He worked at the lighthouse every day except Monday, the day it was closed to visitors, selling admission tickets to the tourists and day-trippers of the small costal enclave. He sat in the worn spinny chair, behind the register, the walls in back of him featuring black and white photos of the lighthouse from decades past, blown up and printed on foam board. This was the preferable amount of social interaction for Thomas, making vague small talk with couples or families or neon-clad tour-group leaders as he ran their credit cards, or exchanged their sweaty bills for the rectangular ticket with the day’s date and an image of the lighthouse stamped on it. He’d then point them toward the roped off queue where they would wait to corkscrew up the 199 steps for the panoramic view. In his downtime Thomas restocked the small spinner of postcards and made sure the display cases in the adjacent room, which housed historical paraphernalia, were dusted, and that the five-minute educational film, which ran on a loop, was still playing uninterrupted.
On his lunch break he’d take his meal, usually a sandwich he’d made at home and a bag of chips purchased from the vending machine, and follow the narrow path down to the beach, trying to find a section not inhabited by visitors, where he could sit on a rock and stare at the water while he chewed his food. Carol, one of the aging docents, was always trying to foist some homemade concoction onto him, worried he wasn’t eating enough, a young man on his own, so he would try to clock out while she was busy, but on occasion she’d intercept him, appearing from the staff room to force a greasy Tupperware square into his hand, telling him she had simply made too much of whatever was inside, had been trying out a new recipe and ended up with more than she and her husband Rory could eat, so she simply had to share with him. Thomas always thanked her, then waited until he got to the beach to dump the contents in the beach heather or bury it in the sand. When this first started he’d been game, sometimes holding his nose while forking the food into his mouth out of politeness, but after a particularly ghastly reaction to one of the meals that left him sweating and cramped all afternoon, he no longer risked it. Still, he’d always at least sniff at the concoctions, trying to isolate one or two key ingredients, so he could comment on it to Carol after he’d rinsed her container in the sink and returned it to her. It wasn’t that Carol was always a terrible cook, though she thought of cooking in the way that some overzealous musicians thought they could skip the foundations and move straight into improvisation, so the resulting dishes were frequently like bad jazz solos, riffs on a theme that didn’t wholly warrant their extravagance. Lately her creations were South Asian—she and Rory had rented a spare room to a guest worker from the region—and she’d begun messing with stews and spices that were light years beyond her culinary skill set.
Most of the kids Thomas’s age who worked in the area in summer were on break from college nearby, or had come from abroad to earn money. There were bunkhouses and dormitories full of young Serbians and Romanians who bussed tables and scooped ice cream, Australians on gap years working in the bars or folding gossamer-thin scarves in high-end clothing stores, freckled, rowdy Irish kids hired to do carpentry or construction. Then there were the kids he’d grown up with here, known since elementary school, returning for the summer from college or internships in cities like New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. Some worked at the same jobs they’d had since high school, or drove taxis, but most went to the beach, got drunk at bonfire parties, ate lush meals, got stoned, whiled away the whole season until they, like the tourists, retreated back to the lives they were living elsewhere.
The staff at the lighthouse was comprised of residents, mostly, with one or two summer helpers hired on. The preservation group that ran the lighthouse wanted its staff to be able to convey a full sense of the history of the region, and usually any summer intern or seasonal worker didn’t care enough to be pelted with minutiae from visitors and history buffs much less the pharologists, the enthusiasts who traveled from one lighthouse to another, studying them, discussing technology and engineering, collecting stamps in their lighthouse passports. The year prior one poor intern, a slope-shouldered blonde named Gabby, was so frazzled by the inundation of questions that she clocked out and never returned. Thomas knew enough by this point to be able to jabber on by rote about lamps and lenses, but he preferred to leave that to the guides. His father had been interested in pharology, contributed to one or two internet newsletters on the topic, but he wasn’t a rabid admirer. There had been one or two occasions since Thomas started working at the lighthouse when someone would ask after his father, someone who’d exchanged an email in the past, or wanted to get in touch, and Thomas would have to explain that his father was dead, and the visitor would turn stuttery and apologetic or go silent, beg off and take their place in the queue.
After closing up at five PM, Thomas would reconcile the day’s receipts, lock the money in the office safe, unlock the blue bike he owned and ride back to the room he rented in town, the FROG—Finished Room Over Garage—from Freddy, a real estate agent whose wife left him after coffee one morning for her Bikram yoga instructor. The room had been her yoga studio, initially, but when she’d gone, he’d thrown out all her possessions—yoga mats, meditation stool, altar, Thich Nhat Hanh books—into the trash and converted it. The trashmen puzzling, but only for a second, before hauling off mandalas and an unwieldy statue of Ganesh along with Freddy’s wife’s quartz crystals and bubble fountain. The place was sparse and the floor creaky, but it suited Thomas. It had a microwave and a hot plate, but no stove, so on the rare occasions Thomas felt like cooking something substantial he’d have to go down to the main house, which meant the possibility of enduring a long, meandering conversation with Freddy who still, after nearly two years, liked to open a bottle of wine (sometimes two) and dissect in detail what went wrong with his marriage to Adrienne, a real forensic accounting of every fight, sigh, miscommunication. Thomas thought, but never said, was that Freddy gave off “divorced guy” energy even when he was still married, and that this seemed to be his natural state. A rumpled, ambient anger, muted by something, like he was always grappling around in a fog. Thomas knew Freddy could rent the space for much more than he charged him, especially in the summer, and that his tenancy was a small act of kindness. Some nights Thomas actually welcomed the conversations, nights he didn’t want to stay in the FROG reading. He’d decided, for no particular reason, to make his way through a trove of Louis L’Amour novels he found in a box on the curb that someone had tossed from their vacation rental. He didn’t particularly care one way or another about the genre, but it seemed like a project to fill the time and they had been free. In this way Thomas had come by most of the items in the FROG, the things left behind or cast away or put to the curb after they’d outlived their use, they made their way into Thomas’ place: a stack of record albums, mostly classical (though he didn’t have a turntable), a kitschy seashell lamp, a batik throw that he hung on the wall for a splash of color. No matter how much he swept in the summer the room was always gritty with beach sand, it traveled into the folds of the sheet on his futon. If he’d had his way he wouldn’t have been living in the FROG at all, he’d be in his childhood home, but it had been rented, and after a perhaps less than respectful period the owner had put it on the market, selling it to a handsome couple who’d gut remodeled it, tearing out the section of wall in the kitchen where Thomas’ father had measured his height in pencil marks. Even with the life insurance money and the settlement Thomas wouldn’t have been able to buy the place outright, and resigned himself to see it go. He rode by sometimes on his way home from the lighthouse, just to check on it. After nearly three years the house was still under construction, never fully finished, the yard a litter of bricks and blue tarps, mounds of dirt and scraps of plywood—a project forever incomplete while the owners tried to source authentic window shutters and wainscoting.
It was in defiance of fate, perhaps an unconscious thing that led Thomas to still ride his bike. It was his father who’d taught Thomas to ride, encouraging him even when he wobbled and fell and scraped his knee. His father was cycling the day he was hit by the Lawler’s Seafood van, one of the white ones with the bright red lobster painted on the side that zoomed all over town, delivering from the docks to the seafood restaurants and beyond. His father flung out onto the pavement, wheel of his bike spinning, sun glinting of the bright white of the van on the shoulder, the back door open and an array of crustaceans dappled around the roadway, dazed and sizzling on the hot pavement. Thomas thought later that only a French film director could adequately capture the humor and pathos of the moment. The police report had not. Nor the deputies who’d come to tell him, hats in hand, heads bowed in a gesture of solemnity. Thomas had burst out in hysterical laughter when they imparted the news. He’d been discussing going to college in a nearby city with his guidance counselor, now he was intent on staying put. Insurance meant he could have gone to college, or moved away wherever he wanted, but he had no ambition to do that anymore.
Locals knew the story, and respectfully never brought it up, a black mark on the town, but he’d told it to Stas last summer, and Stas had laughed, and Thomas acknowledged the absurdity of it, knew it from the moment he’d heard the news, but his cheeks still burned and he grew silent and contracted. That had been the beginning of the end of his relationship—fling? — with Stas. There was a casual cruelty to Stas that had first excited Thomas then repulsed him. But he’d kept with him until early September because he knew Stas would leave soon. There was always an expiration date for these types of summer flings and the need to be held, for Thomas, outweighed Stas’s indifference to Thomas’ circumstances. He’d told the story of his father to Stas when they were lying in bed, sheets sweaty and tangled, and then whenever they spotted a Lawler’s van Stas would point it out to Thomas, as if they weren’t omnipresent, nudge him and say “beep watch out.” By then Stas had taken to staying at the FROG, preferring Thomas’s place to the bunkhouse he shared with several other eastern European guys, whose habits Stas cataloged and found endlessly annoying: Alexi who was always doing push-ups; Zander whose phone always chimed with the plinky little games he played on it; Ratko who liked to trim all his body hair in full view of the rest; and Andrey who constantly Face-timed his snaggle-toothed girlfriend. So, they were together until Stas collected his last paycheck from the wine bar and left for the airport, waving to Thomas and leaving behind a coffee shop punch card, a few foreign coins, and one grey sock balled up in the corner of Thomas’s room.
Even though he’d experience one or two before, Thomas’s migraines had really only started around the time of his father’s death. They would lay claim to him, like a creeping cloud of pain enveloping his head, pinching at the nerve behind his left eye, leaving him nauseated and curled up in a ball. Like his mother they came at the onset of bad weather, radars to an approaching storm or current or change in barometric pressure. Of the few memories Thomas still had of her, she was lying prone on her bed with the lights out, trying to be still and quiet while the migraine gripped her. He tried to climb next to her and even though she winced she accommodated his small child’s body, put her arm around him, and he knew not to move or jostle, just be patient and wait until it lifted, willing her to be well.
He’d asked Stas once to hold him while he lay stricken in the same way, but Stas was twitchy and restless and ill-suited for the task, which only made Thomas feel worse, and in this way he knew Stas lacked something innate he needed. He alternated between calling his propensity to migraine his superpower and his curse. His mother had joked she was a “weather witch” when she was in the aura of migraine and could sense a shift in the barometer. She’d said it first to Thomas when he was very little, off-hand, and he’d been scared of her for the whole next day, thinking she was really some storybook enchantress, hiding behind his toybox until his father finally coaxed him out.
Thomas could often anticipate the onset of a migraine, and usually checked the weather forecast as a way to forecast his own discomfort, but one late July afternoon, sitting at the visitor desk in his work uniform, the pea-green polo and khaki shorts, he ignored the low thrum that was building pressure for too long. He swallowed two Excedrin and clocked out to go home. Unchaining his bike from the steps next to the Visitor Parking Lot he noticed the change in atmosphere, something heavy pushing its way in from the sea, that evening. He pedaled to beat the storm, but the queasiness led him to pull off and puke into the bushes three streets from the FROG. His fingers fumbled as he chained his bike to the stairs leading up to his place, felt the first smattering of raindrops. He saw Freddy gesture to him from the window, trying to beckon him in, but Thomas pointed to his head and loped up the steps, dropping the keys twice before inserting them in the lock, and finally getting inside, kicking off his shoes, and crash-landing onto the bed, where he pulled the thin quilt over his head and lay supine while the rain pounded the roof of his one room.
At one point during the night, after both the storm and the headache broke, more or less, Thomas got up to drink some ginger ale then settled back down. By morning he felt mostly normal-ish, though there was always a kind of migraine hangover, a slowness to his movements and a muzzy sense of dislocation, as if he’d come off a transatlantic flight and his body hadn’t readjusted. He started to pull on his uniform again, at some point in the night having shrugged it off and tossed it to the side of his bed, when he remembered it was Monday and he had no work. He decided to treat himself to a large breakfast, strong coffee to chase the last constrictions of the migraine from his head. By the time he’d reached the bottom step Freddy was intercepting him, telling him the news: a single engine Piper went down yesterday evening around eight PM. Somewhere off the coast.
“That’s awful,” Thomas said, distracted by his hunger, not fully listening.
Freddy flailed more. It wasn’t just any plane, Freddy said, it was his, naming the middle-aged actor who owned a home nearby. A fixture during the summer months, he was always seen around town, often working in the garden he had on his large property, he held fundraisers for local groups and was generally revered.
“Everyone is talking about it. They haven’t recovered the plane,” Freddy said. “People are out in boats, scouting around. Hoping to be the ones who spot the wreckage. The Coast Guard is out.” Freddy sighed and went back into his house.
Everyone was talking about it, Thomas found, when he finally got a seat at the café for breakfast. Janine, the thin waitress who poured his coffee and brought him his egg sandwich, tutted about it, the adjacent table, a family of four with two small children, who kept asking their parents what they were discussing, tugging at their arms, and after he’d finished, the three fisherman standing around outside, cigarettes in their rough brown fingers, arguing about tides and weather patterns and why the actor had chosen to take the plane out that late afternoon anyway.
Thomas felt how news of the accident changed the tenor of the day. Nothing quite this tragic had happened here since he’d been born. Sure, there was the shark attack maybe ten or so years back, that had spooked swimmers for a weekend, but that hadn’t registered with the same impact. There was hardly any violent crime, usually just drunk brawling in the off-season, the occasional robbery of a wealthy home, crimes of boredom or passion, nothing that would garner national attention. The last time he had a migraine this bad, he remembered, was after the storm that beached the Humpback whale. The grey carcass looking unnaturally flung onto the beach, out of place, sand-covered and desiccated. The shore remained closed until it’s majestic tonnage could be removed for necropsy.
“They think they just found wreckage on the beach,” a red-faced woman said, running by and telling everyone in earshot, breathless and manic in the way a tragedy could make people, its effect on human nature.
There was a news van from local and cable news outlets parked at the beach when Thomas arrived to see for himself, reporters in ties with shirtsleeves pushed up, shooting B-Roll, interviewing beachgoers while amateur oceanographers with tide charts pontificated about where or when, based on time and currents, the plane might be, gesturing out over the green-grey expanse of water. Sweaty men with open shirts exposing their round jutting bellies prowled the sand with metal detectors like busy drones, scooping up and discarding any irrelevant bits of scrap. Overhead, a persistent whump of helicopter propellers sounded.
An odd tension settled in, between those who hoped something might wash up out of the sea, the ghouls and looky-loos, and the parents who were horrified at the prospect, hyper-watchful of their children as they busily scooped sand in their buckets or darted around the edge of the water, afraid something ghastly would wash in with the tide.
Thomas heard the noonday siren blast as he rode back by the playhouse where a few years ago the actor had done a fundraiser, a one-night-only staged reading of the play Love Letters. He’d appeared opposite the chairwoman of the board, herself a former performer in her heyday, now just a wealthy retiree who rescued animals and donated to charitable causes. The event had raised enough money to replace the roof of the playhouse, which had leaked so badly that once, during a matinee of A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche got beaned with a sodden portion of ceiling as she was neurotically decrying her fate center stage. Thomas hadn’t been in attendance for either show, but his father sometimes volunteered backstage, building scenery or helping during set changes, and said that the actor had really impressed him. They’d had a small conversation in the greenroom beforehand and the actor was jovial and genial and talked to Thomas’ father all about seed beds.
By late afternoon a clip of the actor’s ex-wife, since remarried, talking about the actor’s love of flying and his skill at handling small aircraft replayed on television. The media had caught her at her home in Rancho Mirage, and she stood in front of her door, framed by bougainvillea, squinting into the sun as she answered questions about her ex. That footage was followed by reports that the actor had been flying with a “companion” that hadn’t been identified to the press as yet. This started another round of speculation among the residents, as to who the companion might’ve been. A local? Thomas eavesdropped on the speculations that evening as he sat at a local bar, slowly drinking a pint of cider. A loudmouthed tourist, already too many drinks in, was saying it was his secret gay lover, a rent boy the actor took flying to impress.
Thomas recalled the cover photo of the actor, from a film magazine, shirtless, his fuzzy chest and muscled, tanned arms, which required near-forensic study for months, until Thomas could summon up the image instantly when he closed his eyes. But the actor wasn’t closeted, and the companion, whose name they released after notifying the family, turned out to be his housekeeper’s son, identified the second day after the crash. The young man had wanted to learn to fly and the actor had taken him up as a kindness.
Thomas was debating a second pint, rarely did he drink more than two especially when he was logy from migraine, but the day had wound him up, when he saw a familiar face across the bar, cheeks flushed, laughing with an unusually tall blonde girl and her shorter, brunette friend. He called his name but the volume of the room was too loud so it wasn’t until he walked over and tapped him on the shoulder that Stas acknowledged his presence.
“Thomas,” Stas said, clearly inebriated but not surprised, and reached up to ruffle Thomas’ hair. “How are you? Gigi, Heather, meet Thomas.”
Thomas gave a hey to the girls, he didn’t recognize them, but his focus was on Stas. “You didn’t tell me you were here again.”
“No, but I said I’d probably come back this summer to work.”
“I don’t think you ever did,” Thomas said, certain of the fact. “And anyway, why haven’t I seen you?”
“So busy, Thomas, so busy. Excuse me girls I must go,” Stas said, laying money on the bar and grabbing Thomas’ arm and steering him toward the exit. For a moment Thomas thought Stas wanted to go home with him. He had told himself that he didn’t want to fall back into that habit with Stas, but he did. Then Stas was asking “What are you doing now? Do you have a flashlight? Let us go to the beach and look for wreckage.”
There really wasn’t any arguing with Stas and so that’s where they ended up, prowling the shore under a cloudy night, pants rolled up, feet squelching along the cold sand.
“Aren’t you a little chilly?” Thomas asked. He’d retrieved a hoodie from his room, along with the two flashlights whose beams were now focused on the ground in front of them.
Stas pooh-poohed the notion. “This is nothing,” he said, his thin V-neck t-shirt clinging to him as he involuntarily shivered. Thomas instinctively moved closer to Stas, putting his arm around his shoulder, which made Stas squirm. “Maybe we split up, Thomas, for a bit?”
At first Thomas thought this was a ploy of Stas’s, a way to get him alone, out to the beach, to rekindle something. But no. Stas really wanted to locate some remains from the crash. Thomas had seen the same crazy-eyed singularity of focus the night they snuck onto a famous author’s property to go skinny-dipping in the pool; they’d almost been caught when the elderly author came out to smoke a cigarette. The frisson of that particular illegality had thrilled Thomas a little at the time as they scrambled to collect their clothes and ran naked off the pool deck. This didn’t.
After forty-five minutes Thomas was tired and irritable. “Shouldn’t we call it quits?” he shouted to Stas, who was kicking at a tower of sand, the possible remnants of a child’s sand castle.
“It’s just that I have work tomorrow in the morning.” Then, after no response, “why don’t you come back with me, to the FROG?” Thomas knew the nickname for his place used to amuse Stas. “I could fix us something to eat, or another drink?”
“I’m good,” Stas said, retrieving a flask from the pocket of his jeans and taking a fortifying shot then holding it out toward Thomas almost an afterthought. Thomas shook his head no.
“I’m going to go Stas,” Thomas said, but held out for a second, his intention and delivery a kind of ellipsis.
Stas jogged closer, right up to Thomas’s face, his breath warm and sweet with alcohol. “Can I please hold onto one of the flashlights?”
“Oh,” Thomas said, “sure,” and began to backtrack to the entrance of the beach. When he looked back Stas was again intently scanning the beach. Thomas had asked earlier why he was so intent on finding something. To be part of the story, Stas had said. But Thomas thought he meant to be the story.
Some people speculated the actor crashed the plane on purpose, a suicide run, but the naming of his companion betrayed that idea. Why would he kill himself and his housekeeper’s son? Still, any theory had legs, no matter how short its run, while the hunt for the wreckage, and bodies, continued.
A psychic from two towns over, looking very much like she was sent from central casting—jangly gold bracelets, flimsy, fluttery scarf, a corona of red frizzy hair, cakey black eyeliner and scarlet nails—told the media she could see, with startling clarity, the victims of the crash alive, but scared, in a place bathed in a pink iridescence. “They’re scared, and they’re hurt and alone, but I can lead ya to them.” Callers to the local radio station, cranks mostly, swore they’d seen the actor, or were harboring him. He’s trying to start a new life, minus the fame, one said.
It was Tuesday and Thomas was back at work, barely arriving on time as the influx of hundreds of media snarled the already unbearable summer traffic. Sections of the beach were closed, now, and law enforcement on ATVs ran up and down the sand. Biking to work, Thomas saw photographers posted on the roofs of neighbors houses. The number of visitors to the lighthouse was up too, for a summer Tuesday, which kept Thomas occupied and not thinking of Stas. The beach was so overwhelmed he couldn’t sneak away to his usual place, and ate lunch in the staff room, which meant he had to consume Carol’s food under her watchful eye today, which fortunately was just a piece of fried chicken with some coleslaw on the side. “I apologize, I apologize,” Carol said, “but I’ve been so distracted, well I mean we all are, that I barely cooked a thing the last day or so.” The only upside of this tragedy, Thomas thought.
Their supervisor, Carl Stubbs, kept a small TV on in the breakroom, in case there were developments in the crash. A patient, weathered man with a bristly white mustache, Carl was uncharacteristically brusque to staff and visitors alike. He’d lent his van to one of the news crews, who needed transportation, and he grumbled about wear and tear, mileage. Carl, who would’ve lent any of his neighbors anything they asked, was now pinched and stingy.
The whole of the morning was chaotic, and Thomas hated the predictability of his routine destabilized. He rang people up incorrectly, gave the wrong change, knocked over a stack of souvenir shot glasses that sent an explosion of glass shards skittering across the lobby.
Two separate fistfights nearly broke out at the base of the lighthouse, where the trio of coin-operated binoculars offered views of the sea. One man slapping another with his souvenir cap before their wives broke up the scuffle.
On his way home Thomas biked by the actor’s estate, or at least the entrance, the long winding drive. Out front of the cattle gate that separated the private road from the main one, fans and mourners had created a small vigil to the actor, with heaps of flowers, candles, and images of the actor torn from magazines or printed off the internet. One or two tiny toy planes sat among the tributes, and other ephemera. Thomas recognized the deputy stationed at the gate, only a few years older than himself, knock-kneed and distracted and sweating through his polyester uniform. A similar scene, minus the officer, was being enacted in miniature on the opposite side of town, where the housekeeper and her son lived. A small offering of candles and flowers. Carol had passed around a sign-up sheet to bring casseroles—the universal food of grief— to the distraught mother. Acquaintances lit candles in the church. Thomas remembered how this all worked.
Thomas ignored the headlines of the paper when he stopped for coffee. He didn’t care to read about the tragedy if he was living in it, however adjacent. The scrutiny, the hot lights and bearing down and constant chatter and crowds and inflamed feelings, all reminded him of the days after his father’s accident, and that kind of scrutiny, the reading of his emotional temperature, became unbearable. He became a sort of ward of the town, then, though technically an adult, just edged over the legal line that demarcates minor and adult. That kind of bubble of care that enveloped him and kept him from losing himself, righted him when he stumbled. A puncture, now. He wanted to find Stas, but more so he wanted Stas to find him. Wanted Stas to want to find him. He sat on the steps of the FROG drinking an iced coffee, gobbling another pair of Excedrin to try to chase the last vestiges of the headache away for good.
By late afternoon, word came in that the fuselage of the small plane had been located by a team of divers, as well as the bodies. It was now, if there had been any doubt before, a salvage operation. Whatever hope, however false, had kept people buoyed now evaporated. Thomas thumbed through one of the L’Amour novels then tossed it to the floor. On his way downstairs he saw Freddy through the window of the kitchen, opening a bottle of wine. The evening was muggy and misty. The light from his bike lamp cutting through the damp. He rode in circles around familiar streets, pedaling in a distracted state, almost hypnotized, past the intersection of the lobster van crash. Thomas wobbled on his bike, always feeling acutely disoriented crossing through that place, and ending up at the lighthouse. Thomas father brought him here after his mother died, after the business of death had concluded and little Thomas didn’t know what the future, the world would look like without her. His father sat Thomas down on a wooden bench, its green paint flaking, and told him about the first lighthouse in Alexandria, Egypt, Pharos, and that there were seven hundred lighthouses in America alone. “Seven hundred, Thomas, think of that.” And Thomas had given a shrug. “Do you know why I like the lighthouse?” Thomas’s father had asked him as he sat cross-armed and choleric on the bench. “No,” Thomas said curtly. “They give us,” Thomas’s father said, “a sense of reassurance, a reminder of endurance in face of the worst of weather, and a beacon home.” Thomas wasn’t sure then what his father meant, so he nodded, then his father reached out to take his small hand in his.
By the morning of the third day the news story had reached its conclusion, as far as those who shape the narrative were concerned. Mystery concluded, anxiety of the search allayed, back to the business at hand. The tide of journalists and gawkers receded, television cameras blinked off, cables were coiled, and news vans drove away, the outsize bloat of interest subsided, leaving only lingering repercussions of the tragedy, the aftershocks of assuming the national spotlight, albeit briefly. That morning the postdrome of Thomas’s migraine disappeared. In another month and a half, the swell of tourists too would wane, Thomas knew, and something like normality would resume.
Mike Dressel lives and works in New York. His fiction has appeared in The Berlin Review, Bachelors, Newfound, Your Impossible Voice, Chelsea Station, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among others. He has also contributed to The Drift and The Gay & Lesbian Review. His artwork can be seen in Dirt Child vol. 4 and Old Pal magazine.
