Jenny is submerged in the water slopped over the train track at Nettlewood Station. The tracks have not had a train run across them in years. She has spelled out the sign, rotting slowly with age, repeatedly in her waking-dreams, tracing the letters with her gray-green, slick, webbed fingers. The broken wall tiles are packed with grit and awash with mud. She laughs at the man-made things, sometimes, and the way they erode as she remains untouched, whole.

Humans are silly things, thinking anything they do at all will last. Eventually, every cobbled street, every paved road, every building rising like a broken tooth from the Boston Harbor will be reclaimed by water and earth. She is forever and they are not, so that means, of course, she is better than they are. She doesn’t need to venture above ground to prove it to their faces. Deep down, she decides, they know.