As a boy he remembered his teachers more than his family, but that was how it was. His upbringing for the country had been more important than his ties to family, so the teachers were branded into his mind with the status of familiar aunts and uncles. Beyond that, he was not a true son of the country. What he knew, he?d learned through demonstration, the way a blade was supposed to cut the air like a scalpel. The way a tree?s branches should be clipped. How to debone a fish, and that if you sat still enough, the whole universe had a heartbeat you could hear.

What he did not remember was a Social Studies textbook, or Algebra, or making anything as strange as a diorama. At the end of a day, after work at the construction site of the new building, he came home to take care of Ame and then prepare dinner. Tag was traditional when it came to food preparation, but that was because it was what he knew. Processed foods seemed weird and fake, looking like creatures he couldn?t recognize staring at him from plastic packaging. The bizarre food-like substances looked like colorful blobs he wasn?t sure he wanted to put in his mouth, much less his children. Yet, people trusted it, as if it had been sterilized against the possibility of germs, and all signs of life, and were a neatly packaged food unit.

He cooked. If there were rabbits in the traps he prepared them in brine for the next day so they wouldn?t taste gamey. There used to be a garden where he would sort his thoughts and eventually harvest up the vegetables from it, but now it was overgrown. The carrots and everything else came from the market. It was the only way he knew how to prepare food, and the food units had a questionably plastic and alien look to them. Tag stayed with what he knew and prepared what he had always known to be Food.

After dinner and a diaper change, and perhaps an intense conversation punctuated by words that only came from his own language, Ame was willing to sleep. That left, at the very end of the day, a moment where Penny had his attention and didn?t have to share it. Tag wasn?t getting cleaned up from work. He wasn?t preparing dinner, taking care of Ame or anything else. Dishes had just been loaded into the washer, which meant that if there was any homework, now was the time for it.

Even if the diorama was a strange construct, it was how the children were learning. There were tests to prove who they were and what they knew, and there was a strange homage paid to the act of memorization.

He wiped his hands off on the kitchen dish towel, catching the open mouth of the dishwasher with the top of his foot so that it swung shut. The towel was tucked back into the top bar of the dishwasher and he pressed the button to send the machine into motion.

After dinner, Penny had kissed her baby brother on the forehead and left him with her dad so she could do her homework. She?d pulled the card table out of the laundry room and set it up in the living room. She?d brought out all of her supplies and got to work on the diorama she needed for her science class. She had a subject, a plan, she?d even made herself a sketch for how it would look. It was all very calm, methodical and orderly.

And then...chaos. In the three hours since then, the living room had become a war zone of craft supplies. A confetti of blue construction paper scraps littered the table and the floor underneath it, colored pencils, pens and markers were scattered all over the coffee table. A bag of sand pushed thoughtlessly to the edge of the table had unbalanced at some point and overturned -- Penny caught it, but not before it had dumped a third of its contents on the other folding chair.

There were shiny pebbles of blue and white clear glass, their smooth surfaces catching the light from certain angles with a dull, tired glinting, leading in a breadcrumb trail from the laundry room to the living room where a hole in one bottom corner of their bag had gone unnoticed. A set of watercolor paints lay open next to a plastic cup whose water had gone greyish black. A glue stick, open, was on its side, stuck fast to at least two of the green pipe cleaners that were overflowing their packaging. There were painted rocks set out to dry, their water soluble colors running as puddles of pale yellow and red collected underneath them dotting almost every available surface left. Small plastic figurines, sea animals of all shapes and sizes. Fishing line that had come off its reel. And seemingly everywhere, a light dusting of metallic blue glitter.

It looked like an underwater landscape had gotten caught in a ceiling fan, sending shrapnel in every possible direction.

At the center of the mayhem sat Penny, her hair pulled into a ponytail that was leaning to one side more than the other, paint on her cheek, her fingers sparkling with glitter that had become affixed to her skin with drying glue, hard at work on her masterpiece.

Science homework was serious business.

?Is it going well?? Tag called out from the kitchen before seeing the war zone. After he took one more look about the area he moved to the doorless, wide kitchen threshold. His hands rested on his hips loosely, at first. It had taken his eyes a few moments to catch up with what had become of the living room. His eyebrows lowered, calculating what had happened as he walked, wary of glitter and glass landmines on the floor.

?This? is for school?? He stopped at the open side of the table, standing over the chair that had been partly showered with sand she had strained to catch. He wasn?t sure what it was he was looking at, or what it was supposed to become, only that the blues, the glass and glitter had consumed her for the better part of two hours. His right hand dropped, curling over the top of the backrest of the empty chair as he leaned forward to examine the project.

?Yes. For Miss G?s science class.? The diorama itself was actually pristine, meticulously put together and coming along nicely so far. It was everything else that was in a shambles. Just at present, she was focused on suspending a mermaid at the perfect angle, tying and then retying the length of fishing line she was using. ?Hey Dad, will you come hold this for me?? She chanced a glance up at him, balancing her mermaid figurine inside the diorama. A moment later, she added, ?...please??

?What is this?? He was talking about the mermaid as his hand unwrapped from the back of the chair. He leaned in, curiously, two fingers from his left hand pinching the bottom of the mermaid as he mimicked the angle she had been holding it at, ?Like this??

She was making a little world, and he had seen something like this in theatre performances before, just never so small as she had it. He wondered, briefly, if the little mermaid was a small puppet actress in her presentation.

?It?s a mermaid,? she explained. ?We?re supposed to make a model of something from nature, recreating it but smaller. I guess it?s to show that you?ve learned about all the plants and animals and stuff? I picked underwater, ?cause I like mermaids. They?re pretty.? Once his hand was there to support the plastic figurine, Penny nodded. ?Yeah, there.? With both hands free, it was easier to loop the thick plastic fishing line around the narrow point in the tail, to thread it through the holes she?d made in the diorama?s cardboard top.

Tag wasn?t far off, thinking of theater performances. She was, in a sense, creating the stage and all of its background scenery, the sand and the rocks made up the ocean floor, the pipe cleaners and bits of twisted paper made coral and seaweed. She?d balanced bright orange and white fish in between some of them, giving the appearance of clownfish who lived in their stinging anemone. In the background, she?d painted a different kind of fish with elaborate brown and white fins like frilly snowflakes, picking out details with her colored markers. In one far corner, she?d nestled a treasure chest that the mermaid would be swimming towards. It was like a picture captured from a movie or a play, rendered in three dimensions.

Penny moved on, cutting the next length of fishing line quickly. While Tag held it for her, she tried looping it around one of the little mermaid?s outstretched wrists first, then changed her mind and caught it underneath the armpits. ?I?ve never seen a mermaid, but some of the kids at school say they?re real, so, I wanted to add one.?

He had never seen one before, but there was plenty that he hadn?t seen. In addition to that was the fact that she was going to school in Rhy?Din, a land where it seemed any creature imagined on paper had come to life. He continued to hold the mermaid as he studied the rest of the construction, ?And those?? He was talking about the bits of orange and white that made up the fish, swimming in the sea anemone.

He had not realized her fascination with the ocean, which became more evident in the work she had put into everything. She hadn?t treated the project like the chore, which he had seen happen with other assignments. It allowed her to break and blend colors and construct a small world where her hands were like that of many gods. His free hand moved to grab the other folding chair and move it back. He had to sit on the edge of it to avoid the beach that had spilled from her little world into their own.

Penny had come to really like the ocean, or at least the idea of it. One day back in the spring, her class had gone on a school field trip for Children?s Day. There was a theme park and a zoo, but her favorite part had been the aquarium. In the observation room, she?d sat on a bench and just watched the fish swim by on all sides, picturing herself in an imaginary world under the water, far away from her present trouble. From her little brother, from the missing Madi, from anything to do with the dust and rolling plains of the West.

Better still, she?d been dragged back outside at last just in time to catch the afternoon sing along, led at one point by an actress dressed up as what turned out to be a mermaid. She hadn?t had many opportunities to learn about Disney movies yet, so one of her classmates had told her the story, insisting that mermaids were real. They can?t keep ?em in the aquarium because they?re people, but they?re kinda fish too, and they?re out there, the girl had told her with matter of fact enthusiasm. Since then, it was her greatest hope that one day her dad would take her to the ocean so she could swim underneath it and see all the beautiful creatures for herself.

Even, maybe, a mermaid.

?They?re called clownfish,? she told him, distracted from her work for a moment as she looked over at her father. He was pulling the chair out and sitting down, and for the first time she noticed that more of the sand had spilled than she?d thought. He was kind not to point it out just then, and her gaze moved back to his face. ?...?Cause they?re orange and white with black on them and somebody thought they looked like clowns. These things they live in are anen-- anemen--? Penny frowned. ?Anemenemone? I can spell it but I can?t say it.?

?Clowns.? He said the words seriously, it was the sort of statement she knew well by now. Tag was trying to decide if he knew what a clown was, if he had heard the word before. The word was familiar enough that he didn?t just ask the question, but he tried it out in the area again for himself. Orange and white and black. His weight shifted and then he spoke, ?There was a clown at the birthday party you went to.? He could not recall which classmate?s birthday party it was, only that he remembered the clown being much more colorful. There had been reds, and almost the sort of bold makeup one saw in a kabuki theatre, where the eyes and lips were dramatic and the skin was made to be white.

The sand could wait.

?Why did you pick the clownfish and the? enemy?? It was the closest word he knew to what she was trying to say, to what she couldn?t say.

The girl nodded, tying a loose knot in the fishing line. ?Yeah.? she said, confirming that he?d remembered the clown correctly. ?That?s right. See how the black outlines the orange parts on the white? I guess that?s supposed to look like the makeup.? Penny lowered one hand to point at the fish, then used the same one to lightly push his away from the mermaid. She studied the angle at which it hung with the critical eye of a perfectionist, shook her head. ?It?s not quite right. Hold it again, please?? Carefully, she picked the loose knot she?d tied apart with her fingernails and redid it.

?The...it?s not ?enemy?, but that kinda fits anyway.? She giggled, and thinking through the word again, his interpretation helped her figure out how to say it. An enemy. ?A-nem-oh-nee. It?s poisonous -- it hurts if you touch it. And these little fish, pretty much everything in the water wants to eat them, so they?ve learned to make themselves immune to the poison by rubbing against them every day. They live inside them so they can be safe, because nobody else can get to them.? Little wonder, then, that the young girl had chosen them. Taking extreme measures to feel safe had been a theme in her life recently. ?I like them because they?re tough. They?ve figured out how to survive without changing who they are.?

?An-enemy?. A-nem-oh-nee.? He copied her exploration of the word, but in the end found her original assessment of it to be correct-- the word was difficult, even for a girl whose native tongue was English.

Her explanation filled the air between them and he considered what it might be like, or what it might mean, to ingest a little poison everyday so that your own home wouldn?t harm you and would somehow ward off the rest of the world. His mind drifted briefly to the scar on his arm. It must have been important to believe that no one could get to their home again, to demand the promise that he would never die. He leaned forward, pinching the scaly underside of the mermaids tail so that Penny could adjust the string again as she liked. Perhaps mermaids needed to hang a little higher than that.

?I think? they are changing who they are, if they live because a poison runs through them.? He was meaning that they were exposing themselves, painfully, creating the change that brought on their immunity and life. ?Change can be good, even if it is poison.?

It was all of that, and it was other things, too. Penny had the tip of her tongue caught in her teeth, just barely visible between pursed lips as she tied the fishing line a second time, hoping to line it up a little better this time. ?Yeah,? she said a short time later. ?Sometimes you have to change to stay safe, right?? Trouble darkened her eyes , furrowing her brows, and she lifted her gaze to him for several seconds before she changed the subject a little, bringing it more directly back to clownfish.

?When they pick out the anen--house they want to live in? Some of them will do a little dance to introduce themselves and see if it likes them. Isn?t that funny?? She laughed. ?Can you imagine having to do a little dance to see whether you could come inside?? With one hand still on the mermaid?s marionette strings, she lifted the other away, spreading her fingers out wide before she waved it a little, mimicking a dance. ?They also have a bunch of babies. Like? hundreds of them. And they?re all boys, and the daddy fish takes care of the eggs until they hatch.? She paused. ?I don?t know what the mommy fishes do besides laying the eggs. The book didn?t say.? Considering that for a moment, the young girl shook her head and re-tied the string one more time. ?Anyway. If something happens to the mommy fish, the ?dominant? boy fish will become a girl. That?s pretty funny, too.?

Penny spoke of the odd dance of the fish, but he did not say that it seemed much like the courtship between lovers. Dancing, conversation and appearance were all designed with the hope of entry. She talked about the father fish being the one that stayed and took care of the family, and neither one of them was willing to put into words the obvious parallel. A home with a man and two children and the mother fish off? doing something.

The book didn't say.

?It would be strange,? he countered, not entirely sure that he could grasp something as complicated as what she said taking place for humans. What he did muse, though, followed his thoughtful pause with the sound of concern, ?To change your gender, to become a woman because it was what the family needed.? He hadn't been able to explain that to Madison, she had always left believing that wherever she went and whatever she was doing would save them. The truth was, she wasn't trying to save them, it was that or she had poorly understood what saving anyone meant.

?I will not become a woman anytime soon. I am not the clown.? There was his smile, amused with the spark of a shadow giving it a rich sincerity.

Penny gently tapped his hand to get him to release the mermaid again, and this time she was satisfied. A satisfied smile appeared on her face, and she nudged it once with a fingertip, watching the little plastic figurine swing awkwardly in its makeshift harness, testing its stability. ?There,? she said, when it swayed once or twice and then settled right back where it had been. ?Perfect.?

Looking over at him now, the smile lingered in place. ?No offense, Dad but you?d make a pretty terrible woman, I think.? Impulsively, she took a couple of steps towards him and wrapped both arms around his shoulders. ?You?re too good for it.?

((written with Tag))