Nina’s mother believes in the evil of humanity. In the evening, she implores her two daughters to watch out! for bad men and monsters. She shakes the clothing iron in her hand for effect, dripping sizzling steamy water onto her husband’s best church shirt. Nina is watching TV. The weatherman shouts with big white teeth, predicting rain for the next three days, and she thinks of how uncomfortable it will be to walk to the bus stop in the rain—how everyone on the school bus will be shaking their wet umbrellas and making the floor slick. Her sister Carmen sits on the carpet, eating maraschino cherries out of the jar, which her mother doesn’t approve of but seems to ignore in favor of other topics. The sugary syrup stains her fingers pink-red. Sticky.
            Again, their mother says be careful! Tonight she’s harping particularly on not-real things. Nina’s mother loves to talk about not-real things, like two tongued spirits disguised as women who steal children away.
            “They look just like real women,” she says. “That’s the kicker. So don’t ever listen to someone who comes up to you and tells you—I don’t know, that they’re my friend or something? And that they need you to come with them. If something happens to me, I’ll tell you or your father will if I’m dead. Okay?”
            “Yes, ma’am.” Nina replies.
            Carmen chews a cherry too quickly, chokes, and coughs it up into a little pink lump on the carpet, which the dog, previously asleep beside Nina’s feet, starts to lick up. The weatherman is gone now, and the news has shifted to a crime report: a drug store pharmacist robbed at gunpoint for opioids last night. The pharmacist, a thin, soft-spoken man in his forties, is interviewed outside his place of work. He says: I’m very glad to be alive. Also—Mark, if you’re watching this, I’m quitting my job.



            Do mythic monsters survive to hunt the second generation? When Nina first told her parents she wanted to be an anthropology major, to learn the history of how people have lived through time, they looked like those wax museum sculptures with glassy, obviously-fake eyes. They said, in unison, like a voicemail recording: you’re fourteen. You have plenty of time to decide what you want to do. Her mother then told her that when she was fourteen the only things she worried about were boys and La Llorona. Said every night she prayed the wailing woman wouldn’t wander up and tap tap tap on her bedroom window. Nina understands their uncertainty, but she also zones out during most of their lecturing. Once, she tried to tell her mother about La Llorona’s narrative roots in the conquistador’s brutal colonization of Central and South America, but again her mother looked at her with empty eyes. Nina isn’t sure what myth the two-tongued spirits are from, but she imagines them nonetheless: eating hamburgers in their spectral cars and braiding their dream hair, eyes fixed on something unknowable in the distance.

            
            
            At school, Nina sits behind Marco, who is always talking about cryptids. Once, he swore his family’s cat was killed by the Chupacabra.
            “The blood was sucked right out of her neck,” he whispered, and with two fingers, imitated stabbing himself repeatedly in the jugular. “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. Like, totally demonic.”
            Like her mother, Marco loves not-real things. In fact, as he often shares with her, he runs a WordPress blog dedicated to reviewing books about cryptids.
            “Bigfoot, Mothman, Nessie, y’know. People are always writing about the popular ones, and somebody’s gotta go through it all to really find the diamonds in the rough.” He told her all this very proudly when he started his blog, back in seventh grade. The baseball players still ridicule him about it, but his ad revenue is through the roof.
            “It’s the Bigfoot boys,” he tells her today, “I was running some demographic analysis last night, and those middle-aged white dudes go feral for my Bigfoot posts. Isn’t that wild? They’re like, 80% of my overall hits.”
            “Really?” Nina replies. “That’s kinda cool.”
            “Yeah,” Marco continues, “but I don’t know. I don’t wanna only be the Bigfoot book review guy. There are so many dope cryptids out there, people just need to write more books about them. Have you ever heard of the Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp? Or the Mongolian Death Worm?”
            At first, Nina just continues listening and nodding her head, but Marco stops and looks at her. His eyes are big and brown and perpetually-excited behind his tortoiseshell glasses. His hands, bumpy and pink with eczema, are covered with little pen doodles and notes. He is so unspeakably beautiful. Beautiful in the way pretty people and tv shows don’t talk about because they don’t even have the capacity to understand it. In front of him, their teacher is reading the most recent Oprah Book Club novel. Marco itches his wrist.
            “I haven’t heard of them, no,” Nina confesses quietly. “But how about you tell me their stories?”



            On the walk home from the bus stop, it rains again, but Nina still takes the long way. She walks by the houses with white fences and weird yard art and little flags staked into the ground with sayings like BLESS THIS HOME and BEWARE: KILLER CAT LIVES HERE. On the corner of the street intersecting her own, she looks at Marco’s house. He isn’t home yet because of his debate club meeting, and she’s pretty sure his parents are both at work, but one of them has accidentally left the garage door open. The persistent rain trickles in, pooling around the entrance, and inside a broom has fallen from being propped against the wall. For a moment, Nina considers running in and fixing it to make sure that one of Marco’s parents doesn’t run over it, but then she sees her.
            At first, she is Marco’s mother. Then, she is his sister. Then, she is something else entirely but familiar. Like a second or third cousin at a family reunion who you only see on holidays. The one whose face you can’t quite remember. She is drenched with rainwater and holding her stomach, but she is smiling nonetheless. A big, toothy, weatherman smile that stretches her mouth into an expanse of everything. She is almost see-through, but not quite. She is wearing a maxi dress with polka dots. For a moment, she stares at Nina, and Nina stares back while the rest of the world only sort of exists. She smiles and beckons Nina towards her like a dancer, and Nina thinks of dancing in the kitchen with her mother. How they would hold hands and twirl to Eydie Gormé—Nina would shut her eyes and imagine they were in Paris or Argentina or wherever the fanciest dancing people were supposed to be. Often, they would dance like this to decompress after an argument, after Nina had said something like: I’m fourteen, Mom, just let me live my life! and her mother had replied with a classic: oh so you know everything now? Okay. I’m just going to go on a vacation this summer all by myself, because you obviously don’t need me. Then they would pause, and look at each other, and laugh. Nina wishes she were dancing, now.
            “Sorry,” she shakes her head and shouts to the woman, “My mom’s really serious about me not talking to strangers. Have a nice day, though.”
            The woman smiles again, seemingly unfazed, and waves at Nina. Behind her teeth, Nina wonders if she has two tongues. If she does, they’re not visible when she smiles, really, but then again Nina is not very close to her and can’t quite see her face. Maybe she’s La Llorona gone suburban. Or a being no one’s ever heard of before. Or maybe just a human woman searching for something. Still, Nina smiles and waves back to her, unsure of why she can’t take a single step. Why her feet feel cemented into the suburban sidewalk. Her mother’s voice echoes like a small miracle in her head, her emphatic watch out! and Nina thinks back I’m trying!. The woman is still smiling as Nina raises her heavy foot, and takes a step away.