Amanda Lamadrid – Page 2

Opossum

by Zach Murphy

Pete and Richard’s orange safety vests glowed a blinding light under the scorching sun, and their sweat dripped onto the pavement as they stood in the middle of the right lane on Highway 61, staring at an opossum lying stiffly on its side.

Richard handed Pete a dirty shovel. “Scoop it up,” he said.

Everything made Pete queasy. He once fainted at the sight of a moldy loaf of bread. Even so, he decided to take on a thankless summer job as a roadkill cleaner. At least he didn’t have to deal with many people.

Richard nudged Pete. “What are you waiting for?” he asked.

Pete squinted at the creature. “It’s not dead,” he said. “It’s just sleeping.”

“Are you sure?” Richard asked as he scratched his beard. He had one of those beards that looked like it would give a chainsaw a difficult time.

“Yes,” Pete said. “I just saw it twitch.”

Richard walked back toward the shoulder of the road and popped open the driver’s side door of a rusty pickup truck. “Alright, let’s go.”

Pete shook his head. “We can’t just leave it here.”

“It’s not our problem,” Richard said. “They tell us to do with the dead ones, but not the ones that are still alive.”

Pete crouched down and took a closer look. “We need to get it to safety,” he said.

Richard sighed and walked back toward the opossum. “What if it wakes up and attacks us?” he asked. “That thing could have rabies.”

“I don’t think anything could wake it up right now,” Pete said.

Richard belched, “It’s an ugly son of a gun, isn’t it?”

“I think it’s so ugly that it’s cute,” Pete said.

“No one ever says that about me,” Richard said with a chuckle. “I guess I just haven’t crossed into that territory.”

Just then, a car sped by and swerved over into the next lane. Pete and Richard dashed out of the way.

“People drive like animals!” Richard said. “We’d better get going.”

Pete took a deep breath, slipped his gloves on, gently picked up the opossum, and carried it into the woods.

“What are you doing?” Richard asked. “Are you crazy?”

After nestling the possum into a bush, Pete smelled the scent of burning wood. He gazed out into the clearing and noticed a plume of black smoke billowing into the sky. The sparrows scattered away, and the trees stood with their limbs spread, as if they were about to be crucified.

“Jesus Christ,” Pete whispered under his breath.

Pete picked up the opossum and turned back around.

Zach Murphy is a Hawaii-born writer with a background in cinema. His stories appear in Reed Magazine, The Coachella Review, Maudlin House, Still Point Arts Quarterly, B O D Y, Ruminate, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine. His chapbook Tiny Universes (Selcouth Station Press) is available in paperback and ebook. He lives with his wonderful wife, Kelly, in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The Empathies

by Mindy Friddle

Sunrise to sunset, that was the deal. When darkness descended, their safety could not be guaranteed. After all, the deserted, boarded-up Magic Kingdom of today was a perilous place.

The governor had finally granted Bev Rodriguez-Cortez special permission to film at Disney World, not an easy feat, that sort of diplomatic dithering, though it helped RoCo, as she was known to friends and frenemies, was an up-and-coming director and, most importantly, born and raised in Florida.

She’d pitched this one-day event as a benefit for the state she loved and missed. RoCo would bring Empathy, the superhero, to this forsaken place—from the pages of the much beloved graphic novel, to the screen via a live feed, broadcast globally. Because the Sunshine State had gone dark and could really use some empathy right now. If she could prove this hallowed park of yon was safe again— then perhaps it could be transformed into a sort of Sundance for the east coast, a place to advance the work of storytellers in film, gaming, and theatre.

The outskirts rough, though. Yikes. As if the Magic Kingdom were cursed, under one of its storied wicked spells. When they’d arrived at dawn, RoCo—though she’d seen the videos, of course—nevertheless shocked at the graffiti-tagged ticket booths, the spiderwebbed cracked glass. The Hollywood Studios, vandalized beyond repair back in 2030, the governor had given her a heads up about that. But she found the interior of the park spared, mostly, thanks to the swarm of copbots dispatched last year to patrol.

She had a tight schedule. The choppers would arrive for pick up at sundown. They’d helicoptered in, they’d helicopter out.

Her crew of carpenters had already mounted a set, primitive, hastily assembled scaffolding on an old stage, with a green screen backdrop. They’d shoot outdoors, thank God the weather was cooperating. In the background, ruin porn— Cinderella’s mothballed castle. Shame not to use it, but that was the deal, too. No glamorizing the downfall. She’d add digital scenery and touch ups later, anyway. She had a scrum of extras at the ready, placeholders mostly, for the soldiers and sundry reprobates.

An audience of one hundred, approved and invited by the governor herself, would arrive in an hour, ferried in by shuttle, escorted by a fleet of copbots. Pricey tickets, but then this was a fundraiser, of sorts.

They’d commandeered the former restrooms near the castle, between Fantasyland and Tomorrowland, for costume and makeup. There, RoCo found the Empathies in costume for a final fitting. Gemmy, the costume designer, a genius, functioning splendidly without the crutch of flashy technology, if need be. Gemmy could do wonders with cellophane and duct tape. She could sew by hand.

As for the Empathies, RoCo had cast those who had stage experience, who could improvise. No divas, please. She needed talent.

And, after weeks of auditions, had found it. Four actors who could carry off the ferocious mercy of an empyrean superhero who takes the form of an afflicted being she saves, before she ascends above the stricken…

She cast Sara Talltree as the Cherokee grandmother in the Trail of Tears chapter. Sara, a singer, a musical headliner—her acting chops superb, too. For the World War II chapter, Rachel Duschman would play the middle-aged woman among the freezing, naked Jewish families in the snows of the Black Forest. Rachel, seasoned actor, a real professional, had no problem with nudity—hers or anyone else’s, if it served the story. It did. Glenna Nettles—her star was rising in the virtual gaming avatar world— would play the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirl. And, for the Mall of America chapter, RoCo’s riskiest choice, a young actor with a dash of community theatre under her belt, but a face that could emote like a son of a bitch—Summer Bremer.

“So we were thinking, barefoot,” Gemmy said as RoCo approached Sara. “Ditch the moccasins.”

“They’re a bitch to take off,” Sara added.

RoCo nodded. “Barefoot works.”

Glenna emerged from behind a stall, wearing a blue-checked school uniform, faded and dusty, poignantly threadbare. She twirled for RoCo. “Yep. Perfect.”

Rachel didn’t have much of a costume, a few tufts of snow, strategically placed, tits and crotch, just so any pearl clutchers in the audience wouldn’t get the vapors.

RoCo looked over at Summer.

“Velvet and booties, they were all the rage back then,” Gemmy said.

“Nice,” RoCo said.

Summer’s costume: purple crushed velvet dress, lace tights, ankle boots. Fashion from before she was born, so she’d perused old pictures and videos from back then as part of her research. Summer’s character—the victim Empathy chooses to morph into— a “mall girl” from 2017. Summer had vague memories of malls from her childhood, back when people shopped like that. In the Mall of America chapter, her character is a high school student Summer’s own age, sixteen, who sings in a chorus that Bloody Black Friday. Summer had watched the videos of Santaland in the mall, where the choirs sang Christmas music…just before the attack. She’d read the news articles, how the bomb had gone off in the middle of the mall, the skylights shattered, the escalators torn into jagged broken zippers, the top story collapsing onto the people below. The fake snow and debris plumed, dusted everyone, everything. The gunmen, strapped with assault rifles and grenades, “the evil seven” who were “domestic terrorists,” stormed in to pick off the survivors—the skaters in the ice rink, even the children in Nickelodeon Park.

At the audition, the director, RoCo, had told Summer, yeah, well, all kids want to be Empathy for Halloween, this is more than costume play. That was after Summer had told her she’d cosplayed Empathy at ComicCon for three years. Summer was more than a fan, is what she meant to convey. She was a follower from the beginning, an Empathy disciple.

The director was scary, a little. Gemmy said, Hon, don’t let RoCo freak you out. She’s a softie underneath the armor.

“Anyone want to run lines?” RoCo said now. There were a few ha-has. They all had just the one line, albeit in different languages. What you do to others, you do to yourself.

Summer’s line, the only English version. All the work in gesture, in the face. That’s what RoCo said, and why she’d cast Summer.

When Summer learned she got the part, her mother almost didn’t let her accept, especially when she found out Summer wasn’t allowed to bring along a parent, or any adult, for that matter. Florida? Her mother said, over and over, making it sound like Shanghai or Moscow, far more hellacious spots, she reminded her mother. They lived in Connecticut now, Summer and her brother, Townie, with their mother and Ivan, in a Community of Peace.

Ivan, her stepfather slash acting coach, told her mother this could be Summer’s big break.

It took Summer and Ivan three days to persuade her mother this was an opportunity not to be missed, working with Bev Rodrigues-Cortez, and this audition might just lead Summer being cast in the new Empathy series.

Last year, Summer had played Ophelia in Hamlet, for their town’s Shakespeare in the Park. Sort of a big deal. Ivan had told Summer, Your pain is fuel. Use it. Fresh from her father’s deathbed, Summer had great gushes of pain to pull from. She got a standing ovation. Ivan had sent the video to RoCo.

“Half an hour,” RoCo said now. The audience had arrived.

Summer felt the usual pre-performance butterflies, nothing she couldn’t handle. Or so she hoped.

There was just the one set on stage. A string quartet and drummer, in front of the stage where the orchestra pit usually was. A few extras—from boys to old men— to play the oppressors. RoCo called the scenes truncated action. Empathy descends amid savage violence, wields her magic mirror, recites her line of power. The reckoning then, as the cruel ones wither and see, as Empathy morphs into one of the victims, and ascends.

“Remember, what I’m after here,” Roco said. “That instant of epiphany, that turning point when the evil is reversed, when the wicked are wounded by their own deeds, and Empathy reflects that complexity in her face, in her body.”

There would be a live stream of today’s performances. Two drone cameras, and one cameraman, as RoCo intended to capture the audience’s reactions. But RoCo said she’d take the raw scenes into the studio next week and work her magic, add all the flash and dash, fuse the scenes into one polished video, post it for a global audience. Summer had overheard Sara and Rachel talk about how this was RoCo’s own audition, too. To prove she could direct the Empathy series.

“No green room, sorry,” RoCo said now. “But there’s a tent, behind the stage. A monitor in there, to watch.” After the shoot, the Empathies were expected to circulate in the crowd, with props— magic mirror, boomerang, a stuffed toy falcon. “It’s part of their ticket price. So, smile and pose with the big wigs.”

When the solar shuttle arrived to ferry them over to the stage, Summer sat behind Gemmy and RoCo.

“You know, these one sceners—what do you call them? Truncated action? Tableaus? It reminds me of the Stations of the Cross,” Gemmy told RoCo. “ ‘Meditating on specific holy events’, as the sisters used to say.”

“Bitch, really?”

Gemmy needled RoCo, it made Summer nervous. But RoCo didn’t get too riled up or anything. She and Gemmy went way back.

“I haven’t been to mass in forever,” RoCo added.

“Just saying. You can take a girl out of the church, but ...”

RoCo eye rolled, yeah righted.

But RoCo was thinking of her mother and her aunt, living together in Vermont, in a Community of Peace where RoCo had safely installed them. These days, her mother and aunt both prayed to Empathy along with the Virgin Mary and sundry other candled saints. They hated leaving Florida, detested the cold Northeast, pined for Miami even now, where they’d lived all their lives…before Helga. Miami, the Keys, gone now, sea-swallowed after Helga roared in. Much of Southern Florida unpeopled nowadays, what land left, bitterly fought over in legal battles, in violent squabbles. Gated communities breached like broken dams. Then the rise of Florida Anarchists—Flanarch—their ruptures of lawlessness, their demands that Florida secede.

Her mother and aunt would watch the live stream today—RoCo’s gift to them. They would watch and brag about RoCo to their neighbors, of course, but she hoped the performances would bring them comfort. Surely her mother and Aunt Maria would be moved, watching these Empathies brandishing mirrors of comeuppance, wielding ferocious mercy, here in Florida.

In the tent, the chattering stopped because they were getting into character.

Rachel practiced deep breathing in the corner, Glenna yogaed, warrior position. Sara, first up, stood still, eyes closed, waiting for her cue.

Gemmy helped Summer slide on her chiffon robe over the velvet dress. Gemmy had designed the robes for all four Empathies—translucent, shimmery like gossamer. There were wings, too, crepe that drooped, like enormous limp lettuce leaves. Summer had practiced for hours, shedding the robe in one fluid movement, as if emerging from a chrysalis, when she transforms into the mall girl.

On the monitor, they watched the governor introduce RoCo. The camera panned over the glamorous audience, sequins twinkling. “Florida’s gentry,” Gemmy whispered, “what’s left.”

Summer trembled. She always shook before performances, it was okay, it was energy, but Gemmy looked worried. “You’ll do great, hon. Besides, I’ll let you in a little secret. They—” she tilted her head toward the audience—“don’t give an alligator’s ass about the performances. They’re here sniffing around investment opportunity. Ka-ching. It’s just a big ol’ shmoozefest cocktail party.”

The drummer started up, loud boom booms, going right for the solar plexus.

“Hey, when you circulate after, head for the bar.” Gemmy winked. “I’ll sneak you some sangria.”

The extras assembled on stage. Three teens, two older men, all dressed in black, like stagehands. The point, RoCo said, was to keep the wicked faceless, to make evil banal. Sara glided onto stage, one foot in the rope sling, her sheer robe and wings fluttering, catching the sunlight.

Summer had read The Trail of Tears chapter to her brother, Townie, hundreds of times, she knew every frame. The three American soldiers in blue uniforms, with rifles and bayonets, on horseback, forcing Cherokee people to march through the woods. Women held babies, men carried the old and sick who were too weak to walk the thousand miles to Indian Territory. The soldiers barked orders, warned them to leave the dying behind. The youngest soldier, the yellow-haired one, rides his horse over, kicks one of the old women as she falls to her knees, begging to rest—

Then, when you could hardly stand the cruelty, Empathy descends, glowing like the moon, then growing so bright you can hardly bear to look. Bring it on, Empathy. Torch those evil dudes. Smite them down! But—she doesn’t. As much as you want to her to, she doesn’t. At first everyone freaks out, the horses rear, the women clutch their babies, the children wail. One soldier shouts to take cover, he thinks they’ve been blasted by cannon fire. No, the other soldier says, squinting toward Empathy, they cursed us with their savage gods, they brung this on.

Sara Talltree, Empathy now, stood on stage in her tattered white gown. Summer could see anguish in her face. Fury, too. She held up her mirror, the men cowered, as if it were a weapon. It was a weapon. But Empathy stops herself from wreaking revenge. That’s what the professor on the Hullabaloo talk said, when Summer researched. Empathy’s mirror goes off like a nuclear flash and the soldiers fall, they think she’s going to kill them and they crouch in “defensive positions,” the professor said, before their “egoic hard shells are melted” and they “see.” The professor called this “cathartic equilibrium.”

“What you do to others, you do to yourselves.” Sara recited the line in Cherokee. Her face soft but strong, too, with “strident benevolence.” The soldiers sob, take off their own coats to give to the women and children.

Sara slipped off her gossamer robe without a snag. In her beaded ragged dress, she cradled the mirror, slipped her foot back into the rope sling, and slowly rose, off stage.

RoCo, watching the monitor, said, “She nailed it. Sara totally nailed it.”

The audience clapped.

In the World War II chapter, Empathy arrives to save a group of Jewish women, naked and freezing, running in the snow. The Nazi soldiers herd them out into the woods, to shoot them and shove them into a mass grave. Empathy descends in the clearing ahead, she fixes the soldiers with her gentle, steady stare. The soldiers shoot at her, scream louder and louder. The bullets go through her. The soldiers’ dogs, unleashed, charge at her, then stop, lick her hand. When she raises her mirror, a ball of light glows and spreads, solid to liquid to air. The women huddle together. The light expands like the sun, it blinds. The soldiers’ guns jam. Their eyes, you see it in their eyes first, the widening, then filling with tears. The lieutenant takes off his wool coat and he wraps it around a woman near him, it is still warm from his body, and he says here, here, then he takes off his shoes, his dry wool socks, his shirt. He wraps the clothing around the woman, blue with cold, until he, himself, is naked. All of them, the soldiers, are soon naked, shivering with cold, as they drape the women with their coats, their shirts, their long johns, so warm, one of the women says, so warm. We will save you, the lieutenant says, his teeth clacking with the cold. The Nazi soldiers are overcome with shame, with the pain of seeing what they have done. They FEEL it. How could they have been so blind to their own brutality? They will save them, the humans in front of them. They will die for them.

Rachel almost stumbled off the rope sling, but caught herself, and made it look natural. When she shrugged off her shimmery robe, she was naked, and stood ram-rod straight. Her line, delivered in Yiddish, rang out clear, and there was such beautiful suffering in her face as she rose off stage.

The audience clapped and cheered.

Glenna came on like gangbusters, jumped off the sling rope, landing in a crouch, like a gymnast. Glenna told Summer she was into Empathy as gangster superhero, who freaks out the soldiers, before she mirrors them. “I want them to cower and piss themselves. I want those assholes to hurt,” Glenna had admitted. Glenna researched for her part, too. She hadn’t even known anything about Boko Haram, and how they kidnapped more than two hundred schoolgirls from their dorm in Chibok, Nigeria, and then raped them, enslaved them for, like, years. Glenna had hired a dialect coach to help her get the Hausa dialect right. It sounded melodious when she said it now, her line sounded powerful, and Glenna’s face was mostly furious, and a little sad.

The audience clapped and whistled.

Summer was not herself.

She was Empathy now. She placed her foot in the rope sling, nodded. Began sailing over to the stage, to her mark.

In the Mall of America chapter, Empathy arrives amid the mayhem of dust and blood, surrounded by the cries of the injured, the silence of the dead. The Evil Seven had detonated the bomb from afar, and would shortly arrive, toting assault rifles and grenades.

Empathy would stop them from further carnage, when she mirrored them. But what of the dead innocents at her feet? The injured? What if she’d arrived in the Seven’s headquarters the day before, a junk yard on the outskirts of the Minneapolis where they’d built their bomb from pressure cookers and scrap metal? And stopped them… then? This must weigh on Empathy, Summer thought. That her superpowers could not obliterate the root of the tragedy that day. Even a superhero could be sick with grief.

Summer, herself, had been sick with grief last year, after her father died.

Rob Bremer chose not to live. Declined treatment after he was diagnosed with cancer, refused to give up the drinking habit that taxed his ailing liver, because it was the only joy left in his life. Or so he told Summer’s mother. This was after he’d been fired from Reflexa Pharmaceuticals and he nursed his humiliation every day, along with vodka sodas. Summer had overheard her mother talking with him on a video call, begging him…he had two children to live for, so stop being selfish. Summer’s mother accused him of punishing her, still, for leaving him.

When Summer sat by her father’s bed at the end, and held his boney, bruise-splotched hand, he tried to talk, but the painkillers stole his clarity. She said, Daddy, I know you love me. I know you love Townie, too. There were other things she wanted to tell him. How sorry she was about turning snotty, convincing herself, at one point, he was a terrible father. She regretted not staying with him the summer before, even though he told her not to bother, he didn’t need kids around for God’s sake. So she and Townie had stayed home with their mother and Ivan, and Summer did her plays—

Summer stepped off the rope sling, now, onto the stage. In one hand, the mirror, hidden in the folds of her shimmery robe. She took a step toward the extras in their black leotards, frozen in malicious crouches. Her soft wings dragged a little behind her, and she felt a tug. A nail, maybe, snagging one wing.

The professor on Hullabaloo said the Mall of America chapter revealed Empathy’s “impotence,” her “reckoning with her own limitations.” The superhero, he said, “is not omnipotent, but must accept what she can do, from where she lands.”

As mortals must do.

It felt tragic, to witness pain and heartache in a loved one, as Summer had with her father at the end. But she’d discovered there was something purifying about facing the suffering with him. Not running away from pain, but seeing it, enduring it—

Summer’s face dripped with tears now, the rivulets tickled, running down her neck.

A raspy buzz zipped by her, a drone camera hovering for a close-up.

The extras began slowly moving, standing, from their hunkered down heap.

Townie was watching the live feed, from a thousand miles away. Summer imagined his beautiful hazel eyes gazing at the screen, at her, at Empathy. His bandaged arm still propped up, until they had the new skin ready. Townie had put his hand on the gas grill at the Father’s Day cook-out. Her mother had screamed— Summer would never forget the sound of her mother’s scream, there was such agony it. Later at the burn center, her mother kept asking, why, Townie, why? Summer knew why. Townie was nonverbal, but he finally understood about their father, that he was really gone. Forever gone. Dead. Townie wanted the pain, to feel it completely, he wanted physical grief, he wanted to manifest the sadness locked inside him.

If only Summer could stop Townie’s suffering.

“What you do to others you do to yourself,” she recited now, in the midwestern flat accent she’d practiced, and each word plumped and glistened as she held up the mirror, and the extras dropped to their knees. They writhed as she mirrored them, and it felt good, just as Glenna had said, to watch them cringe and thrash, hurting, but there was poignancy, too, as they run to the injured, as the leader of the Seven cries out when he cradles a bleeding woman, as if she were his own mother.

Summer—Empathy—began to slide off the gossamer robe and wings, transforming into the mall girl. The girl who had dressed up to sing in her high school chorus, O Holy Night, when the bomb went off. Who would rise now—

The stage rocked and shook.

Fireworks?

RoCo hadn’t said anything about sound effects. Screams from the audience. Another blast, closer, and Summer felt herself flung into the air, she was flying, and then… everything went black.

Two drone cameras captured footage of the carnage, the cameras zipping merrily as hummingbirds, dutifully recording not just the performances but afterwards, the capsized tents, the blasted, splintered stage and chards of chairs, the heaps of groaning wounded, the dead and the dying. No one knew much about Flanarch, how many of them there were. But these days, just one misanthrope could throw a wrench in the smoothly running cogs of a society, a country. It was the most perilous development, the ability of a single individual, leveraging technology, to wreak such havoc. Flanarch had detonated two explosives remotely, hacked into the copbots, the firebots, even the medbots, and put them into sleep mode.

RoCo screamed. Her black spikey hair gone, her head covered in purplish clots, and yet she screamed at the medbots, she kicked them with a bloody bare foot, yelling wake up, wake up.

Summer was not a girl. She was not herself. Summer was Empathy. A superhero. That is what she told herself now, after she came to. That is what she believed, because otherwise—

Otherwise, Summer could not survive this.

She let Empathy take over. She folded Summer up into a tiny box, origamied herself, pleated tight, tucked somewhere inside dark and hidden.

Help the one in front of you, where you land.

Summer had landed hard, concussed, on a tent that cushioned her fall from the asphalt. Her left arm, broken, hung limply at her side, she tried not to move it now, as she applied pressure on the man’s leg, the stump of leg, with her right hand.

It was hard to see the face of the man Summer—Empathy—was saving now, because of all the blood. Thirsty, he rasped. Water. “Water!” Empathy demanded. “I need water here.” A bottle of soda appeared, pushed to her by unseen hands. She poured a few drops into the man’s mouth. Empathy told him to wake up. “Look at me, now. Stay awake.” His eyes—dark brown, caked in rusty gunk— opened, moved to her. “Sir? What’s your name?” Avoid shock. That was after you stopped the bleeding. Because people could die of shock.

(Summer, herself, in shock, after seeing Gemmy lying there, barely recognizable, except for the necklaces—a cross, a Star of David, a crescent, hedging my bets, she’d told Summer, just an hour before. But Summer couldn’t think about that now.)

The tourniquet on the man’s leg soft with blood, pulpy, but Empathy pressed, pressed hard with all her might. Like the health teacher had instructed, when Summer got certified in First aid, for Townie, in case Townie ever—

The drone camera zoomed close. And Summer remembered. The live feed. Townie. Watching!

“Townie, I’m okay,” she told the hovering camera. “I’m helping, we’re helping people. Empathy is here! Empathy is saving them.”

Mindy Friddle is the author of the novels The Garden Angel, selected for Barnes and Noble's Discover Great New Writers program, Secret Keepers, winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, and Her Best Self, forthcoming in 2024 from Regal House. Her short stories have appeared in storySouth, LitMag, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southern Humanities Review, phoebe, Bright Flash Literary Review, Steel Toe Review, A Long Story, Gateway Review, Failbetter and Emrys Journal. Mindy earned her MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson and now lives on Edisto Island, a small barrier island in South Carolina. Details at www.mindyfriddle.com.

Deconstructing Mourning Through Memory: A Review of Lisa Solod’s “Shivah”

by Nia Dickens

What does it mean to grieve a loved one for too long—and to have no choice in the matter? In her debut novel, Lisa Solod explores the terrains of grief through seven parts. While the structure borrows from the seven-day Jewish mourning practice, Solod’s prose reminds the reader that each day carries a lifetime’s worth of memories, contradictions, and precarious emotional attachments. To accept death in the face of little familial reconciliation requires demanding malleability from the processes by which we use to mourn the ones lost.

Solod’s novel begins with Leah witnessing the death of her mother, a woman who’d used alcoholism as a means to cope with her dementia and later Alzheimer’s. Leah’s not alone in navigating her mother’s demise. Her two sisters, aunt, and young daughter also feature prominently throughout the novel as these women reckon with what they once knew to be true of the maternal head of the family. Solod’s writing demands that the reader take their time with this family. In beginning with death, Shivah works to peel back the complexities behind not only the women of this family, but the emotional drainage that one experiences when forced to grieve a loved one while they’re yet still alive—even as the concept of what it means to be a “loved one” gets continually challenged in this family.

It’s no small thing that Shivah’s subtitle is “a novel from memory.” Memory plays an integral role as Leah deconstructs the memories of her mother—featured then as a vibrant, independent, bipolar, and emotionally abusive woman—while attempting to coexists with the fragmented parts left behind by Alzheimer’s. Memory of course is often less about the order in which events get remembered or even which ones linger. It’s about the gaping wounds and euphoric highs left in our bodies.

By mixing memory with grief, Solod deviates from any linear structure of storytelling or one predicated by an overdependence of plot. Shivah is about emotional resonance and Solod’s novel barrels towards its moments of emotional fracturing. Sometimes it’s between Leah and her siblings as they grapple with what’s owed to their mother during her slow demise, Leah and father, whose struggled to support his wife’s navigation of mental illness and his daughters, and of course Leah and her mother. By the end, we’re rewarded with a quiet moment of resolution, along with the reminder that acceptance is not necessarily something that can be found at the “end.”

Nia Dickens is a fiction writer, whose work centers on Southern Black coming-of-age narratives. She's a former fellow of Richard Hugo House, alum of Hurston/Wright and VONA Voices workshops, and recipient of MVICW's 2020 Voices of Color Fellowship.Dickens currently serves as a teaching artist for Write253, a Tacoma-based nonprofit for youth writers. In Fall 2020, she began an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Miami. Her work can be found in Tahoma Literary Review and Wraparound South.The recording of her latest flash piece "The prayer Sally Hemings's mother teaches about boys named Thomas" can be found on Soundcloud.

A Conversation with Lisa Solod

SC: Could you speak a little about your process when writing this novel? Were the sections drafted chronologically, was there a certain theme that you started with and expanded the plot from?

LS: I usually start my novels with a central idea. I don't outline but I do know, in a vague way, what I am going for. That said, I start writing chronologically but that often goes out the window when I am deep into a book. I can write the middle, the end, anything can happen. I also have a tendency, when finished with a first draft to rearrange parts and sections. In fact I might do that up until the final edit! I am very concerned with smooth transitions.

SC: The book follows a very particular structure. Could you speak a little to your thoughts when it came to those choices and how the structure informed content/plot or vice versa?

LS: The structure of Shivah came to me in a flash, even before the title. I began to understand that while I was writing I had also begun the real life mourning process. I just had no idea that process and the novel would take a dozen years. And in fact, of course, the mourning process is still with me.

SC: Besides structure, which craft elements were you most interested in prioritizing in the novel?

LS: I value beautifully crafted sentences above all else. I am absolutely fanatical about finding the right sentence, the right words, the right rhythm. I want my readers to stop many times in the novel and say: Wow. I want them to think: This is powerful, this is beautiful, this is true. So, my writing has to be everything at once: compelling, intelligent, gorgeous, and also I wish to use the fewest words possible. I am a cross between Raymond Carver and Philip Roth. Anyway, that is the goal.

SC: What went into the decisions on characterizing Leah's mother in the novel? Was there ever a concern on your part about balancing the mother's flaws without sacrificing the reader's emotional investment, particularly in Leah's grief?

LS: I absolutely was concerned with balancing Mother's issues with the things she handed down to Leah: the strength and faith and commitment and love of beautiful things. I have written a number of non-fiction essays on my real mother and I understood the balance but needed to stay on top of it when writing a novel and a longer work. I needed her to be believable, not a villain but a complex character; I needed Leah to also be flawed: too introspective, too concerned about closure. I needed both the main characters to be people readers might recognize.

SC: Since the nature of grief often doesn't function like many readers expect a narrative to (with a neat beginning, middle, and ending), how did you balance finding a resolution for Leah within the confines of the novel?

LS: I don't think I completely understood the nature of grief until I began to write about it about 15 years ago: first in dealing with my father's long illness and death, then with an estrangement with my sisters after that death, and then with my mother's protracted disappearance. I also realized that I had tamped down other "griefs" over the years and that ultimately, to heal, I had to at least acknowledge my own helplessness to change the outcome of an event: no just the death or estrangement or even the failure of purpose but that I had to learn to move on or I would be captured forever in the spiral that is grief. In the novel, it was important to me to end on a positive note: especially when the Mother dies before the book even opens. It was important to show a journey for the two, Mother and Leah, that wasn't always linear but that had its own end that made sense. I think the novel is very much the way women talk to each other, in my experience; they circle and circle and go off on tangents but they also talk about everything that matters, eventually.

Lisa Solod has been writing since the age of eight and publishing since the age of seventeen. She has pursued numerous careers and held a number of jobs over the years including journalist, public relations expert, advertising copywriter, freelance writer and novelist. A lifelong writer, she finds listening to and telling stories just about the best thing in the world. Her writing has appeared online in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Lilith, The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, Savannah Magazine, The Manifest-Station, and the Huffington Post among other places.

Letter from the Editor(s)

Dear reader,

First of all, thank you for your patience as we put this issue together. It’s a time of tumult for many, and I as well as our small but mighty staff have been affected by these changing winds. I know that the pieces we’ve been lucky enough to feature for this issue will be worth the wait.

Though the South Florida summer brings sun and storms in nearly equal measure, there’s a certain promise to the season that even those of us far removed from school days of watching the clock can still feel. A summer can be anything—a summer of reunion, of rest, or of “blue cans,” as is the case in Coco Hull’s fiction story—but they rarely offer stasis. In the spirit of poet Hibah Shabkhez from this issue, “Now the abyss/Stares back, then blinks you an invitation,/And you dive right in.”Change bursts through these long, golden, abyss-like days, and it’s all we can do to jump in and hold on.

We’re so grateful to have had the opportunity to engage with the varied pieces sent to us by a talented and diverse group of writers throughout this reading period. Whether drastic and far removed from our world, as is the case in Mindy Friddle’s dystopian fiction piece “The Empathies,” personal and uplifting as in Leo Williams’ nonfiction piece “Searching for Scorpio Rising,” or subtle and cyclical as the turn in Tim Moder’s poem “Loon,” changes echo through these digital pages.

Personally, I have a complex relationship with change (despite or exacerbated by the last couple years), and I’m sure many of you can relate. I used to wonder, even during times of tooth-baring joy: how can this moment matter if the end is already in sight? Growing up in South Florida, endings buzz in the air like gnats. There are plenty of approaches to dealing with gnats—swat them, ignore them, shower to wash them off your skin—but they persist. Yet as is the nature of change, the endings I’m meeting will bring new beginnings. So I can accept that the gnats are here. And they might cloud the air, but they don’t erase it. We can still breathe, create, and revel in the strange, no matter who we are by the end.

Speaking of change, I’ve had the pleasure over the last few months of training the next managing editor of Sinking City, Megan Ritchie, introduced below. I’m thrilled to be passing this magazine to her capable hands and so excited to see what she does with it! Thank you again for your continued dedication to and engagement with our magazine. We hope you enjoy issue 12!

With love,

Amanda Lamadrid

Dear Reader,

First of all: I am so excited to meet you!

It’s a pleasure to be taking over as managing editor of Sinking City from the talented Amanda Lamadrid. And I can’t wait to see where these upcoming issues take us—in more ways than one. Many of us are back to traveling this summer and as we all cross borders, I’ve been thinking about the ways that this can serve as a balm to our cultural divide.

As a reader, I'm always seeking work that feels international, whether it’s set in a writer's home country or written in their mother tongue. I'm interested, too, in place: where do you feel out of it? What do you identify as home? What futures do you see there? Miami is an international city, and though I’m a transplant myself, I hope Sinking City can remain true to the many universes it holds.

I’m so looking forward to reading your work. It’s a privilege to do so.

With gratitude,

Megan Ritchie

Thank you for reading,

Amanda Lamadrid and Megan Ritchie

Thinking in Two Languages

by Shiksha Dheda

Shiksha Dheda is a South African of Indian descent. She uses writing to express her OCD and depression roller-coaster ventures. Sometimes, she dabbles in photography, painting, and baking lopsided layered cakes. Her writing has been featured(on/forthcoming) in Brittle Paper, Daily Drunk Magazine, Door is a jar, Luna Luna Mag and Versification, amongst others. She is the Pushcart nominated author of Washed Away (Alien Buddha Press, 2021) She rambles annoyingly at Twitter: @ShikshaWrites. You can find (or ignore her) at https://shikshadheda.wixsite.com/writing/poetry

Weatherman (CW: allusion to physical violence)

by Shiksha Dheda

His face rained today
-much contrast to
the rainbow smile

of yesterday

The droplets began
uneasily and

paced themselves to a
rhythm-less tempo

They erupted
in a hailstorm -
complete with the heavy
stones of heartache

The thunder came
-suddenly-

- quietly-

with a low note of howling

Later – unexpectedly-

came the bolt of burning, bright lightning

His face returned to
the genuine colourful
burst of rainbow-
after the insincere rainfall

Sunlight shone amiably,
whilst I held the ashy remnants of his lightning
to my cheek.

A Conversation with Esther Vincent Xueming

SC: With poems covering such a range of topics, the sectioning of the collection helped contextualize my reading of the poems. As a fiction writer, I found that I continually sought out an ‘arc’ to follow along. I wonder if you could speak about the intention behind each distinct section of the collection? Do you see them building and telling a story, in a way?

EVXM: Thank you for this question! This particular editorial decision was something I grappled with for some time. You’re right to say that my poems cover a wide range of topics. They also traverse expanses of geography as well as landscapes of memory and time. When I embarked on this project, I wanted to produce something like Grace Nichols’ I Have Crossed An Ocean. I was also reading and inspired by Linda Gregg’s Sacraments of Desire, Joy Harjo’s She Had Some Horses, and Li-Young Lee’s The City in Which I Love You, all of which were sectioned meaningfully into four to five parts. My working manuscript comprised four sections, but my supervisor felt that four was too disparate and that three might be better in terms of the book’s coherence. Again, I am indebted to his guidance and from there, I started to think about the three sections. I knew I had to create a section for the dream poems, and decided to title each section after a poem within the section. Dream fruit held most of my dream and meditation poems, and poems evoking sleep and the subconscious. I wanted to open the collection with Dream fruit as a way of inviting the reader into my dreams and subconscious, into a mode of dream-like envisioning.

The second section About love, is truncated from the first poem in that section, which writes after Boland’s “Quarantine”. I had to think about how to arrange the poems in this particular section, as they ranged from romantic, familial love to love for the land and home in which one is born into and resides upon. I have to admit that this was the most tricky section but I am satisfied with how it has materialised. “Falcon” was the last poem to join the collection and I decided to include it in About love rather than Dream fruit even though it draws from a dream too as I found that the peregrine falcon’s migratory nature would serve as the connection between this section and the next, just as how the bird in the poem connected the speaker’s home to other places, bird to self.

The final section Pilgrims contains my travel poems, or poems about ‘elsewheres’. One of the questions posed by this section is the mobile nature of home, and whether or not we can feel at home away from home. The poems in this section are seeking poems. They search for home and belonging, to place and to Earth. They recognise their status as outsider, as transient visitor, as pilgrim. Yet, they dwell in place and establish roots through routes. I wanted to end with a grounded sense of self, and chose stone, which across many cultures signify permanence in the face of rapid industrial and urban change. “Memory stone: In fragments” pays tribute to the various places I visited in Croatia, and traces the speaker’s memory that is held within each stone. The stones also symbolise time, and reminds readers that long after the human body perishes, the stones will remain, weathering to nature’s rhythm. I intended for the final lyric in this poem “6 Ensemble” to wrap up the section and collection. This ultimate lyric is concerned with “the history of home / away from home. Collected over time”, with memory recreating an “ensemble of remembered places” and an image of “sojourn”. The temporary nature of the “traveller’s sojourn” and “drifting” is also a commentary on our fleeting time on Earth, and the final image of the “undercurrents crash / beneath, waves breaking reef ashore” can be read in many ways.

I would love to hear what readers think, but personally I find the sound of waves crashing and the image of the broken reef so powerful and evocative, as it returns the poem, the book and reader to Earth, to water, to the sea. In all honesty, the book would not have been possible without Earth. We are not possible without Earth.

SC: This is a broad question, but I wonder if you could speak a little about your process when it comes to poetry? Do you generally begin with an image, a line, a subject, etc or does it depend on the piece? I’m thinking specifically of “The Blue Mountains;” I keep coming back to the image of that “leaking hose.” Imagery is so strong throughout this collection, but I was occasionally more swept away by the concept of the poem itself, as in “Montenegro in Two Scenes.” What comes first for you when drafting, and what do you work to hold onto as the poem evolves?

EVXM: Every poem is different, and so my process differs for each poem. Typically, I draw from recurring memories or dreams or experiences. This could be in the form of an image, line or emotion. If I refer to “The Blue Mountains”, the poem happened because I was reading some news about the particularly bad bushfire season in Australia sometime in June 2019 through May 2020. Australia holds a special place in my heart because my family (we grew up working class) actually had to sell our apartment to downsize from a spacious (by local definition) four-room to a much smaller three-room flat just to afford this family vacation. I was twelve, on the cusp of adolescence, and this was our first family trip outside of Southeast Asia. This was a big deal for us and as a child, everything about the place was magical. In particular, I recall how my mother loved The Blue Mountains, which offered our family a welcome respite from the city. In turn, I resolved in my childish heart to retire there one day. The place represented for me some kind of memory of familial bliss and natural beauty, and so when I read news of the bushfires destroying the land, I felt a kindred sense of grief and sorrow.

It’s interesting how we can feel kinships to places away from home, and feel at home away from home. As a child, I felt at home and at peace in The Blue Mountains, with its invigorating mountain air and wide expanse of space. This memory helped me to empathise with the place. I think the impetus for writing the poem came in the form of the image of the charred joey, published by The Times of India in one of its articles. Local news coverage reported the numbers of lives lost on a daily basis, human and more-than-human, and my heart somehow went out to the latter, who were dying by the millions. I began this poem in grief but ended on hope. The dead joey taught me that my poem could be “brimming, undefeated, full / of life… against the raging dark” of the fires and I am humbled each time I think about the lessons nature has taught me by just being.

Ironically, I don’t try to hold on to anything but let the poem speak through me. I see myself more as a vessel, and the poem as the voice, message or journey that needs to take place through me. That’s why my poems begin, but I never know where they lead. Each poem surprises me as I write and when I revise my work. Sometimes, when writing a draft, I know it’s still raw and unfinished when the poem is clouded by negativity, anger or bitterness. It’s important to let these emotions through though, so that the poem can gain clarity and light. The revision process is important for me in finding my way and finding out what the poem really wants to say. It’s quite an intuitive process and I know a poem is ready when it teaches me something I never knew before.

You mentioned “Montenegro in two scenes”. My first draft was actually a collection four lyrics, of various places in Montenegro. My supervisor read it and said I was trying to do too much without enough depth, and so I let go of two other lyrics and decided to focus on two more poignant ones. I think this was a good decision because it allowed me to take my time to get to know Perast and Cetinje again. It also meant I had to focus on these places and what they taught me: the old man’s joy immortalising the young boatman who never returned home in the former, and the stray dog’s wisdom and lack of attachment in the latter.

SC: When it comes to ecopoetics as a genre, a characteristic attributed to it by James Englehardt is that “it is connected to the world in a way that implies responsibility.” This genre feels heavy in a way, as if it carries even more of a weight due to the present moment. In creating an entire collection within the genre of ecopoetics, how did that ‘responsibility’ manifest for you? Was it more beneficial to your craft to lean in, or was it necessary to put certain connotations aside in order to create more freely?

EVXM: You refer here to Englehardt’s “The Language Habitat: an Ecopoetry Manifesto”, where Englehardt begins with the opening line “Ecopoetry is connection.”, and goes on to define ecopoetry’s entanglements with language, science, the non-human world, spirit, body, family, culture, society, ethics and lastly, play. I appreciate this way of thinking about ecopoetry as “responsibility”, an ethical framework through which literature engages politically with the world and our environment. In fact, one of the ways I might describe ecopoetry is as a form of eco-social activism. I like to think of Red Earth as my contribution to Earth, through poems that mourn and celebrate Earth, that seek communion with Others (places, people, cultures, more-than-human beings) while recognising our differences, that search for home at home and away from home to come to an enlarged, expanded, planetary vision of Earth as home and the self as at home on Earth. While the word “responsibility” might seem heavy, another way to look at it is through the eyes of love. We can also be responsible for a thing that we love. In this light, we can think of ecopoetry as poetry of loving attention to Earth, with an ongoing awareness of human-induced environmental damage to Earth and the fragility of ecosystems should we not act responsibly.

For me, when I was working on the collection, I didn’t know as yet what its theme or genre would be. I was writing poems that were eco-conscious, I was writing poems about family, I was writing poems about places away from home, I was writing poems about home. I was writing poems motivated by awe, deep anger, love, grief, hope. To respond to your question more directly, I created freely under the guidance and advice of my MA supervisor, Boey Kim Cheng, who told me to write without concerning myself too much about the collection’s theme. I think this freedom enabled me to delve deep and reach out without limiting myself to any one topic, theme or genre, i.e. ecopoetics. However, it was clear that across my poems, there were similar concerns about the speaker’s place on Earth, and how the speaker related to Others and by proxy, the self. As I prepared my exegesis, my research and critical examination of my work naturally began to gain clarity in two areas: ecopoetry: place and the making of home, as well as ecofeminism. I have to thank Kim Cheng for directing me to specific poets and readings. Independently, I devoted much of my research to the study of women authors like Mary Oliver, Joy Harjo, Eavan Boland and Grace Nichols whose poetics spoke to me and influenced my work.

As I mentioned earlier, I did not consciously set out to write a collection of ecopoetry. However, I found myself writing a collection of ecopoetry by engaging with issues close to my heart, in responding to places or news or policies or art or memories or objects or subjects that somehow had eco-social resonance. We live in time and in place, and so I was simply writing as someone conscious of her time and place on Earth.

Esther Vincent Xueming is the editor-in-chief and founder of The Tiger Moth Review, an independent eco journal of art and literature based in Singapore. She is co-editor of two poetry anthologies, Poetry Moves (Ethos Books, 2020) and Little Things (Ethos Books, 2013), and Making Kin, an ecofeminist anthology of personal essays by women writers in Singapore (Ethos Books). A literature educator by profession, she is passionate about the relationships between art, literature and the environment. Follow her on Twitter @EstherVincentXM. Her debut poetry collection, Red Earth, is available for purchase from Blue Cactus Press here in North America and Europe and here from our distributor in Asia and the rest of the world. In Singapore, you can get a copy of Red Earth
from any Kinokuniya store.

Tender Collections of a Shared Planet: A Review of Esther Vincent Xueming’s Red Earth

by Allen Means

When I was in elementary school, I was best friends with a little girl who loved trees. She loved them so much in fact, that she would cry when other children plucked leaves from their branches. She used to tell me that the roots of trees were their hands, buried deep in the earth. The way she described it was like their tree-ness was simply an accident of nature, and only by chance were they alive and quiet instead of alive and tumultuous (like us). At the time I didn’t understand it, especially when she would make me ask to take their flowers or lean against their trunks, but I knew I loved her kindness. I assumed I had to think of the trees like people in order to understand, imagining that the trees were once children who had pressed their fingers too far into beach sand, letting it climb up their forearms and elbows, and been fossilized just like that. Their roots and branches just limbs.

In beginning to read Esther Vincent Xueming’s debut poetry collection, Red Earth, I could not help but imagine the speaker as my dear friend, someone with an incredible empathy and a powerful vision to share. Red Earth is an admirable account of our planet’s condition and a kind offering of hope and healing, seeking to transform not only our connection to the earth but our connections to one another.

This collection of ecopoetry is sliced gently into three parts, Dream fruit, About love, and Pilgrims, each dedicated to their own meditative lens, although more largely connected by a preoccupation with the vast and unknowable. In her poems, Esther Vincent Xueming embarks on a search for lost roots— familial, spiritual, and metaphysical— through reflections on family, memory, art, nature, and poetry.

Various pieces in the collection include dedications from the poet to those (people, animals, places, poems) in her personal and artistic life, something that becomes noticeable as part of the foundation on which Red Earth was written, in its abundant practice of giving ode and acknowledgement to that which gives and inspires. These dedications come in a form that differs from poetry that often seeks to “capture a moment.” Because while Xueming has a gift for reflection and description of life’s intimate moments, these poems seem to contain no desire for ownership, but a desire to cherish and give.

The poem, "Crossing" is a tribute, after William E. Stafford's "Travelling through the Dark," that provides a devastatingly gentle remembrance of a deer put to death. The lines "And though I never / knew her, I want to remember" express a dedication to preserving life, even of those we do not know. This collection of a memory is meant to affirm and honor a life lived and is followed by a section break and the beginning lines "Imaginary friend, let me resurrect / your broken body from the dirt and ash" (28). The speaker of these poems has a powerful sense of energy and vitality, finding and making connections to others through our shared life and shared soil. Xueming’s poems seek for a way to not only preserve, like the photograph in "Crossing," but re-document and "resurrect" the life that might otherwise be missed or forgotten. It is a deeply admirable feature of the poet in this collection, in her attempt to give and create space for that life, and provide us a mindful, loving look into what it means to reflect rather than capture or take.

"The Blue Mountains" is another poem that gives us insight into that reflection of moment, in which the speaker recounts her past home in Australia and attempts to grapple with the news of its devastating wildfires.

"Australia is burning, and the mountains of my memory

are turning blue. I think how this poem

could be a leaking hose running out of water

to quench a dry and angry land. But I also think

how it could be brimming, undefeated, full

of life in its last breath before the raging dark." (57)

There is a kindness in this reflection. In the sentiment that poetry, perhaps, may provide a testament to that which has existed or lived. And while a poem might work to amend or to advocate, it might also, in its simple extension of words, work to preserve memory of— to instill the respect and honor of attention, re-documenting the fullness of "life in its last breath."

In the last section of the book, in a poem called, "Monsoon," the speaker recounts an experience during monsoon season, in which the speaker describes the relationship between the environment and the people who must both labor under its conditions.

“The southerly winds have arrived,

and with them, occasional showers and thunderstorms

washing the afternoons down with the shingle of rain.

They will stay for four months, returning again

next June. Our plants rely on this gift of seasonal rain

to survive. We try to care for them, inventing a way

to collect the rain with a wooden pole and a small bucket,

fourteen floors above the ground. In another place,…” (83)

In this poem, the speaker spirals slowly from her account of the season into a recount of a specific memory, in which an unknown temple keeper offers her shelter from the wind and rain beneath his red-roofed temple (84). This sweet, touching narrative then plays out with a tinge of irony, in which the temple keeper kindly takes the speaker’s shoes and keeps them dry beneath a 'No Shoes' sign.

In a book that so highlights a suffering environment at the hands of humanity, it is touching to see how Xueming approaches the world’s condition as one that is complex and multifaceted. In all its grappling with the vast and unknown, Red Earth still comforts with its attention to the sweet, humble moments of humanity where those that are connected to and by the earth can still find hope in the kindness of others.

And although the poems in this collection still seek for roots, for peace, for belonging, for wholeness— they are grounded in moments that offer rather than take. “The Red Earth” provides and contains life, but the speaker documents, cherishes, and collects in an attempt to connect with the earth and give back. Like a dear friend who asks us to respect and honor, Esther Vincent Xueming's Red Earth is tender and thoughtful in its craft and attention, drawing connections between us through the inhale and exhale of an earth that is just as alive as we are.

Allen Means (he/him) is a queer poet and writer from Boulder, Colorado, where he earned a degree in Creative Writing and Japanese. He currently resides in Miami, Florida, where he is pursuing an MFA in Poetry.

Cowabunga Sunset

by Ross West

The salty beach air was filled with the lazy calls of sea gulls. Crowds of people who’d come to spend the day at Cowabunga! Ocean Park were having their fun playing on the sand and in the water. I got a resupply pack from the Maintenance & Repair Shop and lugged it out to the floating wooden dock next to the kayak rental booth. After opening the pack and taking out the electronic controller, I punched in the command. A harbor seal stuck its head out of the water and with a few kicks of its powerful tail propelled itself up onto the dock next to me. Another command launched the seal into its roll-over routine that brought it to a rest propped up on one fin, underbelly exposed. I inserted the special wrench and opened the door in the seal’s chest. Out popped the old toaster-sized battery unit. I slid in its replacement, snapped the door shut, and tapped the Done button on the controller. The seal barked, scooted across the dock, and dove back into the water.

That afternoon I worked a shift at lifeguard Tower Two. When it ended, the owner of Cowabunga!, Greg Becker, was standing there waiting. He was forty-five or so, shaggy-haired and a little chunky, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of dude shorts.

“Hey man,” he said. “You’re Jacob, right? How about if you and me take a little walk.” I’d only been on the job three days—had I already messed up?

We went down to the busy waterline, past some kids building an impressive sandcastle.

“I like to meet the people who work here,” he said.

“Cool.”

“We’ve got almost a mile of beach,” Greg said grinning and slapping his belly. “Boogieboarding, snorkeling, volleyball, pipeline surfing—you name it.”

He pointed at the dark blue sky streaked with a pair of clouds shaped like white feathers. “The Sky-Tron dome covers the whole park—gives us a completely programmable environment. Those sailboats on the horizon and those surfers out there riding the reef break, all holograms. What you feel is the artificial sun’s infrared heat.”

“Awesome.”

He laughed. “That’s just the word I like to use.” He picked up a shell and chucked it into the surf. “So why do you think all these people come here?”

I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. All I could think of was, “To have fun?”

“Exactly,” he said. “For fun and to get away from the crazy stuff outside the park. Half the world’s starting to look like freakin’ Mad Max. Drought, starvation, water wars. Even in this country, things are getting a little . . . scary. So, it’s important we give our visitors a vacation from all the doom and gloom. Make sense?”

“Totally.”

Greg stopped walking and faced me, dead serious, looking me right in the eye. “You and the rest of the staff make that vacation happen. You are the Cowabunga! vibe.” He talked to me like an adult—very different from any of the teachers and coaches and bosses I’d ever had. “People are suffering,” he said. “This place is a hospital, the beach is our medicine. And you, my friend,” he tapped a finger against my chest, “you are Dr. Feelgood. Can you dig it?”

It was like he’d knighted me or something, like all of a sudden I knew what I was supposed to be doing. I felt ten feet tall, ready for anything. Oh yeah, Greg, I could definitely dig it.

* * *

In high school I had mostly played water polo and hung out with the guys on the team—guys who had girlfriends and were always telling stories. But I was shy and didn’t have much free time between practices and games, school, and two part-time jobs I worked to help Mom with the bills. The guys used to razz me pretty hard about my lack of experience in the female department. Cowabunga! changed all that.

A few days after Greg dubbed me Dr. Feelgood, I was up on lifeguard Tower Four when I looked up the beach and there she was. She was wearing a staff T-shirt and gym shorts, walking barefoot on the dry sand. Flipflops dangled from one of her hands, the other brushed aside a wavy strand of chestnut hair. Never had I seen anyone so beautiful.

I asked around. Her name was Mary. Just hired. The next week our shift supervisor assigned the two of us to pair up later that afternoon doing Special Needs Aquatic Support. I couldn’t believe my luck and bounced through my morning duties grinning, whistling, and feeling all kinds of stupid goofy happy.

Mary and I met in the parking lot just as the van arrived from the state hospital. The driver, a nurse named Roberto, had brought us one tiny and very shy little girl about five named Jeannie. The Special Needs intake form had a note in the Additional Information box. “Uses wheelchair. Eleven surgeries. Hospitalized more than half her life.”

We made our introductions and got Jeannie into a floatation jacket then wheeled her down the access ramp into the water. Her face scrunched up with fear.

We stopped, the water just lapping over her thighs. Mary bent in close, stroked one of her little stick-like arms.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

With tears about to spill out of her eyes, Jeannie gave a shaky nod and a quivering

“Yeah.”

“Jacob here is about the best swimmer in the whole wide world. Did you know that?”

Jeannie shook her head.

“See that island way way out there?” Mary pointed at the man-made atoll we called Gilligan’s Island, a quarter mile offshore. “He can swim all the way out there and back.” Mary rested her hand on my chest. It felt so good, my thinking went a little blurry. “Isn’t that right, Jacob?”

“Uh, yeah, done it a hundred times,” I said. I smiled and gave the kid’s cheek a brush with the backside of my finger, something that used to help when I babysat my cousins and they were headed for a meltdown. It didn’t work any great miracles with Jeannie, whose hands remained clamped on the armrests of her chair while we rolled her farther down the ramp. The water came up around her and the flotation jacket lifted her out of the wheelchair. Mary and I held her, one on each side, but even so Jeannie was panicky, straining her mouth upward and gulping down breaths like a hungry baby bird.

Every time she bobbed down and the water came up close to her mouth, we made sure she bobbed right back up. After a while she calmed down. She made a few tentative strokes and seemed surprised by how the water supported her, how easy it was to move her frail body. She was getting the hang of floating and paddling and kicking. It wasn’t long before she was flinging herself back and forth between Mary and me.

“I’m flying,” she squealed. She was a little motorboat, spinning around and around, slapping the water to make big splashes, giggling.

Jeannie swam and we played until Roberto honked the van’s horn and waved his arm.

“I don’t wanna go,” she cried.

We rolled her out of the water and got her all bunched up in a towel.

She pushed her fists into her cheeks. “Don’t. Wanna. Go.”

“You can always come back,” Mary said.

Her face lit up. “Promise?”

I took her hand and gave it a squeeze and a little shake. “Promise,” I told her.

Roberto got Jeannie and her chair strapped into the van. She bounced happily up and down, talking to us through the glass, saying words we couldn’t hear. When the van turned out of the parking lot, she waved and blew us a kiss.

I waved back. “What a cutie.”

“Hope we see her again,” Mary said.

We just stood there in the parking lot like neither of us wanted to leave. Mary loosened the hair she had pinned up. It fell halfway down her back, and she pulled it into a ponytail.

“So how did you know I’ve been out to Gilligan’s?” I asked.

The corner of her mouth curled up in a sneaky little smile and she aimed her green-green-green eyes at me. “I’ve been watching you.”

I froze.

“See you tomorrow,” she said and walked off toward the Operations Center. I couldn’t take my eyes off her—the graceful way she moved, her swimmer’s shoulders, how her ponytail swayed.

* * *

When I showed up for my shift the next day, Greg was waiting for me at my locker.

“You were good with that little girl yesterday,” he said, surprising me. “I saw your whole session through a telescope from upstairs. Couldn’t hear what you said but didn’t need to.”

He was close enough that I could smell alcohol on his breath. Maybe I should have been paying attention to that—I’d heard rumors—but right then I was just happy to hear him say I’d done a good job.

“I got kind of a special project coming up. Could use a little help,” he said. “Thought you might be the guy.”

I shrugged like, sure, I’m up for it.

“Come on then, I’ll tell you about it.”

We walked along the water chitchatting like we did it all the time. Me and the big dog. Far down the beach he turned away from the water, crossed the dry sand, and took a path that sloped up through clumps of beachgrass to a small bluff. I knew it was the place he stayed at when he was in the park, but I’d never gotten a good look.

From the top of the bluff I saw a hammock slung between two stout palm trees next to a lanai shaded by a canopy of bamboo stilts covered over with palm fronds and beach grass. Under the canopy were a couple of little tables and some wicker chairs—including a big one obviously for Greg. The hut itself was like something a castaway would bang together—weathered boards and bamboo. Looked like it wouldn’t stand up to a strong wind.

We went inside—it was a regular modern apartment. Greg rattled ice into a blender, unscrewed the caps from different bottles, splashed in a couple of jiggers from each one, squeezed a lime over the top, and let it rip. When the clattering roar stopped, he reached into the cupboard to get glasses and over his shoulder said, “You and Mary Yeager seem to be hitting it off.”

My face got hot in like two seconds. He handed me a glass filled to the brim with the icy margarita.

“She seems like a real fine young lady,” he said with a wink and a smile.

I sipped the sweet, strong drink and hoped he wasn’t going to say anything more on the subject.

“So here’s the deal,” he said. “Some people are coming to look over the park in a few weeks. It’s an annual inspection—required by the bank that loaned me the construction money.”

I gave him a nod, like I knew all about borrowing a gazillion dollars.

“During their visit, I’ll want someone with me in case I need anything. Sound like something you could do?”

“No prob.”

“Alright,” he said, laughing as we bumped fists. “Welcome to the inner circle.”

“Cool,” I said.

“Today we’ve got something to celebrate.”

Greg handed me a piece of paper he said had just arrived—some news about his loan. One paragraph was circled. “I read it once, but I’d kinda like to hear it again. Would you mind reading it?”

“Out loud?”

“Yeah, I’m—” he waved his hand back and forth. “It’s a kind of dyslexia.”

“Okay, yeah, sure.” I cleared my throat and read.

The intensifying global emergency of catastrophic climate change (including the worldwide disappearance of beaches resulting from rising sea levels) is forcing governments to enact unprecedented draconian restrictions, eliminating freedoms of activity and expression. Constrained consumers are resentful of these imposed austerities; their compensatory desires thus stimulated, they crave respite and distraction as never before. One year of not only positive but accelerating revenues substantiates the value proposition offered by Cowabunga! Ocean Park.

I looked up from the paper. “Is that supposed to mean something?”

“It means,” Greg said with a big smile, “we’re making enough money to stay afloat.” He held out his glass and I clinked it with mine. “And much to my relief, it means the visit from the bankers ought to be a piece of cake.”

* * *

Nights were super popular at Cowabunga! We had bonfires and weenie roasts and smores, full moon surfing, couples taking romantic walks along the sand. But about a week after Mary and I worked together in Aquatics Support, the park closed early—the staff swept all guests off the beach and out the doors well before the Sky-Tron kicked into its sunset routine. A maintenance crew was coming from the wave machine company to do their quarterly check-up on the hydraulics. My job was to let them in and make sure they had whatever they needed.

With the crowd and the staff gone and the crew not yet arrived, I was the only guy in the whole huge park. Very peaceful. I went for a walk on the deserted beach and stopped at one of the concrete fire rings that held a pile of ashes and charred wood left from the previous night’s luau. I found it amazing that in the middle of a global climate train wreck we could have open fires on the beach. Outside in the real world just about anything that released even a puff of greenhouse gas was regulated seventeen different ways by six different government agencies. Not to mention the EcoGuardian vigilantes that would go after “Earth killers” by burning down their businesses, cars, and homes. But Greg wasn’t about to have a beach without campfires, so he purchased ten times more carbon offsets than were required and ended up winning a Green Hero award. Smart guy.

My phone rang. The maintenance crew leader said one of their trucks had broken down and they’d have to reschedule for another night. Before we even finished the conversation I was already thinking about Mary and working up the courage to ask her if maybe she might want to come hang out and go for a swim.

“Perfect,” she said when I called. “I’ll be right over.”

I went into the Control Room, fired up the Sky-Tron, and nudged up the intensity of the sunset routine. I paced around and looked at the clock about five times, then went back to the Sky-Tron and cranked all the inputs to the max.

When Mary arrived, we ran to the beach, laid out our towels, and dove in. Soon we were beyond the breakers, moving in the open water as easy and happy as a couple of otters. As the sun dipped lower, the western half of the dome throbbed with ever more intense neon colors—orange, red, gold, green, and purple. I told her what I had done.

“You made us a tie-dye sky,” she said, a big grin on her face. She slapped water at me and dove. I felt her gliding smoothly past my calf.

We swam back to shore and toweled off in the fading light of the greatest sunset in the history of the world. I lit a fire while Mary opened a bottle of red wine. We sat and drank and laughed, watching the flames of the crackling fire. We drank some more and got a little buzzed.

“Oh my god,” she giggled, looking at the eastern horizon, “What is that?”

The full moon I’d programmed on the Sky-Tron was rising. It wasn’t a normal full moon—no, this thing was gigantic, twenty, maybe thirty times regular size, with the Man in the Moon gazing down on us, quite pleased to be setting the mood for what was to come.

* * *

My big day as Greg’s gofer came, and we met the visiting bankers, Melinda Lanz and Lou Jordan, at the Operations Center. Greg introduced me as his assistant.

“We’re glad for an excuse to get out of the office,” Melinda said with a nice smile. She was about forty, kind of pasty-looking in her shorts and sandals, but in good shape.

Greg toured them through the building, showed them how everything was state-of-the-art and blah, blah, blah. They asked one very technical question after another. Greg had all the answers. When they ran out of things to ask him, he led the way to the double doors that faced west.

“Now you’ve seen the infrastructure,” he said, “but this is the real Cowabunga!” He flung open the doors, and we stepped out into the bright sunshine and the bustling scene of sunbathers, Frisbee tossers, joggers, inner-tubers, kayakers, body surfers, picnicking families, roaming clumps of kids, and an old couple with long poles fishing from the jetty.

Melinda shaded her eyes with her hand, took it all in. “Wow,” she said, slipping out of her sandals. “Oh, the warm sand feels so good on my feet.”

Lou stared at the water where a pod of gray whales was playing near the surface, spouting and showing their flukes as they dove. The head and fins of one of the whales rose into the air and splashed back into the water. People on the beach cheered.

“Animatronic,” Greg said, clapping his hands together. “Every afternoon at three.”

“But those are real,” Lou said. He pointed at a group of surfers floating on their boards waiting for waves while two riders cut up and down the face of a perfectly formed six-foot curl. “Must be one heck of a wave machine.”

“Built by the Swiss, believe it or not,” Greg said with a chuckle. “My main contribution was developing the lattice supports that hold up the dome. Graphene nanotubes and positive air pressure—the architects and engineers went nuts.” He craned his neck from horizon to horizon smiling and shaking his head as if he could hardly believe what he had created.

“When I was a kid, I lived at the beach. Never felt more alive.” His face turned solemn. “Then a few years ago, they started talking about beaches around the world disappearing. I said to myself, hey man, this is a bigass problem. In fifty years or maybe a hundred we’ll get ocean levels under control and natural beaches will come back—that’s the hope, anyway. But in the meantime, my job, my sacred duty, is to keep the flame of the beach vibe alive.”

“Sacred is a strong word,” Melinda said.

“Global warming is just bummer after bummer after bummer. A soul killer,” Greg said. “People need a break—a way to recharge. We’re Homo ludens, man—Homo playful. We need to have fun. And we can’t afford to bum out and give up. The stakes are way too high.” He opened his arms to take in all that surrounded us. “We need surfers and slackers, parrotheads and pirates, a place where lovers can rub lotion on each other and lie in the sun, where kids can chase each other into the surf.”

He was on a roll and would probably have continued but something behind Lou caught his attention. The rest of us turned around and saw a tall white-haired man in a funeral-black suit lumbering across the sand toward us, a thick envelope in his hand. When he arrived, he adjusted the hang of his still buttoned coat and said, “Gregory Becker?”

Greg nodded.

“I’m with the Office of Cultural and Historical Disambiguation,” the man said, passing the envelope to Greg. “You have ten days to comply with this order and cease all operations.”

The undertaker turned and walked off.

Nobody moved. Greg just stared at the envelope in his hands like he was holding a dead cat. Then they all started looking at each other, even at me, as if I had any idea what the hell just happened.

Lou ran his hand through his hair. “I, uh, guess that just about wraps things up,” he said with a sympathetic shrug. Melinda patted Greg on the shoulder and said something about it being up to the lawyers now. The two of them shook hands with Greg and off they went.

He plodded down the beach in the other direction. I caught up with him and asked if he wanted me to come along. He made a grunt that could have been a yes and I followed his silent, hunched form all the way to his hut.

Once inside, he went straight for the blender and dumped in ice cubes and what seemed like a ton of booze. When he hit the button, the ice made a hellacious racket. He slopped the chunky slush into two big tumblers and handed me one. He took the other glass and the pitcher and fell heavily into a chair. I felt sorry for him and figured I’d stick around to help however I could. But nothing was happening—he just sat there brooding, staring off with a blank look on his face. Once in a while he took a sip. When he drained the pitcher, he made another batch.

The clock on my phone said 4:19. In three hours I’d be with Mary. She and I had been spending every spare minute together, and after work we were going to have a little celebration—one week since our first night together on the beach. We’d be at her apartment. Alone.

He slapped the fat envelope on his thigh, his breath suddenly faster and louder, his chest rising and falling in short, sharp spasms. He tossed the envelope at me.

“Here,” he said. “Read it.”

I opened the packet of papers and read aloud the cover sheet that explained what was inside, a list of what sounded mostly like legal documents.

“Also included for purposes of overall context is an initial assessment taken by the OCHD in response to—”

“That,” Greg said, thrusting his finger toward me. “That’s the one. Read that. Every word.”

I found the document and read it to him.

To: Office of Cultural and Historical Disambiguation
From: Delilah Mallet-Grimshaw, Assistant Director, Office of Narrative Compliance
Subject: Progress Report, Case No. 1307

Background
In accordance with the Accuracy in Historical Representations and Communications Act (8.3.26b), I am reporting progress related to actions taken by this office.
On April 19 it was reported that a commercial enterprise—Cowabunga! Ocean Park (hereafter referred to as “the replica beach”)—was operating in violation of numerous provisions of AHRCA.
Field investigators were dispatched. Upon confirmation that the replica beach promoted and/or portrayed inaccurate historical representations, an Action Team was formed for further investigation (electronic surveillance warrants obtained). Formal analysis, assessment, and response preparation activities ensued.

Objectionable Representations
Numerous violations of Class 1 restrictions were identified including, but not limited to:
• Romanticized and unhistorical representations (as set forth in AHRCA subsection 1.1.4: “No description of an historical time, place, situation, etc., may be shown/presented inconsistent with the full and accurate context of the historical dynamics of anthropogenic geodegradation.”).
• Denial of basic tenets of science-backed consensus on mechanisms of climatic change and associated impacts.
• 103 specific infractions of the Code of Observance.

Greg snorted. He tried to rise out of his chair, stumbled, caught himself. He went to the kitchen and got ice from the freezer.

“Continue with the execution,” he called out, slurring the words while he emptied a bottle of booze into the pitcher.

I read on.

Action Plan
Sole proprietor of replica beach, Gregory L. Becker, to be served with a Letter of Finding enumerating violations of the AHRCA and demanding cessation of operations. Letter will inform recipient that failure to comply will render the proprietor subject to the full extent of the Act’s punitive remedies (17.1–67).
Replica beach operations to be suspended. Historical Reconciliation improvements to begin under auspices of the Office of Cultural and Historical Disambiguation, Office of Narrative Compliance.

Anticipated Outcomes
Successful removal/remediation of offensive, unhistorical, and dangerous misrepresentations of significant natural and cultural activity associated with ecological dynamics/degradation/dysfunction.

The blender screamed like it was mixing gravel. Standing right next to it, Greg didn’t seem to notice. His forehead was shiny with sweat, his eyes twitched from side to side.

When the noise stopped, I said, “You got a nice-looking hammock outside—mind if I give it a try?”

This caught him off guard and he was too drunk to notice my little strategy to get him out into the fresh air. Glass in one hand, pitcher in the other, he wove his way to the door. I followed close behind, ready to grab hold if he started to fall.

Once in the hammock, I made a big show of rocking back and forth. “This is awesome,” I said.

But he wasn’t listening. He thrashed around the lanai, mad, mumbling. “Pissy little pissant bureaucrats . . . addicted to their pissant power.” He scowled and kicked over one of the little tables, then thrust his flushed face close to mine and growled, “Beware the man”—he paused, burped—“who knows only one book.”

He went on raging, but it wasn’t aimed at me. I figured he needed somebody to be there, to vent to, so I just swayed in the hammock and listened to him rant about people being blind and stupid, about there being many paths to the top of the mountain. Eventually the booze caught up with him. He settled into his chair and passed out.

Something big was up—definitely—but I didn’t really grasp what all it meant. And anyway, in a couple of hours I’d be with Mary in her bed—next to that, what else could possibly matter.

* * *

When the government lowered the boom, everything went down the crapper fast. Greg fought with every ounce of his strength, his lawyers made appeal after appeal—and struck out every time. He showed up at the Operations Center less and less, mostly he spent his time alone in his hut drinking and smoking weed.

I was among the people who were lucky enough to keep their jobs. Over the next eleven months we watched as Cowabunga! got completely overhauled and changed into the Beach Museum—the BM, as we called it. The transformation was slow and painful, like watching a beautiful animal die. It was without doubt the worst year of my life.

I had the most seniority of anybody left on the staff and one of my jobs was to break in the new hires. This kept me pretty busy—morale was so bad we had a hard time keeping people on the payroll.

My latest trainee was Randall, a chubby baby-faced guy just a couple of years younger than me. Like almost all the hires since the swimming requirement had been eliminated, he wasn’t half as physically fit as staff members used to be. I took him to the employee dressing rooms and got him squared away with a locker and a set of work clothes to match the ones I already had on.

He awkwardly wiggled into his pea-green rubberized rain suit and the knee-high rubber boots. The bosses said this gear was designed to protect us from contact toxins and environmental pathogens—what it was really good for was making us sweat like pigs.

I unscrewed the cap from a tube of white zinc oxide cream and squeezed a thick gob onto my finger.

“Really?” Randall said, narrowing his eyes.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “it’s just sunblock with an SPF of like ten thousand.” I applied the white goo to his nose, cheekbones, and forehead in kind of a starburst pattern. “The dome filters out all the UV radiation, but the Narrative Control Team decided this stuff emphasizes the E.D.N.’s section on the resurgent ozone hole and skin cancer.”

“What’s the E.D.N.?”

“Environmental Degradation Narrative,” I said, looking in the dressing room mirror and applying the white stuff to my own face. “It’s our bible, the document that controls everything we do.” I wiped the excess cream on a paper towel. “Time for the tour.”

I led him down to the beach, which the E.D.N. had staged with a soiled diaper, cigarette butts, random plastic crap, crude oil and beach tar, dead fish, rotting bird carcasses, and a condom. Not far offshore, a one-tenth-scale cruise ship was anchored in a vast gyre of floating plastic trash—from a bilge pipe in its stern plopped chunky gray-brown sludge.

Randall’s face pinched with repulsion.

“Right over there used to be our number-one surfing area,” I said, bobbing my chin toward a patch of flat water.

He squinted to see through the smoke (non-greenhouse) rising from a pile of (simulated) burning tires. “Surfers? Here? Are you kidding?”

“The wave machine’s still out there—it’s just turned off. The accountants say it saves a ton of money. And why not? With the E.D.N., the water’s so filthy it would be like surfing in a toilet.”

Randall ran his wrist across his sweating forehead.

“A little warm, huh?”

He fanned his face with his hand.

“The temperature is set for 93 degrees with 95 percent humidity under an always-overcast sky. The only break is every day at four when we get a Category 1 hurricane—the air-movers make a godawful howl. Keep your peepers peeled for flying debris.”

He looked like he’d just taken a mouthful of sour milk. “Didn’t this place used to be like a resort?”

I told him how the government brought in the Narrative Compliance people to transform the place—Artistic Director, Experience Designers, code writers, a crew of construction workers, and the main man, the Story Czar who, with his one droopy eye, oversaw the whole project.

The Czar, I said, was big on living-history dioramas—his vision was for schoolkids on field trips to have the experience of learning about global warming by talking to real (fake) people: a boatful of climate refugees, island people whose village was half-submerged, an environmental scientist in a lab coat, a UN delegate working on global policies.

“Do the kids go for it?” Randall asked.

I laughed. Some of the laid-off Cowabunga! staff got rehired to put on costumes and be actors in these dioramas, I said, but they got laid off again when the Czar replaced most of the living dioramas with holograms—much more cost-effective.

“So what we do now,” I said, “is march kids through the museum’s fourteen Info Stations. At each one a hologram lectures them about another glacier melted, another forest burned, another species gone extinct.”

I picked up the pace and we made our way onto a tongue of beach that jutted out into the sea. “Just out here is something pretty cool,” I told him. We arrived at a child-sized body lying face down on the sand, wavelets lapping around its lifeless form.

“The Experience Designers went through a bunch of different models before they settled on this one. The first version was too stiff—like a mannequin. Then there were a few that were too loosey-goosey, sort of jiggly like water balloons. Technically this guy is the CMBC-6, the sixth version of the Climate Migrant Beach Corpse. We call him Ricky.”

“My god,” Randall said. “That’s disgusting.”

“Narrative Compliance says it really hammers home the tragedy. The schoolkids are totally grossed out, but it’s the only thing in the park they actually pay attention to.”

Randall looked at me, trying hard, as I hoped he would, to understand what the Beach Museum was really all about.

Heading back toward the parking lot we saw a grimy yellow school bus pulling to a stop, the noise of high-spirited kids pouring from its open windows.

Randall’s face brightened. “I’m planning to become a teacher. The ad for the job said I’d get to work with kids. Good for my resume, you know.”

I nodded like I cared, and for a second I wanted to tell him how, by Info Station 4, the squirmy kids from this bus would be turned into yawning, glassy-eyed zombies. Just then I remembered Jeannie, the little girl in the wheelchair—how I had promised her we’d always be here for her. How we weren’t. How it must have broken her heart.

I wiped the sweat from my face. “Class field trips now make up ninety-six percent of our visitors. That’s the business model,” I said, my voice sounding as flat as one of the holograms. “We don’t make squat on gate receipts anymore. Everything’s subsidized by the government.”

Next to the bus, the teachers herded the boisterous kids into a line.

We came to lifeguard Tower One, the place where I’d last seen Mary. She too had kept her job during the transition to the BM, but it hadn’t taken her long to see where things were headed. She was smart that way, a lot smarter than me. We were standing right by the tower in our knee boots and our dorky rubber rain suits. “This place is the shits,” she said. Staying was crushing her spirit. We both knew she had to go. She said she wanted to find somewhere that was more like what Cowabunga! used to be.

“You could come with me,” she said, but not with much hope. We’d talked about going off together and she knew my answer, at least for now.

“I need to do this,” she said, apologizing. “It’s not about you, it’s all my stuff. Do you understand?”

“I do, totally.” The guilt was tearing her up and

I didn’t need to make it any harder on her than it already was.

“When I find a good place, I’ll call,” she said, brushing a tear from my cheek. “Maybe Greg will be okay, maybe then you could come be with me.”

“Every time my phone rings,” I said, “I’ll be praying it’s you.”

She gave me her warmest, twinkliest smile, then took my head in her hands, looked into my eyes for a long time like she wanted to remember, then kissed me soft and slow.

“Be brave,” she said.

She turned and walked down the beach. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. I felt everything all at once and felt nothing but numb. I watched her get smaller and smaller and then she was gone.

Randall said something I didn’t hear. “Sorry, what?”

“Is that the end of the tour?” he repeated.

“Yeah,” I said. “That pretty much gets you up to speed.”

* * *

After I got off work that night, I walked up the beach to see Greg at his hut. I found him on the lanai, slumped in his big chair, looking to be in even worse shape than he’d been the night before. His squinty face bloated, his skin so red it looked sunburned, the beard he’d grown, matted and wet with spilled drinks. He waved the half-full pitcher at me. I nodded. He poured me a tall one then collapsed back into the chair, exhausted from the effort.

“Should I get the book?” I asked.

He raised a finger, let it fall.

I found the fat biography of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys. We were at the part where the creepy manipulating psychiatrist had taken control of every aspect of Brian’s drugged-out life. I knew the story, knew Brian was about to escape and get his life back, and I thought maybe it would give Greg some hope. I read for only a few minutes before I heard raspy rhythmic breathing. His eyes were closed. Gone for the night. I wondered how long he’d last. Another week? Probably not a month. I covered him up with a beach towel.

It was a moonless black night. The lanai was softly lit in by a couple of strands of little Christmas lights strung in lazy arcs. They gave off a friendly warm glow, like a campfire in a dark wilderness. I sat, sipped my drink, and thought of Mary. I imagined, like I imagined a hundred times every day, she was off the grid someplace in Peru or Thailand or maybe New Zealand, doing whatever it was she needed to do. She hadn’t called yet, but she would. I was sure of that. She’d call and tell me she’d found a place. And I’d go to her, wherever she was, anywhere on earth, and everything would be like it was before.

# # #

Ross West has placed fiction, essays, journalism, and poetry in publications from Orion to the Journal of Recreational Linguistics. His work has been anthologized in Best Essays Northwest, Best of Dark Horse Presents and elsewhere. He served as senior managing editor of Oregon Quarterly magazine and as text editor for the Atlas of Oregon and Atlas of Yellowstone.