The Salmon Son

an excerpt

It’s one of those blistering, sticky July nights when even the shadowed clouds of early morning

fail to quell the pervasive dampness. Like a needy lover, the moisture clings possessively to the air, smothering it. It’s the type of summer night that sear the man’s memories of childhood, when the house was still as if holding its breath—that stillness broken only by the rattling of the old box fan echoing against the bedroom walls and the droning of the cicadas in the old maple outside his window.

Through the large windows of the MacGregor’s Gas and Convenience, he’s momentarily transfixed by the solitary streetlamp shining above the tiny parking lot. Its light ripples and dances under the onslaught of muggy heat, rupturing the darkness through a mass of skeletal firs that mark the outer boundary of town. They are the same smudged windows. The same rusted fuel pumps. The same tired vegetation. Here, the past adheres to everything, like barnacles to the shell of time.

He grabs a pack of red licorice. It’s one of the few things his stomach can tolerate. These recent weeks sustained only on licorice, flat ginger ale, and du Maurier Signatures. He’s surprised by the queue of people waiting to pay until he remembers it’s tourist season. It’s not the town itself that’s the attraction, but the ocean resorts three hours further east. The town benefits and sustains itself by being the last small dot on the map where one can refuel, use a payphone, or relieve their bladder—the restroom economy of eastern Canada.

The cashier looks over the glasses perched lopsidedly at the tip of her hooked nose, stray grey hairs pasted to her forehead. He knows her, of course, even a decade later. She’s still here. Where else would she go? Her eyes study him as if seeking an answer to a question she’s too timid to pose. The man knows what she’s thinking—there’s something about his features. And then there it is, the flicker of recognition. He has been outed—again.