“It kicks off with a catastrophic outbreak of red tide, but the plot is really about a young woman who is struggling to escape from her father, whom she’s been caring for since her mother abandoned them years ago,” Levey-Baker—whose first job was as editor of the since-shuttered Sarasota edition of Creative Loafing—told us. To celebrate the release, he’s shared the first chapter below.
Our story starts on the beachDead fish had been washing up on the beach off and on for years, but Cicely had never seen anything like this: dead fish everywhere. The bodies floated in on the crests of the gulf ’s small, foam-filled waves and piled up along the water’s edge. Mucus bubbled up between the fish’s gills as the waves knocked the corpses farther and farther up the beach, leaving them to bake in the punishing sunshine. Cicely could see the final limp kicks of the few fish still living, twisting in pain. As the final holdouts dropped from this life, one by one, the stacks of fish grew still. The air stung. It felt like Cicely’s eyes were being rubbed with sandpaper. Her whole face grew wet with tears. The stench from the dead fish crawled up inside her and scratched.
Up and down the beach, people fled. Teenagers squeezed their noses shut as they packed up their coolers and towels and bolted for the parking lot. A gray-haired woman launched a hacking cough as she waddled away from the water.
Cicely wanted to stay, wanted to reread her mother’s letter, but every line became a blurry mess. She slipped the pages back into the envelope in which it came, the envelope her mother had addressed to her at work. Cicely hadn’t seen or spoken to her in more than a decade—how had she known where she worked? The city in the upper left hand corner, Orlando, at least gave Cicely something to go by, a place to write to. But the PO box told her that her mother didn’t want her to find her. Or maybe she just didn’t want Cicely’s father to find her.
She folded the envelope in half and squeezed it into the back left pocket of her jeans. Sand clung to her legs as she ambled between the dunes, back to the path that wound through the mangroves that clustered between the beach and the bridge, the bridge near home. She wiped the tears from her face with the sleeve of her green men’s button-down shirt. What would she tell her father she had been doing down at the beach? It wasn’t like her to slip away without telling him. She couldn’t mention the letter—he would insist on reading it. But it was hers; it belonged to her.
The mangroves offered respite from the ludicrous heat. A hush fell as she traced the path among their shadows. Beachgoers sneaked back here to have sex, and every now and then she saw an empty beer bottle or a discarded condom sunk into the wet sand. Back here, away from the beach, closer to the bay side of the island, she could still smell the dead fish, but the stench wasn’t as sharp. Her path cut underneath the bridge that connected the Circle to the island to the north, where she and her father lived.
What did her mother look like? Cicely had no photos of her— those had all been lost the last time she and her father had been evicted—but Cicely could still summon the details of one taken in their old backyard. In that shot, her mother rested in a tire swing, her feet dangling down almost all the way to neat, freshly chopped grass. The high, curled blond hair, the freckled cheeks, the big shoulders—Cicely remembered all that. But her expression? Was her mother smiling in that photo? Cicely did not know.
She stepped over the battered-down No Trespassing fence that circled her lot. The home stood two stories tall, unfinished and still wrapped in plastic, with hollow spots for doors and windows. The man downtown who owned the property was known to his tenants simply as the Owner. According to the story Cicely heard, when everything collapsed, he bought up all the abandoned half-built homes in the area and started illegally renting them out. Cicely’s friend Delanna—who also rented from the Owner—had once pointed out the skyscraper that was supposedly his, but neither of them had ever seen him.
Cicely dealt only with one of his lieutenants, known for his red bandanna and the baby blue box cutter he wore in his belt. He drove around to all the homes at the start of each month to collect the rent.
The rent. The surprise of her mother’s letter had made her forget about it. Cicely’s father lived with her, but she alone paid their way. For a couple years, Cicely never missed a payment, but last month she caught strep throat and the walk-in clinic had sucked up most of her savings. Now she owed for last month, plus this month, plus interest—almost a thousand dollars. She had no clue how she’d get the cash in the next ten days, before the man with the box cutter was due to drop in again, and she didn’t know what to expect if she couldn’t come up with the loot. Delanna told her tales about what happened to tenants in arrears. First, they paid interest.
Then, if they still couldn’t pay, it wasn’t enough to just kick them out—they were beaten bloody and told to leave town.
Cicely entered the house through the hole where the double doors were supposed to hang. The room that was intended to be the parlor sat mostly bare. The foundation had been covered only halfway with tile, but Cicely had stolen a tarp from a nearby construction site and used it to cover the bare concrete, weighing it down at each corner with bricks, also stolen. The only furniture were their two chairs, empty. Cicely was perplexed. Had her father actually gone to the VFW to see if someone there might help them with the rent? Cicely had asked him to do so several times, but he never agreed. She felt a surge of relief. She didn’t have to hide the letter from him, for now, and maybe, for the first time in years, it wouldn’t be on her to find a solution to their problems.
In the bathroom, Cicely splashed water from a bucket onto her face. Even inside the house she could smell the dead fish from the beach, but the pain in her eyes had subsided and her throat no longer itched. She poured a glass of water from another bucket and gulped it down. She checked her watch. She needed to go to work.
This article appears in Jan 27 – Feb 2, 2022.