Rupture

Katie Licavoli

 

July 9th, 2024, Mackinaw City, Michigan.  

The promise of blue skies and a 90-degree day in Northern Michigan drove tourists to Lake Huron's beaches like flies to a sun-ripened trash can. Some locals resented the increasing hordes of visitors flooding Michigan’s beaches each summer, but not her. The food on her table and the roof over her head depend on them. That's what happens when you own a generational ferrying business that runs from April through October—weather permitting—in a lakeshore, tourism-reliant town like Mackinaw City. For a business like hers, the profits made in seven months are as vital as a heartbeat. They will make or break you.

Business was good this year. Every ferry ride sold out, every ticket booked for the next two months. Her brother—her business partner—all but forced her to take the day off. “A day at the beach,” he’d suggested. So, heeding his advice, she’s at the beach. Acting like just another one of the flies.    

In her faded navy one-piece, she eases into Lake Huron, her feet moving over white sand, polished pudding, and speckled Petoskey stones. By waist deep, goosebumps flesh her skin. Drawing a breath, she closes her eyes and dives, plunging into the icy, inland sea. The cool water floods her with dopamine. It’s high, all-consuming. She surfaces, flipping over and floating, backstroking deeper into the lake, eyes closed, chin tilting to the sun. Nothing, she thinks, beats a Michigan summer.  

Weightless, she drifts, water cradling her as the sun kisses her cheeks. When she finally swims back to shore, it’s only because the growl in her stomach signals it’s time for lunch. Perhaps she’ll finally try the new brewery in town. Her brother has boasted about their Dunkle and pan-fried walleye, and today seems like a day for a patio beer.  

The water is to her knees when she realizes she is alone in the lake. Looking up, she sees the other swimmers have evacuated and are nestled in small pods along the beach. They point out behind her, murmuring, brows furrowed. She turns to see what they are looking at, but finds only normalcy. Blue sky and sun. The Mackinac Bridge, grand in the distance. Speed boats vrooming by, sailboats and freighters gliding. One of her ferries, filled with passengers, cuts across the water, leaving behind it a cascading fountain of spray. It isn’t until she looks beneath the bridge that she sees what is captivating so many others. A cloud of blackness, an unnatural iridescent sheen, spreading across the water as fast as spilled ink on a page.  

Her heart thuds wildly. No, she think. It can’t be.  

“Dad!” a young girl yells behind her. “Gross! What is that?!”   

“I don’t know, honey,” the father replies. “But I don’t think we should be in the water any more today.”

The father starts packing up their towels, mashing them into his backpack alongside bags of Doritos, a couple of plastic-wrapped sandwiches, soda bottles, and a pair of floaties. There are signs posted every half mile along the beach threatening minimum fines of $250 for littering. They were installed by the state last summer.

When she reaches the shore, she pauses, overcome by the overwhelming urge to imprint the image of the still clear, untainted water lapping over her toes. She lingers a moment longer, then, with effort, steps forward. 

On the beach she finds her towel and wraps it around her shoulders. She joins the crowd and looks out over Lake Huron, watching the blackness crawl its way across the water without anything out there to stop it. The young girl and father stand a few feet away, the daughter now digging in the sand at her father’s feet.  

“Do you think one of the freighters spilled something?” he asks.

She doesn’t know if his question is for her, or for anybody listening.

Eyes locked on the blanketing mass killing her livelihood by the second, she utters, “No, it’s not a freighter. It’s Line 5.”     

“Line 5?” he asks. “What’s that?”

“An oil pipeline in the Straits of Mackinac. It looks like it’s ruptured.”   

Her remark appears to baffle him. A silent beat passes before he asks the question she and so many others have pondered for decades.  

“Why would anybody put an oil pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac?”   

#

July 10th, 2024, Mackinaw City, Michigan.  

She talks to others. She watches the news. She tries not to panic.

She learns that the 70-year-old pipeline ruptured in several places, and when the company, Big Oil, that owns the pipeline, tried to shut off the oil supply, their equipment malfunctioned, over and over again.

Days later, Line 5 is still pouring oil into where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron meet, and as the lakes have always done, their powerful currents carry their water, now slick with oil, north and south, east and west along Michigan’s coastlines.  

“Catastrophic.” “Environmental disaster.” Those are the words the news keeps using. “For the community, the economy, the wildlife, and the lake’s ecosystems,” they elaborate. “Corrosion” and “improper pipeline maintenance” by Big Oil shoulder the blame.   

For years, her community and much of the state of Michigan has fought to have Line 5 shut down and removed from the Great Lakes.

There has to be another way to meet the state’s propane needs, they suggested.

There has to be a safer way, they petitioned.

It violates tribal treaty rights, they declared.

This will be disastrous, they said.

But Big Oil countered. 

Shutting down Line 5 will hurt local economies, it warned.   

It saves people money, it argued.

It’s exceptionally durable, it insisted. 

It’s reliable and safe, it promised. 

#

July 13th, 2024, Mackinaw City, Michigan.  

Each day she and her brother gather on the beach alongside other locals, news crews, and gawkers who have come to watch the growing mass of black sludge creep its way through the Great Lakes.

Emptied of freighters, speed and sailboats, and her cherished ferries, all of which have been ordered to be docked until further notice, the lakes look bare. Lifeless. Those are the words that come to mind when she looks at her Lake Huron.  

Her brother carries a pair of binoculars everywhere with him, and seated together on a towel, they take turns passing them back and forth. While he watches the oil stretch its way across the water, she wrangles with incessant thoughts about the future. 

 Each day, seated along the shore, she spots another she knows. She sees the man in the grease-stained ball cap who owns a chain of smoked fish shops around the area. She sees the father and twenty-something son who make their living taking people out on fishing charters every summer. She sees the now white-haired couple who owns Bonnie’s, a local tourist hotspot famous statewide for always having twenty types of pies on rotation and “the best Friday night fish fry in Northern Michigan.” She sees the woman a few years younger than her who runs Darling Anne, the cruise service that takes tourists out to watch sunsets under the Mackinac Bridge. She sees the grandmother who never can stop bragging about her twelve grandchildren, and who for 40 years has owned the most popular bed-and-breakfast in town. She sees local tribal members who, more than her—more than any of them—rely on these waters. Their ancestors have been around since the Great Lakes were just the Great Lakes, and that was enough, and long before a pipeline was ever laid into the earth in the pursuit of efficiency and economic gain.   

#

July 15th, 2024, Mackinaw City, Michigan.  

She is in her office, planted behind her computer, where she’s been researching for hours. 

Nearby, a cold coffee sits untouched, alongside a sandwich, recently delivered by her brother. Its oily residue has permeated its white paper packaging.

Her office is dark, and the computer screen casts her in blue light she’s heard will strain her eyes and trick her brain into thinking it’s daytime, but that is the least of her worries. She scrolls, reading article after article, engrossed in what she’s uncovered about Big Oil. 

They are a foreign company with a net worth of over 90 billion. In the last thirty years, they have had over 1,000 spills, pouring a predicted one billion gallons of crude oil into lakes, rivers, tributaries, agricultural land and wetlands. This is not their first spill in Michigan.

In July 2010, a 41-year-old pipeline owned by Big Oil experienced a six-foot rupture that sent over a million gallons of crude oil into Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River in Southwest Michigan. It took eighteen hours for Big Oil to learn of the break, which polluted nearly 36 miles of the river that was an ecological haven. The spill was on every news channel. Over 4,000 mammals, birds, amphibians, and reptiles needed to be rescued, cleaned, and rehabilitated. Nearly 150 families had to be permanently relocated for fear of health concerns due to their proximity to the spill. Locals reported experiencing nausea, headaches, coughing, and difficulty breathing. Today, that same spill has come to be known as one of the largest inland oil spills in the history of the U.S. It took nearly five years to clean up, and both the spill and cleaning efforts forever changed the river’s ecosystem.

The same year the river was considered safe, Big Oil made a public statement claiming their efforts made the river cleaner and healthier than it was before the spill.  

She rereads their statement again, and then again and again, wondering, what will they possibly say about this?

#

July 16th, 2024, Mackinaw City, Michigan.  

She was up until three in the morning reading about Big Oil. She spent the night at her office and awoke unrested, eyes bloodshot, desperate to return to Lake Huron.

She turns down the street leading to the beach and finds it barricaded off. A large crowd floods the street and overflows onto the beach. The crowd is chanting and waving brightly painted signs. These people—activists, her brother calls them—began arriving in the days following the rupture. Each day there are more of them. She has no idea where they are coming from.              

They have made themselves at home, setting up tents along the beach, collecting driftwood, and building bonfire pits that they sit around late into the night.

They act as if the lakes belong to them, and like their lives depend on the water, too.

Though they have been threatened, they refuse to leave.

“They mean well,” her brother says.

A young girl with dreadlocks and tattooed legs stands in front of a news camera, shaking a sign into its lens that reads “TAR OUR SANDS, BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS.”

All day long these activists wave their signs, talk into camera’s and into their phones. They walk around, passing out pamphlets to anybody who will take one. They are about climate change, these pamphlets. She knows, because she took one and read it. It is these pamphlets that tell her these activists are not locals. For if they were, they would know better.

She sees a couple pushing a stroller past them, but one of the activists—a skinny man with curly hair down to his shoulders—shoves a pamphlet aggressively at the couple. She hears him say, “there’s still time, do it for your child.” The couple takes the pamphlet, and then quickly walks on. She sees them glance at its cover, their expressions twist. They round the corner, passing by a trash can, and chuck the pamphlet in.  

#

July 17th, 2024, Mackinaw City, Michigan.  

Each day, downwind of the activists, she gathers on the beach with her brother and hundreds of others who, like her, have been driven out of work by a thing none of them ever wanted in their waters.

They do not come to the shore to change anything, though God knows they would if they could. They don’t come searching for attention or sympathy—that’s not the Northern Michigan way. They come to the shores of Lake Huron each day because the water is where they’ve spent their life. The water is what they know. The water is home.

So, they sit or stand or pace alongside the water as a 270-foot-deep pipeline changes everything. They watch as throngs of dead walleye and salmon wash ashore. They watch as seagull’s white coats darken from oil. They watch as tourists flee Michigan’s beaches, pinching their noses at the smell of crude-soaked air while they hurry to return to where they came from. 

“It only employed 116 people,” her brother says.

The woman who run’s Darling Anne is seated beside them. “They predict it’s hemorrhaging 23-million gallons of oil per day into the water,” she says, although everyone knows this already. It’s all over the news.

The man with the grease-stained ball cap who own’s the local smoked fish shops stands nearby. He shakes his head, and then takes his hat in his hand, exposing thinning hair. “It’s our backbone—these waters. Us and fifty million others.” He kicks at the sand. “A $6 trillion economy across the Great Lakes Region. Yet it still wasn’t enough.”

Beside her, her brother drops his head into his hands. 

She rubs his back, like she did when he was young. But unlike then, she does not tell him everything will be alright. Instead, she looks out over the water as she broods over the question she just can’t seem to get out of her mind.

Was it worth it? 

 

Katie Licavoli lives and writes in West Michigan. She is in her final semester of earning her Master of Fine Arts in fiction through the Mountainview Low-Residency program, where she is currently working on her debut novel, a contemporary coming-of-age/sports story, alongside a Michigan-based short story collection.

 

Local Composer Receives New Attention, Disappears

Ryan O’Toole

When I met him I thought he might’ve been homeless, sleeping in the men’s shelter on Halston. He approached me in a pub while I was reading a book by a college friend, someone I hadn’t thought of in years. An hour earlier I’d recognized this friend’s name on the cover of a hardback in a bookstore window and ducked inside to confirm my hunch. The author photo showed it was him, but older. He was living in Brooklyn with a wife and daughter, so the jacket copy told me. I bought it, paying nearly thirty dollars for the privilege, and found a place to read while I waited for a doctor’s appointment.

I got through about twenty pages, sipping the foam off a dark beer, when he sidled next to me, so small I hardly noticed, and asked in a soft voice how I liked the book. I turned and stared down at the voice’s balding head. Dark, clownish curls receded to a dagger-point on a wrinkled forehead. A low, wiry brow almost hid gray eyes, and purple-specked lips smiled at me crookedly. I was overwhelmed by the sweet smell of stale sweat.

I said it was good so far, I’d only just started. I tried to gauge the tenor of his approach, whether it was really about the book.

He told me he’d read a review of it in a local paper, the one I worked for actually but I didn’t say this, and he said he thought it sounded interesting. He’d read a previous book by the same author and dropped a title I’d never heard. He liked the first book well enough but wondered if the writer had made good on his talent in the second and improved the flaws of his style. He said it was clear the writer had read too much Sokoloff, whom I’d never read, but in the wrong way, and it hurt his work to crib him. What did I think?

I couldn’t say what I thought because I hardly thought anything. I’d been ingesting the words like an expensive meal, which it was, with the purpose of connecting them to my college friend who’d drifted out of mind. The more I read the better I remembered him: he walked in front of me on a gravel path between the library and humanities building, his elbows jutting backwards extravagantly as if strutting in a silent film. I tried to decide if I should speed up to talk to him, wondering whether we were close enough for that, but the distance in the end was too far. I slowed and let him go. Reading his book, I could almost hear his voice speaking the words in my ear—a delicate stammer which was easily interrupted.

It was off to a strong start, I said, though the prose was a little purple for my taste.

He didn’t hear me or didn’t care to respond directly and instead asked my name, maybe finding my accent local. I told him.

He said it was familiar then asked if I worked where I did. I nodded, and without hesitating he told me he wasn’t a fan of what I wrote, though he was sure others must like it.

I wasn’t offended. His opinion wasn’t important to me or to the world, and I replied, Neither do I but at least I’m paid for it.

He laughed, twisting his head to the side, which gave me the chance to look at him better. His green sweater was moth-chewed and frayed at the collar, and he sat with arms and legs crossed limply like a resting marionette. The ridges on his corduroys were worn smooth and the fabric was thin and pale at his knees. Though it was winter, he wore no coat nor did he have one near him. He seemed so small, so frail, I half-wanted to pull him on my lap and dandle him like my nephew.

He told me his name, Damien Darling, which meant nothing to me but was memorable for the alliteration and adorable surname. He suspected we might’ve been neighbors decades ago in Elmridge: A family with my name had lived on his street. But I said we weren’t those people and came from a different neighborhood entirely, one far away.

A pout raised on his cracked lips, and disappointment seeped from him: His shoulders dropped, and his torso shrank on the scarred bench as if pressed into it. I thought he’d now slink back where he came from, having lost interest. But I tried to keep him. Hastily I invented cousins who’d lived in Elmridge, telling him maybe they’d been his neighbors. He lit up at my lie, and oxygen returned to the small, slow-burning fire that powered him. He leaned forward, closer than before.

I knew it, he said. I can always tell when someone had a connection to the old neighborhood. There’s a whiff of it on them from the sewage treatment facility.

Then he pointed at the book’s orange cover and asked if he could read it when I was done, if I’d come back tomorrow or the day after and lend it to him. If, as a fellow Elmridgian, I’d do him a favor.

I’ll be back the day after at the same time, I said, and I can give it to you then.

Good man, he said, as if generosity were innate to Elmridgians.

I looked at my watch, I had to leave. I stuffed the book in my bag and rose from the bench and said goodbye to Darling who nodded and mumbled.

As I pushed the pub’s door, I glanced at the table and saw him pull my beer close, lift it to his lips, and drink the glass empty.

 

I hurried to my appointment, where the doctor showed me a scan of my spine. Yes, I’d need the surgery. Yes, I could think about it if I needed but I shouldn’t wait. I could take the night but I should call the desk in the morning to schedule. I thanked him and walked out, forcing a smile. Dwelling on it worsened the pain.

 

When I got home, Jeremy asked about the appointment.

It went well, I said. Only good news. I blitzed a follow-up question by telling him about the man: He was only this big—So small—I struggled to hear his voice—He wanted a book I was reading (I didn’t mention the friend)—He was so strange—Almost a person out of time—A little unclean too—I think he may be living on the street.

My frantic delivery, the strategy of overwhelm, worked. Practical-minded Jeremy asked if I’d gotten the man’s name. I repeated it, and he tapped it into his phone.

Is this him? He turned the screen and showed me Darling’s face, younger with an impish grin and dense curls.

 I nodded. Who is he?

Composer, it says. I’ll send you this article. What did Dr. Edelman say about the surgery?

 

In the morning I forgot to call. I listened to an album of Darling’s music, Suite of Viennese Airs, on my way to work. It sounded good, but I wasn’t an expert.

 

I found him again hovering over a newspaper spread across the table. Wire glasses covered his squinting eyes. I tapped the wood with my knuckles, and his hand waved me off. I waited. Snow glittered in the window. His eyes zagged down the gray page.

He jerked up at me, brows pinched in fury. What do you want? Recognizing me, he softened. Look, he said, that’s you. He pointed to an article I’d written, a profile of a chef who’d just opened a restaurant. Huge improvement, he said. Huge improvement.

Thanks, I said, trying not to sound flattered.

He dragged out the chair next to him and motioned me to sit.

I dropped my coat and bag and lifted the book from a pouch and handed it to him. Anything to drink?

Please, whatever you have. He took the book with both hands.

I walked to the bar and ordered two somethings on tap. When I came back, he was handling the book in a way I’d never seen before. He turned it over and over with marmoset fingers, inspecting the corners, the spine, the paper’s edges. Then he cracked it open and sniffed the central crease. It looked like he’d never seen one and was trying to understand its purpose. He read the back cover. I set my drink down, and he grabbed his without looking. He took a long sip and placed the pint to his right.

Thanks, he said. He unlooped the glasses from his ears and tucked them into the collar of his sweater. A kiss of foam stuck to his lip. His tongue licked it away.

I’m sure it’s not a masterpiece, but I’ll enjoy reading it, he said.

I’d made peace with never seeing the book again. I said nothing about wanting it back, and he made no promise to return it. I stayed up all night to finish it, waking Jeremy when I trudged from the living room. While reading, I dreamed about my friend, which made his book somewhat lost on me. A bouquet of college memories, which can be some of the sweetest, bloomed as I turned the pages, releasing dust-scented scenes from shabby dorms and library stacks. I remembered sitting across from him in a seminar on Bodkin. He said something I thought was incorrect, and I argued, righteously I believed, against it. At that age I felt misreading was close to murder. The energy I had then felt impossible to me now. I could never care that much about anything. I remembered his flushed face as he sat in mute embarrassment and the professor’s faltering attempt to move the discussion forward. My cruelty surprised me. I didn’t even care about Bodkin. A red pane in the stained glass window daubed me in admonishing light.

I know who you are now, I said. You’re the composer Darling. His name sounded like an endearment in my mouth.

His eyebrows flexed, then his chin lifted with a walnut of pride. Yes, I was. For a short time I was well known in some musical circles. Mostly abroad.

I listened to your work. It was lovely.

I was young, he said. It was too easy to make beautiful music. The notes grew out of my fingers like my own fingernails. He splayed his jaundiced hands, wiggled the fingertips. Beauty was everywhere—like mushrooms. He looked around the pub, as if mushrooms would appear. Their absence seemed to make his point.

Did you stay long in Vienna?, I asked. I learned this from the link Jeremy sent, a short biographical entry on a website dedicated to the city’s classical music history.

Yes. Vienna. I loved Vienna. I stayed four years. The subject got him talking—sometimes to me with fast-moving lips and intense black eyes, and other times with his gaze cast down, circling the floorboards, like he were speaking to himself or to no one. He described an apartment in the city shared with another student at the academy where he trained. The pink building stared over a small square with a black fountain gushing green water. It felt so opulent, so unreal. He never lived anywhere so beautiful. He never loved any view more. He talked about writing his first real piece of music in the cold apartment, staying up late, cosseting a small candle’s flame. Humming a melody, tapping a rhythm with his shoe. The smell of the academy and the concert hall was warm, dry dust. The smell of stony Wien was hot chestnuts. For a few years, his music was played internationally: Bucharest, Marseilles, Cuernavaca. He shared a box in Yalta with a clandestine Romanov who pulled a finger to her lip and winked when he spotted the resemblance. (The lie challenged his credibility, but the energy of his speech carried me forward). She offered him her cigarette case as a compliment to his work. He refused but earned her address in Salzburg where he’d visit several times before asking to marry her. She declined. There was never another, he wagged his head. I don’t blame her. What use would a princess have for a third-classer who at twenty-five had already seen his best days? His eyes snapped back on me, and he slid further back in time. He talked about Elmridge: what it was like back then, the people there. His family had lived in the same house for over a hundred years. He was the first to leave, and he never went back. He talked about his neighbors again, my family. I listened like they were my family, though the more he said the more impossible any connection became. He sighed about his current life in comparison to his former. The cold cot in the noisy room where he slept each night. The coffee shop where they asked him to leave because he never bought anything. Hunger and fatigue wracked his body, so did the cold. He suffered from a lurgy that lingered all year, and he coughed on his fist to show me. His body slacked in the chair, exhausted. His head swayed, as tears lit his cool, clear eyes.

His speech sounded urgent, though everything he mentioned was at least forty years passed. I wanted to believe, but I wasn’t sure if it was different from other homeless rambles, bloated with exaggeration.

He looked in my eyes and said, My loneliness is killing me, and I wondered if he knew he was quoting Britney Spears, another great musician.

Do you have friends where you live? Family who visit you?

His lips twitched. Yes, but they come and go. He looked down.

One hand rested on the table while the other covered his heart (confirming its beat), and I stifled an urge to smother his prone hand with mine. It’ll be okay, I wanted to promise, leaning close. You’re still strong, capable, a genius. But I didn’t. I bought him a basket of fries and another beer.

I had to go, I was already late. I stood up, thanked him for some reason, and left so quickly I forgot the pain in my back which had been as constant as a prayer until that moment.

 

When I arrived at the restaurant, Jeremy said I looked disturbed. Pale, fatigued.

Long day at work, I said. Deadlines. Sorry.

He said I needed iron, so I ordered a steak. I asked for a glass of red with it. Jeremy told me about his day. The ease of his talk calmed my nerves, relaxed tense muscles in my back which had over the years formed a hump between my shoulders, and reminded me of my affection for him. But my mind drifted anyway. I felt like Darling’s malnourished body was mine, and I was wasting away too. I tried to forget it. I scarfed my steak and wine.

Can you have alcohol before the surgery?

What surgery? I blurted before remembering. Just a little, I said. One glass is fine.

My hands twitched on the tablecloth as if over my keyboard. Jeremy clocked the tremor, seeing a symptom, and suggested we leave and I lie down at home.

On the couch with pillows under my head and thighs, I remembered my story with Jeremy, which was simple. We met and discovered our ambitions and desires for life matched. We reached an agreement, close to love, and married a year later. We moved into a nice-enough apartment and loaded it with our nicest things. Jeremy’s dining table was chosen, mine was curbed; my dresser was lugged in, his left out; his TV, which played a film from the 40s with milky lighting, stayed. The tall male actor leaned in and kissed the female lead. She melted in his arms in a way I couldn’t melt.

 

I looked for Darling the following days. I went to the pub after work, shirking the usual journalist haunts where I chin-chinned with my middling, middle-aged colleagues. I’d already forsaken the book, so the desire was charitable, maybe friendly. I drank beers looking out for him, sitting on my coat to ease the pain.

I went to the coffee shop he mentioned, where I found a sign of him: a week-old newspaper peeled across the table, its edges browned and crinkled by a sweaty hand.

I described Darling to the barista whose eyes blanked at my sketch of him. I bought a latte hoping it would make up for the interrogation, but I realized my hulking, prying presence—larger in my coat and stranger with my pain-addled gait—unnerved them. I binned the cup outside.

I walked a block south to the men’s shelter where I thought he might stay. I asked the desk person about Darling, but information wasn’t public. I said I was a reporter at the paper, which sometimes worked, but was told again information wasn’t available.

Old men sat in cushioned chairs barely filling their clothes. Wool caps, chess boards, cards dealt with clawed hands. I scanned the bookshelf as I was leaving and saw the orange spine of the hardback. I tipped it off the shelf and turned it over in my apish fingers. I opened the cover, held my breath for a scribble then fanned the pages for an annotation or underline. But nothing. I left disappointed, confused. If Darling wanted, I could make us both famous. Him again. Secure us a book deal, a pot of money, some Brooklyn digs. I couldn’t imagine that he could’ve been avoiding me, maybe feeling he’d gotten what he wanted: a beer, a book, an ear, then to be left alone.

I floated a story idea about Darling to my editor: Local Composer Receives New Attention, though there was no attention beyond myself. But she looked concerned, suggesting I was off-track. Perhaps, she said, you need some rest.

My editor, like Darling, found the stories I turned in disappointing. She and I danced around her withering faith in me, but she was wrong to think I was slacking off. I wasn’t, I still worked as hard as the day I started. But the truth was I’d lost my touch. The intangible factor that elevated a story from reportage to, well, something more was gone and had been for years.

I wrote the story about Darling anyway, using all of my night, and amended the title to reflect reality. I forgot it in a drawer.

 

Walking down Fremont with the aim of buying a gift for Jeremy, I spotted a lyre of dark curls among the heads and hats bobbing on the sidewalk. Darling stood at a bus stop consulting an invisible watch. A sense of urgency seized me. I wove through wools and toques to catch him before the bus arrived. My hand landed on Darling’s shoulder which tensed. Before I could think to apologize I was telling him my idea:

Darling, let me write about you. I’d only need to do an interview. One hour or less. You’d say everything you already told me but in more detail. About Vienna, the Romanov. You’d approve the story. Every word of it. The article would bring new attention to your music, and you’d reclaim your old status. They might even play your stuff at the symphony. A Darling revival. I’d parlay the article into a book deal, of course. There’s a guy at Crowley who owes me one. (A cover appeared in my mind: powder blue, white cursive script, My Friend Darling or something like that—Wait, My Darling Friend. Huge improvement). All I’d need is an hour with you in front of the tape recorder. One hour. The newspaper’ll buy you lunch, a steak. Will you, as a fellow Elmridgian, do me a favor?

Darling’s face, his nodding excitement, dissolved like a harlequin washing off his paint. His curls whitened then receded over hollow temples. His widow’s peak shriveled, revealing a freckled scalp. His gray eyes browned, and a silver mustache grew like fescue on his lip. His fairy grin, belying his joy at seeing me (this stroke of luck!) and hearing my salvational idea, dropped into a frown. Hatred twitched across the new man’s face.

Don’t touch me, he said, shrugging off my hand. I’m not your darling.

I’m sorry, I said. The man looked nothing like Darling. I started to brush the dirt off his shoulder but stopped. I turned and smiled at the bus driver who’d watched the interaction, the jury of passengers glaring from the windows.

I plucked out my wallet and stuffed a green bill in non-Darling’s glove. For the bother, I mumbled.

I lumbered out of sight down a snow-lined street. Discomfort from the short run pulsed my back. Then a man bumped by me. Sorry, sorry. Pain bristled like a hair shirt. It shot up my neck into my jaw then down my legs and arms. Muscles stiffened, froze up, and I couldn’t take another step.

I slumped against an iron fence in front of a house lit for the holidays and reached for my phone to call Jeremy, but my fingers curled and fumbled the plastic thing, and it skittered away on the glassy pavement. I breathed heavily and waited a moment, which I saw stretching across my life, for the pain to pass.

Ryan O'Toole is a writer living in Chicago. His work appears in storySouth, Two Thirds North, the tiny journal, and elsewhere.

You Showed Up, That Counts

Heather Richmond

 

The lake didn’t care about funerals. It breathed mist across the dock, soft and slow, like it had every Saturday morning. Jude stared into the fog, half expecting to hear his brother call out to him. Tobin had always led. Jude had followed. The funeral had made it official. The lake made it real. His older brother. His best friend. Gone. Tobin would never tease him or throw his head back with a boisterous laugh when they did something stupid together. Jude swallowed hard, forcing the feeling down the way he always did when things got too big to name. Now he had to be the oldest brother. Whether he wanted to or not.

 He straightened the too-big jacket on his shoulders, as if adjusting it might make the role fit better. Jude hadn’t changed; his slacks still held the crease from the service. Silence settled around him, his black shoes rooted to the dock. Everything about him felt wrong, except for the familiar weight of the fishing pole in his grip.

Eli stood behind him, eyeing the tackle box they’d found tucked in the alcove behind the Beech tree. Tobin’s secret spot. The bark was slick with dew, and a pair of sycamores leaned nearby like eavesdropping uncles. Eli undid the first few buttons of his dress shirt and rolled up the sleeves. The black fabric clung to his elbows, damp and defiant. He shrugged into his blue hoodie and zipped away the uncomfortable reminder. Eli walked back to the stump where he’d placed the tackle box and gently opened the lid, as if it might break, or as if Tobin might still need it back. Everything was still there—hooks, sinkers, the half-used spool of fishing line. And Tobin’s lucky green lure. He held it up. The lure winked like it hadn’t heard the news.

“I wanna use it, Jude,” Eli said.

Jude’s voice was flat, almost brittle, “It’s not lucky anymore.”

Eli didn’t answer. He knelt beside the tackle box, fingers fumbling with the lure. He tried to tie it onto the line too quickly and the hook bit his thumb. Eli hissed, pulling back as a bead of blood welled up. He stared at it, his thumb pulsing.

The sting pulled up a memory: Tobin, kneeling on the dock, last year. A victim of the same kind of catfish hook. “Every real fisherman’s got one,” he’d said, holding up his bleeding thumb with victory. Eli laughed then. He didn’t now.

He wiped his hand on his jeans and tried again. His knot was crooked; his cast was worse. The lure slapped the water like a mistake. The line jerked sideways, unwilling to follow.

“You’re not doing it right!” Jude’s voice cracked like a defeated branch snapping through the air, and birds scattered.

Eli froze. His lip trembled. His hands stayed mid-air, unsure.

Jude exhaled, unclenching his fists. “Sorry.” He rubbed his forehead, then softened his voice, “sorry, let me see.”

They knelt together. Jude showed Eli how to loop the knot, and how to flick his wrist. Eli cast again. This time, the line held, and the lure danced. It skimmed the surface like it just remembered how.

A tug. The rod bent. Eli reeled, arms shaking.

“Hold it steady,” Jude said, reaching behind him to brace the reel.

“I am!” Eli grunted, the line jerking again.

“Let it run a second—then pull.”

Eli wrestled the rod upright. A palm-sized shimmer broke the surface.

Jude unhooked it gently. “Well, it’s too small to keep,” he said. He lowered it back into the lake. The fish flicked once and vanished. Eli dropped the rod and cried; his knees buckled beneath him.

Jude didn’t speak. He wanted to say something, but nothing felt right. He sat beside his little brother, watching the ripples fade. Jude steadied himself before touching Eli’s shoulder.

 Jude’s thoughts drifted, unspooling like the line off a reel. It came back to him then—Tobin’s voice, the splash. Barefoot on the same dock, Tobin held up a fish no bigger than his hand.

“You gotta act like it’s a monster,” he’d said. “That way it feels important.”

He’d made Jude pose with it, grinning like a fool, while the fish flopped in his grip. Later, Tobin had let it go.

“Too small,” he’d said. “But it showed up. That counts.”

Jude blinked hard. He’d been about eight then, just a year younger than Eli now. The memory pressed against his ribs. Then he hummed. It was the tune Tobin always sang while fishing—half melody, half nonsense. It had tattooed its way deep into his bones. The wind shifted. The lake answered in circles.

Jude paused, his voice lost. His shoulders softened. Tears fell. Grief vibrated through the armored shock he’d been wearing. He let the tears land where they wanted.

They sat like that as dusk settled in. The fish had swum away. Jude coiled the line slowly, eyes on the water.

“Think Tobin woulda caught something today?” Eli asked.

He didn’t say anything at first, just handed over the rod.

 “If not, you’d have caught something for him now that we know you’re a real fisherman,” he said, rubbing the top of Eli’s head just like Tobin used to do.

“Mama’s gonna make you fix that,” he said. His hair, neatly combed that morning, now stuck out in defiant tufts.

Eli placed the tackle box back in the nook behind the Beech tree. “For next time,” he whispered, while he tucked it away like a memory.

Jude pocketed the green lure. He wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

They walked in step, their loafers soft against the gravel.

“I messed it up,” Eli whispered.

“You didn’t mess it up,” he met Eli’s eyes. “You showed up, that counts.”

Eli’s eyes brightened and he hummed Tobin’s tune.

Jude turned back once, just to look. The lure in his pocket felt heavier than it should.

Heather Richmond is a poet and fiction writer finishing her master's in creative writing at Tennessee Tech University. Her work explores the intersection of narrative tension, humor, and small moments words can hold. Her writing has been featured in The Pioneer Pen and The Iris Review. Between drafts, she enjoys spending time with her sons, anime, reading, baking cookies, nerding out, and performing improv. 

Time as a Spiralling Mirror

Rory Gallagher

 

Dan is fifteen. He holds a paintbrush in one hand and a bucket in the other. The weight of himself rests upon a ladder, of which he has climbed to the top. He is meticulously reinvigorating the coving where the wall meets the ceiling, with nearly-white paint. Chips and flakes of previous artisans’ handiwork float to the carpeted floor below. Float down to Jim who holds the bottom most rung of the ladder. Jim is a local vagabond, pot-bellied and balding. He gave Dan this here job, a reinvention of a hotel, so that it may be purchased by the right outside influences. They are two among many at work. Afterward, the two rest in the front doorway. The sun is still high and beats down on them from above. The two reflect on how much work has been and how much is yet to be. Jim gives Dan a loan of his beer, claiming that there’s no better thing after a day’s work. It is the first time that Dan has tasted a beer, and it is sweet and it is satisfying just as Jim had said. In a month’s time the hotel will be bought. In another two it will be sold again. From here it will lie dormant, never to reopen.

Dan is sitting in a café. He is on a first date with a girl named Lily. They’re both twenty-three years old. Lily is a few months older. They’re drinking cheap wine despite it being 2pm in the afternoon. In an hour they will be back in Dan’s unfurnished flat. It has been like that for some time and will be like that for some time more. In another hour still, the two will be in Dan’s bed, having just slept together. Dan says aloud that he is a lucky man, he always will be. Lily admires that attitude, and says that people think too much on their own suffering. Naively, Dan says that life is suffering. And as soon as we realise that, suddenly, it isn’t. Lily says the only suffering we ought to think about is that which is far from us. Dan thinks she is talking about death, but she is speaking geographically.

Dan is walking home with Danny now. They’ve got the same name. They are as brothers, unrelated. They are passing between them a small bag consisting of half a gram of cocaine. The other half is already in them. Danny asks Dan if he believes in God and in heaven. Dan says he doesn’t, but that he has enjoyed some spiritual teachings, even if he doesn’t really believe it all.

Dan is in Lily’s now. They are sitting cross-legged on her velveteen sofa, with green entwined trimmings, like tassels. There are many pieces of art on the walls. Some are original. Many are reproductions. She bought a painting of a woman with her back facing the canvas, tying her shoe. She is naked from the torso up. Her face isn’t visible, yet she is forlorn. Lily bought the piece the week previous. She hadn’t bought a piece for some time before that. She is explaining to Dan that they cannot be together. She is almost angry with him. She explains that sometimes love just isn’t enough. Dan believes that all things in time bend towards love, like flowers to the sun. They have tears in their eyes and their fingers are interlinked.

Dan is standing in the front room of Danny’s childhood home. His mother lies in a six-foot casket before them. Of this, she fills five-feet and three-inches. Danny’s father refers to him as ‘Dan’, as does his sister. This makes things confusing for Dan, who turns his head anytime the name is called. Danny’s wife Sara also calls him ‘Danny’. She is kind and small like the woman horizontal. This makes Dan feel better.

Dan is standing opposite Lily now. It is their wedding day. She is telling him she loves him, in words that aren’t her own. He replies in the same fashion. They are now one in the eyes of something greater, if only that of the attendees. They are both smiling. They are surrounded by each other and those they love. It is a good day.

Dan is standing at the head of a dining table in the home he purchased a year and six months ago. Lily has been pregnant for three of those months. He holds in his right hand a glass half full of an expensive wine. He cradles it in his palm like a goblet. Sitting to his left is Lily. Further down the table is Danny, who is sitting beside his own wife Sara. The rest of the table is populated by those cherished few. All ears are fixed on Dan, all mouths beaming. No one has said anything for a moment, then Dan does finally. He says that sometimes he likes to jump ahead to the end of his life and imagine what moments in time might appear to him as he lies dying. He says he hopes that this is one of them.

Dan wakes up to the sound of wailing. He is resting on his side, clutching his slumbering wife. They are nestled like cutlery. The wailing is coming from the next room over. The wailing is coming from his daughter, June. She has been alive for seven months and thirteen days. Her teeth have started to come through, of which she has but two. The hair on her head is blonde. He suspects it will darken with age. He gets up gently, so as to not disturb Lily. He goes through to the next room. He doesn’t pick June up but instead climbs into her cot with her. They are nestled like cutlery. He kisses her and sings to her softly, a rock ballad he first heard as a young man. He changes the lyrics so that they might be applied to a daughter.

Dan and Danny are fishing now. And they both have young sons, not yet teenagers, who are fishing too. The boys are mostly concerned with the rods, not the fish. They walk home together the four of them, having caught nothing. Dan holds his son’s much smaller hand as they scramble across rocks. On the way home his son sees a puddle and knowingly, submerges his whole foot in it, shoe and sock and everything. Dan scolds him and asks him why he did it. The two walk lone-handed for the remainder of the journey.

Dan is at his dining table again. It is Christmas. Soft jazz emanates from the radio on a shelf behind him. He is wearing a purple crown, unsheathed from the winning end of a party cracker. He is holding one end of a different party cracker now. His son is holding the other. He loses this time. It’s okay. His daughter June is spending her first Christmas with her own family. Anne scrapes what hasn’t been eaten onto one plate and brings it to the kitchen. Dan’s son explains that he will be spending New Year’s with his girlfriend. This is okay too.

Danny sits in the hallway of Dan’s home now, hunched over on a fold out chair, his fingers interlocked with his own. Sara is gathering for him, something to eat. He can see her from where he is sitting through an open door to the kitchen. Dan is lying horizontal now in the room behind Danny, to which he has his back. He is wearing a shirt and tie, and he has taken off his jacket. Anne comes out from within the room her husband lies in now and walking around Danny, she turns to face him. Danny doesn’t look up. Anne asks him if he’d like to come in and see for himself. She rests a gentle hand on his shoulder. She is a kind woman. This makes him feel better. Danny explains that he can’t go in there. “I just can’t go in.”

 

Rory Gallagher is an Irish writer, interested in the minute dramas of everyday life.

 

Pressure-Treated

J.M.C. Kane

 

My brother drinks the same beer our father drank, holds the bottle the same way—thumb over the label like he's hiding evidence. I drive two hours every other Sunday because our mother asked me to, and because my daughter likes his kids.

He rebuilt the deck himself. Pressure-treated pine, four-by-fours sunk in concrete he mixed by hand. It's level. I checked. He saw me checking and didn't say anything, just handed me a beer and told me the Bengals were getting their asses handed to them again.

We don't talk about the years he didn't call, or the night of the DUI when he did, or how he paid for the Camaro. His oldest daughter looks like our mother did in the pictures from before we were born—dark hair, shoulders that hunch forward like she's apologizing for taking up space.

He asks if I want to help him replace the deck stairs before winter. I say sure. He nods, sets his beer down, walks to the truck for the Sawzall.

I watch him work. He measures twice, cuts once, doesn't need the level because his eye is better than the tool. When the blade binds, he doesn't force it. Just backs it out, adjusts the angle, tries again.

He hands me the tool, says he needs a break. Lets his hand stay on mine a moment, and then a longer one. I feel the sandpaper of his fingers; my nose flinches from the stench of booze.

I set the saw against the stair edge and engage the blade. It twists in my hand, gouges, and locks. He nudges me aside. “Goddammit,” and then he calls me what he’s always called me.

My daughter runs past, chasing his son through the yard, her braid snapping behind her.

He asks if I'm staying for dinner.

I say yeah.

My mouth tastes like pennies.

The Bengals are down by twenty.

 

J.M.C. Kane is the author of the non-fiction book Quiet Brilliance: What Employers Miss About Neurodivergent Talent and How to See It (CollectiveInk UK). He is an ASD-1 and writes from this learned experience. His prose work has been published in more than three dozen literary journals & magazines, including Plough, Camas, HeartWood, The New Ohio Review, Blue Mesa, Smokelong Quarterly, and Redivider (Emerson). He lives in New Orleans with his family where he works as an environmental attorney.

The Water in the Middle

Josh Price

 

“Hey,” I say, “This is the place I almost died that time.”

She’d wanted to come up to Indian Valley for ages but I was always too freaked out by the drive to come with her.

I hadn’t put two and two together that I’d been to the place before, until we finally came, or more to the point she finally convinced me with a valium to come. I don’t like one lane roads, windy or straight.

We were standing in almost the exact same place that I’d been so drunk that time at my friends bachelor party (my face in stagnant water, on my knees praying and dying, unmoored, staring at an upside down sky), except now there was hardly any water in the lake, just a puddle out in the center blowing clouds into the face of the world.

Clouds are birthed out here like stars birthed in darkness. I am just another weather phenomenon, falling into the sky where nobody remembers to breathe—face-planting into the mud with no idea how deep the bottom goes. Everyone suffocates trying to find out.

I feel like maybe we should tell someone we are out here. When I pull out my phone (Ha!), I don’t have service. I ask if she has her phone on her before it occurs to me what a dumb question that is. Of course she does.

She checks hers, and she doesn’t have service either. “It’ll be fine,” she says, and she is off, stooping to look at the flora and find lizards hiding in the shade of dead bushes. She always wants to explore the world. I always want to define it.

I’m looking around for the campsite where we had the bachelor party, using the bathrooms as a point of reference, trying to remember the person I was then (and how I became that way)—standing at the edge of something I want to understand but don’t know what.

I walk out to where the water used to be. When I get out onto the dead lake, I’m by myself and I’m looking at the benches and the fire pits and now it feels like there’s no one else here and maybe there never was.

I look back, and I can’t see her. My adrenaline dumps and I fight the urge to run towards the bathrooms. She’s just behind the building and out of my line of sight, but isn’t this the kind of place where psychos do meth and rape people?

I call out to her—scared like a little kid—and hear a “Yeah!”

I holler, “Just checking!” feeling embarrassed for being me. My dad always called me a Nervous Nelly. The mind can make you believe anything if you let it and you definitely shouldn’t do that.

I wondered what went on in her mind when she explored the world inside her.

I began walking out towards the center of the old lake again. Dry as bones. Already hot. Cracks in dried mud crunching under my work boots; I wished I’d worn the cross trainers I leave in the trunk of the Nissan with our go-bags, but I don’t feel like going back to the car to get them.

I see where the ground is much darker. That is where the mud will get thicker. Still looks like a little puddle from where I am, but it’s probably a good 30’ feet across.

The mud is stickier. I’m afraid of knowing whatever it is I’m after, but can never stop myself once I’ve started. How deep is it?

My boots are heavy, wet mud sticking to them now. My heart is heavier and I don’t know why other than everything is either sorrow, or terror, or boring.

I take another big step and hear a sucking noise as my boot goes all the way under the muck. I feel a jolt of real fear. I could die here. It could take a while. It could be painful. A while is a long time when you’re afraid. Maybe that’s why my childhood seemed to take forever.

I pull my foot towards me, but because the boot is stuck and I’m lazy and don’t tie my laces tight my foot comes out of my boot. I put my hands out behind me as I fall, to keep from landing on my tailbone. I scrape my hands in the crusted dirt. I sit there wondering how much time is in an instant when I hear her calling me.

I turn and she’s running towards me, eyes bugged out. My ears are ringing and my brain feels like it might as well stay out of this. I think fear might be older than everything.

“We need to go!” she yells.

“What’s wrong?”

“Fire! My mom! We have to go, now!”

Shit. Not again.

I get up, and she’s already running back to the car. I gallop after her, too late now to go back and get my boot.

#

So yeah, of course there was another fire, and it had gotten away from the firefighters (not their fault), and of course it was down where her mom lived—a place that was hard to get to and if we didn’t get there fast we might not be able to get to her at all.

I was doing my usual restless-and-angsty thing and she was doing her usual stoic, I’m-totally-not-screaming-inside thing.

She was driving too fast. I felt like screaming, slow down!

Traffic slowed in front of us. She did scream, then. We all did these kinds of things when the truth revealed itself. I didn’t want to say anything. Whatever I chose would be the wrong thing to say, no question.

Traffic stopped.

“Must be a car wreck up there.”

She didn’t say anything. She and her mom were really close. This danger to her mom was terrifying her. I was probably just jealous of how close they were, because my mom died.

When we finally got passed the wreck, and got to town, she screeched the tires around corners, doing 60 in a 35. Yikes.

 “Hey, we don’t want to get pulled over,” I said, “or we won’t get there at all.”

She took her foot off the accelerator.

“Do you want me to call her?” I asked. “I could, I mean, she’s probably okay…”

I especially didn’t want her to feel afraid; I didn’t want anyone to feel afraid. Just because I’m a shitty person does not mean that I’m a shitty person.

“She doesn’t have service,” she said, and I heard that scream inside her throat, getting restless, wanting to Kool-Aid man out of her mouth and into the void.

“Shit,” I said.

We get into the avenues and the roads are filled with cars. We weren’t going to be able to get in. The fire was ten blocks away.

I take off my lone boot. I hop out of the car, pop the trunk to put on the trainers. I fall on my ass in the process, get up and jog through the gulley. I get to her mom’s place in five minutes. By the time I do the fire is only a few blocks away.

Her mom is sitting out front in a lawn chair like she’s waiting for a bus. She’s calm, sunglasses on, smiling, drinking a can of Racer 5.

My wife pulls up in the car moments later. I’m not sure how she got here so fast and maybe I don’t want to know. I could feel her twitching, seeing her mom so calm. My wife knew nothing of calm. She was wired the opposite.

I was twitching too because I was trying not to laugh.

Her mom gets into the front seat, hands me my boot.

“Where is your other shoe?” She asks.

“I dropped it,” I say, but she misses my joke.

I go to put her things in the trunk but it’s full with our bags already and I have to get into the back seat with her bags taking up the whole back seat.

People are mostly gone from the avenues, except for the occasional die-hards who refuse to leave and wind up making firefighter’s lives harder. We get out easily enough and we’re back out on the road without a problem. My wife is reading her mom the riot act over the drinking, which I think is funny. I interrupt, to ask my mother-in-law about her roommate’s dogs.

“Rita took them,” she says, and she says “Rita” like you’d say a bad word. I laughed. I mostly thought everyone was a bad word, too, so I totally understood.

“Who cares if she wanted to have a beer while she waited?” I say.

It wasn’t normally me standing up for my mother-in-law, and to be fair she consumed at least twice as much alcohol as she copped to—or that was what my wife and I figured, at least—which meant three times as much as anyone should. I used to drink like that, too.

My wife looks at me like she just had the same thought. Her mom laughs, which sometimes sounded like insults.

“Mom!”

“What?” my mother in law says. She cracks open another beer and swigs it. I snigger in the back seat. I’m sort of jealous. I want to drink, too, but that was why I’d quit. I always turned into that guy at the bachelor party. All it took was time.

“What are you going to do, anyway?” I ask. “You’re under mandatory evacuation, right? Where is the shelter?”

They both look at me.

OH…

She’s staying with us.

We’re back out on the highway, headed to our house.

I look down at the road as we drive. If I threw the door open, rolled just right...

I look up at my wife scowling at me in the rearview. She looks away sharply when her mom cracks open her third beer.

“Mom!”

“What?”

#

When we get back to the house the dogs go spastic, making anguished noises and acting like they haven’t seen us in years. Then when they see grandma they act like we never existed. They are traitors to their country.

I sag onto the couch, sigh; go on Amazon and order a new pair of boots.

I look outside, towards Mt. Baldy, and the clouds are billowing out of Indian Valley like stars being born.

The End

Josh Price loves gardening, music, and cemeteries. He lives in Northern California with his patient wife and terrible dog. His debut chapbook, Trailer Park Ocean was published with ThirtyWest in 2025 and features the flash piece “Philemon”, which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The Los Angeles Review, Blood+Honey Press and others have published his flash, fauxmoir lit Mag and Scribble Magazine have published his short fiction. Visit him at Instagram and Threads @ s.joshuaprice, or his website, josh-price.com.