They called her Opal because of the scars. Whenever she surfaced, pale streaks crossed her back in long, trembling lines that glowed almost strangely in the morning light. The marks sat on her skin like old handwriting, each one left by a boat that never slowed in time. They looked like rivers drawn by an impatient hand, the kind that lead somewhere difficult and unforgettable.

The river smells like rot. Algae baked too long in the sun. Fish scales ground into mud. Even in October the air is thick enough to drink. The path down is narrow, palmetto fronds scratching bare arms, sand soft as flour beneath our shoes. Branches snap under Dan’s boots. Ellie’s sneakers scuff faster, more urgent. Mosquitoes rise in clouds, whining, relentless. We carry our brother in a Sterilite box, twenty quarts labeled neat in black marker, a body sifted into powder.

The storm had passed by morning, but the yard still held its weight. Leaves plastered the patio. Mud streaked the sliding doors. The pool behind Mrs. Langley’s house sat black and still, as if the water waited for someone brave enough to look inside it. Mama and I walked the stone path in silence. She carried her bucket. I carried the pump. Our clothes stuck to our skin, heavy with leftover damp from the night. We worked for people who lived close to the coast. Houses with white trim and blue shutt...

We often speak about the elements of resistance. About what is required to create a force for change. What incites that spark? What feeds that fire? We speak about hatred, violence, and oppression: fascist governments, rights stripped, suppression of speech, and the collective suffering of people. It’s easy to argue that resistance stems directly from our suffering. The antithesis of oppression. An opposing force to counteract the other.

The night I quit, the air clung to the toll plaza as if it wanted a ride north. Heat rose off the concrete. The fluorescent canopy washed everything pale. Bugs knocked themselves stupid against the lights and fell in a soft peppering onto the hood of the supervisor’s golf cart. In the far lanes, a semi rolled through without slowing, its diesel breath thick enough to taste. I sat in Lane 6, cash only, the booth no wider than my shoulders.

There is a specific archetype of the millennial poet, a figure of earnest conviction we recognize instantly. She is armed with a liberal arts degree, student debt, and the belief that her interior life is a subject of profound importance. She was taught in workshops that her voice matters, and she took it to heart.

The first time I heard the name Andrew, it came through a kitchen radio with the hiss turned up. I stood barefoot on cool tile, watching my aunt wrap plates in dish towels, as if glass could be persuaded by softness. Outside, Miami sat under a hard blue sky, bright enough to feel false. On television, men traced the storm with their fingers and promised it would turn. My aunt watched the map, then shut the sound off and kept wrapping. She trusted weather more than voices. “You still got that volunteer badge?” she asked.

After illness forced my father, Frank, into early retirement, our kidney-shaped pool became his occupation, hobby, religion and full-time source of financial ruin. He skimmed it. Shocked it. Tested it. Discussed chlorine like a man briefing NASA. When the pump broke, a large “Super Pump” arrived. My mother stared at it, saying, “Well, I didn’t know they made those that big.” I almost died laughing. Dad tried hard to look offended, but a mustachioed grin gave him away. When Mom told him to pose with the pump, he did. He never liked being the joke, but he liked being ours.

The news came on a Tuesday: U.S. Space Command was moving to Huntsville. The headlines said Redstone Arsenal wins the bid, but that word "wins" sat strange in my mouth. In the breakroom, someone printed the article and pinned it to the bulletin board above the coffee pot. The photo showed the gates of Redstone shining in the morning sun, a soldier standing guard beside the sign.

I return to the tracks when the heat breaks. The pines breathe the same sweet tar scent they carried when I was a child, the scent that hung over every mill town in Levy County when cedar mills and turpentine stills smoked through winter. Vines twist across the rails now. Brush crowds the right of way.  Even so, the steel remains straight and stubborn, a line the land has not managed to take back. When I lay my hand on it, the metal holds the night’s last breath.

All Ruth saw was more attention. And when the wrong kind of attention showed up, people like her paid for it. The June heat shimmered off the sidewalks, rising in waves that blurred the edges of palm trunks and lampposts. Humidity pressed against Ruth’s skin as she stepped out of the motel’s back corridor, the scent of salt from Matanzas Bay mingling with the sweetness of blooming jasmine. Her uniform clung to her back, damp before she’d even begun her rounds.

My daughter Frankie doesn’t say my name. She knows it. I’ve heard her whisper it at night, curled up in her toddler bed, when the house is quiet and the shadows stretch across the floor. “Mommy,” she breathes, and for a second I believe I’ve dreamed it. At night, behind her door, she practices. Soft words slip out like secrets, as if she’s testing them before anyone can hear. Pressure shuts her down. But in the dark, when no one is watching, her voice feels safe. In the daylight, I try. I kneel. I call to her. She turns to me, eyes bright, smile full, but I can tell she doesn’t understand what I’m saying. She opens her mouth like she’s going to answer, but instead I hear bits of “Old McDonald” or sounds that don’t quite form words.

The first thing you learn growing up near the glades is that stillness is a kind of power. Not quiet. Not hiding. Just the stillness of an alligator, belly pressed into the mud, eyes watching without ever blinking. They don’t have to flinch. They know they own the land.

It started with a palm frond. One of those thick, green giants that fan out over Florida yards like they own the place. My Uncle Bob ripped one clean off the tree, held it high over his head, and marched barefoot around the pool. Jimmy Buffett’s “Volcano” blared from the lanai speakers, steel drums skipping over sun-soaked chaos. Kids doing cannonballs, adults sloshing bourbon in plastic cups, and bathing suits doubling as dinner clothes. He said nothing. Just grinned and kept moving. We followed. Every one of us. Cousins dripping pool water, aunts in cover-ups, and the dogs trotting at our heels, nails clicking on the pavement as if they were tap dancing. The conga line snaked through the screen door, into the kitchen, and around the card table stacked with paper plates and Publix potato salad. No one asked why.

The storm reached Jacksonville long after the newscasters said it would. All afternoon the sky over the Westside stayed bright and blue, the kind of blue that fooled people into thinking weather would skip the city the way visitors skipped the industrial stretch along the river. Cars crowded the Winn Dixie parking lot on Cassat Avenue even though rain had not fallen yet. Mothers hurried through the sliding doors with coupons in hand. Kids held on to the sides of carts,...

It’s 1:17 a.m., and I’m sitting on the floor of my kitchen drinking Dr Pepper Blackberry out of the can like it’s medicine for a heartbreak I haven’t earned yet. I haven’t cried today, but I can feel it coming, crouched behind my molars. This beverage might be the gateway. The label promises “Delightfully Dark. Subtly Sweet,” which, coincidentally, is also how I described myself during a short-lived phase in college when I tried to brand myself as “the mysterious girl who reads Bukowski and wear...

The one-hour photo smelled of vinegar and metal, the scent clinging to the back of my throat like it might stay there forever. My hands sweated inside the sleeves of my windbreaker as I slid the yellow Kodak envelope across the counter. The clerk, a man with nicotine-stained fingers, tore the seal with his teeth, holding the flap open like it was a wound. He flipped through the stack without looking at me, his mouth tight. “Most of these didn’t turn out,” he said.