The House of Discarded Dreams by Ekaterina Sedia

thing. “Come along,” she said. “I’ll introduce you to my grandma.”
    Peb babbled in response, talking about ethereal planes and dizzying stars. It seemed to miss other dimensions, too black or too fiery to describe.
    “It’s okay,” Vimbai consoled. “You’ll learn to like it here, and my grandmother knows so many stories— ngano , the folktales that tell children how to live in the world, and nyaya , the myths people make up to pass the time.”
    The vadzimu was done with the dishes and sat on the stool by the counter, her eyes hollow and her wrinkled hands folded in her lap. Such fragile birdlike hands, Vimbai thought, dry like twigs, wrapped in the cured leather of old skin that spent decades in the tropical sun. Vimbai barely remembered this woman, how she was in life—just her own passing embarrassment at the old woman’s superstitions, and just as ephemeral a regret that they spoke different languages and thus were unlikely to connect.
    Vimbai noticed with a measure of satisfaction that the ghost, at least, was more fluent in English. If it had also grown less superstitious remained to be seen.
    “Grandmother,” Vimbai said. “Look at this—it’s a psychic energy baby.”
    The old woman looked and reached out, instinctively—as if there was really nothing else to do with babies but to pick them up and hold them, no matter how ethereal and burdened with unnecessary extremities; no matter how dead one was. And even after Vimbai went to bed that night, she heard quiet singing and cooing from the kitchen, along with the thin gurgling voice of the Psychic Energy Baby.
    That night the tides had grown especially, inexcusably high—through her sleep Vimbai heard the lapping of the waves somewhere very close to the porch of the house, and through her sleep she thought that the sea was pulled so close by the gravity of the moon that sloshed happily in the darkness of Tortoise’s belly. She dreamt of Tortoise, his smiling face smeared with moonlight, white and thick as milk, the oceans of the world following on his heels—oceans always followed wherever the moon went, tortoise or no.
    Meanwhile, the waves whispered into the yard, their salty tongues singeing the roots of the few arbor vitae planted near the house; they poured under the porch spooking those who lived under it and chasing them up the steps, where they remained, wet and shivering, their backs pressed against the closed door and their fur growing slow icicles. They listened for Maya’s sleeping breath in the depths of the house and whimpered softly.
    The gentle fingers of the ocean pried the house from its foundation, carefully shaking loose every brick and every cinderblock, never upsetting the balance. The waves lifted the house on their backs arching like those of angry cats, and took it with them, away from the shore. In the darkness, the lighthouses shone like predatory eyes, and everyone in the house slept except for the vadzimu , who remained alert and awake, singing to the sleeping Peb, curled up in her lap like a cat, in a language no one but her understood.
    The night continued much longer than usual—before the sun rose, the house had drifted far into the ocean, where water lay smooth as silk, wrinkling occasionally under the sleeping breath of the wind.
    Under the several hundred yards of water, down on the bottom, horseshoe crabs burrowed in the sand, their movements sluggish in the cold water, the spikes of their tails pointing uniformly north. They had flat, almost round bodies that glistened pretty shades of dark green and light brown, and their blue blood flowed leisurely through their open circulatory systems. They were spent, depleted—bled almost dry and thrown back by human hands where they lingered in a disconcerting state between life and undeath. They had enough blood not to die—yet not quite enough to keep them living. So is it any wonder that the crabs—ancient, trilobitic—whispered stories of vampires that