The earth shudders in the wind’s embrace, opening itself to receive the rainwater. The trees clasp the earth with their roots but let their branches sway against the wind’s loud groans. It feels good, this moment before the moment when the veil is lifted between the two worlds, when the dense dark clouds warp time, turning afternoon into dusk. Savoring the petrichor, I start rubbing my back against the amaltaas’ rough bark. I want so badly for the tree to devour me, to suck me into its roots, to pull me away from civilization. My back moves the amaltaas until its gold petals start to pepper my long, tousled hair and get caught in my patchy beard. The more I am covered with the wild, the more I feel like myself.

The first time I heard the story, I was eight. My uncle whispered it after supper while we swatted mosquitoes and picked fish bones clean.

“The Skunk Ape lives where the swamp doesn’t end,” he said, pointing toward the cypress line where the sky thickened into night. “Smells like death. Walks like a man, only larger. Red eyes if you catch the light right.”

I laughed the way children laugh at warnings, but I remembered how his finger trembled when he drew the cross in the air.

It was 1986 — several years before that government-shill company Aftermath appeared and “professionalized” crime scene cleanup with fancy biohazard protocols and training and a sweetheart deal with those OSHA (as Ernest put it) fuckers, promptly shutting down our operation.

Dawn rolled over and squinted at her cellphone screen: 1:58. Yes! She had always wanted to see this happen.

1:59. She rubbed her eyes and focused. Behind her, Sonny sighed.

One o’clock in the morning again.

It was over. No fanfare.

For a fraction of a second, she pictured Keenen in the room across the hall, witnessing the same nonevent on the corner of his computer screen.

I arrive for a slow-pitch, twenty-somethings, city-league softball game. Our manager, Frederick the Great, advances on me and yells about my chronic tardiness, which he regards as my fatal flaw. Indeed, he appears about to throttle me.

“But the game hasn’t started,” I object.

“Two more minutes, Riley. Two more minutes and we would have had to forfeit.”

“The rulebook says you can play with just two outfielders.”

“You’ve said that before. I haven’t looked over the rulebook, but I think you made that up so we can get by with eight players until it’s convenient for you to show up.”

I translated English to Polish for most of my life, but I started translating memories to the ring when the dementia got worse.
At first it was little things. My father would forget what day it was or put salt in his coffee. Once he called me by the name of a cousin who had died of colon cancer a few months before. I watched the realization crawl over his face when he saw my body didn’t match. But the night he forgot the name of his favorite boxer, I understood that something inside him had slipped beyond my reach.

Elise sat sulking on her bedroom floor beneath the dim glow of old Christmas lights. Her mascara was smudged. Jeans unbuttoned. She embraced the silence after a night of loud music and strong drinks. The hour crept impatiently past two in the morning and as if she were simply a ghost of memory from so many nights this past year, she found herself answering the call of Bennett Cole.

Among Sarah’s looping worries that kept her awake at 3am was that her toddler would find the pills and think they were candy.

“They say oarfish are a sign,” Carmen’s neighbor says. She was old when Carmen was a child and speaks with the kind of cigarette-hoarse authority that makes you stop and listen. “They’re deep-sea fish. They only come up when something bad is going to happen.” 

The rural route pulled us past the gob pile, the highway melting to blacktop, narrowing through pine woods cross-scented with hog farms, deeper into the country than I’d expected, and I wondered whether I was ready for a whole weekend with Ted so soon. He smiled and slowed the car at first sight of the house: sagging gutters, mudded driveway, our destination. His citrus cologne filled the car, and the arm of his brown suede jacket brushed my neck as he reached behind me. He’s going to hug me, I thought, my body turned toward his, but instead he twisted my seatbelt to fit the duct-taped shoulder-guide.