Two children wander through the dense, adult confusion of Marshsong. They are tender, strange, cruel, joyous. They play like animals in the wild—untethered, un-self-aware, wild with invention. And they equally play off each other; a sort of ping pong game of emotions that ricochets between them. At times, I think that both Fennel and Isabella are me. Other times, I think that their energy comes from much of my childhood spent in the wiles of Oregon and California with my endearing brother. Sometimes me and my brother are split across Fennel and Isabella. Othertimes, we blur. 

There is something sacred and feral in the energy of siblings. I have always been drawn to it—the collision of loyalty and rivalry, the effortless shorthand, the years of unspoken understanding that stretch like rubber bands over time. I wrote this before my brother died, but already I felt the strands between us loosening, fraying into distance. I went to college. He did not. I moved away from home. He stayed there. That grief—of growing apart before truly losing him—saturates this chapter, even if I didn’t know it yet. 

As Jhumpa Lahiri once wrote, “There is no such thing as a perfect sibling relationship. There is love, of course, and history, and loyalty, but there is also distance, and the terrifying knowledge that growing up means growing apart.” 

The children in this story are full of contradictions. They float above the earth, full of curiosity and laughter, unburdened by adult sorrow—but also, at times, sharp and thoughtless. Their cruelty is a kind of play. Their play, a kind of defense.