Taryn thought of the photograph doing the rounds on Facebook, of a starving polar bear balanced on a pillar of melting sea ice, like a statue on a plinth, a memorial to itself. She thought of Shift, who might know the names of the gods of all the rivers, or at least all those in the south of England and Wales. Then she thought of a scene in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, a film she loved, where a river deity arrives at the heroine’s bathhouse. Shuffling and reeking, it floods the tub and scrubbed timber rooms with oily mud, broken bicycles, and supermarket trolleys. All the rotten flotsam
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