LES GARDIENS
Dr. Ellis Thibodeaux twisted the calibration knob on the dissolved oxygen meter, squinting as afternoon light fractured through the cypress canopy. Water slapped gently against the aluminum hull, casting ripples of light. Ellis pulled their focus back to the digital display, though the familiar shimmer had already begun forming at the edges of their vision.
Maya hunched over her log nearby, methodically cataloging core samples. Ellis caught her glancing up, a familiar flash of concern poorly masked by professional detachment. Her notebook pages showed the hallmarks of someone Ellis had trained well: precise columns of oxygen readings, temperature gradients, and microscopic silt analyses.
"See that?" Ellis nodded toward the water without looking up. "Right where the good water meets the dead zone."
Maya's eyes followed the gesture, then returned to her instruments. "Readings are normal across the board." Her voice took on that careful neutrality Ellis had come to recognize, the scientific equivalent of humoring someone.
Ellis finally looked up, meeting her gaze. The shimmer was stronger now, moving in their peripheral vision with purpose. It coalesced and separated, formed intricate patterns and dissolved them along the transition zone where clear surface water met the oxygen-depleted layer beneath, like a living language Ellis could almost but not quite understand.
"I know what the instruments show," Ellis said quietly. "I'm telling you what I see."
Maya's expression remained neutral, practiced. She'd been with Ellis long enough to witness these moments before—these declarations of phenomena that registered on no equipment, insistences on patterns that existed beyond the data.
"Like at Henderson Swamp last month?" she asked. "And Bayou Benoit before that?"
Ellis nodded, returning to the meter. They'd learned over the years to document the data first, to establish the scientific baseline before allowing themselves to document what else they perceived. Twenty years of scientific training battled with what they knew to be true, that where instrument data showed anomalies, often enough, they saw patterns.
The proper methodology had become a kind of ritual: measure, record, analyze. Only then, in a separate leather-bound journal kept locked in their desk drawer, would they document the rest, the things they saw that existed in the spaces between empirical data points.
"My great-aunt Mathilde called them les gardiens or the small gods," Ellis said quietly, surprising themselves. They rarely spoke of this aloud, and never to colleagues. "My first summer here, during the '97 flood, that's when she told me about them."
The memory surfaced clear as spring water: rain on a tin roof, an old field guide with handwritten notations, and Mathilde's sing-song voice carrying a story Ellis had never forgotten.
#
July 1997
The porch swing creaked, chain links grinding in a slow gentle rhythm with Mathilde's rocking, marking seconds with their groans as she watched both the storm crawling over the marsh and the careful efforts of the youngest of her sister’s ti-zanfan. Ellis sat cross-legged on the weathered boards, twelve, with a serious face and a mop of blonde hair, watching a great blue heron lift from the water's edge. They'd been trying to sketch it in the notebook balanced on their knees, but the bird had sensed their surveillance and transformed itself from flesh to shadow across the water.
"Ti-El, you been seeing things, ain't you?" Mathilde said suddenly, her voice cutting through green frog barks and cicada song.
Ellis's pencil stilled mid-stroke. They adjusted their thick-framed glasses, not looking up. "What do you mean?"
"Your moman* called me last week." Mathilde's voice held no judgment, only a calm matter-of-factness.
Ellis traced the outline of the heron on their page a second time, adding unnecessary detail to the wings. "What about?"
"The lights you say you see moving in the trees behind your house in Chicago." Mathilde let the words settle softly between them, watching Ellis's face carefully. "Said the school counselor's been worried."
Thunder in the distance, empty barrels rolling across a wooden floor, marking the time as 3:00pm, always 3:00pm. The air felt marginally heavier, just a little electric, same as it always was before every summer afternoon storm and every tough conversation.
"They're just dreams," Ellis said. They'd learned this response from watching the tight line of their mother's mouth when they'd mentioned the lights at breakfast three months ago, the way her hands had trembled slightly as she'd set down her coffee cup.
Mathilde made a sound, half laugh, half sigh. She continued rocking, entirely comfortable letting silence stretch between them. When she finally spoke, her voice was soft. "You ever wonder why your moman don't like bringing you down here? Why three days is always the most she can stand before she starts finding reasons to leave?"
Ellis looked up then.
"She gets headaches," Ellis said, repeating what they'd always been told.
"She gets headaches, yes she does, but mostly she gets scared," Mathilde said gently. "Scared of what you might start seeing if you stay too long. Scared of what she might start seeing again herself."
"Again?" The word hung between them as they watched a sheet of rain rolling across the marsh, its edges somehow clean as the lines on a map.
"Your gran-moman had the same eyes. And her moman Ellis before her" Mathilde's gaze drifted across the approaching storm, watching the way the light changed over the water as its boundaries started to blur. "It runs in our blood like the water runs through the basin, sometimes hidden, sometimes plain to see, but always moving."
Ellis considered this and realized it surprised them less than they thought it should. "Is that why Mom gets so scared when I talk about it?" they asked, voice barely audible beneath the gathering wind. "The lights?"
"Your moman was ten when they took your gran-moman away. Came home from school to find her papa, the doctor, and the sheriff in the living room, and her moman gone." Mathilde's eyes clouded with old pain. "They called it 'nervous hysteria.' But all Loretta did was insist on what she saw. Wouldn’t hush up, wouldn’t act like she ain’t seen nothing like they told her to."
Mathilde glanced toward the kitchen door, checking they were still alone. Ellis's mother had gone into town for supplies, their father was out checking traps with a family friend.
"Wasn't always like that," Mathilde continued, her voice rising to match the patter of the coming rain. "We used to understand about seeing different. The old ones knew there was more than one way to know the world."
Ellis closed their notebook, drawing it against their chest, as though to trade protection from the increasing moisture for protection of a different kind. "The counselor says I have an overactive imagination. She wants me to take medicine."
"I bet she does," Mathilde said with surprising heat. Then, more gently: "What do you see, Ti-El? When the lights come?"
Ellis hesitated, fingers tracing the spiral binding of their notebook. They'd never described it aloud before, not fully. Every attempt had been met with their mother's thinning smiles or their father's too-cheerful suggestions about playing outside more.
"It's not really lights," they began slowly. "Not like sparkles or flashlights or anything. More like... you know in a parking lot, how those oil spots make swirling rainbow patterns." Ellis looked up cautiously, watching Mathilde's face for signs of disbelief. "But they move on their own, around living things, trees, mostly. And birds. Sometimes they make shapes that almost look like... not exactly arms or wings, but something reaching."
To Ellis's surprise, Mathilde was nodding, her eyes bright with unshed tears. "They shimmer when they move, them? Like heat rising off a hot blacktop, but with a kind of purpose to it?"
Ellis felt something loosen in their chest, a tightness they hadn't realized they'd been carrying. "Yes. Exactly like that. You've seen them too."
It wasn't a question.
Mathilde's hand moved unconsciously to the hollow of her throat, where a small mark—it could have been a scar or maybe a birthmark—was visible against her loose, sun-spotted skin. "They say the Ivory-bill died out in '44, the Ghost Bird did," she said, seemingly changing the subject.
The first fat raindrops hit the tin roof with hollow pings as the sky darkened to indigo. Ellis scooted back from the screen that wrapped around the porch, closer to their great-aunt's swing, now still, drawn by something in her voice that seemed to speak directly to the nameless thing they'd been carrying inside since the night they woke to find their bedroom filled with trembling light.
"What's an Ivory-bill?" they asked.
Mathilde's eyes crinkled at the corners like road maps to forgotten places. "That big woodpecker with the white bill like carved bone, him." Her fingers sketched the shape in the air, bigger than a crow, with a powerful head and distinctive markings. "Some called it the Lord God Bird, 'cause that's what people would say when they seen one, 'Lord God, look at that bird!'" Her laugh, sudden and full, drowning out the rain. "Others called it the Ghost Bird, 'cause even when they was plenty, they was hard to spot, them. Like they was already halfway gone from this world."
She slid a hand beneath the swing’s cushion, pulling out a battered Peterson field guide. The book fell open to a page marked with a faded ribbon, a magnificent black and white woodpecker with a startling crimson crest.
"This was your gran-moman’s book. See her notes?"
Ellis ran a finger over the penciled observations in the margin, recognizing their grandmother’s tight, precise handwriting, so like their own. Dates, locations spanning the 1930s, and something else: tiny symbols Ellis didn't recognize repeated beside each entry. A vertical line with three branches, sometimes accompanied by small circles or cross-hatches.
"What are these marks?"
"That's for later," Mathilde said, touching the symbols with a reverence reserved for holy things. "First, you need to hear about the day I saw the last one. Me, I was nineteen that summer of '44, living at my papa’s camp deep in the basin while the men were away. Me, moman, my sisters, and my papa, though he was mostly bedridden by then, the cancer eating him hollow like termites."
Ellis shifted a touch closer as the rain intensified, a loud rhythm on the roof like a snare drum beaten faster and faster.
"World War II," Ellis supplied, always precise with facts.
"That's right. Both my brothers gone, Paul somewhere in France with Patton's army, and Louis on a ship in the Pacific. My sweetheart Raymond was there too." Mathilde's eyes took on that distant look, not seeing the present anymore but looking back through the long corridor of years. "That July, we got the telegram about Louis. His ship got sunk by a Japanese torpedo. Two weeks later, old Miz Fabacher down the way lost both her sons on some beach in France they couldn't even pronounce right. Most our boys went to France, they did, because they thought we spoke the language. Called them ‘Frenchies’.”
Her fingers worked absently at the wooden armrest, tracing patterns worn smooth by decades of similar motions. Ellis recognized it later as the same three-branched mark that appeared in the field guide.
"That summer, everything felt... suspended between two worlds. The basin, it was changing too." Mathilde's voice softened. "The water, it wasn't flowing right. Hadn't been since they started building those control structures upstream."
She reached out and touched Ellis's notebook, still clutched against their chest. "You like to draw the birds, just like your gran-moman did. You like to understand how things work, you." It wasn't a question. "That's good. But there's things in this basin—things in this world—that don't fit in notebooks or textbooks. Things you can only understand by watching. By being quiet and patient-like.”
Ellis nodded solemnly, recognizing the gravity in her voice. "Like the lights in the trees."
"Like them, yes." Mathilde rocked silently for a moment, gathering her thoughts. "That morning in '44, I slipped out before sunrise to check the crawfish traps. Nobody was supposed to go out alone, but with my brothers gone and my papa bedridden, someone had to do it.”
She leaned forward slightly, her voice low as if sharing a precious secret. "And I needed to get away from the heavy in that house. Just for a little while."
#
July 17, 1944
The morning broke hot and close, the air so thick with water, you could feel it pressing down on you. Mathilde slipped out of the camp before sunrise, before her mother and sisters stirred. The wooden pirogue slid silent through the narrow channel between cypress knees, her paddle barely disturbing the dark water that reflected nothing, as if reluctant to give up its secrets even to the sky.
She was looking for signs. Her papa had taught her before the sickness hollowed him out, how to read the basin like it was a book written in a language of mud and water and light. Which birds nested where, which fish ran in which season. The water level was wrong again, too high for July, the result of the Corps' new control structures upstream. She guided her pirogue through a stand of tupelo that should have been on dry ground, their trunks disappearing into water that hadn't been there two summers ago. The wrongness of it sat in her chest like a stone, sadness for the drowning trees, but also something deeper. As if the basin itself were trying to speak through her, to express some wordless distress at its altered state.
The new flow had drowned out some of the bottomland hardwoods where the Ghost Bird had been spotted last spring. Mathilde had marked it carefully in her own field guide, adding the same small symbol her mother had taught her to use, the cîpre-signe, the cypress mark that the medicine woman who delivered her had drawn on her blanket at birth when she opened her eyes too wide, seeing too much too soon.
Mathilde's head ached dully from the heat and from too little sleep. The telegram about Louis had come three days before, and she'd spent each night since sitting with her mother, who couldn't cry but couldn't sleep either. The war felt both impossibly distant and unbearably close, something vast and hungry circling their small lives.
The sun was just beginning to filter through the cypress canopy when she heard it, that distinctive double-knock echoing through the trees. Kent-kent. She froze, paddle suspended above the water, the sound vibrating in her chest like a second heartbeat.
Kent-kent.
The Ghost Bird. She knew it immediately, though she'd only heard it twice before in her life. Her heart quickened as she carefully maneuvered her pirogue toward the sound, tying it to a cypress knee and stepping lightly onto a raised hummock. The ground gave slightly beneath her weight, releasing the sugar-sweet scent of decay and regeneration, the basin's constant cycle of death becoming life becoming death again.
She moved slowly, careful of her footing, eyes scanning the massive trunks of the old-growth cypress. Another double-knock led her deeper, off any path, into a stand of trees that must have been ancient when her great-grandparents first settled here.
Then she saw it—a flash of black and white, larger than any woodpecker had a right to be, with that distinctive ivory bill that gave it its name. It worked its way up a dying cypress, powerful beak hammering at the wood, sending chips flying. The sound carried through the still morning air like gunshots, a memory that made her flinch, thinking of her brothers in their uniforms, surrounded by such sounds.
"Lord God," she whispered, understanding the name in that moment.
But it wasn't the bird that made her blood run cold and hot all at once. It was what followed in its wake.
At first, she thought it was a trick of the morning light through the leaves, like when one of her big headaches was coming on. The ones that started with lights dancing at the corners of her vision, then turned sharp and mean behind her eyes. A shimmer, a ripple in the air behind the bird as it moved. But as she watched, the ripple took form.
A being that seemed made of feathers and air and morning light, with wings that didn't quite end where wings should, stretching into something like fingers or branches or roots. It moved with the bird, around the bird, through the bird, as if they were two parts of the same creature, existing in the same space in different ways.
Mathilde felt her breath catch in her throat. The being—for she knew instantly it was a being, not a trick of light or imagination—shifted as she watched, its form responding to the bird's movements with fluid grace. Where the Ivory-bill's wings spread, the entity unfurled something that wasn’t quite wings. When the bird's head turned, scanning for insects beneath bark, the being's awareness seemed to extend outward, touching the tree in ways that transcended physical contact.
"Le Gardien," she whispered, using the term her gran-moman had used for the basin's hidden protectors. She wouldn't learn its true name—Le Voyageur—until decades later, when she found her gran-moman’s hidden journal with its careful taxonomy of the small gods.
The being turned what might have been a head, and Mathilde felt it see her, really see her, with eyes that weren't eyes at all but shifting patterns of light that seemed to look through her skin to the blood and bone beneath. She could feel it looking, as if the light itself were moving through her body, reading her easy as she could read the basin’s seasons.
She didn't run. Something told her running would be pointless, that this thing could follow her anywhere in the basin if it chose. Instead, she stood very still and lowered her eyes, the way her gran-moman had taught her. Her gran-moman had taught her young: If you see something that ain’t quite there, don’t run and don’t stare. Look down, speak soft, and remember, they were here before us, and they’ll be here after.
"Je ne veux pas de mal," she whispered in French, the language of secrets and prayers. "I mean no harm."
A sound reached her then. It wasn’t birdsong, and it wasn’t quite the familiar sound of wind through cypress and Spanish moss. It seemed like something between music and mathematics, a vibration that seemed to pass through her rather than reach her ears. It carried a question she couldn't hear but somehow understood: Why have you come?
The question wasn't hostile, merely curious, like a child asking why the sky is blue. Mathilde felt her migraine threatening at the edges of her vision, a pulsing that matched the rhythm of this impossible communication.
"The water is wrong," she answered, though she wasn't sure if she spoke aloud or only thought the words. "The trees are drowning where they shouldn't drown."
She hesitated, feeling the weight of worlds in the silence that followed. The being's form rippled slightly, creating patterns of light and shadow that reminded her of sunlight through water. A second vibration passed through her, carrying a complex sensation—recognition, agreement, a shared perception of disruption in the natural order.
The communication felt ancient and immediate at once, as if the being existed in a different relationship to time itself, experiencing past, present, and possible futures simultaneously. Mathilde's mind struggled to interpret impressions that weren't meant for human understanding, flashes of the basin as it had been centuries ago, as it was now, as it might become.
When she dared look up again, both bird and being had moved further into the cypress stand. Without conscious thought, she followed, drawn by a need she couldn't name. She'd never been this deep in the swamp alone, but fear seemed a distant thing compared to the wonder pulling her forward.
For what must have been hours, she tracked them, the great woodpecker and its otherworldly shadow, as they moved from tree to tree through the altered landscape. Sometimes the being would reach out with those impossible limbs and touch a tree before the bird landed on it, as if testing or preparing the way. With each touch, Mathilde perceived subtle changes, a brightening of color in the cypress needles, a strengthening of the bark, a stirring of insects beneath the surface. The being was following the bird, but it was also facilitating its hunt by enhancing the relationship between woodpecker and tree.
Other times it would hover near nesting cavities, seeming to peer inside with a sorrowful attention that Mathilde felt like a weight in her own chest. Once, it extended a limb into an abandoned nesting hole and withdrew something that glimmered briefly—a memory of eggs that never hatched, of fledglings never born—before dissolving it back into the air with a gesture that conveyed unmistakable grief.
She noticed how the bird avoided the stands of tupelo that had been submerged by the rising water, now dying from the changed conditions. When they passed these places, the being's form would become less distinct, its edges blurring. Mathilde sensed its discomfort, an almost physical distress that mirrored her own unease about the changed water patterns.
Later, the bird and being paused at a massive cypress that had been marked with white paint, tagged for lumber, part of the wartime harvest that was taking the oldest trees. The being's reaction was immediate and profound. Its form contracted then expanded in what Mathilde could only interpret as distress. A high, thin note, like crystal shattering at a distance, vibrated through the air, making Mathilde's teeth ache. The bird responded with a series of rapid, angry pecks against the paint mark, as if trying to remove it.
The being extended what might have been a hand or a wing-tip to touch the white mark. Where it made contact, the paint briefly glowed then seemed to age rapidly, cracking and peeling away from the bark in tiny flakes that dissolved before they reached the ground. Beneath, the exposed bark shimmered momentarily with the same quality of light that composed the being itself, as if it had transferred something of its essence into the tree, a blessing of sorts.
Mathilde lost all sense of time, of direction. The swamp had become a dream-place, and she moved through it as if in a trance, careful to keep her distance but unable to turn away. The heat of the day built around her, drawing sweat that plastered her dress to her skin. The migraine pulsed behind her eyes, growing stronger. Mosquitoes whined at her ears, but even they seemed reluctant to land, as if something about her temporary communion with bird and being had rendered her untouchable.
By midday, they had reached a part of the swamp she'd never seen before. She faced an island of ancient cypress surrounded by water so still it mirrored the sky perfectly. The bird landed on a massive, lightning-scarred trunk, and the being hovered nearby, larger now, more distinct, as if gaining substance from the old trees around it.
The bird gave its double-knock once more, the sound echoing across the water. Kent-kent.
And then, silence.
The being, Le Voyageur, seemed to expand, spreading its like-wings impossibly wide, holding the bird, the tree, the island. For a moment, it shimmered with a light that hurt Mathilde's eyes, bright as the sun on water. Her migraine exploded behind her eyes, and she had to look away, doubling over with the pain of it.
Through tear-blurred vision, she saw the ivory-bill suddenly take flight, powerful wing-beats carrying it up and away from the island. Its trajectory was unusual, abandoning the typical undulating flight pattern she'd observed before. It now made a direct, purposeful path south across the open water. The bird moved with unusual urgency, as if responding to some signal or warning undetectable to human senses.
In return, the being pulsed once with brilliant intensity, then rushed after the bird in a streaming ribbon of light and shadow. But there was something wrong in its movement, a struggle that Mathilde hadn't observed before. As the bird flew further, the being seemed to stretch, like it was pulling apart, reaching after the bird but unable to keep pace.
Mathilde found herself wading into the water, reaching out as if she could somehow help, though she didn't understand what was happening. The cold water soaked her dress to the knees, then the waist, but she barely noticed.
"Attends!" she called, the French for "wait" tearing from her throat. "Reviens!" Come back.
But the ivory-bill flew on, unheeding, and the being, stretched now to a thin, shimmering thread, gave what seemed like one final pulse of light before it tore apart like mist in a strong wind, fragments scattering across the water's surface. They glittered briefly, like oil on water, before dissolving into nothing.
Except, one fragment, no larger than a firefly, drifted back toward Mathilde, hovering before her for a heartbeat. It pulsed with a diminished version of the being's light, carrying a complex impression. This small living thing drifted closer, then settled into the hollow of her throat. She felt a brief, impossible cold, then a warmth that spread through her chest and was gone, leaving something behind that she couldn’t name.
The double-knock of the bird echoed once more in the distance, and then never again. It took its watcher with it, and for the first time, the basin felt empty to Mathilde in a way she couldn't explain. It was hollow, as if something essential had been removed from the fabric of the place itself.
She stood in water up to her chest, the stillness around her absolute, not even the whisper of wind in the cypress. In that moment, she knew, with a certainty bone-deep and inarguable, that she had witnessed an ending.
The Ghost Bird wouldn't return. And neither would the being that had followed in its wake.
Or so she thought, until years later, when she began to understand what that small piece of it had left within her.
#
July 1997
"I tried to follow them, me," Mathilde told Ellis. "Waded out far as I could, but the bird flew beyond where I could reach. I was half-starved, half-drowned, had a migraine fit to split my skull, but I still remember it clearer than what I had for breakfast today, I do.”
"What happened to the... the thing that was with it?" Ellis asked, leaning forward, chin propped on their knees, arms wrapped around their legs.
Mathilde's hand went unconsciously to her throat, fingers pressing against the hollow where her collarbones met. Ellis noticed the small mark there in the shape of the symbol from the field guide. It seemed to shimmer slightly in the storm light, though Ellis couldn't be sure if that was real or a trick of water-heavy air.
"Most of it scattered. Broke apart like fog in sunshine." Mathilde paused, eyes distant with memory. "But a piece, just a tiny piece, came back to me." Her voice held wonder still, after all these years.
Ellis's eyes widened behind their glasses. "What did it do to you?"
"Didn't do nothing I could explain back then. Just felt cold, then warm, then gone." Mathilde leaned forward, voice dropping further. "But after that day, I started seeing them everywhere. All the small gods of the basin. Not all the time, just... glimpses. When the light was right. When they wanted to be seen."
"Like the lights I've been seeing in the trees," Ellis said.
"The Comeaux twins down the road, they see them too, but they call them 'swamp angels’ and think they're the spirits of folks who drowned out there." Mathilde shook her head. "Your cousin André, he sees them but tells himself it's just tricks of the light. Calls them 'swamp gas' or 'marsh lights' and leaves little offerings anyway, just in case. But different folks see them different ways."
She tapped the field guide still open in Ellis's lap. "That's what those marks are in your gran-moman's book. It’s where she saw the birds and also where she saw their guardians. The small gods that watch over them."
"If they're real, why doesn't everyone see them?" Ellis asked, the scientist already emerging in the child.
"Some folks just ain't built for seeing, them." Mathilde said simply. She considered her next words carefully. "And sometimes, I think, they choose who sees. Like they're testing us, trying to find the right eyes."
"But what are they looking for?"
"Witnesses, maybe." Mathilde rocked slowly, the creaking of the chains punctuating her words. "Someone to remember what's being lost. Someone to understand the connections before they're broken."
Ellis was quiet for a long moment, digesting this. Then they asked, "Why did you tell me this now?"
"Because you're at a crossroads, shær. This is when you choose how to carry the seeing. Whether you hush it down like your moman, or hold it close like your gran-moman. Or maybe… something different." Mathilde's voice was gentle but firm. "Your moman’s scared for you, wanting to make the lights go away with doctors and medicine. She thinks she's protecting you, and maybe she is. This seeing, it ain't always a gift. Ask your gran-moman."
"But she's—"
"Dead, yes. But they broke her first, trying to make her unsee what she saw." There was an old anger in Mathilde's voice now. "She spent the last years of her life in that place, drugged so heavy she could barely speak. All because she wouldn't stop talking about what she saw."
Ellis hugged their notebook tighter. "So I shouldn't tell anyone?"
"I didn't say that. But you need to be careful who you tell and how you tell it." Mathilde studied Ellis's face. "You got a scientific mind, you. I see it in how you watch things, how you draw them. That might be your protection, your way of understanding without getting lost in it."
"Is that why you never told anyone what you saw? About the Ivory-bill and its... guardian?"
"I told some people. Those who'd understand." Mathilde smiled slightly. "There's always been folks in the basin who see differently. We find each other, eventually."
Lightning flashed again, closer now, and the rain intensified, a silver curtain separating them from the water beyond the porch. Ellis opened their notebook to a blank page and held it out to Mathilde.
"Show me the symbol again? The one in Grandma's book?"
Mathilde took the notebook. With hands that trembled slightly with age, she drew a symbol: a vertical line with three branches extending from one side.
"This is the old sign for them. The guardians. If you see something, anything at all that don't quite make sense, you mark it down with this. Don't try to explain it. Don't tell nobody who won't understand. Just keep the record, like your gran-moman did."
She handed the notebook back, her eyes serious. "Stories like that aren't meant for ears that don't know how to listen. You hold it careful-like, until someone comes along who knows the right questions, Ti-El.”
Ellis took the notebook, studying the symbol. "What if... what if I'm just making it up? Seeing things that aren't there?" They voiced the fear that had been growing since their mother's whispered phone calls with the school counselor.
"You think I'm making it up?" Mathilde asked, not unkindly.
“No," Ellis said firmly.
"Then trust your own eyes the same way. Ça c’est la vérité,” Mathilde added, her voice low. She reached out to touch Ellis's hand, her fingers warm despite the storm's chill. "The basin's changing again, faster than ever before. The small gods are getting harder to find, but they're still here." Her fingers returned to the hollow of her throat, where the mark like a scar or birthmark seemed to pulse faintly with its own inner light. "I can feel them sometimes, even when I can't see them."
"What do they want from us?" Ellis asked suddenly.
Mathilde considered this, rocking slowly. "I don't think they want anything from us. I think maybe they want us to see the connections before they're gone. To witness. To remember."
Ellis closed the notebook, feeling the weight of something being passed to them, an inheritance both precious and dangerous. "I'll remember," they promised. "I'll keep the record."
"I know you will," Mathilde said. "That's why I'm telling you now. Because you've got the eyes to see what most folks don't. And someday, you might need to know you're not the first in this family to see more than what's supposed to be there. That you're not crazy, no matter what they tell you, shær."
The rain began to ease, and from somewhere deep in the basin, a chorus of frogs started their evening song. Mathilde hummed softly, an old Cajun lullaby her gran-moman had sung to her. Ellis leaned against their great-aunt's knee, watching the swamp transform in the after-storm light.
"What do you think happened to it?" Ellis asked after a long silence. "To Le Voyageur?"
Mathilde's humming paused. "I used to think it died with the bird. But now..." Her fingers touched her throat again, tracing the symbol that seemed increasingly visible, as if the storm had somehow brought it into sharper relief. "Now I think maybe it just changed form. Scattered itself across the basin to watch through different eyes. Through our eyes, maybe."
She looked down at Ellis, her gaze suddenly intense. "Your moman tried to stop seeing. Taught herself to look away, to ignore what was right in front of her. It nearly drove her mad, that conflict. That's why she gets the headaches."
"What should I do?" Ellis asked, their voice small against the returning sounds of the basin.
"You'll find your own way of seeing," Mathilde said. "Not like your gran-moman, who couldn't help but try to make everyone else see too. Not like your moman, who pretends not to see at all." She smiled slightly. "Maybe something new."
#
University Research Station, Atchafalaya Basin, Present Day
"You never told anyone else the story she told you?" Maya asked, carefully labeling another water sample. The afternoon light was beginning to shift toward evening, casting long shadows across the water.
Ellis smiled slightly, touching the hollow of their throat where an almost imperceptible mark, a vertical line with three branches, had appeared the summer after Mathilde died. It was visible only in certain lights, from certain angles, like a scar that existed partially in another dimension.
"I told you, didn't I?" Ellis replied. "And I documented everything. Not in the official research, but in parallel. Just like my grandmother did."
They reached into their waterproof field bag and withdrew a leather-bound journal, its pages thickened with use and water exposure. Opening it revealed neat columns of data matched with the same symbol drawn over and over, accompanied by precise coordinates, dates, times. Between these entries were detailed sketches of observable phenomena as well as the shimmering entities that accompanied them. Maya studied the journal with careful neutrality, but Ellis noticed how her fingers lingered on the symbols, how her eyes tracked the patterns in the drawings with unusual focus.
Maya traced her finger along a data graph in Ellis's journal. "Your hypoxic zone prediction model..." She hesitated, eyes narrowing in realization. "Everyone in the department thinks you've developed some revolutionary algorithm, but it's…" she glanced at the water, then back at Ellis, "…because you can see where they'll form, can't you?"
Ellis nodded, relieved at not having to explain. "The instruments point me in the right direction. They give me the parts," They gestured toward the monitoring equipment, "but I see how those parts connect." Their hand moved to the water, where light played in patterns too orderly to be random. "Like the visual representation of ecological relationships."
"The living shape of the data," Maya said. "And you think I can see them too?"
"I think you've been seeing them for weeks," Ellis replied. "Tell me I’m wrong. I've watched you tracking things with your eyes that don't register on our equipment. I've seen you hesitate before sampling, as if sensing something in the water."
Maya was silent for a long moment, her face turned away. When she looked back, there was a mixture of relief and fear in her expression.
"I thought I was imagining things," she said finally. "Strange patterns in water samples under the microscope. Movements at the periphery of my vision. I've been having these headaches…"
"Migraines?" Ellis asked.
Maya nodded. "They started about a month after we began the fieldwork. Right after we discovered that new microbial community at the boundary layer."
Ellis looked out across the basin as the afternoon light slanted through the trees, creating patterns across the water's surface. For a moment, the light seemed to gather and shift in ways that didn't follow the movement of the leaves, in patterns that resembled nothing so much as wings that weren't quite wings, fingers that weren't quite fingers.
"There," Ellis said quietly, pointing. "Where the light hits the boundary layer. Do you see it?"
Maya squinted, following their gesture. For a moment, her face showed only concentration, a frown of effort creasing her forehead. Then something shifted in her expression, a flicker of doubt quickly suppressed.
"I don't…" she began, then stopped. "Maybe it's just the light reflecting off the particulate matter in suspension."
Ellis waited patiently. This was the moment of choice, the crossroads Mathilde had described all those years ago. The moment when one either chose to see or chose to look away. They watched as Maya's scientific training battled with what her senses were telling her.
"Don't look at it directly," Ellis said quietly. "It's like looking at stars; you see better from the periphery." They demonstrated, gaze soft-focused just beyond the water's surface. "Forget what the equipment says should be there."
Maya exhaled slowly and adjusted her posture. Ellis recognized the transition, the deliberate shift from analytical observation to pattern recognition. It had taken Ellis years to learn this scientific double-vision.
"The reflections…" Maya started, then frowned. "No, not reflections. The light itself is…" She tilted her head. "It's behaving like it's responding to something."
"Keep going," Ellis encouraged. "What's it responding to?"
Maya leaned forward. "It's concentrated around that sampling site," her voice gained confidence as scientific vocabulary gave her footing, "where we found those new chemosynthetic bacteria colonies." She glanced at Ellis, the researcher in her needing verification. "The light's different there. Moving like it has…" she hesitated over the unscientific word, "…intention."
"And what about the microbes?" Ellis prompted.
"They're organized differently than they should be," Maya said, connecting pieces rapidly now. "Our cultures showed unusual symbiotic patterns that shouldn't—" Her eyes widened. "The light and the microbes are connected, aren't they?"
"That's the beginning of it," Ellis nodded. "What else?"
Maya turned back to the water, her perception shifting further. "It's…it has a shape. Defined. Like it's holding the microbial community together somehow, facilitating the chemical exchanges." Her voice took on a note of wonder. "It's the relationship made visible. The symbiosis itself has form."
Ellis felt an overwhelming surge of emotion—pride, relief, connection. It had taken them years to articulate what Maya had just expressed in a moment of clarity.
"That's it exactly," they said softly. "What instruments measure are the individual components. What we see are the relationships between them."
Maya continued to stare at the water, her face illuminated by more than just the evening light. "It's beautiful," she whispered. Then, suddenly, she winced, pressing fingers to her temple.
"The headache?" Ellis asked.
She nodded. "Like pressure behind my eyes."
"It gets easier," Ellis assured her. "Your brain is processing information it wasn't built to interpret, at least not in the way we're taught to interpret sensory data. Mathilde called it 'the adjustment.' My grandmother never managed it. She couldn't stop trying to make everyone else see what she saw, couldn't find a way to contextualize it."
Maya tore her gaze away from the water with visible effort. "But you found a way."
"Science gave me a way to legitimize it," Ellis explained. "I run parallel methodologies, standard instrumentation," they tapped the monitoring equipment, "and this." They touched the corner of their eye. "The first data set is for peer review. The second helps me interpret the anomalies in the first."
"What do we—I mean, how do we proceed with—" Maya fumbled for the question.
"We do what scientists have always done," Ellis said, looking up from their journal. "We observe. We document. We look for patterns in the noise." They closed the journal. "But we're careful about how we present our findings. The world's not ready for a paper titled 'Ecological Entities at the Hypoxic Boundary Layer.'"
Maya let out a nervous laugh, the sound of someone grateful to be back in familiar scientific territory, even if that territory had just expanded dramatically.
"So we keep it secret?"
"We share it carefully, and in the right contexts." Ellis smiled. "I've published twelve papers using insights from what I see, translated into the language of ecological science. No one questions the results because they're empirically sound. They just don't know the full methodology."
"A bridge between worlds," Maya said.
"Exactly. Not denial, like my mother. Not desperate evangelism, like my grandmother." Ellis looked out across the basin, feeling the presence of Mathilde in everything, her lullabies woven into the frog-song, her love steady as a hand on Ellis’s shoulder, even now. "A third way of seeing clearly and speaking carefully."
Maya's hand went unconsciously to her own throat, fingers tracing the hollow between her collarbones where nothing yet marked her skin. But Ellis knew what might come, the symbol that had appeared on their own skin the summer after Mathilde died, the mark that now sometimes seemed to pulse with its own subtle luminescence when the seeing was strongest.
"Welcome to the family," Ellis whispered. And somewhere in the basin, something that wasn't quite a bird and wasn't quite a ghost repeated its distinctive call for the first time in decades:
Kent-kent.
Author's note
*This story includes both Kouri-Vini (Louisiana Creole) and Louisiana French. This decision was intentional and meant to depict the natural code-switching within a family that lives in the overlap of these languages and cultures. Mathilde uses Kouri-Vini for family words (moman, gran-moman, ti-zanfan). Later, she uses Louisiana French as a way of showing reverence; in her generation, many Kouri-Vini speakers who were Catholics would have said their prayers in French. She also slips briefly into Louisiana French with Ellis, who, born in 1985 and raised in Chicago, would not have spoken Kouri-Vini, but could have known some French.