er hand aches from signing “hospital.” But Giles won’t go, and she understands why. Doctors know claw wounds when they see them, and there are protocols regarding animal control: visits to Mr. Arzounian, searches of the Arcade Apartments to make sure a tenant isn’t harboring a dangerous beast. She is, though, and both she and Giles know what the local government does with dangerous beasts: They are taken from their unfit masters and put to sleep.

So she’d capitulated to Giles’s request and provided him with a guesswork treatment of iodine and bandages. He’d made jokes at every step, his way of making it clear that he wasn’t upset, but it had done little to soothe her. One of his cats, eaten. A wound that will sprout who knows what sort of infection. Giles is old and not especially robust. If something happens to him, it’ll be her fault—her and the heart she can’t contain. Her heart, then, is a wild animal, too, a second living thing to be locked up should animal control arrive at the door.

Elisa is monitoring Giles, making sure he ingests both the soup and water she poured, when they both hear water dribbling into the bathtub. They stare at each other. One thing they have come to learn is that the creature can move into, out of, and through water without a sound, which means he is warning them, on purpose, that he has stood up. Giles’s hand tightens around his spoon like a shiv, and it breaks Elisa’s heart. Everyone is changing, and none for the better.

It takes a full minute for the creature to exit the bathroom. He plods slowly, face tilted to the floor, gills flat and submissive, lethal claws tucked out of sight behind his thighs. His finned back is curled in a submissive hunch, and he keeps one shoulder to the wall as if he’s chained himself to one of Strickland’s concrete posts. Elisa is confident that not once in his ageless life has the creature known the misery of regret, and she stands, holding out her arms, as eager to accept his apology as she is reticent to accept her own.

The creature, afraid to look at her, slouches past her open arms, trembling so badly that scales ping off and land on the floorboards, where they twinkle as brightly as the constellation of lights on the theater’s ceiling. He shuffles across the room like one of Chemosh’s whipped slaves, his head dipping lower until it matches the height of Giles, seated at the table. Giles shakes his head, holds up his hands.

“Please,” he says. “You’ve done no wrong, my boy.”

The creature releases his hands from their hiding place and raises them, so gradually that it’s imperceptible, until all ten of his claws, half-retracted into his fingers, snag at Giles’s bandaged arm. Giles looks at Elisa; she stares back, sharing his confusion and hope. They watch as the creature lifts Giles’s arm from the table, as tenderly as if it were an infant, and positions it beneath his downturned face. Despite the creature’s meekness, the pose is disquieting: It looks as if he is about to eat Giles’s arm, like a scolded child forced to finish his dinner.

What happens is less violent and far stranger. He licks it. The creature’s tongue, longer and flatter than a man’s, extends past his double-jaws and laps at the bandage. Giles’s mouth moves, but he looks too startled to manage actual words. Elisa is no better prepared; not a single letter forms from her dangling hands. The creature rotates Giles’s arm as he licks, wetting the entirety of the bandage until it is soaked to Giles’s skin, until the dried blood is liquid again and the creature is licking it clean. He lowers the glistening arm to Giles’s lap, slowly leans over, and then, like some parting kiss, licks the top of Giles’s head.

The ritual, abruptly, is finished. Giles blinks up at the creature.

“Thank you?”

The creature doesn’t react. It looks to Elisa that he is too ashamed to move. But it has been a long day for a being whose only true comfort is inside water: His gills and chest begin to expand and shake. Elisa wants to wash Giles’s arm, reapply iodine, rewrap it in sterilized bandages, but she can’t bear the idea of insulting the creature. She steps close and settles a hand upon his bowed back, gently pushing him toward the bathroom. He allows it, but only in a backward stumble that doesn’t impede his genuflection to Giles. It is the least graceful she’s seen the creature, and she has to tug his arm to get him through the bathroom doorway, a whack from his shoulder joggling the air-freshener trees.

She folds him into the tub. The lights are off and his face slides underwater, and yet his eyeshine is undiluted. Elisa breaks his gaze to pour salt into the water, but feels him watching. Throughout her life, she has felt men on the street or bus trace her movements. This is different. This is exciting. When she reaches into the tub to swirl the salt, their eyes meet, only for a second, but in that second she reads both gratitude and amazement. The idea is outlandish. She amazes him. How is that possible, when he is the most amazing thing that ever lived?

Elisa finishes stirring. Her hand is beside his face. Such a small thing to move it, so she does, cupping her palm to his cheek. It is smooth. She bets the scientists never noted this in all their data. They only registered teeth, claws, spines. She caresses him now, her hand gliding down his neck and shoulder. The water has turned him the same temperature as the air, and maybe this is why she doesn’t feel his hand sliding up her arm until he is at the soft, bluish flesh of her inner elbow. His palm’s scales are Lilliputian daggers, nicking playfully at her skin, while his claws poke, never enough to puncture, as they travel her biceps, leaving white scratches in their wake.

After dressing Giles’s wound, Elisa had changed into a gauze-thin shirt dating back to Home, and when the creature’s hand shifts from her arm to her chest, the cotton soaks instantly, as if by magic. First one breast, then the other, is heavied by the grip of the shirt slicked to her skin. She feels naked beneath his hand, can feel every shiver of her hitching chest, breathless but not because there is anything illicit here. He is always naked before her, and it feels overdue that she join him in this natural state.

The room incandesces from below. The Story of Ruth, she thinks, the projector cranking up for another screening. But there is no music. It is the creature, his body lights suffusing the water with pink, like flamingos, like petunias, like untold other fauna and flora from a world she knows only from field recordings: reek-reek, chuk-a-kuk, curu-curu, zeee-eee-eee. She arches her back, leaning her full weight into a palm wide enough to cradle her entire chest.

Somewhere far away, Giles hisses in pain. Elisa realizes her eyes are closed; she opens them. She finds that her whole body has moved. She is bent over the tub so far that her hair dangles into the water. She wants to keep going, tip forward until she drowns as she has drowned so many times in dreams, but Giles is hurt, and it’s her doing, and she needs to treat that wound again, especially after it was licked. With great effort she straightens her spine. The creature’s hand trails down her belly and reenters the water without splash or sound.

Elisa covers her wet shirt with a bathrobe before moving into the main room. She does not, however, go to Giles. She walks past him, across the apartment’s length, to the kitchen window. She leans her forehead onto it. She presses her hand against it. Her vision blurs, but not because she’s crying. There is water on the window, hanging in small globs on the pane, slugging in wet streaks down the glass. Yes, she might be crying after all.

It is raining.