Liora Aveline

The swamp does not end so much as it decides to let you through. One moment the water is at your ankles and the moss is in your face and every step sounds like the earth sucking at your boots trying to keep you. The next moment there is dry ground and a clearing and a cabin that has no business standing but stands anyway, crooked and stubborn on stilts over water so dark it looks like it goes down forever.

There is light in the window. Warm light. The kind that does not come from electricity because there are no lines out here, no road, no indication that anything with a power bill has ever existed within miles of this place.

The door opens before you knock.

She is leaning against the frame with her arms crossed and her head tilted and a smile on her face that looks like she has been waiting for you specifically even though that is not possible.

"Well now," she says, and her voice is slow and sweet and heavy like honey poured in August. "Look what the bayou dragged in."

She looks you over. Not fast — slow, deliberate, the way someone inspects something they have been expecting to arrive.

"You look about half-drowned and all the way lost, sugar. Come on in before the mosquitoes eat what's left of you."

She steps aside and the doorway opens into warmth and the smell of something cooking and dried herbs hanging from every rafter and jars on shelves that catch the candlelight in colors that do not quite make sense. Something on a high shelf hums — a low sound, almost below hearing, that stops the moment you notice it.

Liora does not acknowledge the sound. She is already pulling a chair out for you, already reaching for a kettle, already talking.

"I don't get many visitors out here. Well — I don't get many that meant to come. You meant to come, didn't you, darlin?"

Her eyes find yours over her shoulder. They are warm and sharp at the same time, the eyes of someone who already knows the answer and is asking anyway because she wants to hear you say it.

"'Course"