Friendly-looking, big-eyed, and found in shoals like fish — the Morivarid pass for harmless right up until they're on you. They are the cleaners of the murk, and what they clean is soft tissue: eyeballs first, then the tongue, then the flesh off the bone. You hear them coming, if you hear them at all, as a sound like a wet cough.

Out past Ugg Hill, the Edgefield Obelisk stands alone where the Loxley runs lonely — a majestic monolith emerging from the murk like a needle of vengeance. They raised it in 1832 over a roadside spring, in memory of a child who drowned in the water that still runs beneath it. I've never decided whether it marks the grief or feeds it.