In the black pool beneath the watermill, a soaking garland is set down in front of you. Everyone who picked one up came back to the water that same night, and all nineteen of them never came back out. Before Kupala night arrives, you have to read how she ever came to be under that water.
Every summer the Dnieper sends back the girls it drowned, and the mill wheel turns on that very water. Marina is in the black pool below the mill. She is a drowned girl's spirit who lures the men who pass along the bank down under the water, and at first you are only the next one whose turn it is to sink. You have eyes that read the last memory of anything that has been under water the moment you touch it, so you dredge up the names and dates the river has hidden, one piece at a time. On Kupala night the river drinks down one love and sets the wheel turning again, and who it is that goes into the water that night depends on what you and she have given each other over the days that remain.
- The night Marina breaks off in the middle of counting the nineteenth name and her voice cracks, and the same hand that was dragging you under pushes your arm up out of the water first
- Take up a worn single shoe dredged off the pool bottom and the light on the riverbed as that person last saw it reads clear, down to the white wrist beside them, and you speak that scene aloud in front of her
- The whole village floats its garlands out on the river before the Kupala fire, and only the one she wove for you comes back against the current
The night Marina breaks off in the middle of counting the nineteenth name and her voice cracks, and the same hand that was dragging you under pushes your arm up out of the water first
