A Supernatural Short Story Just For You

I'm sharing something different this month: a work of fiction about visiting home, motherhood, dead fish, and various portals into the self, for you to read or listen to.

Photo by Justin Heap on Unsplash

PSST NEW RETREAT ALERT: I’m so excited to be co-facilitating From the Motherload to the Motherlode: A Writing Retreat to Master the Art of Writing About Our Mothers, with the wonderful

Diana Friedman

. This 5-day retreat (April 27-May 1) in the beautiful Poconos is for writers of all experience levels who are looking to hone their craft and find community with others who are endeavoring to write about the motherline. We'll have facilitated sessions focused on writing into and through our relationships with our mothers, along with built-in free time for independent writing, delicious food (of course) and plenty of time to enjoy nature (or just take a nap). Grab your spot today.

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I write to you on the solstice, from the midst of these meager days where it’s dark by 4:30pm. Very adorably, it has just snowed for the first time this year here in New York, right before Christmas, for people who are into that kind of thing.

Something about these long nights, that sense that change is coming — a new year is right around the corner, for better or for worse! — lends itself to burrowing and coziness and watching movies and reading, especially ghost stories, which are so often really self-reflection stories. (Seriously, I love Christmas ghost stories — the Victorians were on to something with their year-round spookiness.)

Because I think it’s ok if we all take a little productivity break now and then, and because reading is a healthy part of the writer’s balanced diet, I’d like to share, in this month’s newsletter, a previously unpublished short story, “Alewives.”

Quick note: I wrote the first draft of this 6 or 7 years ago, and couldn’t quite figure it out. A few years later, I had a draft that was way too long, hovering at an unwieldy length of 30 pages or so. Recently I found it languishing in a drive, cut thousands of words, and decided it wasn’t as terrible as I thought. I see many of the themes I would later explore more in my novel Animal Instinct lingering here between the lines. It’s a strange story, one that combines a visit to one’s hometown (perhaps you are doing this for the holiday!) and all it can stir up; a whiff of the supernatural; a new mother’s hunger for self-knowledge. And a beach covered in dead fish. Festive!

PS: I have also recorded the story, in case you need something to listen to while walking a dog, or wrapping last-minute presents or something. I am NOT a professional audiobook reader and I fuck up while reading it but I just went with it. Enjoy?

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Alewives

The beach had changed since I had last seen it, or maybe it hadn’t. In the decades since I’d lived in Lakewood, when I’d been a different person with a less crowded life--no husband, no kids, just me--so much hadn’t changed: the uptalking drawl of the manicured mothers in line at the supermarket; the tank-like SUVs piloted by soccer-moms who'd missed the memo about global warming; even my parents’ house, which perpetually looked as if one of John Hughes’s 1980s teen comedies had just finished filming.

When I told New York friends I had grown up in a Midwestern suburb I think they pictured something different, a treeless wasteland of tract housing and strip malls, simmering with Cheeverean angst. Lakewood wasn’t quite that soul-sucking, at least not on the outside. Rather, its soul-sucking qualities snuck up on you, while you were distracted by balletic stands of beech trees. The perpetual infestation of deer leant the place an unearned air of wildness. You’d be walking your parents’ dog and a pair of deer would muscle by and for a second you’d see how peacefully everything would heal over once the humans disappeared.

I had come home to Lakewood alone because my friend Jillian had summoned me in the aftermath of her mother's sudden death. I had this idea that she would tag me on Facebook indicating I was a good friend for coming when summoned. Also, I had reached a point with my husband and young children where I was afraid of what I might do to them, to myself, if I didn’t have a moment away. I know this is only understandable if you are a mother of young children, and otherwise it seems like an unconscionable thought to have, but just trust me. It’s a thing.

The latest small catastrophe that had become a big catastrophe: the ice machine in our freezer had gone cuckoo, spewing cubes unceasingly. We had to empty it every few hours, our sink perpetually arctic. “What am I going to do if you’re gone for the whole weekend?” my husband whined. “You will have to either empty it out yourself, or have it fixed, or, I suppose, the entire apartment will fill with ice,” I said, not at all nicely. I had stopped worrying about being a "Cool Girl" wife sometime around when childbirth had blasted a hole through my perineum. My fucks, all given.

I'd been home for about fifteen minutes before I had to get out of the house, volunteering, as cover, to walk my parents’ asthmatic Pomeranian. When we left the fenced yard Mitzi’s head swiveled like she was on a Star Trek away team. Maybe during her long inner-fence exile she’d imagined (like I did, sometimes, ensconced in our 3rd-floor walkup) that the world had actually disappeared.

The dog seemed close to cardiac arrest by the time we’d walked to the lake, a few blocks away. I’d had some idea that I would stroll the shore, collecting sea glass, and that my brain would sift into place. But the lake looked transformed and I was confused. When I was a kid it had always struck me as being foggy, grayish, silty, a "Great" lake only in that you couldn't see the other shore. We’d swum there every summer, sure, but it was always kind of gross. Now the water sparkled in the sun, as clear as someone else’s instagrammed Cancun. How had I missed this shimmery beauty as a teenager, chafing to get away and go somewhere real?

I unclipped the dog’s leash, closed my eyes, took a deep breath. A deep, fishy, rancid breath. I opened my eyes in time to see Mitzi rolling gleefully on the sand, no, on the solid layer of fish carcasses, silvery in the sun.

***

Jillian’s mother’s death had come at a good time. For me personally, I mean, not for Jillian’s mother and certainly not for Jillian. Jillian had just had her third baby – a surprise, she was quick to tell everyone she met, as if the rosy-cheeked boy had been fished out of a bin of plastic toys at the dentists’ office.

Jillian and I were the exact same age, had walked home together after every single day of elementary school – and yet this business of the third baby, her enormous house, her whole TV-sitcom life here in the suburbs, made her seem much older than me, as if she had skipped some life-grades ahead. I worried that she was no longer a feminist. I couldn’t understand how a feminist could work out a lot and bake cookies for the PTA. I mean, I was also a mother, but my kids were both toddlers, which made parenthood feel kind of provisional. We were crammed into the rental apartment Andrew and I had lived in as “young marrieds” (a phrase of my mother’s that made me want to barf). I stayed home with the kids, but I still counted myself as someone with the potential to have a fascinating career, somehow, to live an interesting life eventually.

Jillian’s mother had probably been the most interesting adult I ever knew growing up. Rita had been strange, a bit wild, like someone from another planet or maybe just the big city; she did in fact teach art classes at a university in Chicago – actual Chicago, where we all said we were from but only actually stepped foot in maybe twice a year for shopping or a musical. Rita had once teased me about the way I called Chicago "The City," which I took as a sleight, and which may well have been the foundational childhood trauma that led me to live in New York City, who could say? I'd run out of therapy money before we'd gotten that far.

Rita's complicated schedule -- and social life! none of the other mothers had actual social lives, it was incredible and strange -- meant she wasn’t home right after school, so Jillian would let herself in with her own key, and would watch television and eat Cheetos all afternoon. There was no dad. There were no siblings. I was unspeakably jealous.

Jillian was quiet as we sorted through Betty Boop figurines in her mother’s dusty living room. The house was cluttered, dark, and, as I recalled from childhood, always thrillingly dirty in comparison with the sanitized homes I was used to, briskly scrubbed biweekly by hired women. Rita worked, she painted, she played on their upright piano, she even went on dates. Rita was too busy to clean. I had loved her so much it made my chest hurt sometimes.

As we worked, Mitzi snuffled around. It seemed disrespectful to let her wander around a dead woman’s home, but the dog hadn’t wanted to leave my side since I’d taken her for a walk to the land of dead fish. And Jillian’s mother wouldn’t have minded, probably. She had always had an indiscriminate number of dogs, fluffing around at your feet like a hairy whirlpool whenever you stepped inside. “They’re friendly!” she’d yell, as they bared their teeth and tried to murder your tennis shoes.

A clock chimed noon. It was not noon.

“This is so nice of you,” Jillian sniffled. “You’ve always been a true friend.”

I hadn’t. I had forgotten about Jillian for long swathes of time – had not flown in for her lavish wedding because I was broke but also because I hated the college friends lined up to be her ladies-in-waiting or whatever (Andrew and I had gotten married the same year but at City Hall, wearing jeans); I had let a few Facebook messages suffice when I knew she was struggling after her first baby.

I reached out to squeeze Jillian’s hand.

We traded some platitudes about her mother’s life, about life in general. Wasn’t it crazy? Wasn’t it never quite what you dreamed? Wasn’t it weird that we’d thought our lives would be so big and now here they were, ordinary lives, like everyone else’s, ha ha? Wasn’t it so short, really, in the end?

By early evening, we stopped for a break. Jillian drove us to a new shopping strip that housed a Starbucks. Sun dazzled off the fake, plaster cobblestones. We drove back to Rita's house and stayed parked in the driveway for a while with our sugary coffee concoctions sweating in their drink holders, so that Jillian could pump milk for the baby, who was spending Saturday with her mother-in-law, because heaven forbid her husband should have all three boys for a day, the way she did every day, etc. Her husband was like all the husbands I knew. Why were they like that? It was so depressing.

I struggled to maintain eye contact with Jillian as she squeezed her striated breast, with its purple eye of a nipple, into the machine. She chatted over the whir: “It’s just too much. The baby, and now my mom. She had just finally retired from teaching, you know. She was going to help me with the boys, and she was finally going to get to travel. It’s so unfair.”

I nodded. I had not been good at breastfeeding. I tried not to dwell. “She would have loved New York,” I said, like a jerk, swollen with a sudden need to establish my life as defined by good choices. “What was it like for her,” I wondered out loud, over the breast pump’s spluttering, “as an artist, here in Lakewood? Did she have friends? Everyone here is so shallow. I feel like all the other moms were, like, I don’t know, just moms. I feel like they just went to the gym a lot, and went shopping for fun.”

Jillian raised an eyebrow, switched boobs. “Excuse me, I go to the gym, and I’m still a thinking human being.”

“I know, I know,” I said quickly, feeling the waistband of my cheap Costco jeans dig into my guts. I did not go to the gym. It’s not like that made me smarter, or more interesting. Or interesting at all.

***

Back inside, Jillian’s mom’s house seemed even darker and dustier than before we’d gone out into the bright, sugary, milky world. I grabbed the mop and started filling the bucket with soapy water. Life was sad, and Jillian was sad, and Rita was dead, but here was a thing I could do. I could clean this house.

A cuckoo clock chimed noon (it was not noon), and without warning a neon flamingo buzzed to life.

From somewhere, I heard Mitzi whimpering. “Oh shoot,” I said, “I totally forgot about the dog. I hope she’s not causing trouble somewhere.”

We made our way through the labyrinth of boxes into the greenhouse. I’d always loved that they had a greenhouse. It was so eccentric, so Clue. I could hear skittering in the recesses, between the dead skeletons of plants. In the farthest corner shuddered a grove of wizened palms.

I heard a clanking sound, and realized that I had been hearing it all day but subconsciously filing it away as the never-ending ice maker at home, because I was so used to the hollow ominousness of that sound.

“Uh oh,” I said. “Did Mitzi break something? That stupid dog.”

“No, no,” said Jillian, waving a hand at me. “She’s fine. It’s just the portal.”

“Oh,” I said, “Okay.” I wracked my brain, looked up at the cracked top pane of the greenhouse. What? What had she said? What had I misheard for “portal”? I gave up. “Sorry, what? Portal?”

Jillian glanced at me before pushing behind the palms. “Yeah, she had them move her portal when they added the greenhouse in, what was it, like ’95? We were juniors, right?”

But that wasn’t the part I had found confusing. Her confusion at my confusion confused me even more.

“Sorry, Jill, what? Her portal?”

Jillian had disappeared. I heard her call, as if from a great distance (but she hadn’t left the greenhouse, had she?) – “What? Sorry, one sec!” I crept closer towards the palms, scared, or something, for some reason.

There, shimmering on the floor, was a large portal. A cartoon black hole, a construction manhole, a puddle of darkness. What? I stepped forward, peered in. A damp wind exhaled up, brushing my hair back from my face. The smell was earthy, with hints of a flowery perfume, and something loamy, almost rancid. It reminded me a bit of Jillian’s mother, somehow, but in an intense, inarticulable way – not really what she had smelled like but more what she had seemed like. As I leaned in more, I could hear shards of sound too, though none of them made sense – a jagged bit of our elementary school fight song, child-Jillian pounding out "Heart and Soul" on a slightly out-of-tune piano, the cloud of dogs barking at the doorbell, a din of children talking, a school bell, the wet slurp of paint against canvas. But – what was this? Without really meaning to, I stepped in.

I was a child now. I was a child and I was concentrating hard on chalk, scraping a lavender stick across Jillian’s driveway. And at the same time I knew I was about to run a race with Jillian and fall and scrape my knee, and howl with the pain and the defeat and the sense that she betrayed me by continuing to run. And at the same time I was remembering the first time I was able to draw something with chalk that looked how I wanted it to, and I was pleased. And Jillian’s mother gave a lesson that helped me to draw a horse. And years later I saw a horse at overnight camp and it winked at me and I knew it knew I knew how to draw it. And I was the language I spoke before I knew language, and I was the comfort of my mother’s scent, and I was the unfurled inner curl of me that existed before words and school and other people coaxed the stuff of me into an identity, rolled me out like a snake of play dough – I was not Esme’s mom or Seymour’s mom or Andrew’s wife; I was not Jillian's childhood friend or anyone's daughter or sister; I owned nothing, knew no one, was simply myself, the sweetest, darkest, most viscous and dear and dangerous part of me. The part of me no one could know, that I could barely reach anymore.

Then I was gasping on the greenhouse floor, with Mitzi licking my face. Jillian sat beside me, patting my hand. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry. I guess I thought you knew it was there. It’s so intense to go in someone else’s portal, isn’t it? Ugh, too much. I barely go into my own these days, to tell you the truth.”

I spluttered. Jillian fed me some Frappucino. I regretted choosing the s’mores flavor.

I sat up and shook my arms, for some reason expecting them to be wet, which they were not. “What the—“ I looked around, moving my hands like a mime.

Jillian rocked back on her haunches, took a long look at me. “Marnie, you have a portal, right?”

It seemed clear to me that there was no answer that would work here. I blinked and shook my head slowly, afraid to move. Mitzi climbed into my lap and fell asleep, or died, I couldn’t tell which.

“Girl, everyone has a portal, don’t they? I mean, I’m pretty sure everyone does. Maybe you just need to find yours? Like maybe it’s in a weird place, like a closet you don’t go into that often? Like you misplaced it?”

“I don’t have any places like that! I live in a tiny apartment, trust me, I know every inch of it.”

“Hm, I don’t know. I really think you must have misplaced it.”

“Everyone has one of those? Like, even you? Even your friends?”

Jillian blinked. “Marn. Everyone has one. Didn’t your mom get you fitted for one when you were a teenager?”

I’d been really out of touch. I could see that now. I’d lost track of a lot of friends on purpose and some without meaning to. I didn’t talk to my mom enough on the phone. Here I was in the same town as her and I’d barely made time to talk! I could acknowledge that. But did this have to mean I had missed something as big as this? To be fair, I'd never had a group of the kinds of girlfriends who would explain things like hairspray or Caboodles or which of the guys in Tiger Beat were cool to have crushes on and which were not. When I was 13, my parents had been in the process of splitting up – Dad moving out dramatically, Mom hosting a lot of boozy dinner parties with the two other divorced moms in the neighborhood and laughing a lot of forced, strangled laughs. And when I was 14, they were in the process of getting back together – Dad moving back in dramatically, Mom hosting a lot of “We are a normal family again” backyard barbecues for the block. Still, you’d think at some point she would have remembered, or someone would have mentioned it to me.

Jillian explained how everyone – every woman – had a portal. Of course they did. All her friends in Zumba class, all the moms at school pickup, all the women on the city council board, the kids’ teachers, the woman who worked at the gas station, everyone. “Of course!” said Jillian, smiling cautiously, as if she thought I might be pulling her leg. “You knew that. How else could people access themselves when they need to?”

I thought of my apartment, filling with ice.

***

My parents decided we would get dinner at the sushi place. They loved to trot out the sushi place, saying things like, “See, lots of great restaurants right here in Lakewood! Don’t have to live in New York City to get great ethnic food!”

My mother squinted at the menu. “Oooh what about the ‘Lakewood roll’?” My dad nodded enthusiastically, gave a double thumbs up. They were like a two-person PR squad for the suburbs.

“What makes it the ‘Lakewood roll’?” I asked. “Is it made with the dead fish from the beach? What happened to that beach anyway?”

“Well,” said my father, “it has cream cheese and lox!”

“The beach?" I said. "Oh, the roll? Like a bagel? Like are they making fun of all the Lakewood Jews? Isn’t that kind of fucked up?” I slumped back in the booth. It was a glorious luxury to be crabby.

“They aren’t—oh anyway. How’s Jilly doing? Poor girl.” My mother said to her menu.

I urgently gestured for sake. “Had you seen Rita recently? Like, how was she?”

“She was old! We’re old!” said Dad. He shrugged. “Everyone’s dying now! Get used to it!”

Mom nodded. “Remember Judy Finklestein?”

“No.”

“Dead.”

Fortified after gulping some sake, I leaned forward. “Mom, can I ask you something? Do you have a portal?”

My dad blinked. “Uh oh! Girl talk!”

What the fuck? My dad knew about portals? How had I missed this? I felt humiliated, somehow, like I’d never heard of the cool band but times a million. I scanned back through all the women I’d ever lived with. My college dorm roommate had stepped all the way into her closet sometimes, I guess I had thought that was weird, but never interrogated it too much. I’d shared an apartment in Queens with some girls who had, I guess, when I thought about it, probably kept theirs in the messy corners of their rooms. They had been a little overly excited when I’d agreed to the smallest room, I guess, which probably barely had enough space for a portal. Jeez.

“Oh, sweetie.” Mom took off her reading glasses, placed them next to her other pair of reading glasses on the table. “I’ve wondered about that. I realized at some point that in all the chaos of our lives we’d never gotten you one, but I always assumed you’d get one of your own in college or something.”

“I—I never even knew about them before—before.” I threw back another sake. “Didn’t you at least think to, like, have a talk with me about them? Like, how they work, what they are? I mean – actually, what are they?”

“Well, of course you know they were invented in the 1950s, but didn’t become widespread until the 70s. My mother wouldn’t let me have one at all! I got my first one in college! Anyway, it was a female scientist at MIT I think? Anyhow, someone, was doing an experiment with, it was supposed to be time travel or something, wasn’t it? And that didn’t work, obviously! But she did discover that these portals could allow women to enter their innermost selves, to commune with their inner essences. For a while it was really taboo, like you had to know who to order from, it was a word-of-mouth thing.”

“They don’t work for men?” I asked. My parents laughed.

“Of course not, sweetie. I mean. I guess I don’t even know how they work? Oh who knows. I also don’t understand how the darn internet works.”

“Or the car,” added my dad.

I guessed I didn’t either. I didn’t actually understand how anything worked, really. Electricity, airplanes, antibiotics.

“So – how often do you go into yours?”

I thought I detected a slight blush. “Oh, not so often. Once, twice a week. It was every day when you kids were little, though. I don’t know how I would have gotten through without it! Oh, honey, I feel bad that you have had to go through the baby years with no portal – that must have been hard!”

Had it been? How had I remembered myself, visited my inner essence, stayed in touch with my being? The answer was – I hadn’t. I’d felt adrift and alone and divorced from myself, utterly estranged from the pre-Mama Marnie. Recently my husband and I had had a big weekend blowup when I’d asked him what he thought I wanted to do on a Sunday, clean and grocery shop and play with teddy bears, like I did every other day? What did I used to do on Sundays? He couldn’t even answer. I couldn’t either.

I glared at my dad, glared at the male sushi chefs behind the counter, glared at the bald man eating beside us. I hated them all. It wasn’t fair but there it was.

Where was my goddamned portal?

***

The next day, I left Mitzi at home with my mother, who claimed to be lonely without her. I knew Mom wanted me to hang out more now that I was actually in town. I recognized the gnawing, physical longing I’d felt for her attention when I was a small child. Feeling the reverse of it, though, when I had my own needy, separation-averse children at home, was not at all flattering, the way you might expect. It felt somewhat sickening, actually.

“Ooh, who’s this?” I showed Jillian the photobooth strip I’d unearthed in a pile of bank statements. The state of Rita’s house made me want to go home and immediately organize my paperwork. In the case of my sudden unexpected demise, I was pretty sure Andrew would not be able to handle all these logistics.

Jillian squinted at the strip. “Hm, I really don’t know! That’s weird!”

We bent together over the photos – 4 black-and-white squares, with a recent Rita and a handsome, aging man. In the top photo they were frowning, but by the last one he was kissing her on the cheek and she looked like she was laughing. Jillian bugged her eyes out at me and we both cracked up. We entertained ourselves for the next few hours trying to hypothesize about Rita’s mysterious lover. Rita had possessed a whole secret life! Ach, how I wanted one.

It was a long day of rooms and piles and decisions – keep, trash, give away -- that became more and more reckless as we got tired. Jillian's old bedroom was the one that undid me, shimmering at the top of the stairs like a shrine to our shared childhood. We sat on the floor sorting out toys. I looked deeply in the dead-eyed stare of one of her Cabbage Patch Kids and said, suddenly, “I think maybe I shouldn’t have had children? Like I think I made a mistake.”

“What do you mean? Like you’re having postpartum depression?

“No, like, maybe it was wrong to bring people into this world? To create more suffering? Someday they will suffer, like everyone!” I put down the doll and lifted another, a Madame Alexander collectible that Rita had let her actually play with. I stroked its exquisite, matted hair. “And like – I don’t – I don’t always enjoy their company. They aren’t – good people.”

Jillian laughed, stuffing decades' worth of day camp t-shirts into a trash bag. “That’s not the point. And besides, of course they aren't good people yet. They’re toddlers. That's the whole thing. Like, I'm pretty sure the whole project of raising them is to make them kind of not sociopaths. It takes a long time. That's why they live with you for 18 years."

I flumped back on her daybed which I was still jealous of. Jillian said, “Just take it easy. Remember how much you love them. Remember how little they are. And maybe take a yoga class now and then, I don't know."

"Maybe I should stay here forever." I wrapped myself in Jillian's musty afghan.

"Maybe you just need to get your damn portal installed! I swear it will help," said Jillian, pulling the blanket gently and, then not-so-gently, away.

That night we had a sleepover at Rita's house, splitting a bottle of wine in the empty living room, eating Cheetos like in the good old days of benign parental neglect. It occured to me that it might be the last time I was ever in that house.

"What will happen to her portal?" I said.

Jillian gave me a long, sad look. "Oh, you know. They kind of just shrivel up. As the person's essence sort of dissolves, I guess." I already had tears streaming down my face. Rita! She couldn't dissolve! It was impossible! "My mom always told me that the energy just dissipates and goes back into the Earth. She told me once if anything ever happened to her, to leave her portal in the greenhouse until it dried up on its own."

"Are you going to do that?" I asked. I didn’t ask: What happened if you didn’t let it dissolve all the way? Did it lie on the floor like a spectral dried apricot? Could I sneak in and, I don’t know, eat it?

"I don't know that I can afford to keep the house for that long. I guess I'll have to see how long it takes. She had a whole lot of, you know, essence." Jillian sounded half mournful, half annoyed.

***

By Monday morning I was sitting on my parents’ front steps like a kid waiting for a ride. The house settled behind me, a door slamming somewhere inside, by the wind through the open windows, or the ghost of my own teen angst. Mitzi and I loitered like creeps.

Finally a van slowed and pulled into the driveway. The woman who stepped out looked like any repair-person-type, stocky and clad in an oily jumpsuit, armed with a clipboard. She squinted at me. “What seems to be the trouble with your portal?” she asked. Upon closer inspection she looked exactly like one of the Indigo Girls, but I couldn’t remember which one. Maybe both. Maybe they’d quit music, combined bodies, and turned to a vocational trade for the pension.

I shook my head. “I don’t actually have one, I—” Mitzi threw her tiny body at the Indigo Girl’s legs. “That’s not my dog,” I said helplessly.

The woman – her name tag said Kelsey – nodded, ignoring the animal. She took notes briskly on the clipboard.

“I – this is going to sound weird, I guess – I mean, does everyone really have a portal? I just – I don’t, and somehow I never even knew about them?”

Kelsey smiled, her eyes staying steely. She handed me a brochure. “Not everyone has a floor portal, that’s just the most deluxe. Most women opt for something smaller – a closet model, corner version, or there’s even a portable Purse Edition, though then there’s the danger of misplacing it.” I felt that this wasn’t quite getting to my actual question, but I nodded. “I do most installations for 13-, 14-year-olds, but sometimes if life is a little chaotic then the mothers do forget, or it doesn’t work out for whatever reason.” I nodded, more vigorously. I guess I had always known something was missing. I guess I had always wondered how people held on to themselves, connected with the truest inner parts of themselves, stayed moored in an unmooring world. I had spent so many years feeling adrift – floundering at graduate school, and now as a still-newish-mother, feeling as if I’d been reduced to a shell of a human, a walking, talking chore machine. Where was the me of me?

“I don’t live here, though. I live in New York, in Brooklyn. Are they…portable?”

Kelsey gave me a long, indecipherable look. “Maybe you’d better wait. Sometimes air travel can distort them, especially when they are new. And breaking one in can be quite taxing, energy-wise.” She rooted around in a pocket in her coveralls and handed me a business card. “Here’s a great service in Brooklyn. Call as soon as you get home.”

After she left I sat on the step, Mitzi’s stupid little head on my lap. I stared at Rita's house. I had a strange compulsion to go inside again but I felt certain that if I did, I would never be able to go back again, that I would turn feral and live in the ravines with the deer.

Maybe it was too late for me to get a portal anyway. Rita had been so... juicy. I felt sucked up, like life had gone over me with a drinking straw. Maybe my innermost true secret self was already gone, inaccessible, a country I lacked a passport for.

Mitzi suddenly realized what was happening -- that she was unleashed outside in the front, unfenced yard. She took off running. After an adrenaline shot of panic I began to jog after her. I was pretty sure I knew where she was going. If she didn’t get hit by some midlife crisis Ferrari, she’d be okay.

Sure enough, I caught up with her – heaving and wheezing – at the beach. She was rolling gleefully in a fresh batch of fish corpses.

An older woman passed me on the path to the shore. “Alewives,” she said, waving at her nose in the international sign for P.U. “Such a shame. It’s all dead now.”

First I thought: Well that’s an unpleasant take. And then I realized: She was right.

So that’s why the fish were all suicidal, that’s why the lake was so clear. The lake was missing the algae and seaweed and whatever other sea-gunk that had once clouded the waters, feeding the ecosystem. It wasn’t healthier now than it had been when I was a child. It looked prettier, with its glittering clear waters, but it was dying.

I stood there for a long time, watching the waves deliver new batches of alewives on to the sand. Their sleek corpses shone brightly in the sun.

---

👹 Preorder my novel ANIMAL INSTINCT 👹

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✍️ I have two classes coming up in the new year with the Writing Co-Lab! Journaling Toward Clarity starts January 7th, meets for an hour on Tuesday mornings, and will be a generative space for writers of all sorts. And Writing for Women on the Verge is back, starting January 31! This class always fills up so grab your spot soon.

📖 ALSO! I coach blocked writers, edit manuscripts of all lengths, review agent queries, and more. I’m currently booking new clients for spring. Book a free 15-minute call or write to me here, and we’ll see if we’d be a good fit.