly if I shouldn't make it the work of the rest of my life to bring the dead down and present them back to their families. But let's see if I could succeed on my own mission first.

Roger, with a Rumpelstilskin-like prescience, knew not to pry, but the Sherpas couldn't comprehend that I couldn't care less about the stark and ominous wonders Everest offered. So, thinking I was like every other tourist, they kept trying to show me the sights. Two of them were dying to show me the most curious ice formation they'd ever seen.

I perked up. Ice formation? I followed.

It had appeared out of the ground last season, they said. They exhumed it out of the recent snow for me to see. It was the size of a sleeping dog and looked something like hand-blown Italian glass, impossibly whorling and curling into itself, a hyaline nautilus relentlessly tearing sunlight into rainbows. Deep in its center there seemed to be a dark nucleus, and strange, ciliated phalanges circuited throughout its interior. Climbing gear radiated from it like an explosion.

"Roger!" I yelled.

Roger came. "We need the cooler," I said.

He spoke to the Sherpas and they brought the coffin-sized cooler I had had specially made. It borrowed from ice-cream maker technology, had a nitrogen core lining the metal interior. After I delicately placed the ice formation inside of it, I found I could just close the lid. "Tell them to help me pack it with snow," I said. Soon every Sherpa who could fit around the cooler was dumping snow and ice into it. When it was full I padlocked the lid.

I was weeping, but no one could tell because everyone's eyes cry this high up, and anyway tears freeze before they fall. I took several hits from my oxygen tank, then said, "Roger, this is futile. I'll have to reconcile myself to the fact that Everest will be my son's final resting place. We'll have to abandon the search. Gather the men."

I could see he knew there was more to the story. But all he said to me was "Right." Then he told the Sherpas what I said. A few of them looked at me incredulously-the search had hardly begun, and now I was content to leave with just an ice-souvenir?-but the more experienced among them simply started packing up. Americans were generally regarded as the best tippers in the world, even when an Everest ascent failed. Tolerating their strange ways was a small price to pay.

Sea-Level It was my fourth date with Imelda. She was a year older than me. She didn't dye her hair and was a retired librarian and said if I ever caught her playing Bingo I had her permission to kill her on the spot.

We had met through Back from Heaven, the nonprofit I founded to recover the bodies of those who died on Everest. She had joined me on our latest mission, our most successful to date: three deceased climbers retrieved, identified, and returned to their loved ones. One ascent and she was hooked; she joined the team as a full-time volunteer researcher.

And now we were seeing each other. And things were moving fast. Just four dates in and we were going back to my place.

I unlocked the door, reached around to flip the lights, then gestured gallantly for her to enter. She curtsied and strolled in.

And saw the tanks. I still had the smaller Kreisel with my original smack of jellyfish eternally smacking into each other, but what stopped her midstep was the new tank. It took up the wall, a tremendous bubbling cauldron of cornerless glass. In it, the two most enormous jellyfish she'd ever seen pulsed with slow dignity through the water, their blue-while auras commingling. A third one, still just a polyp, trailed behind them.

"Jesus!" she said. "Wow. Just wow."

"Do you like it?" I asked, moving behind her, wrapping my arms around her waist.

She leaned against me. "They're so beautiful." And then, searching for a more precise description, "So unearthly."

"My son's an underwater filmmaker. He discovered this species of jellyfish."

She turned to face me, rested her hands on my shoulders. "No!"

"Really. You'll meet him someday. And I'll have to show you his masterwork: The Aphotic Ghost. He won an Oscar for it." I directed her attention to the mantle.

She looked, then turned back to me and smiled. "You are just endlessly surprising, Enrique." Then, turning herself back to the tank, but belting my arms to her body, she said, "So when do I get to meet the Academy-Award-winning filmmaker?"

"It's going to be awhile, I'm afraid. He's spending time with his mother right now."

"Ah. I see. Let me guess. You and she can't be in the same room together?"

"Not at all. We're in the same room all the time. And she'll always have a special place in my heart. It's just that . . . well, let's just say we come from two different worlds."

"Say no more," she said, squeezing my arm. She turned back to the larger tank and, after a moment's contemplation, she pointed at the polyp and said, "The tiny one's cute. Does it have a name?"

"She does," I said, pulling Imelda a little closer. "Brumhilda."

THE FOWLER'S DAUGHTER

MICHELLE MUENZLER.

It was one of those autumn days, late in the season, where the scent of wood-smoke clung to the air like a drowning man. The dry meadow grasses crackled beneath the long stride of my boots, and the cold iron of my dad's shotgun bit through the layered flannels that had also once been his. I'd flushed two pheasants in the far meadow, and now the strung-together pair swished against my back in a halting rhythm.

At the fence, I slipped through an old break. Its wood had been strong once. When I was a little girl, I had clambered along its length and pretended to fly. But that was a different me, a different fence. Given enough time, everything falls apart.

Like my dad, for instance.

I cleared the last hillock, bringing our shack and the pond into view.

"Dammit." My curse startled some quail into flight.

In the brown waters of the pond, my dad was sunk to his waist, floundering after the geese. They cackled and hissed and led him deeper. I slid the gun from my shoulder and set it in the grass along with the pheasants.

"Out of the water, Dad!" I called, hastening toward him.

His slow spiral inward continued. I grit my teeth, splashed into the icy water, and dragged him ashore; all the while, a furious itching staccatoed my calves.

"Where is she?" he asked, his voice the high-pitched whisper of a child. He shivered in my hands.

"Not here." Never here. At least not when we wanted her.

I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket, wiped the blood spittle from the corner of his blue-gray lips, and carried him home. A change of clothes and a triple layer of quilts soon quieted his shakes.

"I'll be back," I said.

His eyes were already gone, lost in old memories. Did he ever dream of me, or had the geese taken even that? I trudged to my fallen catch in the meadow, a light wind pricking my cheeks and warning of colder days to come. As I bent to retrieve the pheasants, a sudden itch crinkled deep in my spine. I turned to the northern horizon. There, a dark wedge of geese pierced the blue glass of the sky like a bullet.

Mother was coming home.

I cleaned the pheasants and dropped them into a pot of yesterday's broth. Over the long afternoon, they disintegrated, flesh splitting from bone, and filled the shack with their fatty aroma. When only a sliver of the sun remained on the horizon, I left my dad wrapped in quilts and marched to the pond's edge, an old dress clenched between my fingers. Mother was waiting, swimming in quiet circles.

She changed as the last rays of red slipped away, her feathers falling into gold-flecked dust, her skin stretching toward the sky. Human again, if you could call her that.

She struggled to her feet, unsteady, and wiped the mud from her knees. "I am home."

Her voice always startled me at first, too quiet for my memory of it and too soft for the hard angles of her face. I squeezed the dress until my fingers burned.

"Where's your father?" she asked.

"Sick." He was more than just sick this time, though.

"Then I must see him."

I pulled the dress against my stomach. "It'd be better if you didn't."

She touched my cheek, and a deep itch fluttered in my shoulder blades. I jerked away and shoved the dress into her hands.

"Don't touch me."

"I am your mother." A shadow flitted across her brow.

"In blood alone."

She stared, her goose-dark eyes unreadable, then pulled the dress over her head and disappeared into the shack. I collected an old quilt from the porch and huddled near the pond to wait for dawn. Whenever the wind bit too hard, I tossed stones at the dozing geese. If I could have no rest, neither could they.

In the gray hour before dawn, Mother emerged, her face tight and pale. I rose from the grass, quilt still drawn tight around my shoulders. A wet hollow marked where I'd sat the night through.

"Satisfied now?" I refused to soften the bitterness in my voice. She'd kill him with her leaving.

"I will come for you in the spring."

After my dad was dead, she didn't say.

"I won't be here. I'm selling the land and moving to the city. There's already a developer lined up."

Her eyes were quiet, but the trembling of her chin told me my barb had struck. She pulled the dress overhead, folded it carefully, and handed it to me. With her eyes on the eastern horizon, she stepped into the pond. I hated her stillness on the edge of change, her calm acceptance. I hated how easily she could let her humanity slide away, like the sloughing of dead skin.

I hated how easily she could leave us, every time.

"Wait," I said, almost biting my tongue. Why should I have to speak if she would not? "You could stay. Until the end at least. Maybe I would feel differently then." Or maybe she would remember what it was to love her family more than a flock of birds.