The mill was attached to the side of the stone house. It wheeled, rumbling in the downpour, scooping through the river. Inside the house, a child crouched in the kitchen.

“Daddy,” she whispered.

Weslan stood at the sink, listening to the pounding rain, the rushing water. The mill creaked. He could almost hear his wife’s feet on the floorboards. 

“Daddy, I need water.”

Weslan refilled his daughter’s glass and held it to her by the rim. She coughed between sips. “Go to sleep, Lizzie,” he said. His voice came from a deep, coarse place beneath his lungs.

In bed, Weslan ran his hand along the sheet beside him. The rain plodded the roof, and he imagined his wife, Sara, in the shower. Soon, she’d return, towel-wrapped and sopping; the lanterns in the hall would backlight her silhouette; her wet hair would trail her shoulders; and she’d crawl into his arms, cool and wet, whispering, I love how the rain patters on the mill.

Outside in the distance between two hill crests was Terning, the town where Sara used to live and where she had likely returned when she left three nights ago. Terning was known as the town whose people never stopped moving.

When Weslan was twenty, his father sent him to Terning to sell grain. Weslan set up his stand by a drinking well and leaned a carved sign against it. People strolled past, murmuring; they weren’t used to stopping at seller’s stands. Sara ran out of a tavern, flushed from dancing. She leaned over the stone well as if to sip. The bucket rocked and her hair hung, waves swaying.

“They’re deepening it next month,” she said. “I love the gurgle, the sound the water makes when it sloshes against the stone.” She circled to the front of his stand and asked if he ever walked along the river. He lived along the river, he said.

Later that day, she led him out of town to the water’s edge. The river was wide and rushing and filled with stones. They sat on the shore, and Sara laid her cheek on her knee. “Just listen,” she whispered. The river lapped the mud, cooing. She took his hand. Her skin felt cool and smooth like water pouring over him. “Your hands are rocks,” she laughed.

Still in bed, Weslan was startled by a sharp thunk. The mill stopped. Weslan listened but only heard the wind, the rain, his daughter’s cough. No wooden scrape, no sloshing water. He walked outside, stepped into the riverbed, and examined the mill: the wood was sturdy and the wheel rotated when he pushed it, but it refused to carry water on its own. He kneeled in the river and dug in its bed. The rain soaked his hair, his shirt. It streaked his face. His fingers became so cold that he could no longer feel himself scraping the mud.

When Sara first saw the mill, she and Weslan stood on the bridge by the house. Sara’s dress rippled in the wind, and the bridge’s railing creaked as she leaned against it. “It’s so peaceful,” she said.

Thunder cracked. Weslan went back inside. He watched the rain spatter the window. Lights flickered down in the valley as people in Terning woke or slept. Weslan remembered the dying light of the candles he and Sara used to set out at dinner, how Sara would knead dough and drum the table, waiting for it to bake.

Lizzie woke, her glass empty. She tugged on Weslan’s pants. Weslan set Lizzie’s cup by the sink and, instead, filled a waterskin. He hoisted her up. His six–year–old daughter fit squarely on his shoulders.

Lizzie wasn’t used to leaving the house. “Where are we going?” she asked. She touched his face. Wind cut against them.

“To find Mommy,” he huffed.

In Terning, people moved in and out of houses, prancing across streets in the moonlight. They held drinks and swung around posts and kissed beneath lanterns. A woman slipped past, smelling of wine. For a moment, Weslan thought it was Sara. He started after her, but Lizzie patted his face.

Early in their marriage, Weslan and Sara used to lay in bed as Sara sipped a cup of wine. She twiddled her thumb around his, holding the wine in her other hand, sloshing it gently. 

“Have you thought about children?” Weslan asked.

Sara squinted at him, glanced away, whispered, “Why?”

“My father named me after his father. When he died, he left me the mill. I always imagined someone coming after us.” 

Sara shrugged and set her cup on her stomach, tracing her finger around the rim.

The next night, she twirled and laughed, and in bed, she slipped into his arms. She pulled back after every kiss, readjusting, repositioning, moving, always moving. She sunk between his thighs, beneath his knee, and peeked at him. She pooled around him, curling, curving, sweeping, making soft sounds like creaking. She slept easily afterwards, lulled by the churning of the mill.

Weslan carried Lizzie further into town, weaving through the current of people. He peeked in the windows of empty residences. The houses didn’t belong to anyone. The people shifted from house to house throughout the day and slept wherever they found themselves.

When Sara learned she was pregnant, she lay, trembling, and Weslan cradled her in his arms. She tossed throughout the night, sometimes waking. She told him about her dream. “I’m drowning. I’m holding something above me and kicking my legs but I keep sinking. My hands are so cold. I can’t feel what I’m holding and I can’t move and I can’t let go. Some clogging, choking thing tells me I can’t let go.”

Soon after, Sara complained about not being able to hear the mill anymore. Weslan loosened the stones in the kitchen wall to make a window so she could hear the mill more easily. He left the faucets running overnight, but she still couldn’t sleep.

The people in town kept moving, sweeping around him, but Weslan had to stop. He leaned forward, his palms on his knees. He shifted Lizzie on his back, took in a long breath, but it didn’t get past the lump in his throat. Lizzie leaned over his shoulder and said she wanted to walk. He let her down. On the ground, Lizzie took a moment to find her balance. A group of people stirred up dirt in their hurry past, and Lizzie coughed. Weslan gave her the waterskin to drink. After she returned it, he took her hand.

“Which way is home?” Lizzie asked curiously. Weslan turned himself around, trying to remember.

“To be honest, I’m not sure,” he admitted. The loss of direction scared him. He always knew where the mill was, and how it was, and that gave him steadiness. Now he didn’t know. “We would have to find the river. But we’re not leaving yet.”

“I know,” Lizzie said. She pointed at an inn, suggesting to search there next. 

The inn had no attendant. String-tied paper sculptures of long-necked birds and multi-winged butterflies were left on the counter. The sculptures were for visitors to hang on doorknobs; the people came and went too often for locks.

Lizzie led Weslan down the inn’s long hall. She stopped at a door that was already cracked and pushed it open carefully. The paper sculpture swayed. The room was dim, the fireplace cold. In the bed, a woman lay with her back to them. She wore nothing; her silk nightgown hung on the bed’s corner post. The quilt was rumpled and pushed away, and her legs were uncovered and curled. For a moment, Weslan saw his wife. But it wasn’t Sara. It was a stranger.

On a night after the birth, the baby screamed and Sara threw a pillow around her ears.

“She’s awake again,” Weslan murmured. He went to warm milk. Sara gathered her sheets and followed. “Will you sing to her?” he asked.

Sara shook her head wildly.

“Maybe you can hold her?” 

“I’m too shaky,” she whispered. “I don’t want to drop her.”

In the inn’s hall, Lizzie had a coughing fit, so Weslan guided her back outside. He started to think that he wasn’t going to find Sara tonight. He also started to worry that Lizzie would be tired. He crouched to ask if she wanted to take a rest, but she smacked his shoulder in glee. “Dancing!”

Lizzie faced a tavern whose sign read “The Camel Well.” Weslan recognized it as the tavern where he and Sara met. The well was tucked between posts, its bucket on the ground. People spilled into the establishment from the street.The music was clacking shells and shaking sand underlain by a smooth trombone. Lizzie ran inside. The crowd swallowed her.

Weslan called for Lizzie, pushed after her. The people blocked him like a living maze. He tried to listen, beyond the music and chatter and movement, for the sound of Lizzie coughing, but he couldn’t hear her well. 

When Lizzie was five, Sara began sleeping on the couch. “I can’t hear the mill in the bedroom,” she said. Weslan tried to take her hand, but her fingers slipped through his like liquid. 

Later, when Weslan heard Lizzie coughing, he noticed Sara was still awake. The window illuminated the wispy hairs by Sara’s ears. She hugged Lizzie’s stuffed bear. “I come so close to sleeping but all I hear, all night, is her coughing,” she whispered.

“It’s only a cough,” he said.

“She’s been coughing for months.”

Weslan touched her knee with his palm, but she twisted away and pressed her forehead against the cushion. In a muffled whisper, she said, “I wish we never had her.”

In the tavern, Weslan shouted for Lizzie. People streamed in channels and waves and moved in all directions. They knocked him, and he lost his way. He shouted and shouted, but the music was louder than his voice.

Lizzie’s head popped up over the crowd. She was standing on a tall table that someone lifted her onto. Weslan pushed to get to her. She sat on the table’s edge, and he held her legs. She touched the space below his eye with her finger. “You’re tired,” she noticed. 

Weslan smiled weakly. “It’s hard for me to be around so much commotion.”

Lizzie clapped his cheeks. Her hands were cold. “You don’t like dancing.”

Weslan frowned. He touched her hands. The trek to town had roughened her skin.

As people paraded by, they clacked clackers and shook shakers that tossed water droplets like confetti. Lizzie laughed when the water hit her. 

“We can dance,” Weslan said.

Lizzie wrapped her arms around Weslan. He lifted her off the table and brought her into the flood. He held her above the crowd, over his head, and spun and swayed until his arms grew tired and he brought her down into himself. Lizzie’s joy bubbled beside his ear and she laughed and laughed. He scratched his lips against her cheek. 

Weslan popped Lizzie back onto his shoulders. He maneuvered out of town, found the river, and walked them home along it. Lizzie fell asleep on his back. Whenever he got too used to her weight, he bounced her to remember that she was there. 

As they came away from the valley far enough to see sunlight shoot over their stone house and its broken mill, Lizzie woke, coughing. He passed her the waterskin over his shoulder, and she gulped to the rhythm of falling water.

Jean Strickland is a speculative fiction writer from Maryland. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Dark Matter Presents: Monster Lairs Anthology, All Worlds Wayfarer, and Bards and Sages Quarterly, among others. She enjoys watching anime and convincing her friends to play games with her. Follow her work on jeanstrickland.wordpress.com or on Twitter @b4heroes.