The Spear Cuts Through Water

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, graphic violence, and ableism.

In second person point-of-view, a grandchild listens to their Lola (grandmother) tell a story about the Old Country and the Inverted Theater. The grandchild often tires of Lola’s stories but listens to this one with rapt attention as their nine brothers sit in a different room, listening to the radio.

Once, the Moon and the Water fell in love. They could interact when the Moon reflected on the Water’s surface, all images inverted in the reflection. In this reflected world, they built the Inverted Theater, maintained by their child and accessed only in dreams.

In a dream, the grandchild enters the Inverted Theater. Many others are there, but they appear as dreaming shades. The grandchild sits in the theater, and a shade asks who they are. The grandchild describes trains, radios, and the war that ravages their country. They are from a merchant family on the Unified Continent, to which the family immigrated from the Old Country generations ago. The shade gestures to the spear in the grandchild’s hands. The grandchild was not aware that they were holding it and now recalls that it is a family heirloom.