Free The House of Discarded Dreams by Ekaterina Sedia

pillow, its smooth skin and several feet and hands brushing cool against Vimbai’s cheek. “Don’t be sad,” Peb said, its former petulance forgotten. “Why are you sad?”
    “I miss Maya,” Vimbai answered. “I wish I could go with her.”
    “There are creatures under the porch,” Peb said cryptically. “The house found them.”
    “They were on the porch,” Vimbai said. “And now they are gone.”
    “No,” Peb argued. “Still under.”
    “There are only horseshoe crabs there.” Vimbai sat up abruptly. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”
    Peb bobbed over her pillow, floating up then down, until it jetted higher up and disappeared through the ceiling.
    Vimbai rubbed her face. “Horseshoe crabs,” she murmured. Poor crabs, bled half to death by wazimamoto in medical trucks. Vimbai jumped off her bed, reenergized by the possibility of a new discovery. There would be time later for Maya and Felix and Balshazaar; now was the time for horseshoe crabs.
    Vimbai had never anticipated that she would be sticking her face into strange and unfamiliar places so much, but there she was—on her hands and knees on the porch, by the very edge of the water. The house had mutated again, developing a coquettish hem of round pebbles and pieces of seaglass, polished and clear. The barnacles hung onto the edge, their quick ghostly feet kicking food in their mouths hidden somewhere inside their chalky shells. If it weren’t for horseshoe crabs, Vimbai would’ve studied barnacles for the sheer weirdness of their anatomy and lifestyle.
    Vimbai kneeled on the edge of the porch that currently fancied itself a littoral zone and studied the surface of water—smooth and clear, and so cold. Her breath fogged the air and touched the waves; Vimbai tried to cloud them with her breath like one would a pane of glass, but to no avail. She took a deep breath and thrust her face into the ocean.
    The salt and the cold burned her skin, a million needles threading her cheeks. Her teeth ached. She opened her eyes underwater and they burned too, tears not helping the matters at all. The water around her seemed stationary, like a block of green ice. She couldn’t see very far, and her breath tried to break out of her chest like a caged and panicked bird.
    Vimbai came up for a breath of air, and gasped, still crying from the cold and the salt and the sadness of all this water, always separating her from something she wanted. How could one love something so cruel, something so terrible to her parents? As if answering, a withered ghostly hand lay on her shoulder.
    “ Sahwira ,” her grandmother said. “Girlfriend, my girlfriend. You look for thing no mortal eyes can see. Let me guide your vision.”
    Her grandmother’s hands lay flat on Vimbai’s temples and pushed her gently back toward the water’s surface. For a moment, blind fear boiled in Vimbai—what if she were to hold her head down and never let her come up for air, no matter how much her heart thundered and her legs kicked and thrashed? What if she wanted Vimbai to be a ghost, like her, to finally touch the souls of her ancestors?
    But it was foolish. The hands on her head were so gentle even without warmth, so kind, that Vimbai succumbed and let them guide her. She opened her eyes, and for a moment there was just familiar transparency without images, the endless wall of thick glass. And then her grandmother’s eyes entered her own.
    If she were asked to explain how it felt, Vimbai would’ve faltered for words, groping for images that best described what she was experiencing. Her grandmother’s sight entered her own like a hand enters an empty glove. Vimbai had been hollow and now she had a center, a depth, a density—she felt three-dimensional and alive and aware. She focused her eyes and she could see every grain of sand in the bottom, every rock, every shrimp hiding in the crevices. She saw kelp forests and the silvering of a school of anchovies, the rapid quirk of a