There was a small gap between the door to his bedroom and its frame that bothered him to no end. When he was lying in bed at night trying to fall asleep, the gap taunted him. The little sliver of light was like the little bit of his brain that was active and keeping him awake.

After a particularly frustrating sleepless night he decided to fix the door. Thinking it wise to start with what would be the simplest solution, he got a Phillips head screwdriver from the tool bag in the cabinet over the washing machine in his laundry room and began to adjust the hinges.

The gap was at the top of the side opposite the hinges. His hope was that he would be able to loosen the top hinge enough that the door would tilt and close it. The plan succeeded; at least it sort of succeeded. When he loosened the hinge, the door had tilted and closed the original gap, but in doing so had revealed a new gap on the side where the door met the frame.

To credit his patience, he spent at least twenty minutes loosening and tightening the hinge, trying to find the sweet spot that would hide both cracks. When both of his hands were cramping too badly to turn the screwdriver, he decided there was no sweet spot; the door just wasn’t wide enough to fill the doorway. Stumped but still determined, he sat down with his back to his desk and stared at the door, looking for the most suitable way to fix the problem.

The most obvious solution was to replace the door, but it was also the most difficult and the most expensive. He could take the door off and replace it with a quilt or a sheet, which would be less expensive and less difficult, but he worried about not being able to completely shut the door and about light and noise coming through from the outside. Maybe he could find a piece of wood to attach to the door that would fill the crack. Satisfied with that solution, he elected to take a break and have a snack.

He went into the kitchen, prepared a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, poured a tall glass of milk, and took them out to the back porch. It was early fall, the leaves on the high oak trees in his backyard were starting to change, and the sun was beginning its descent towards the rolling hills that made up his horizon. He could hear his neighbors’ children in the magnolia tree that sat on the edge of his property. They were pretending they were pirates and the tree was their ship.

“We’ll get that Peter Pan,” said Michael, their oldest son, from about three-quarters up the tree, “just wait until he gets a load of our secret weapon.”

“Arr! We’ll show him!” came the high-pitched pirate voice of Michael’s youngest brother Edward.

“Shhh! Here he comes…” said Michael.

Their middle brother Simon was coming around the corner from the front yard. He was wearing a pointed green hat and battling imaginary pirates as he went, occasionally diving away from attacks and rolling on the ground.

“Ah ha! You’re no match for Peter Pan! Is that the best you’ve got?! Ha!” He said as he went, shaming his imaginary enemies. Approaching the magnolia tree he called out to his brothers.

“Come out and face me Hook! It’s time to—“
Before he could finish his sentence he was struck directly in the face with the husk of a magnolia blossom.

“ARRRR!!! You’ll never defeat Hook and his pirates! Neverland belongs to me!! Fire ALL cannons!” said Michael, and Edward started to unload his stockpile of husks at his younger brother.

Simon had frozen after the first shot to the face, and took three more husks to the torso in rapid succession before erupting in tears and taking off towards the house. After some hushed debate the two older brothers must have agreed they had gone too far, as they emerged from the tree and walked slowly up to the house, hanging their heads as they went.

He laughed to himself and remembered what it was like to be young. Looking down at his snack he thought for a moment about how little had changed. He had been eating this same snack for as long as he could remember. He even still used the same routine for eating it that he had developed when he was a child.

He started by eating the four corners of the sandwich, turning it into a kind of square shaped cross. With the corners gone he was able to dip each of the remaining spokes in the glass of milk before eating them.

Eating all four spokes left him with that most glorious bite of the peanut butter and jelly, the center bite. This most sacred of bites he would place in the milk for exactly five seconds before eating, making sure to hold it under the surface so that both sides of the bread got drenched. Finally, with the sandwich gone, he would finish the milk in one long draught.

There had been some minor tweaks to the system throughout the years, mostly to account for the different soaking times associated with different types of bread, but the routine had basically stayed the same, and he saw no reason for it to change in the future. Some things were just perfect.

Satisfied with his snack, he felt reinvigorated and returned his focus to the gap. First he retrieved his measuring tape from the tool bag in the laundry room and took measurements of the crack. Then he went out to the garage and starting searching for a suitable piece of wood.

It had been months since he had been in the garage for any reason other than to retrieve bottled water from the fridge or meat from the freezer, and it surprised him to see all the things he had forgotten about. There were two broken lawnmowers, a weed eater that he had only used once, several old bikes with flat tires, and all sorts of things in old mason jars that had been there when he had bought the house. Everything was covered in a thick coat of dust, and cobwebs were everywhere cobwebs could be.

After taking a few minutes to walk around and take stock of all the things that had been left here to die, he took the handsaw from it’s spot on the pegboard beside the refrigerator and a two by four that was resting against the door frame and went back outside.

The handsaw was dull, the wood was old and warped, and he was trying to cut a sliver of wood just over an inch wide. After trying about a dozen different grips and saw angles, he decided it was impossible to hold the wood and saw it at the same time. He was considering giving up when he remembered the vice in the garage. 

Even with the aid of the vice, he cut six different slivers before he got one that worked.

Determined to finish the project, he went back to the garage and got some rusty wood screws from one of the mason jars and the twenty-year-old power drill his father had passed down to him as a housewarming gift. He had partly thought it was a joke, and he was a little bit surprised when the drill actually worked. He attached the freshly cut sliver with three of the wood screws, driving them flush with the edge of the wood, and closed the door to check his handiwork.

There was a small place at the very top where the sliver rubbed the frame. It wasn’t all that noticeable, but it did make the door stick just a little bit when it was opened or closed. He thought about leaving it, he had already been working on this for hours and it was basically finished, but he knew it would bother him every time he used the door, so he went to the laundry room to look for sandpaper.

With the corner sanded and the door closing smoothly and completely, he allowed himself to feel satisfied with his work. After returning the tools to the garage, he went to the kitchen to make dinner. He had started pot roast in his crockpot that morning, so all he had to do was steam vegetables in the microwave and cut some bread and his dinner was ready.

He poured a beer and took his meal into the living room. While he ate he watched the evening news. Scientists had developed a revolutionary new cancer treatment that equipped leukemia patient’s white blood cells with a specially modified strain of HIV.

He spent the rest of the night flipping back and forth between a baseball game and the various sitcoms and late-night shows he watched. When he found himself dozing, he went upstairs, brushed and flossed his teeth, and got into bed. For the next few hours, as he tried unsuccessfully to fall asleep, there was one thought that kept running through his head.

The Gap

At 6:15 on the second Monday morning in September, Lisa Stanhope woke up and left her house to hang signs advertising her sister-in-law's yard sale. Lisa had been given the day off after working overtime on both the Friday and Saturday before. Marcy, her younger brother Jackie's wife, was eight months pregnant with their first child. Neither of them let on, but Lisa knew money had gotten tight and would only get tighter once the baby was born, so she had volunteered to organize the yard sale to help them raise some extra money. 

She showered, got dressed, ate a simple breakfast- half a cantaloupe and a bowl of oatmeal, and left her house. Before hanging any signs, she stopped at the Citgo station on the corner of Church Drive and Bethesda Road. As she filled her gas tank, the smell of the gas fumes sparked her memory. She had loved the smell of gas ever since she was a little girl. She remembered sitting in the back of her family's great blue Chevrolet Nomad station wagon while her father filled the tank. He used to whistle while the gas pumped. To this day, more than thirty years later, whenever she smelled gas fumes she thought of her father's whistling. 

Once the tank was full, she took a roll of scotch tape and two of the yard-sale signs out of the backseat and went into the store to buy a cup of coffee. As she was leaving, she taped the two signs on the windows of the gas station. When she turned on her car, the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun" was playing on the radio. It reminded her of how her bed had felt that morning, the light coming through her window, the softness of the jersey knit sheets underneath her, the warmth that came from her own beating heart and breathing lungs, caught and wrapped into a cocoon around her by the comforter she could now faintly feel against her cheek. She wished she was still there.

It wasn't that she minded being up early. In fact, she enjoyed the morning. It was slower and quieter than the other parts of the day, and people tended to be nicer. -maybe not nicer, she thought, but at least more subdued. She guessed it was probably because their brains were still half-asleep, only just awake enough to perform the very minimum it would take to accomplish whatever it was that had gotten them out of bed in the first place. Or was it that she wasn't yet awake enough to care to analyze their behavior and judge them for it?

There were also those bright, chipper people who were most awake in the morning. These self-proclaimed "morning people" were always beaming early in the day, talking about how great it felt outside, telling you about the birds they had heard singing as they left their house that morning, about how beautiful the sunrise they had woken up at 5:30 to see had been. Their enthusiasm tended to wane as the day went on--although one of her workmates, Rodrigo, held on to his throughout the entire day. If she was honest with herself--which was easier for her in the early hours--she couldn't deny that she despised Rodrigo for his endless positivity. She felt like he was rubbing her face in how much happier and more enjoyable his life was than hers. That, or he was showing off how much better he was than her at pretending to be happy. Either way, she couldn't help but roll her eyes whenever she heard his buoyant, brassy voice.

The light turned green, and she started forward across Church St. As her attention was drawn out of her own thoughts and back into the world around her it occurred to her that she might be wrong about Rodrigo. Maybe his positivity was his way of coping with his own worries. Maybe it was his way of taking control over his life, his way of asserting himself. No matter what life threw at him, he could always choose to respond positively. He could always choose to project optimism. Her stomach turned and she became oddly conscious of her hands on the steering wheel as it dawned on her that she was jealous of him. Why couldn't she stay positive like that? Why did her problems always seem to weigh her down? She told herself that she would try to do better with Rodrigo; maybe she could learn from him. Then she remembered his voice and she knew that she would not be able to keep her promise.

The next place she stopped was at the corner of Bethesda and Martin Lane. The plot of land was a little more than an acre, bound by Walker's Creek on the north and Martin Lane on the south. A dense patch of woods formed the eastern border of the lot and Bethesda ran along the west. She knew the large, forest green, antebellum-era house that stood in the center of the lot had been empty for at least two years. The exterior paint was quickly losing its grip; flakes littered the ground all around, leaving in their places empty spots of wall that faintly reminded her of freckles. There was a small, drained pond to the north of the house just above the creek and a tin-roofed barn was gradually rusting away in the backyard. With her coffee in her right hand and the signs in her left, she hopped out and walked over to the wooden telephone pole just beside the intersection. Bethesda was one of the major arteries of the area, and she felt confident that people would see the sign. 

She was in front of the pole when she realized she had brought her coffee instead of the staple gun. She couldn't help but laugh at herself as she went to retrieve it; she was always forgetting little things like that. Once, a few years before, she had driven two hours to a boutique in Fleming, hoping to return a dress she had been given as a gift. It was only after walking into the store that she realized she had left the dress back at her house. Her husband, Jeff, had laughed himself to tears when she had told him what had happened. It was, much to her chagrin, still one of his favorite stories to tell.

She sat her coffee on the roof, opened the back door, and picked up the staple gun off of the backseat. Once she got back to the telephone pole, she positioned the sign about six and a half feet high and put a staple in both the top-left and top-right corners, straining to reach on her tip-toes. As she was stapling the bottom-right corner a loud scraping noise behind her startled her. She turned to look and was blinded by a flash of white light.

Michael Jones woke up at 6:30, thirty minutes earlier than usual. His head throbbed. He had gotten, at the very most, three hours of sleep. Stumbling into the kitchen, he filled a glass of water and drank it down without drawing the cup from his lips. After repeating this two more times, he went into the bathroom and pissed for what felt to him like three full minutes but what was in fact a still impressive forty-two seconds. Barely alert enough to be considered half-awake, he returned to bed.

The next time he opened his eyes it was 7:00. He jumped out of bed and rushed to get dressed. There was no time to shower or brush his teeth. He could get breakfast when he got to work. Once dressed, he pulled a wooden box from underneath his nightstand and carried it out into the living room. He sat down on the couch and opened it on the coffee table. There was a small plastic bottle, a baggy of light brown powder, a small mirror, and an old hotel keycard. He took out the bottle and the baggy of powder. 

The top of the bottle was shaped like the point of a bullet, and that's what the device was called. There was a hole in the tip that led to a small chamber. A wheel on the side controlled a barrier that connected the chamber to the main emptiness of the bottle. He unscrewed the top, emptied the powder into the bottle, replaced the top, turned it upside down, gave it nine quick flicks with his index finger, and turned the wheel. When he did, a pinch of the powder fell into the bottom chamber of the bullet-shaped top. Covering his left nostril, he held it up to his right and sniffed. The bitter, brown powder in the bottom chamber rushed into his nose. He closed his eyes and let the drug wash over him. The pain in his head melted into a warmth that radiated through and invigorated his whole body. He repeated the process with his left nostril, again closing his eyes and tilted his head upwards. 

For a moment, time seemed to stop and he hung suspended on the peak of a soft, ecstatic pulse. Once he came back to himself, he put the bottle back into the box, returned it to its place in his nightstand, locked the front door, and left out the back.

The drive from his apartment to the convenience store where he worked took thirty minutes. He was supposed to be there at 7:45. Local construction crews and landscaping teams came to the store for breakfast each morning around eight, and he needed to be there to run the cash register so his boss, the store's overstressed and overweight, constantly red-in-the face owner, Rick, could prepare sausage and cheese biscuits and fried bologna sandwiches for them. Michael could smell the grease, hear the crude jokes the laborers told everyday, see Rick's stubby fingers wrapping biscuits in their aluminum foil wrappers. It was all repulsive to him. In no mood to be yelled at, and having already been chided for his lateness in the mornings, he sped through traffic, weaving in and out of the other commuters.

The combination of his exhaustion, the low-quality heroin, and the adrenaline from the speed he was driving sent his mind racing. He couldn't keep himself from thinking about all the things that he normally tried to keep himself from thinking about. He couldn't hold them back, and he couldn't find any way to distract himself from them. He thought about his parents. He hadn't talked to them since he stormed out of their house four months ago when they had confronted him about his drug use. He knew they hadn't deserved to be treated the way he had treated them, he knew they were worried about him and wanted to help him. He also knew that he would never accept it. He knew that he didn't want it. He thought about his girlfriend. They had fought last night and he had left angry. He couldn't remember now what had started the fight or even what it had been about, but he did remember the look on her face and how she had gone silent after he had pulled the bullet from his pocket and taken a hit.

Did they really think he didn't know how destructive his decisions were? Did they not understand that that was the whole point? That he didn't want any recovery, any return to normalcy? Normalcy is what had driven him here in the first place. All those self-righteous self-lovers with their inflated egos and distorted realities. No. He couldn't stand normalcy without heroin and normalcy couldn't seem to stand him with it. What was the point? To work in a dead-end job so he could afford his piece of shit apartment? To enjoy his life with his girlfriend and family who saw him as a degenerate? He couldn't take it anymore. He had to take action. He had to change something. He turned up the radio (the finale of the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun"), closed his eyes, and pushed the throttle to the floor.

Tom Mayfield's alarm went off at 7:15. His wife Sarah got up to take a shower. Though he was completely awake, he lay motionless in bed with his eyes closed, listening--to the overhead fan, to his own breath, and finally to the shower once it turned on. Rolling over on his back and stretching his arms and legs wide, he felt the warm spot where his wife had been sleeping. The shower turned off, and he opened his eyes. Just as he did a loud squelch erupted from the handheld radio on his nightstand.

"10-26, we've got a report of an accident at the corner of Bethesda and Martin." The dispatcher's voice shook every ounce of sleep from Tom's mind. His house was only three hundred yards from the accident.

He got dressed, strapped the radio to his belt, grabbed his extrication glasses off the kitchen table, and left the house. He could see the wreck as soon as he pulled out of his driveway. There was a crumpled black sedan sitting in front of one of the two oak trees that stood along the driveway of the old, empty, house on the corner of Bethesda and Martin. The way the roof was collapsed meant that the car had either somersaulted into the tree or skidded on its nose into it. A silver sedan was parked in the pull-through behind the tree.

Passing the house on the opposite corner, he noticed two long skid marks on the side of the' driveway. It looked like the driver had hit the side and been thrown into the air-. The next set of tire marks didn't come until he had crossed Martin. He figured that the impact of the landing must have caused the back end to rise up, throwing the roof of the car into the tree.

His adrenaline was already pumping as he turned into the driveway. It calmed him, helped him to focus. Time seemed to slow down. Looking to his right as he pulled in he saw a woman's body lying in the ditch a few feet away. There was a staple gun and stray papers littered around the body. Her head was lying at least twenty feet further down the ditch. The lower jaw was missing, and the contents of her skull strewn across the grass. Trying to piece things together, he noticed blood on the post of the stop sign. She must have been hit by the car and thrown into the stop sign. He knew there was nothing he could do for her, so he focused his attention on the black sedan. He parked the truck, jumped out, retrieved the acetylene torch from the toolbox in the bed of his truck, and raced to the car.

As he got closer, he could see movement behind the driver's window. He could feel his heart pounding behind his ears. Once he got close enough, he let the driver know he was there and assured them that he was going to get them out. There was no response. The spastic, uncontrolled nature of the driver's movements made Tom suspect brain trauma. During his EMT training, he had been taught about a concept known as "The Golden Hour." Studies had shown that in cases of extreme trauma patients' survival rates took a nosedive if they weren't in the hands of a surgeon within the first hour after injury. The body, it seems, doesn't settle in to its new mangled state immediately.

To get the driver out, he would have to remove the roof of the car. There were six joints that connected the roof to the frame. As he started cutting the first joint, he checked his watch. 7:32. He figured the wreck had occurred around 7:20, which left 48 minutes in the golden hour. It took him two minute and fifteen seconds to cut through the first joint. Before he started the second, he called into his radio.

"Dispatch this is 1014, we're gonna need helicopter evac for this accident at Bethesda and Martin."

"10-4 1014, we'll get them headed your way."

Tom put the radio back on his belt and got back to cutting. The second joint took him longer than the first. The third went faster than both of the first two. After finishing the first three, he rushed to the other side of the vehicle. Before he relit the torch, he checked his watch. 7:38, 42 minutes left in the golden hour.

He focused on cutting the remaining three joints as fast as he could. Sweat poured off of him as the heat from the torch rose up in his face. He finished the last joint, put the torch down, and hurriedly removed the roof. The driver was the only person inside, and he was in bad shape. As Tom climbed into the car to help him, he took stock of the injuries he could see. Both femurs had snapped and were protruding from the thighs, there were four visible fractures in his skull, and based on the contour of his back he had several broken vertebrae. He was unconscious, but his arms were twitching at his sides, a result of all the pressure on his brain. Tom stood in the seat behind him, grabbed him under the arms, and hoisted him out of the car. He could smell the metallic, chalky powder from the airbag, and the combination of it and the sweat from his brow made his eyes burn. Once he got the driver out of the car, he strapped him to a stretcher and checked his watch. 7:46, 34 minutes left in the golden hour.

The helicopter should get here any minute, he thought. It should take around ten minutes to get to the hospital, and maybe another five to get to an operating table. That leaves about twenty minutes in the Golden Hour. He knew the driver's chance of survival was slim, but he also knew better than to doubt modern medicine. He had seen too many unbelievable recoveries first-hand; he knew the kinds of miracles that happened every day.

An ambulance arrived and two paramedics got out. One immediately walked over to the driver and started assessing his injuries. The other went to talk with Tom's supervisor.

"Where is the helicopter? Seems like it should be here by now." Tom asked Terry, a fellow volunteer, after a few minutes had passed.

"Paramedics must have cancelled it." The paramedics were the highest authority on scene, and had the final say on the course of action.

"Really?" Tom replied, the leftover adrenaline fueling his surprise. "Sure, the guy's in bad shape. But you can't tell me you haven't seen seen people worse off come out the other side."

Terry shrugged his shoulders, "Apparently they disagreed."

Tom stood and watched with the other volunteers. He watched as the helicopter didn't come. He watched as the paramedics loaded the driver into the ambulance and pulled away, headed for the hospital, at least twenty-five minutes away. As they were leaving, he checked his watch. 7:56, 24 minutes left in the golden hour. And what about 8 o'clock traffic?

He loaded up the torch, got in his truck, and drove back to his house. He always felt an odd tension walking into his house after working an accident. The calming, comfortable feeling of arriving home clashed sharply with the adrenaline-fueled, chaotic, accident scenes. He spent a few minutes petting his dog, then went back to the bedroom and took a hot shower. There was a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. His couldn't stop thinking about the paramedic who cancelled the helicopter. He wondered if he would have made the same decision. If he even could have. His role as a volunteer firefighter and EMT was simple, keep patients alive and do your best to stabilize them until the paramedics arrive. While it would have been nice to get paid, a lot of other pressures come along with that. A paycheck meant a business, and a business meant a bottom line. How did it affect the ambulance company's bottom line when a helicopter was called in? Did they forfeit their wages? Did they split them? If they did, wouldn't that give the ambulance company an incentive not to call in helicopters? They couldn't possibly ask the paramedics to weigh that incentive against a person's chance of survival, could they?

It all seemed so wrong, so broken, and in that moment he honestly wished there was something he could do about it. What could possibly be done? As long as it cost money to provide healthcare there would be issues like this, and as long as it took money to build hospitals and buy equipment and research treatments and pay doctors it would always cost money to provide healthcare. As the water beat down on him, a calmer, quieter, voice came into his mind. It whispered that he shouldn't worry about it, that it was wiser to do nothing because there was nothing that could be done. It reassured him that his life would go on as usual, that the world would keep spinning, that this window into one of the mean realities of life would close and he would resume his everyday routine. It reminded him that there had always been and would always be things that were broken, that some things were out of his control, that some things he just had to accept. It comforted him. It made him feel like he was a child, powerless in a world too big and too mean to stand up to.

What it didn't mention-what Tom refused to see-was that it was this acceptance, this willingness to ignore the things that stirred his conscience into a rage, this desire to listen to the voice that comforts and subdue the voice that enrages, this same need, multiplied millions of times over by people in every corner of the world who saw and knew and did not act, that kept the world broken, that enabled evil to fester and spread.

 He turned off the shower and dried himself off. After he shaved he stood and looked at himself in the mirror, staring at his reflection. As he looked he relaxed his eyes. His reflection blurred. He stood and stared intently, focusing not on himself or the reflection, but on the glass of the mirror itself. As he watched, his reflection slowly began to fade. Now he was in front of the wall, now its pale gold wallpaper shone through him, now the wall was all he could see. With a clear, calm, mind he got dressed and ate the breakfast his wife had left him on the kitchen counter--three pancakes, two slices of bacon, and a handful of fresh blueberries. When he finished, he turned off the lights and walked out the back door. The blue-green glow from the clock on the microwave read 8:25. The golden hour had passed.

The Golden Hour

There were a few seagulls squawking on the porch outside my window. My mouth was dry and I could feel a throb in the back of my head from dehydration. The room's blinds fortunately blocked out all the light from outside. My sleep was such that, not yet having checked my phone or watch, it was impossible to tell whether it was still early or had already passed into mid-morning. I listened to the tide behind the seagull's cries and decided it didn't really matter.

Dauphin Island is a small, narrow island located in the Mobile Bay on Alabama's Gulf Coast. Spanish explorer Alonzo Pineda was technically the first European to discover it, but he was quick to move on. The French eventually settled it, first naming it Isle du Massacre after mistaking the mass grave mounds of the natives for some kind of vicious tribal massacre, and later changing the name to Dauphin in honor of a son of Louis XIV. The island served an integral role in trade, as the shallow depth of the Mobile Bay meant smaller boats had to carry cargo out to Dauphin Island where larger ships could pick them up. It was also an important strategic position, and Fort Gaines, built in the early 1800's, is still a fixture on the island.

The Wikipedia page, which I read as I waited for my gas to pump on the drive down from Huntsville, also talked about Dauphin Island's unique wildlife situation. It turns out that the island is the first land encountered by a large variety of birds as they migrate North in the spring, and as such is used as a sort of rest stop. The island's use in trade having diminished with the dredging of a channel in the bay, the exotic birds and quiet beaches eventually led to a split focus on research and tourism. The Eastern half of the island is home to wildlife preserves, an estuariam, and Fort Gaines; the Western half is populated with mostly beach houses and a couple of high-rise condominiums.

It's an eerie place. At the widest point it's less than two miles across, and the majority is less than a mile. It feels like the ocean could swallow it with a big wave at any time, yet- maybe in service to the birds -it allows the island to keep its head just above sea level. Adding to the oddness is the fact that all along the ocean's horizon, separated by about two hand lengths (if said hands are raised in front of your face while standing on the beach with your feet in the wet sand where the waves reverse course and retreat) are massive oil and natural gas rigs. Goliaths of human ingenuity and audacity, the rigs stand like sentinels, watching over the island, a constant reminder of the world's increasing complexity and the staggering reach of humanity. Somehow, the rigs didn't seem unnatural. In fact, the first thing I thought of were giant mosquitoes, with their long sucking tubes drawing oil from the Earth. Whether it was a good idea for people to relate to the Earth like a mosquito relates to a person was a question that seemed important. What if the Earth related to us as we relate to mosquitoes, with poisons and slaps? What if it already did?

Opening my eyes and getting out of bed, I started to remember the dream I had just awoken from. I had been on the island, and it was just as it was when I had explored it the day before. This was unusual. Normally my dreams were set in imagined places that were amalgamations of other place I had been or seen. What was more odd was that I was conscious of this while I was dreaming. I could remember thinking how weird it was that this was the real Dauphin Island, a thought that seems to imply I already knew I was in a dream, although I never consciously made that realization. In the dream I had been on the Eastern half of the island, alone at dusk in one of the wildlife preserves. At the base of a tree just in front of me stood a massive brown and white osprey. It's bright yellow eyes stared back at me for a few seconds before it twisted its neck and turned to walk away from me. After a few steps it stopped and turned to look at me again. It made a little squawk and twisted its neck around again as if telling me to hurry up, and I started to follow.

Once it was sure I was following it took off and flew in front of me. Though no more than ten minutes had passed in the dream, the sky was now dark and filled with stars. The moon was full and the osprey was easy to follow. As the trees started to thin out, I realized the bird was leading me toward Fort Gaines.

When I broke the tree line, the osprey landed in front of me. The second its talons touched the ground they become bare human feet. Where the osprey had been there now stood a beautiful Native American woman. Her long black hair flowed over her shoulders, flitting this way and that as if there were a breeze, which there wasn't. Her eyes, now a rich shade of brown, stared at me with the same piercing quality as the Osprey's had. Just as I remembered my voice she raised a finger to her lips and gestured for me to follow her with the same twist of the neck the osprey had used earlier.

She led me along the southernmost wall of Fort Gaines, dragging her hand along the stones as she walked. About halfway along the wall she stopped and knelt down. On the ground beside the wall was a small wooden trapdoor. I was wondering how I hadn't seen the trapdoor earlier when she lifted it open and motioned for me to climb down, and seeing no other choice, I did. The ladder led to a long, unlit stone hallway. I looked back up just in time to get one more look at the woman's eyes before the trapdoor slammed shut and I awoke.

I could smell bacon from the hallway as I walked down the hall toward the kitchen. Expecting the smell to be nothing more than a memory, I was pleasantly surprised to find two pieces waiting for me beside the stove. There was a note sitting on the counter beside the bacon. 

"Headed into Mobile to ride out the storm. Call us when you wake up and we'll tell you where to meet us. -M" M stood for Mike. We had been friends since undergrad, and he was the best man in Luke's wedding, which was the whole reason we were in Dauphin Island to begin with. 

In the haze of my hangover I had forgotten about the storm. I turned on the TV to the weather and picked up my cellphone, which I had thought was in my pants pocket in my bedroom. There was a missed call from Jack (which had really been me calling myself from Jack's phone in an effort to locate mine the night before), a notification that the Braves had beaten the Giants 4-2 (Tim Hudson got the win with a 2-inning save coming from Huntsville native Craig Kimbrel), and a message from Mike's girlfriend Lindsey that said pretty much the same thing as the note but with more exclamation points.

"Tropical Storm Henrietta is expected to hit Dauphin Island in the next hour, and all residents are advised to take cover." The weatherman stood in front of a radar map of the island. The edges of the storm were just starting to approach the island, and I decided there was plenty of time for me to get across the bridge to the mainland.

I could see the storm rolling in by the time I had finished eating. Around the house the sky was still a light shade of grey, but out around the oilrigs it was nearly black. The wind slapped against the sides of the house and swirled around the stilts that held it up. It surprised me how fast the storm moved in. By the time I had showered and gotten dressed it had started raining and the dark grey clouds had crept within a few hundred yards of the house.

It took me longer to leave than I would have liked. My phone battery was nearly dead, and I opted to let it charge for a few minutes before leaving. The rain was already coming down in nearly horizontal sheets of big, heavy, drops by the time I started the car and pulled out of the driveway. My grandmother had been kind enough to let me use her car for the trip. I normally rode an old Honda motorcycle, and I was thankful not to have to be on it right then. The car was a 1992 Buick LeSabre. It was in great shape for its age. Grandma hadn't driven it in years, and the odometer clocked in at a youthful 52,302 miles. The problem was the roads. The violent weather patterns and gradually climbing ocean meant the island was in a permanent state of semi-flood. There were fifty-yard stretches of two-inch deep water on the roadway, and a heavy rain could block off whole portions of the island. Though it was in good mechanical condition, the LeSabre sported the same bald tires that had been on it the last time my grandmother had driven it. As I drove I paid close attention to the feel of the tires, waiting for the familiar release of a hydroplane and gently releasing the throttle when it came.

Leaving the beach area and entering the more heavily wooded center of the island, I started to question my decision to leave the house. The sky was dark and I couldn't see fifteen feet in front of me due to the rain. To my sides I could see the large trees that lined the road swaying violently in the wind, and this more than anything else made me anxious. I turned on the radio and found the weather announcements.

"-Recommend remaining inside your homes and away from any windows until the storm passes." I turned the radio off.

I was two hundred yards or so from the turn to the bridge, and the rain had slowed temporarily. As I stopped at the stop sign I noticed an osprey sitting on the sign to the seafood store just across the street. It seemed to be looking right at me, and I found myself looking back at it, wondering how the wind and rain didn't seem to bother it. I was easing off the brake when the bird twisted its neck back, just as the one in my dream had done. Against my better judgment, and looking back on it, in some odd way feeling like I had no choice, I followed the bird straight across the intersection and towards Fort Gaines.

I'm not normally a superstitious person. I think people naturally make connections because that's how our brains operate, constantly receiving diverse inputs and connecting them to form a coherent whole. One side effect of this mode of operation is a tendency to see connections that aren't there or emphasize connections more than they deserve. For some reason though, this osprey brought out a kind of primal superstition in me that I couldn't resist. The resemblance to the bird in my dream and the already odd nature of that dream mixed with the fact that the rain had taken a brief break to catch its breath had me feeling like some ancient Greek hero called upon by the gods and destined for the a most calamitous adventure. I recognized the absurdity of what I was doing, but I kept on driving, watching the osprey soar through the rain the whole way.

As we got closer to the fort the rain came down harder. Somehow I never lost sight of the bird. It was as if it flew outside the rain and had a light that shone from its breast. When it got to the fort, it turned and headed towards the south wall. I pulled the car to the side of the road and set out to follow it on foot. The rain and wind stung my eyes and I struggled to shield myself as I walked. For a brief second I took my eyes off the great bird to watch my steps, and when I looked back up it was gone. Immediately my mind bombarded me with reason. What did you expect? You were going to follow this bird somewhere and it was going to turn into a beautiful woman, is that it? And if that had somehow miraculously happened, then what? You and you're beautiful, silent, companion would still be stranded on an island in a storm.

As if in protest against the sting of my own logic, I decided to retrace the path I had walked in my dream. I walked down the south wall, tracing the wall with my fingertips as my guide had in the dream. When I reached the place that my memory told me was the location of the trapdoor I stopped. Scanning the ground around me made it clear that there was no trapdoor in sight, only high grass and old stone. But there was something. Against the south wall, about fifteen feet in front of me there was what looked like a bundle of clothes.

She wasn't more than five, and when I got to her she couldn't do anything but cry and tremble in the cold. Adrenaline pumping in my veins, I picked her up.

"Everything is going to be okay. I'm going to help you." I told her as I held her against my chest.
By the time I made it back to the car, the girl had stopped crying and had gone silent. I put her in the front seat and started the car. I asked her who she was and where parents were, but she just sat and looked at me as if she couldn't understand what I was saying or else had forgotten that she could respond. I decided my best move was to go to the police station; I just hoped it hadn't been evacuated already.

I left the radio off and listened to the storm beat down on the hood of the car. As I left the gravel lot that surrounded the fort and started down the road back to town, the girl slipped her seatbelt off and slid over next to me, resting her head on my side. I could feel her breathing slow down, and listening to it helped me slow down my heart rate. The storm outside was just gathering strength, but in that car at that moment the worst had already passed.

I was relieved to see the lights on when I got there. I picked the girl up and carried her inside. As I walked in a young couple jumped up and ran towards me.

"Oh my God! Sarah! You found her! Are you okay sweetie? Everything's going to be okay now. I've got you," the woman, a brunette with rain-soaked hair and tear-drenched cheeks, said in a flush of hysterics as she took the child from my arms. The father, a fit, blond, man with thinning hair, threw his arms around me in a relieved hug then shook my hand and thanked me before hugging me again and turning to embrace his family.

An officer approached and shook my hand. "Thank God you found her. I've had the rest of our guys looking since her parents came in. Where was she?" Knowing I didn't have a good reason for being where I was, I decided to make one up.

"I found her on the south side of the fort. I'm a nature photographer and I was down there trying to get some pictures of the fort in the storm. Just lucky I saw her, I guess." While technically a lie, the story had a tinge of truth to it as I had in fact sold a few of my nature photographs to some relatively well-known periodicals in the not-so-distant past.

"Well, lucky works just fine for me. Thanks again." He said before shaking my hand a second time and excusing himself to go call the rest of the search off.

My head was spinning, and I decided to slip out of the station before either the parents or the officer turned their attention back my way. I sat in the parking lot for a few minutes, just trying to process the events of the day. As much as I tried, there was no way to explain it in a way that would satisfy my reason. What, you're trying to tell me that a bird from your dream appeared in the real world and led you to a lost little girl? Do you really believe that? And the truth was that I didn't. It didn't make sense, and I wasn't willing to accept the supernatural explanation that was the only one I could come up with. Wet, tired, and stretched far beyond my mental comfort zone, I decided that the best remedy would be a shower and a few drinks with my friends in Mobile. Having a concrete plan of my own design helped calm my mind, and I listened intently to the rain on my windshield and the sound of the tires on the road. As I crossed the bridge I looked out the passenger's side window over the eastern half of the channel. Just for a second, far out and high above the water, I saw a large brown and white osprey soaring gracefully, untouched by the storm.

The Osprey

It hadn't been as painful as I'd expected. My assumption was that the pain you experienced at the moment of your death would be a function of the amount of good you'd done in your life, but that didn't seem to be the case. In truth there was no pain at all, just a high intensity shaking followed by a profound lightness that I assume was the result of no longer carrying around my old, heavy, body.

It took very little time for me to realize that the attempts I'd made at planning while I'd been alive would be completely useless now that I was actually dead. My senses had left me as soon as my body had, and all that remained was the awareness that the aspect of myself that remained when you subtracted away my body did, in fact, still remain. I had no concept of motion or place and no control over anything at all. I just, plain and simple, was.

I spent some time laughing at myself for having been so foolish as to think that the afterlife would be anything like what was described in stories or shown in art. It was one of those things, when we're alive, we can't help but imagine the experience of being dead as at least in some ways similar to being alive, but once we're dead, there's no imagining that death has anything in common with life.

"I'm glad to see you've still got your sense of humor."

The voice spoke from the same place that my own internal monologue came from, which was an unbelievably odd and uncomfortable feeling.

"I've got to be honest with you, I got my fair share of entertainment watching you plan this plan of yours, and even more watching you do all the amazingly awful things you did to earn your ticket to Hell. That kind of commitment really is admirable, even if it was completely misguided."

As the voice spoke a new sensation started to arise in my awareness. The closest thing I could compare it to would be nausea, only it was pleasurable. As the feeling expanded, what I felt as myself expanded with it. Then there was a second voice.

"Ah but mistakes made with noble intentions, when seen from a compassionate angle, though still a tragic and awful thing for the victims, are equally as tragic and awful for the doer, and are less a result of some inherent defect as they are of the poor way in which the nature of existence is presented to a person."

This voice was an immediate comfort to me, but the comfort was short-lived. As the voice spoke other voices began to arise in my consciousness. Too many voices for me to possibly process. The screams and cries of victims, the droning buzz of news anchors, the questions of children, the assertions of adults, the lies of criminals, the deceits of the powerful, the whimpers of the hungry; they all flooded me and overwhelmed my understanding.

I had no way of blocking them out, no ears to cover, and though I tried to parse them the best I could, struggling to hold on to my own voice in the infinity of voices that now occupied its place, in time I had no choice but to let go, to let them wash over me.

As I surrendered to the cacophony, it became less of an assault. I began to hear singing and music, the lullabies of parents, the instruction of teachers, the laughter of children. Finally they all gently blended together into a quiet, joyful, whisper.

The words had no sooner hit my ears than I felt my newly expanded consciousness contracting. The voices vanished and the only sound I heard was a high-pitched rushing sound, like a balloon having the air let out of it. It grew louder and louder until I could feel the pain in my head.

"Head! There's his head. He's almost out, just give me one more good push."

Forked Logic

A man has lived his whole life sinfully, with the intent of going to hell and killing Satan. He has just died.

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