Carrie Vaughn's stories have appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Talebones, and other publications. She lives in Boulder, Colorado. For more about her, see her website. To contact her, send her email.
Water is life here, and it's evident in that if you stray too far off the beaten path and away from water, you will get lost and you’ll be lucky if anyone sees you again before sundown. My village is settled neatly between two gentle rolling mesas and along a thin river in a sparsely populated community lovingly called ‘the valley’.