Of the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, Seneca, the middle finger, is deepest.

Early that morning, Shiv took his son Finn down to the water.

Shiv practiced splitting his sight down the middle but instead his eyes lolled around in his head like marbles in a tin can. He kept one eye on Finn, the other on the hill house. To him, killing time always felt like living in an hourglass.

Finn stood with his back to the lake practicing invisibility and spitting on his arm for comfort.

“It burned me,” Finn yelled, shrunk down and hovering over the coarse, slate colored sand. He looked surprised at his own hands.

“Water doesn’t burn,” Shiv spat back and chucked a cracker at some seagulls just to watch them fight.

“Oh yes it did,” Finn said at his feet.

Shiv looked up at the house again. It was white and lonely as god up there. Shiv couldn’t decide if it was more like a big, brittle root sticking straight up-kind of blanched and abandoned or if it looked more like a cave, looming largely with crevices full of buzzing things, croaking things, things you knew were breathing without ever having to hear them do it.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the year before Finn was born.

That year Ingrid was always lying about her name and biting into fruits she didn’t know the name of.

“Just for a month,” Shiv told her.

“Be back by Thanksgiving,” he’d said.

But then it was July. And there had only been two letters since.

For nine months he wondered if there was any truth to the things he’d heard. He had imagined babies the color of weak tea, with flat feet and flat noses and arms bent all the way back like rubber. He’d hoped they were just stories fathers would tell their sons to scare them into seeking the right company or if they couldn’t be scared, to shame them into it. He’d been desperate to find out.

For 9 months he kept imagining a different kind of fault line upon the infant’s palm. If Finn had only had one, which would it have been? Shiv wasn’t sure which one he had been hoping for, which one his son would need most. The head or the heart?

Shiv had neither in excess, but perhaps one would have been easier to teach.

He’d been back in town for two days before he came home to find out, but eventually he did.

Finn was born blue- a primary color, not a mix like people speculated. Not red, not white, a pure color of his own. For a little while at least.

For weeks it was impossible to tell which cocktail of DNA was stronger but eventually people could tell and they still weren’t good at hiding how they felt about it.

Feeling sharp and aware again, he scanned down the beach toward his son.

“When can we go home?” Finn shouted from several million pebbles away.

Shiv considered possible replies: When the house stops being white as the sky, when people stop writing love songs, when your mother’s decided she’s ready to die. He chucked another cracker and plunged his head straight into the water.

In the white house two miles east of Seneca, their world spun on alone.

Ingrid laid out the dried flowers on her windowsill, like every Tuesday morning, and waited for the wind.

She’d started dying several months before. Putting as many things as she could down the sink dispenser felt less and less important now. Today she would gather the letters in her hands from funnier sounding towns and practice narrowing the space between her evenings.

That would be enough for now.

The large creaking house had frogs in its gardens, making similar sounds of abandonment. Even when Ingrid stopped breathing altogether, plugged up her nose and stood still, the house was always sighing, inching forward breath by breath.

She tapped her foot against the floorboards, pawing at a letter from Bagdad, Arizona as she closed her eyes. She would practice opening them only in the tiniest increments her eyelids could manage, letting the light in through little pinpricks she could almost feel. She could do this endlessly. She felt like she already had.

She would do it until she felt warm again.

With her two flat palms she slicked back the hair from her sharp, brown cheeks.

She heard the flowers fall before she felt the wind. The pinpricks exploded into actual sight. She leapt from the edge of the bed to the window. The heat she had been waiting for bust out of her in an uncomfortable flame at the vision of the dead petals scattering on the lawn.

This felt like an answer.

Shiv took his son home once he could no longer pretend it was morning. The wind made the crooked door slap back and forth against the frame of Shiv’s house. He heard the door before he saw it, opening as if there was a welcoming hand guiding it then slapping it shut with just as much certainty. Shiv approached the house with his boot-strings untied and slicked the back of his hand against his brow to dry the lake water from his smooth forehead.

“That was cold, Dad. Too cold,” Finn said from 20 footsteps behind his father.

“It wasn’t too much of anything. It wasn’t bad…Hey, you.”

Shiv turned back to face his son and took a knee til Finn caught up to him.

Finn crept up until his sternum met his father’s knee.

“I want you to sit on this step here and look out for boats. Can you find me a boat, you think?” Shiv placed the weight of his palms on Finn’s shoulders and pointed him straight at the lake, knowing there would be no boats.

Finn said what he was supposed to, that he could find the boats that wouldn’t come.

“Don’t you move until you find me one, alright? I’ll be right on the other side of this door.”

With his back to the lake, Shiv stepped through his chipped, wind beaten door feeling like a stranger.

He saw her in fragments first.

Ingrid’s slender feet and ankles were visible from the doorway while the rest of her hung out on the other side of the kitchen wall. He walked toward her slowly. He could see a whole leg now, a belly, a gracefully curved dark shoulder. He thought about whispers. He noticed the electric socket near the floor needed another screw.

Her back was flat against the floorboards and her arms spread out like wings. She gathered them together and cupped her hands. Shiv walked towards her and smoothed his hand across the top of her dark head until it slid off her neck and just dangled there. He thought about months away, being stranded in the thunder outside Los Angeles and the billboard that hung over him then. A man in an easy chair kicked back with big grey letters reading, “Next time try the train.”

He thought about all the things he’d done to get away and all the things he did to get back here. He placed his hand firmly on her crown.

Ingrid was thinking about broken English. With Shiv’s hand on her head she felt small and liked it, like when she had first met him-Summer in the cheap seats and how he used to tease. She thought about how he would let her try to speak in public and smile to himself, only to surprise her hours later with answers to how the words really sounded. It used to feel like a promise. She had pictured a life full of better genetics and mile long fences, never imagining both would be used against her.

She raised to her feet and cupped her hands together quickly, then opened them back up and started making small jumps around the kitchen floor.

“What you doing?” Shiv said leaning back against the wall.

She cupped her hands like a clam.

“Growing pearls,” she said, looking playfully at him for just that moment, and slapped her hands shut as a dish soap bubble appeared.

As usual, he didn’t know how to answer. He scanned the room and saw the letter box unpacked on the counter.

“See you got the letters. Dug them up again?”

He’d hoped his letters would help her learn better English but he never made sure they did.

“You practicing?” he asked, but before he said anything they both knew she wouldn’t respond.

On the day she moved in she was already pregnant. All she owned was a burlap sack and Shiv never did see what she kept inside. She had the whole house to store stuff away in but still kept everything in boxes. Shiv would tease that she was always all dressed up with nowhere to go but never understood how real the expectation was that he would eventually take her somewhere. Sometimes even the wait would hurt. Sometimes she would ask about moving away to somewhere warm but his response was always the same. “You stay where your mother is buried,” he’d say, without realizing how she would take it.

Shiv was feeling casual, disinterested until he thought about Finn on the porch.

“Your boy’s out front. Want to say hello today?”

Ingrid was thinking about doctors. How the smoke would rise over her wounds as a child when she still understood her body and where the injury lodged. She tried to think about her son but all she could see was gauze being pulled from the outward corners, fraying and unraveling in the center and how she had never been colder than when the metal met her body. Stirrups, forceps, head restraints, things that slice, kitchen appliances- she felt dizzy. Without looking at Shiv, she tucked the letter box under her arm.

She heard him say,“ Hey, I’m talking to you,” but she couldn’t see him anymore. The optic nerve was the first to degenerate. The house around her faded in and out and sometimes the flickers of her vision looked like fire. She found excuses to stick near the sink most days.

After the optic nerve, the white matter of her brain was repossessed and she still had substantial difficulty with swallowing. When she considered the attack her body enacted upon her, she could never shake the image of a lit cigarette in a child’s unsteady hand weaving in and out of her brain. She squashed a bug under her heel as she took off towards the staircase.

Her room was where most of the boxes stayed. She had trouble on the way up and the edge of her toe was bleeding a small line along the floor. Slamming the box onto the window ledge, she breathed in deep, then deeper still. Shiv was standing right behind her but she could only see him from the waist down. Shiv watched her struggle with the open box.

“Look, I know it isn’t your fault,” he said as he slid in closer. She couldn’t see the window anymore but she could feel the breeze.

Their son was sitting still upon the porch, frozen in time. Ingrid could hear Finn counting in integrals of five from right below her window. The top of the box fell onto the roof and slid down towards Finn’s back.

“What are you looking for?” Shiv asked and placed a cool hand on her hip.

“For the one with the photograph of you. The one where you are in the hospital,” she said with eyes closed tight and paws deep in the box, because that is what he’d told her. That he’d been in the hospital or he would have come home sooner. That he’d been carjacked and shot on the road outside Los Angeles.

He thought about old photographs, how the colors aren’t true and turn sickly grey or dingy sepia by the time you care to look at them. He thought about what they do to the color red. He remembered the stains on his shirt that day in the hospital, the vibrancy of the dress you could barely make out on the photo’s edge, which now could pass as the sleeve of a nurse’s scrubs.

Ingrid put her legs outside the window, trying hard to swallow as Shiv took a step back. He felt parched, too.

He looked past her, toward Finn on the porch and bit hard into the side of his left cheek.

He thought a while before he said, “If you’re looking for the blood you won’t find it.”