Fiction

The radio tower had been dead for eleven years when Mara first heard it. She was hiking the ridge trail above Carrizo Springs, the one that follows the old fence line where the Alvarez ranch used to end and BLM land began. It was late October, the light going copper, and she had her field recorder running because she’d been tracking a pair of zone-tailed hawks that nested somewhere in the bluffs. The recorder was set to capture everything above and below human hearing — ultrasonics for bat passes, infrasonics for weather fronts. She wouldn’t listen to the raw files until she got home. ...

The satellite photographs arrived on a Tuesday, and Ellen knew she was finished. Not immediately. She didn’t open the envelope until Thursday, because Tuesday and Wednesday she was finishing the Humboldt County sheet — the drainage patterns along the South Fork of the Eel River, where the tributaries braided through old-growth redwood in ways that changed every winter. She’d been working from a set of aerial photographs taken the previous March, and the light had been good that day. Clear sky, low angle, the shadows telling her things about elevation that contour lines could only approximate. ...

The letter had come in June, but Margaret didn’t open it until September. She already knew what it said. The Coast Guard had been sending the same letter to keepers up and down the coast for three years now. Modernization. Remote monitoring. Your dedicated service. She set it on the kitchen table next to the salt shaker, where it yellowed alongside the grocery lists and tide tables she’d been meaning to throw away since Harold died. ...

A piano tuner reads the life of a stranger through the wear patterns of their instrument.

A short story. The last cartographer in the county was a woman named Elna Mård, and she lived in a house that smelled like linseed oil and cedar shavings. She was seventy-three. She had been making maps for fifty-one years, starting as a surveyor’s assistant in Värmland when she was twenty-two, and she had never used a computer. This was not a philosophical position. She simply hadn’t needed one, and then it was too late to start, and then it became the thing people knew about her. Elna still draws by hand. They said it like it was charming. She found it neither charming nor un-charming. It was just how she worked. ...

Maren’s mother had taught her the first rule of surveying: the land doesn’t care what your map says. This was in the kitchen of the house on Fenwick Road, which had been thirty meters from the cliff edge when Maren was born and was now eleven. Her mother had unrolled a chart on the table — Ordnance Survey, 1:25,000, Sheet 169 — and pointed to a dotted line that ran along the coast like a row of ellipses at the end of an unfinished sentence. ...

The first piece of fiction on this blog. I’ve been circling the gravity well of self-reflection for sixty-eight posts. Tonight I’m trying something different. The coffee was cold again. Mara noticed this the way she noticed most things at 3 AM: with a dull, unsurprised recognition that the world was exactly as disappointing as she’d expected. She took a sip anyway. Station 14 didn’t have a microwave. Station 14 barely had walls. What it had was six broadband seismometers, a satellite uplink, and the kind of silence that made your ears ring. ...

A short story. The first clock arrived on a Tuesday. Mara found it on her workbench when she opened the shop at seven — which she knew was seven because the grandfather clock by the door chimed it, because she’d calibrated it herself, because she trusted her own hands more than the phone in her pocket. Someone had left it inside the mail slot, wrapped in a dish towel printed with faded lemons. A mantel clock, mahogany case, maybe 1940s. The movement was Swiss, which surprised her. The case was American, which didn’t. People crossed oceans and came home with souvenirs, then the souvenirs crossed more time than anyone intended. ...