Dead Fish Wind

Cooper Levey-Baker

Description

Cicely works to support a deadbeat father in a town stricken with a catastrophic outbreak of red tide. But then Cicely starts dreaming of a way out of her predicament through a scheme involving stolen placentas and an outlaw doula.

Sujets

• Dystopian
• Florida
• Florida (homonymie)
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Madville Publishing
• Date de parution: 20 janvier 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781948692755
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2022 by Cooper Levey-Baker
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
Dead Fish Wind is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, businesses, companies, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Requests for permission to reprint material from this work should be sent to:
Permissions
Madville Publishing
P.O. Box 358
Lake Dallas, TX 75065
Author Photograph: Karen Arango
Cover Design: Gigi Ortwein
ISBN: 978-1-948692-74-8 paperback; 978-1-948692-75-5 ebook
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021940751
To Rachél
Contents
Part One
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
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17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
Part Two
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
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40.
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43.
44.
About the Author
Part One
1.
Dead fish had been washing up on the beach off and on for years, but Cicely had never seen anything like this: dead fish everywhere. The bodies floated in on the crests of the gulf’s small, foam-filled waves and piled up along the water’s edge. Mucus bubbled up between the fish’s gills as the waves knocked the corpses farther and farther up the beach, leaving them to bake in the punishing sunshine. Cicely could see the final limp kicks of the few fish still living, twisting in pain. As the final holdouts dropped from this life, one by one, the stacks of fish grew still.
The air stung. It felt like Cicely’s eyes were being rubbed with sandpaper. Her whole face grew wet with tears. The stench from the dead fish crawled up inside her and scratched.
Up and down the beach, people fled. Teenagers squeezed their noses shut as they packed up their coolers and towels and bolted for the parking lot. A gray-haired woman launched a hacking cough as she waddled away from the water.
Cicely wanted to stay, wanted to reread her mother’s letter again, but every line became a blurry mess. She slipped the pages back into the envelope in which it came, the envelope her mother had addressed to her at work. Cicely hadn’t seen or spoken to her in more than a decade—how had she known where she worked? The city in the upper left hand corner, Orlando, at least gave Cicely something to go by, a place to write to. But the PO box told her that her mother didn’t want her to find her. Or maybe she just didn’t want Cicely’s father to find her.
She folded the envelope in half and squeezed it into the back left pocket of her jeans. Sand clung to her legs as she ambled between the dunes, back to the path that wound through the mangroves that clustered between the beach and the bridge, the bridge near home. She wiped the tears from her face with the sleeve of her green men’s button-down shirt. What would she tell her father she had been doing down at the beach? It wasn’t like her to slip away without telling him. She couldn’t mention the letter—he would insist on reading it. But it was hers; it belonged to her.
The mangroves offered respite from the ludicrous heat. A hush fell as she traced the path among their shadows. Kids sneaked back here to have sex, and every now and then she saw an empty beer bottle or a discarded condom sunk into the wet sand. Back here, away from the beach, closer to the bay side of the island, she could still smell the dead fish, but the stench wasn’t as sharp. Her path cut underneath the bridge that connected the Circle to the island to the north, where she and her father lived.
What did her mother look like? Cicely had no photos of her— those had all been lost the last time she and her father had been evicted—but Cicely could still summon the details of one taken in their old backyard. In that shot, her mother rested in a tire swing, her feet dangling down almost all the way to neat, freshly chopped grass. The high, curled blond hair, the freckled cheeks, the big shoulders—Cicely remembered all that. But her expression? Was her mother smiling in that photo? Cicely did not know.
She stepped over the battered-down No Trespassing fence that circled her lot. The home stood two stories tall, unfinished and still wrapped in plastic, with hollow spots for doors and windows. The man downtown who owned the property was known to his tenants simply as the Owner. According to the story Cicely heard, when everything collapsed, he bought up all the abandoned half-built homes in the area and started illegally renting them out. Cicely’s friend Delanna—who also rented from the Owner—had once pointed out the skyscraper that was supposedly his, but neither of them had ever seen him. Cicely dealt only with one of his lieutenants, known for his red bandanna and the baby blue box cutter he wore in his belt. He drove around to all the homes at the start of each month to collect the rent.
The rent. The surprise of her mother’s letter had made her forget about it. Cicely’s father lived with her, but she alone paid their way. For a couple years, Cicely never missed a payment, but last month she caught strep throat and the walk-in clinic had sucked up most of her savings. Now she owed for last month, plus this month, plus interest—almost a thousand dollars. She had no clue how she’d get the cash in the next ten days, before the man with the box cutter was due to drop in again, and she didn’t know what to expect if she couldn’t come up with the loot. Delanna told her tales about what happened to tenants in arrears. First, they paid interest. Then, if they still couldn’t pay, it wasn’t enough to just kick them out—they were beaten bloody and told to leave town.
Cicely entered the house through the hole where the double doors were supposed to hang. The room that was intended to be the parlor sat mostly bare. The foundation had been covered only halfway with tile, but Cicely had stolen a tarp from a nearby construction site and used it to cover the bare concrete, weighing it down at each corner with bricks, also stolen. The only furniture were their two chairs, empty. Cicely was perplexed. Had her father actually gone to the VFW to see if someone there might help them with the rent? Cicely had asked him to do so several times, but he never agreed. She felt a surge of relief. She didn’t have to hide the letter from him, for now, and maybe, for the first time in years, it wouldn’t be on her to find a solution to their problems.
In the bathroom, Cicely splashed water from a bucket onto her face. Even inside the house she could smell the dead fish from the beach, but the pain in her eyes had subsided and her throat no longer itched. She poured a glass of water from another bucket and gulped it down. She checked her watch. She needed to go to work.
2.
The sun was dissolving into pink evening stripes by the time she stepped off the bus, and her shadow stretched way out in front of her, tickling the pitted pavement of the parking lot that sprawled between her and the dance hall where she worked. Built decades ago, the hall predated the retention pond that flanked it, not to mention the Interstate that passed by just to the east. It had once been surrounded by pines and dwarf oaks, but all that was gone now. Back when the hall was built, this area was a separate town from the downtown near the beach, but over the years the county slashed more and more east-west corridors into the woods, and then the Interstate replaced the train tracks, and in what felt like an instant the two town centers bled out toward each other, forming one long, low, concrete mass of subdivisions and shopping centers. The hall—once the site of sock hops, Easter picnics, political rallies—lost the town center it served, and was shuttered for decades. But an investor, the son of a former mayor, had come along a few years ago and restored it. The venue became an instant hit—part concert hall, part city hall, part titty bar, part rec center. Everyone went there, and everything happened there—bake sales, handshake deals, burlesque shows. The same investor who spruced up the hall also paid to construct the towering sign that Cicely now walked toward—a neon-animated outline of a woman lifting up her skirt, with a bright red tongue flashing between her legs.
The bouncer nodded as she walked in the back door. Inside, she heard the music of the evening’s first act—soft and dreamy, a muffled digital beat submerged beneath warm synthesizers and arpeggiated guitar chords. A female singer cooed. The music was fuzzy; it seemed to crawl through the hall, poking into corners and settling into the grooves of the walls and rafters. It wasn’t loud, but it filled space.
Cicely poked her head out through one of the side curtains. The singer’s face was unfamiliar. Her dress looked like it was made out of a thousand pearl coins, and it rattled when she shook her hips.
The stage had been built for the big brass bands popular decades ago, and it dwarfed the singer, who was backed by a tight tuxedo-clad trio. Lights hanging from the ceiling filled the air with a woozy blue light. Only a few of the tables at the foot of the stage were full—it was early still. A pair of servers, each of them topless, dressed in nothing but black, low-slung tights and heels, brought Mai Tais, the house cocktail, to the men sitting up close. The men stared at the singer, transfixed. One mouthed the words she was singing. Like the singer’s face, the faces down front were unfamiliar to Cicely. Had the singer brought them out? Did they know her from some other venue?
Cicely walked back to the dressing room, where she found Delanna, who started as a server on the same day as Cicely a few years back, and Hilda, another server. Delanna nodded when Cicely came in; she was in the middle of telling Hilda a story about her boyfriend.
“… been hurting him for weeks, so he finally goes to the doctor. The