I fall asleep, beneath quilts aroma-ed like me, fingers holding faint traces of kelp cake taste from bedtime snacks, teeth clean.

My head goes wild when I'm asleep. Of course everyone thinks that; Wrass thinks that but one time she told me about a dream where she rode a wagon to Uncle's estuary house and Uncle wasn't home, she couldn't find him, so she took some bread from his cupboards and left.

I told Wrass that sounded like real life, not something wild. She shrugged and said it'd never happened before, plus it was pretty weird since Uncle doesn't even make bread.

I still think that sounds like real life.

Tonight I fall asleep, and in my dream I'm a boy like Anemon, swimming into a volcano. My yellow-green skin protects me from the heat, but I still prickle all hot and itchy, and I dig into the sides of the volcano and come back up with handfuls of rocks, which turn out to be sponges of money, but tiny krill crawl out of the sponge holes and attack my fingers, and attack a glass house, which starts cracking and I try using the sponge money to cover up the cracks but that just lets more krill out and they swarm in white clouds in the water.

Then I'm a girl like Mackere, with long, droopy arm fins, and I'm swimming in the empty travelways, paying half-chewed up yurees at stations beside the buildings, which pour out droplets of whale milk which you have to slurp up super fast before they dissolve in the water. Guilty, I keep cheating the stations by paying with half-eaten yurees, but they still spurt out milk and I keep drinking it as fast as I can, then moving onto the next station, and the next--all looking like big boulders--and putting more half-eaten yurees in to turn the crank to get some milk.

I wake up sometime in the night, eyes so achy they won't stay open, but my quilts have come untucked from one of the corners so I get up and bob around like I'm in a storm near the surface and I tuck the quilt back under and try to go back to sleep but the quilt keeps touching my ear wrong and my cheek wrong and my bed's hot--not as hot as lava, but still hot--but if I sat on top of the quilts I'd get cold and probably bob off to the ceiling and my stomach growls and somehow I fall asleep again.

Then I dream I'm at Mum's weaving station, trying to weave gray strands of cloth together with one hand, my right arm twitching and jerking uncontrollably at my side, it did that a lot worse when I was younger but in this dream I am younger, only in the dream I also remember doing inventory in the store every day, but I'm younger and visiting home and Mum's teaching me at her weaving station and I'm frustrated at it and I'm missing half of school since I have to get the weaving correct before I leave and my movements go way too slow and the school day keeps speeding along--I know the school is in their last class of the day, math, and I'm missing the whole class and the teacher's starting to dislike me--and the rice threads keep bunching together in the weaving and turning into useless yarn so I have to start all over and math class is basically done and I wake up and the water's gone slightly grayish with light so I get up but I'm still tired and I go into the kitchen and my right arm's extra twitchy plus the rice fabric of my pajamas itches like it never has before and my back fins hate being scrunched up and my skin prickles with heat and we're out of milk I flex my fingers, tap them together and together again and flex my fingers but then Ange wakes up and I act like I'm fine, I'm fine, just getting kelp cakes for breakfast.

Another night, I can't fall asleep, teeth and tongue clogged with sticky kelp cake taste. Parro and Ange ate squid soaked in something spicy and I didn't try it since the taste wriggling from the stove gave me a headache so I just ate kelp cakes and that was it.

I can't fall asleep, I mean, it takes me a long while of lying in bed and rolling onto my side and stomach and other side, and pushing the quilts up and down my ear and away from bunching at my feet, and scratching my shoulder fins and pushing the quilt below my neck so my gills can breathe better but they were fine before so why am I suddenly worried about suffocating in my sleep with my gills under the quilts--I mean, I fall asleep eventually. I mean, I'm tired, my eyes ache, I'm basically always tired since I can't fall asleep and I wake up a lot during the night and naps make my brain feel like kelp that's been chewed up and spit out and mushed in the mud--

I dream about a shadow that stalks me, I dream we have to cook my kelp dolls to eat because we've run out of money, I sign at Parro not to put Voyage in the stove pot but he does and my stomach's growling so I eat the kelp doll stew he's made too and for a side dish we eat mud because we have no money but my favorite scallop shell's been ground to dust to sprinkle on the mud for flavor.

I dream about a shadow that stalks me, we visit home and the sun's blindingly bright so I wear that black eye mask I wore when I was six since the doctors thought it was something wrong with my eyes, not just my brain disliking so much light, and a shadow stalks me since something's watching me, making my fins prickle, even though I only see blackness and tiny pricks of light between the threads, and Mum and Da talk and Wrass is there too but they leave me in a room by myself with the shadow, it touches me and leaves cold spots on my fingers and cheeks, the spots turn my skin numb and weak so my fingers can't even pry off the eye mask when vibrations roll over me like large things are smashing together and I try swimming for the door but my hands can't find it anywhere in the room and I get all dizzy and the shadow's still there making me prickle and I wake up.

The quilts haven't moved. My side in the mattress aches. I roll over. My back prickles with a fear of a shadow stalking me, except in the night my room is entirely shadows so how could just one be stalking me? I can't hold my eyes shut because of the sensations nagging in my brain, I count to thirty at the most before they snap open, just to double-check and triple-check and quintuple-check that that eye mask hasn't somehow returned like I won't be able to take it off.