Twelfth Planet

Ever since Duncan left the troupe for his father’s dementia, gravity had gone a little loose around Zed. He kept catching himself blinking at the moon with that same tip-of-tongue feeling he got tossing clubs onstage. They’d be dragging props back to the trailer or poking steaks on Louie’s grill, and then—like sleepwalking, like UFO abduction—he’d crane over backward, jaw dangling, half expecting the stars to plummet into his palms. An amateur move, honestly, juggling with your eyes instead of your hands. This was first-grade shit: you had to trust your partner’s throws. “Look alive,” Louie would say every time Zed’s eyes went vertical, and then Zed’d get a Budweiser to the gut—which might’ve accounted for the trust problem.

So, he took a box cutter to the roof of the Airstream. While Louie and Neil felt up a couple of Miller Lite reps cosplaying as maidens, Zed sliced a face-sized hole over his bunk. From then on he fell asleep with the stars sporing over him. What was that urge hammering off the top of his skull? He seemed to be levitating, half-vapor. And yet—when the beer knocked the wind from him or the sky stained with dawn—he emerged as though from a surf wipeout, breathless and bummed.

“You cut what?” Duncan asked, his voice crackling through the feedback of his own speakered Tracfone; poor connection, he’d apologized, as per us. Always his end.

“A redneck skylight,” Zed said. “ Plenty of people do it down here.”

“I thought that was meth.”

“You’re reaching.”

“You’re the one with a hole in your roof.”

 A steel-toed silence.

 “Look,” Duncan said. “You can understand how anything . . . spacey . . . might be a little triggering.” Blunt percussion behind him. Feline yowls. “Hold on.”

Zed legged out in the lawn chair, watching the sunset apply lipstick to the skyline. A pageant of clouds fluffed through the ten-gallon twilight; his head was already protracting.

“Sorry,” Duncan said, gasping back to the receiver. “Had to do some wrangling.”

Wrangling—that was a new one. Since Duncan moved back in with his father, Zed had witnessed the slow sharpening of his terminology: caring for honed to ass-wiping, looking after to goddamn ancient aliens again. Dementia was melting Mr. Brighton. While his mind went liquid, some strange new ideas had emerged from the slush pile. The yowling ebbed.

“How’s Mr. Whiskey?” Zed said.

“Just spared from the microwave.” Duncan hefted out a sigh. “Where were we?”

“You’d just started accusing me.”

“All I’m saying is—Jesus, what am I saying? When was the last time you took a weekend?”

Zed thought about it. Thought longer. The days spun into a slot-machine whir.

“There you go,” Duncan said. “You’re overdue for decompressing.”

The guy had a way of calling things. That next week fatigue oozed through Zed piecemeal, pooling in his fingers. He wondered whether this new clumsiness was self-fulfilling, Duncan’s warning prompt, maybe. Duncan had been their best catcher. Knew how to read a bad toss before the pin left Zed’s hand, compensating for fumbles, returning each object to their three-count. Neil, Duncan’s pierced-up replacement, wasn’t so meticulous. When Zed tossed a torch a little wide at their last Sunday show in Austin, he pulled up and let the thing sizzle past, watching it hiss in the dirt. Their beer-battered audience prickled with laughter.  

Summer wilted by. They worked their way east in three-week stints: Shreveport, Jackson, Mobile, Pensacola. The same cities, the same shows off the same dusty exits, funnel cake and horse shit, stray condors swiping their bowling pins during the falconry exhibition. Louie taking shots off the same faux-maiden cosplayers’ buttressed cleavage. In Duncan’s absence, the tired rhythm of it all echoed more clearly. At night, Zed blinked up at that cross section of sky, picturing it as a release valve for his karmic form. Two decades of Renaissance Fairs—it was starting to feel like rattling through a memory.

In Charleston Louie pulled him aside. He’d just fucked up another matinee, tossing a stray knife so close to Neil’s scalp that his hoop earring clinked audibly. Neil had walked offstage right then—hard to blame him—and slammed into the trailer, where he was currently taking a toke and a breather.

“Part of me wishes that was on purpose,” Louie said. “It wasn’t on purpose, right?” They picked through the gauntlet of shops that led to the exit, marionettes and ceramics and the wizard’s stall pawning crystals that could chiropract your chakras.

Louie squatted atop a stray keg and gave Zed an auditing look. The guy was a Cirque du Soleil expat, classed down to fairgrounds by a whiskey habit and a broken wrist that had set funny. Twenty-five years ago, he’d front-flipped through fire pits. He spent most of his waking hours literally and figuratively fucking around, but he stowed up a stare you could bounce off of.

“You’re overdue for decompressing,” Louie said.

“You called Duncan?”

Louie’s eyebrows wafted toward his hairline, enough for Zed to guess that the call had gone in the opposite direction. “He told me you’re stargazing.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“There’s a hole in our roof.” He held up his hands. “Go home for a while.”

“Home,” Zed said, as though invoking it. Home was the fairgrounds in Lexington, Memphis, Missoula. Home was the Airstream. “And what, you and Neil cover for me? A two-man act?”

“Neil’s having second thoughts.” Louie coughed. “Actually, everyone is. Corporate’s dealing with a mutiny. The jesters, you know, union shit, something about profit margins. ‘Trim the chaff’ is the phrase I heard—come to think of it, do you even trim chaff? Point is, they’re streamlining. I’ve been meaning to bring this up. Technically speaking, we’re under review.”

“Our salary?”

Louie shook his head. “We’re the chaff.”

An underwater pressure noosed through Zed’s ears. It was the same blooming ache he’d felt back in Charlotte when Duncan told them he was leaving, and he sensed this was merely an extension of that moment—the first fracture’s followthrough.

“Take a week,” Louie said. “Hell, take a month.”

“You’re asking me to duck out.”

“You won’t help our case if you’re dropping shit.”

* * *

Leaving the fairgrounds was like breaking an orbit. Zed aimed his Volvo through the gates, feeling sort of skew to his body. He turned west on Highway 26 by blanched habit: Charleston to Charlotte. That was the circuit. The state blurred by in a Coppertone cloud, bristled pines and marsh grass, the route grooved into his tire treads by twenty years of practice. Three hours photosynthesizing and then he was whipping off exit 33, braking through the fairground. There were twenty of these properties in the contiguous US, all franchised, all skeletally identical. Once a year the show gusted through them like a long-delayed breath. He marooned the car in the parking lot and climbed the padlocked gates. Ghosting through these empty stalls gave him the Scrooge-ish sense of Christmas future. His whole life was held up by habit.

They’d always vacationed together. The fair hibernated six weeks a year, too long for couch-surfing but too short to rent. So the three of them would beach the Airstream at a fairground and fly somewhere sticky, Thailand or Tijuana, for a month and a half of debauching in venereal heat. His life looped to these rhythms: the cities juggling by, the seasons, the venues like so many torches tossed between the three of them. He’d get these pangs sometimes, muscular cravings. He’d start feeling feline, even, like a lion pacing its cage, poised for movements he couldn’t articulate. Like everything else, Duncan was the one who corrected him. When things got too existential, they’d heft up to the roof and trade tokes of Alaskan Thunderfuck, the fumes lifting them from their bodies just high enough for their souls to breathe.

It was during one of those rooftop un-soberings that Duncan told Zed about his father. They were right here in Charlotte, a few weeks shy of a year ago, watching a bloated harvest moon seep across the sky. As the smoke fumed from Duncan’s mouth it seemed to drag something sludgy behind it. He chewed the end of his spliff. “Ever heard of the Annunaki?” 

Since dementia had forced Duncan’s father into early retirement, Mr. Brighton had been doing unusual reading. The loss of his wife in a cruise ship catastrophe had tilted his tastes from grief to granola, then beyond this galaxy. He called Duncan at odd hours, speaking in terms of Zen and the karmic continuum. He was enlightening himself, he said. Coming into his true astral nature.

The neurologist assured Duncan this was nothing to be alarmed about; while dementia unraveled memory, it also affected behavior. So he nodded along to his father’s ranting, keeping in mind how empty that house must have seemed without Mrs. Brighton. Then the visitations had started.

They weren’t angels. Not exactly. Ancient astronauts, Mr. Brighton said, extraterrestrials from a planet past Neptune. Annunaki—a Sumerian word. Those who from heaven to earth came. The idea was that they’d poked us out of monkey DNA, engineered us to mine gold for use as an atmospheric preservative; particles of that metal, suspended in mid-air, would reflect UVs and keep the ozone intact. In the nine thousand years since their planet’s orbit had diverged from Earth’s, humanity had lost track of its purpose. But now the planets were intersecting again, the Annunaki’s mind-control signals warping through space. This, Mr. Brighton claimed, was the source of his symptoms. The overlords had pinned him for synaptic experiments.  It took Zed’s jaw a moment to stop toggling. “Jesus,” he’d whispered. So Duncan was leaving. Just like that, he was dropping two decades of precedent to watch his father wilt. “He thinks they’re draining his brainwaves,” Duncan said. He’d laughed, but Zed could see the way his cheekbones tightened; the guy was afraid.

Zed was afraid, too. Now, sulking over this empty stage, he swore he could feel molecules wafting loose from his skin cells. Was this the same unraveling feeling Mr. Brighton mistook for UFOs? Some kids had spray-painted over the poster of the jugglers that backed the platform, adding testicles to each tossed-up torch. The sunburnt artist had painted them in caricature: Louie’s nose scythed out from his brow. Zed—a little fatter than was fair—sprawled mid face-plant, toes sliding out on a banana peel. Duncan lunged to catch his fumbled throw. In an artistic insight that had always puzzled Zed, Duncan’s avatar was weeping. Duncan the martyr. The ass-sparer. Zed missed that guy. For the first time in twenty years, he didn’t know where to go.

* * *

I-40 East drooped from the piedmont to the coastline like a fuse. If you followed it all the way east, it marooned you in Carolina Beach. Fourteen miles of sandy delta, a glorified dune tonguing up where the Cape Fear River vomited into the Atlantic. The main drag was a pastel cross section of mini-golf  and beach boutiques with plaster marine life clawing up their facades. Every telephone pole was mounted with a tangle of Christmas lights; at dusk the road stretched out like one long constellation. Mr. Brighton lived at the end of it all, in a double-wide on the edge of the Fort Fisher battleground.

Zed parked by the road, intending to surprise them. No lights on, but Duncan’s Chevy glinted in the driveway. Things were denser than he remembered. He’d been here once before, for Mrs. Brighton’s wake; the scree was practically manicured back then, trimmed weekly by Mr. Brighton himself, who’d spent four decades as the memorial’s groundskeeper before his brain started eroding. Now maritime oaks gnawed over the trailer and adjacent museum, the old Confederate battery looming up as though poised to swallow them into its own sad history. Zed double-punched the doorbell, a little spooked. Nothing. He counted to thirty. He was pulling out his phone to text Duncan when the door hinged open, followed by twelve inches of steel. A bayonet poked out from the entryway. The bald man holding the weapon was a little amphibian. His jowls oozed down his neck. He like a melting wax museum sculpture of Swamp Thing; other than that, he looked like hell.

“Duncan,” Zed said. He was already backing down the steps. “I’m Duncan’s friend. Zed.”

Swamp Thing advanced with the bayonet. “Duncan!”

The porch light bloomed. Duncan hopped through the door, tripping into a pair of jeans, and Swamp Thing went boneless. Zed could actually see the thought drain from his face like a swallow of whiskey. He looked at his son, then Zed, then the bayonet, a sad weight anchoring into his pupils.

“You’re crushing the parsley,” Duncan said.

“What?”

He pointed. Under Zed’s feet, a weed was stapled to the dirt.

“Sorry.”

Duncan shrugged as though he’d been observing, not accusing. “Dad, this is Zed. Remember? We used to work together.”

But Mr. Brighton was watching the tree line. “Let them in,” he said.

* * *

 The place looked like a diorama of a campground supplied by a library. Open books tented over every surface. Whiffs of charcoal writhed in the feeble draft from a wall-mounted AC unit. Duncan’s coffee steamed right out of Zed; two sips and he was sweating it through his shirt. Elbowed up to the breakfast bar, he listened to his friend confessing.

“It’s like Brad Pitt,” he said. “What’s the movie? Where he turns into a toddler.” He sloshed something antiseptic into his coffee, took a swig off the flask. “I had this idea I’d be helping him find his keys or whatever, but he’s literally shitting himself.” The man in question was cocooned in the recliner, rocking the chair with his snores. Duncan dropped his voice. “And the legal shit, Jesus. I’m working on power of attorney, you know, to literally pay the utilities. They act like I’m trying to put a pillow over his face.”

 “Have you thought about moving him somewhere? Assisted living?” “I toured a place; they scared me off. Second story had bolts on the windows to keep people from evacuating. That’s what the nurse called it.” Duncan whistled slow. “Anyway, him and me don’t have enough money between us.”

He’d ditched the coffee by now, was going straight for the flask. His hairline had been eroding. Stray blood vessels pooled under his eyes.

“Anyway,” he said, “how the hell are you?”

Zed tapped the flask. “Mind sharing?”

And then it was the roof of the Airstream again. Zed told him about Neil, the knives, the corporate chaff-trimming. The drink left barbs in his throat. “We’re fucked. I’m just now realizing it. We’ve been fucked, ever since you left.”

Duncan’s face constricted.

“Not like that,” Zed said. “All I mean is it’s fractal. You’re protons. Louie’s neutrons. I’m—the third one, or something.”

“He pissed here,” Duncan said.

“Sorry?”

He smoothed his hand over the counter. “Right in front of the sink. I got back from the lawyer the other morning and found him with his dick out. And I was done, okay? Listening to the proof of incapacitation bullshit, and the bills, and I forgot to buy goddamn cat litter. Then he wouldn’t let me wash off his legs. I’m trying to keep him still and he starts pissing again. Point is, I needed a second. So I left him there.”

“Sure,” Zed said.

“I locked the door, I mean.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know, half an hour? I came back in and he was asleep on the toilet seat.” He palmed his eyelids. Zed groped for words. “What else could you do?” Duncan nodded. “What else.”

Still, something jagged chafed Zed’s gut. “And the aliens?” he asked, trying to blunt it.

“I don’t know if he can read anymore. Sometimes I see him holding the books upside down. Did you hear what he told us outside?”

“Let them in.”

“That’s all he says now. Goes out there and stares. Best I can figure, he’s talking about Annunaki.”

They scorched down the last of the drink. An absence in the ambience; Mr. Brighton had stopped snoring. Zed pivoted. The recliner was empty. The blanket lay wrinkled like a carcass on the floor.

“For fuck’s sake,” Duncan said.

They winced down the hall. The front door was lolling on its hinges, letting in lungfuls of gnats. The porch light lapped over empty lawn. Zed couldn’t help noticing the sky, the stars sieving down like raindrops, the adipose moon—no light pollution. It was easy to see how Mr. Brighton might get certain ideas, living out here. How that skyline might start talking to him.  For ten minutes they searched the trees, yelling his name. Then Zed noticed the light in the back of the trailer. He pointed.

“For fuck’s sake,” Duncan said.

They found him in the bathtub. The water was navel-high, climbing. He cupped up handfuls and dumped them on the tile, making small, puckered sounds. Zed had the sudden urge to scoop handfuls himself. Duncan turned off the tap. Mr. Brighton’s mouth fished open.

“Let them in,” Duncan said. “I know, I know.”

But Mr. Brighton was pointing at Zed. His Adam’s apple toggled, words clotting up his throat. “Sink,” he said, and that single syllable launched through the room like a champagne cork.

* * * 

As long as Zed had known Duncan, he’d longed to get the two of them tessellating.

He’d left Reno at sixteen. His Moms was shacked up with a Paiute in Washoe, tweaking again, and his Pops had just been shipped off to San Quentin on assault charges. He’d holed up at his Pops’s place until the pantry was empty, then hitched his way to the Greyhound station. He was thinking Florida, maybe, warm water, beaches for sleeping, rubbing his last two twenties together like kindling when he’d seen the caravan braking into the field across the street. Zed sat there deliberating while the Big Top craned up. The rippling banner: Ringling Brothers. The goddamn circus.

He’d spent that summer scavenging after them. He washed windows in the parking lot, dug through the trash for hot dogs, bummed rides in the beds of riggers’ pickups. On cold nights, he snuck in with the sheep and slept there in the straw and manure, siphoning their cottony warmth. That’s how Duncan found him. He sat up solstice morning and the guy was right there, grinning through the chain links. He tapped his cheek.

“You got some shit on your face,” he said. “Literally.”

Who knew why he brought Zed back to his trailer? Why he handed him a towel and brewed coffee while he showered, loaning him clean clothes, shoes without holes in them. Zed had come out of the bathroom ready to bolt, figuring the guy for a perv, used to the world of his parents—people who only gave to get. But Duncan wasn’t like that. He brought Zed to the foreman, who asked him two questions: had he killed anyone? Did he want a job? They set him up with the riggers. He raised poles and drilled stakes as thick as his torso. His knuckles raisined from the sun. He walked the aisles at shows, selling plastic swords, cotton candy.

Every time Duncan strutted into the big ring he stopped to watch. The knives vaulted over his head in perfect arcs, the strobes polishing their sharpened edges, but Zed was more interested in the way Duncan’s eyes squeezed shut. He seemed to feel the rhythm of the objects like a nerve. How Zen, letting his body blur to a reflex. Zed craved that thoughtless trajectory. He started juggling at night. When he could keep a three-count, he set up outside Duncan’s trailer. Duncan stood there in the doorway, shaking his head. “Took you long enough.” He was a natural teacher. He showed Zed how to feel one hand’s toss in the other, making each catch an extension of that same instigating motion. When the circus broke down for the season, Duncan sputtered the Chevy out to Phoenix for an audition with the Renaissance Fair. He threw a Boston Mess with the torches, and Louie stopped him right then. Duncan took the job on one condition: Zed came with him.

That was just his way. Later Zed would wonder if this was his friend’s atonement for a lucky childhood, loving parents, a college fund. Whatever the reason, he’d tossed the two of them into rotation; from then on, Zed was his follow-through. For twenty years he’d been sailing off Duncan’s momentum. Now—marooned in the double-wide, watching the guy’s hands shake while he snuck whiskey into his coffee—his friend seemed windless; the wind knocked out of him, maybe. Duncan was stranded here at the end of an island, at the end of his father’s life, and Zed (symbiotic by now, or maybe parasitic) had left his own rhythm to follow him.

“I’ve reached a nadir,” Duncan said. “Existentially, I mean.” He knuckled his forehead. “You know what? Let’s take the old man for a walk.”

They found Mr. Brighton cross-legged on his bedroom floor, looking more Buddha-like than ever. He stood and dropped his boxers.

“Not now.” Duncan closed his eyes. “Z, will you dress him?”

What was he supposed to say? Duncan was already shutting the door. Zed listened to his footsteps creak the laminate, the slam of the cabinet and wet trickle of glass filling. Couldn’t blame the guy. Not really. Mr. Brighton fingered his crotch, grinning emptily. He dug a pair of shorts from the hamper. Something folded in the pocket; he pulled it out. A yellowed Polaroid. A woman grinned up from the gloss, long-faced and boxy, a breeze pricking the hem of her sundress.

“Who’s this?” he asked, but Mr. Brighton just blinked at him.

Zed couldn’t help it. He stashed the photo in his jeans.

* * *

In 1860, Fort Fisher had run all the way from the oceanside jetty to the inland bank. The Union had stippled it with salvos, smothering the last of the Confederate supply lines like a bloody Marlboro butt. The battery’s earthen walls accounted for its persistence—sod swallowed artillery in a way brick or concrete couldn’t. Trailing Mr. Brighton along the nape of the battery, they seemed to be poised at an axis; the joint between river and sea, yes, but also something temporal. Maybe it was the way the grass had sucked up the battle’s gore so perfectly, starching the sod a filterless green, no trace of skulls or viscera. Zed stayed close to Duncan, feeling transitive.

“He’s giving the tour,” Duncan whispered. “Trying to, I mean. I don’t even think he realizes.”

Mr. Brighton stopped at a replica cannon and waved. Zed watched him struggle for syllables. How many times might he have walked tourists through this circuit, grooving into its paces? The scrunch of his lips—like his brain hadn’t caught up to his body. He was moving through a memory without even meaning to.

While they nodded along, Duncan worked through another flask. He caught Zed looking and offered some. The stuff scorched his enamel going down. Real wound-washing shit. He winced off tears, handed it back, and Duncan—who he’d never once seen fumble anything, not even the two-sided torches—dropped it in the dirt. He laughed a little too loud. Zed wrinkled the picture out of his pocket. “Any idea who this is?”

Duncan grabbed the photo. There was a metallic glint to that woman, an industrial beauty about her—Zed recognized the jutting chin.

“Your mother,” he said.

Duncan slid the picture into his jacket. He kept his hand there for the rest of the morning, cradling it.

* * *

Mrs. Brighton had never been buried. Half a decade ago—celebrating their fortieth anniversary—Mr. Brighton surprised her with a cruise. For two weeks they puttered through the Mediterranean. Then, deviating from their course to dodge waterspouts, the hull caught a reef ten miles shy of Gibraltar. The captain ditched his post. The cranes that lowered the lifeboats were faulty. When the Coast Guard swooped them to safety on an adjacent island, Mrs. Brighton was one of thirty-three passengers who remained unaccounted for.

Zed still remembered the way Mr. Brighton had moved through the house before the wake, head on swivel though he’d misplaced something. He wondered now if this had been the first jabs of dementia rooting themselves in his brain. Hunching at the table—sipping from the same flask Duncan used now—Mr. Brighton had stuttered through the story of the wreck with a physical urgency.

They’d left holding hands. He remembered the dampness of her wedding band on his palm, the guilt that he’d forgotten to grab his own from the nightstand when the alarms dribbled through the hull. The boat had lilted sideways, and he’d hit his head—a stray pipe or something —and come to half concussed, sardined into a lifeboat with fifty others, his wife not among them. He remembered the piss and the puke sloshing his shoes, the ocean lapping in, their boat sagging from the weight of too many bodies. He’d tripped and looked down and there was an old man, seizing, footprints staining his life vest.

They were over capacity. Already sinking. Still, he’d snatched at arms as they flailed up from the waves, tugging people into the raft hoping each spluttering face might be his wife’s. When the Coast Guard dragged them to safety, he’d sat hypothermic on the beach and watched the helicopters suck by, squinting for a glimpse of her in the windows. He’d waited for three days. Then he’d crawled to the tideline and swallowed mouthfuls of ocean, groping for the taste of her.

Watching Mr. Brighton’s careful grief, Zed had wondered what it was like to grieve hungrily—for your first mourning urge to be consumption. Then Duncan had pulled him outside to sneak a joint together. He’d imagined swallowing his friend with each rubbery lungful, savoring that unity, and decided he did know; he was feeling it.

* * *

They drank their dinner. The fridge was skeletal: Buds, Schnapps, a few heels of Sarah Lee. When the Buds were gone, Duncan stomped into his shoes.

“Going to town,” he said. “Watch him, will you?”

Zed followed him out. The moon looked ready to fall from the sky, bright enough for a sunburn. Duncan scratched up the Chevy poking the keys at the door. “You gonna try to kiss me?”

“I feel like I’m missing something.”

“Someone’s got to stay with him.”

Was this why Duncan had called Louie? Always predicting. He’d known Zed would come out here and babysit. He chewed his lip, tasted blood. “That’s not what I mean. Not aliens, either. Remember sitting on top of the trailer? I’m getting that tip-of-tongue feeling. I need to move, I guess, but I can’t tell which way.”

Duncan opened the door. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Did you ever feel like that? After you left?”

He was keying the ignition. Duncan, his compass. For twenty years he’d shown Zed which way to go. The Chevy growled. “I don’t know,” he said. “Try praying about it.” That was it. He shut the door. The truck zagged down the driveway and floated off, muffled in shadow.

* * *

 Waiting in that trailer was like stubbing a toe. Zed dozed with the Schnapps, bruising his gums on the bottle. He blinked awake to find Mr. Brighton weeping. He was crawling through the living room hands and knees, dragging his arms under furniture.

 “What is it?” Zed asked. “Hey. What’s up?”

Mr. Brighton fisted both hands through his pockets; Zed remembered the picture. He went to Duncan’s room, found the photo on the dresser. Mr. Brighton wielded it like weapon. Then—as gently as if he were working with gunpowder—he tore it in half. He folded both pieces into his mouth.

“You tell me,” Zed said.

 Of course, he went back to the hamper. He shook out Mr. Brighton’s shorts and more photos of her fell to the floor. She might as well have been an angel. An alien. When he found the front door gaping, he wasn’t surprised. He moved like a dream, like the sand-specked breeze, the Schnapps spindling heat up from his stomach. He followed Mr. Brighton to the jetty.

“Let them in,” Mr. Brighton said, and Zed understood that it wasn’t aliens he’d been talking about. It wasn’t aliens that made him grab invisible hands from the water. That sent his neck craning back, scanning the skyline for helicopters. Mr. Brighton was rattling through a memory. They weren’t so different, the two of them—staring at the moon, looking for something they’d never get back.

When Mr. Brighton stooped, Zed stooped with him. They bellied forward, slick and amphibious, swallowing the stampede of shore break.

MASON BOYLES

Mason Boyles is a first-year PhD student in creative writing at FSU. He holds his MFA from UC Irvine, where he received the Weinberg and Schaeffer Fellowships for his fiction. His stories have appeared in publications such as Wisconsin Review, The Baltimore Review, Chariton Review, Black Dandy, and Driftwood Press. He is currently at work revising a novel about a family of strip-mining Brauchers.