Stone's Throw 2023

Hen’s mother died sick and screaming in her bed. She was eight when her mom began vomiting blood, 10 when she finally succumbed to the war inside her body. By contrast, when her father drunkenly shot himself in the garage six months later, she imagined he hadn’t felt a thing. That was as close to a peaceful death as she knew.

He snorted every few seconds and cleared his throat of loose debris. The wet growl that dropped from his mouth sounded like a woodchipper grinding down trash bags filled with jelly. The lump of fat that curled under his chin like a water balloon swelled each time he swallowed.

He’d been barely a teenager when it happened. They wouldn’t prosecute on something a juvenile had done more than a decade ago. Would it hurt his career? No. If anything, he’d be lauded for the huge donation and celebrated for acknowledging the childhood mistake.

And anyway, it wasn’t more than a bump, and that should’ve been the end of that.

But the guy was waiting for him outside the terminal, and Derrick felt like he’d stepped into that scene in The Long Good Friday where they stuff Bob Hoskins in a car, a pre-Remington Steele Pierce Brosnan turns around in the front, and you know the Hoskins character is going to die.

The house is muggy. Swamp air doesn’t have boundaries, it wafts in through windows and doorways; it rises through the floorboards. Edna sits, languid on the musty couch.

“I think he done shit hisself,” she says. “Stinks in there.”

He would frown and think and screw up his face and shake his head and even cry at the loss of a memory that he knew he had once possessed. He remembered, possibly, his Mama used to do the same, and he would search for her in his memory, the days bleeding together like spilt wine.

The kid doesn’t care about cooling off and settling in. As soon as she’s in her bathing suit, she runs along the deck, screaming to get on the boat. She wears the pink life vest with the characters from Frozen that Gramma Sharon bought at the local beach store. Laura follows behind, slathering her with sunscreen. Caro wriggles free, slick as an eel, as soon as the last dab is applied.

I think most men considered me a challenge: reel in the sea loving mariner, tame her, and make her your wife sort of thing. Only that’s not how it works. You can’t ‘domesticate’ a seafarer. They love the salty wind in their hair, the cool water against their skin, the sound of the waves crashing against the hull of their ship.