FICTION
Relief, story by Toby LeBlanc | April 2025

Excerpt from Soaked, published by Cornerstone Press 2025

Aging has not been what Arlis thought it would be. He gets up in the morning with tons of energy, but it is gone by noon. He can remember numbers and names as long as you don’t talk while he’s reciting them to himself. But he’s gotten more optimistic rather than falling into a stereotypical later-life grump. None would believe it, though, the way his face remains flat and expressionless at nearly all times.

His body tells the story clearly. His doctor calls his newest issue “vertigo.” After months of procrastination, the only reason he made an appointment at the federal clinic is because the vertigo interfered with his mission. The doctor was nice, and he might have trusted her, but he will never trust the nanotech treatment she suggests. A career working for the Fed taught him nothing they purported to “help” did any such thing. Captain Miller of the Cajun Navy says the vertigo is just a natural side effect of being married to the water. Arlis’s body will stay lonesome for water when he’s away. Despite Captain Miller’s authority coming from an unofficial, private, volunteer, socially focused entity, Arlis appreciated some explanation. It makes sense to him that his old job in the Coast Guard feigning control over the unpredictable left him impotent in many ways. Forty plus years of riding the waves, weathering the storms, pulling bodies from the wet grave, and pointing a fully automatic weapon, aches in his weary knees and lower back. He rathers that explanation than consider his belly growing from all the thank you dishes he gets from his new job could be putting undue strain on his jointsonly. He doesn’t need a doctor or the Fed to assess the wear on his body, held together with loosening sallow skin, and tell him he’s gotten fat.

Everyone at the landing gives him a wide berth, mainly because of the dissonance between his lack of expression and his pleasant disposition. He seems too happy to be working among the exhausted holdouts inhabiting these islands beyond the levees. This is the most life Arlis has ever seen. The mangrove water is friendly. Or, rather, the salt grass, houses, and levees are friendly; collections of humanity amidst the water. These folks risk everything to continue calling South Louisiana home. Despite flood insurance ceasing to exist after Hurricane Pilar, only people like this can live here, mainly because they don’t know how to exist anywhere else. The tepid saltwater sloshes lazily over the hybrid outboard engine on his Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat. The motion of the craft is gentle and responsive, things his former Coast Guard boat could never be. It’s a perfect venue for the mission he has retired into: relief.

First stop is Mr. Hebert. The elderly man has more hair than Arlis. His posture in his wheelchair is better and his waistline is smaller. Last week, Mr. Hebert texted that his porch was collapsing. Every foot of living space counts when his entire world hangs precariously on carbon fiber, cement-filled pillars. It’s not like the ninety-three-year-old can get his wheelchair up and down the twenty feet of stairs to the small dry patch of dirt below. An exosuit would solve the problem, but Mr. Hebert, like many of the sodden residents of these marshy islands, doesn’t trust technology lo-jacked into his brain. So many of the older generation don’t like the metal and plastic of these suits even if they allow the wearer to move in ways not possible in years. Stepping into these prosthetic sheaths create artificial barriers with the world when the people wearing them already feel too removed from the life they should be living, something Arlis completely understands. Exosuits are too expensive anyway. Mr. Hebert even gave up on his automated lift this year. Salt air corrodes any metal in the custom-made elevator Arlis’s organization fabricated for him, making it seize up regularly. Mr. Hebert once got stuck for four hours in mid-descent to a boat below.

The land his house perches on is special, being neither marsh nor one of the long chenier ridges that oak trees still manage to grow on. It’s an old high point of this parish, leftover land haunting the water. Mr. Hebert watches Arlis laboriously climb the two flights, eyes peering from his front door, giving his home the appearance of an obese but watchful heron standing amidst the four-foot-tall oyster grass, face in the wind, waiting for word from the gulf of fate.

The dilapidated porch is a tangible piece of better times when Mr. Hebert’s wife was alive, before the house was raised as the land sunk and the ocean came to find them. Arlis will often listen to stories about their life well after the sun is below the horizon and the wind turns the tops of the salt grass back toward the sea. The images of their love sparkle behind Mr. Hebert’s cataracts. The collection of dark splotches on his cheeks, gathered like storm clouds from stubborn refusal of sunscreen, become slightly lighter and less ominous. Mostly it’s Mr. Hebert telling his same stories, making his same comments:

“Poo yie but dis rain!”

“Back in ’24, Pilar came and washed away so much…”

“My wife, she was da best cook. She could make a dark gumbo, fry up fish…”

Being in the proximity of that kind of love soothes an ache Arlis has never been able to name. That’s why this Cajun Navy thing has been so nice. It feels good. It’s people helping people, instead of helping the Fed help itself to whatever it can dry off. In lieu of tending a coast no one can really map anymore, much less guard, Arlis brings boards to a grieving old man, mail to those the Amazon drones’ GPS can’t find because addresses shift with the tides, and food to those who can’t get to a market. He must remind himself constantly there isn’t a document to fingerprint verify. Not having to mess with drones is Arlis’s favorite. Human interaction is valued over productivity in this gig. It’s worth more than his time, and it feels more fulfilling than his pension. When his watch beeps with a message or dispatch, it doesn’t have to be cleared through a commanding officer. The only command is to provide help in whatever form it should take. In this case, it’s just a conversation with a lonely old man.

He leaves the composite planks in the space beneath the house. Other spryer members of the Cajun Navy, likely wearing the strength and motion enhancing exosuits the old timer doesn’t trust, will arrive to do young men’s work. As he pulls away from Mr. Hebert’s house, having shared a cup of synthetic coffee and some nostalgia, he realizes it only took his whole career to end up in the Navy he’d thought he’d signed up for.

Only a half mile or so from the soon to be renewed Hebert house, he wonders why he left. There are no more planned stops today. The channels on his cell watch are quiet. His home behind the levee wall won’t do. It’s not part of his mission. At home he gives no relief, and he finds none either. While the quiet of this domesticated water is soothing, the quiet at home is painful. There lives a void left by his first wife, the sea. It drives him to inventory the contents of his fridge on his roll-up interface most nights while languishing on his couch, debating which leftovers he should add to the anchor weight growing over his belt. Food gives him the temporary experience of tenderness. Much more of these homecooked thank you’s and his thick masts of legs will struggle against the wages of inactivity. His waistline is not the worst casualty, though. The bit below his waist could be all but forgotten. During deployments he didn’t have to worry about it. But he’d remember just how bad his case of the flops was when he’d arrive at shore. Eventually he couldn’t get it up at all. As age found him, and the bitterness between him and salty water grew, he stopped caring. He’s hoping someone here can revive him if that’s not too much to ask.

As he daydreams of a faceless woman and the touch she’d give without asking him to pay, he nearly misses a strange grove of trees. Passing through patches of black mangroves, he happens upon foliage which shouldn’t be on this side of the levee wall, close to where Gueydan used to be. It’s not uncommon for the remaining land to shift in this region. But this island harbors azaleas and honeysuckle clambering across thriving cypress. Typically, cypress left here in this salt are skeletons, last alive when he left for the Coast Guard in ’31. More worrisome is a small tunnel through the foliage, possibly leading to some sort of cove; a perfect hiding place for pirates. Thieves and other ne’er-do-wells stage their goods in these types of places and move before anyone can find them. Poachers, too, will find whatever animal research traps are placed here and plunder them. These need to be inspected by hand since GPS and satellite are no good for land constantly on the move. He begrudgingly sends up his small drone and it hums into position over the island. The camera can see nothing through the dense canopy. Irritated gusts of sea breeze make it hard to guide the drone back, and the chop of the water makes it even harder to land. The wind hushes momentarily, just long enough for him to feel dank humidity crawl up his spine and make every crevice feel like a sauna. This weather has never rendered aid to him.

He will have to inspect the cove himself. A thought of calling in for assistance is quickly chased away. His job is to help, not to be helped. It feels good to follow an instinct other than how long to microwave his meals. But he checks himself. He’s spent years “helping” the Fed, but all he did was protect their security and economic interests. Part of why he left was because he he’d finally acquired some wisdom and could tell the difference between helping and protecting. Today, whether he tracks newly broken off vegetation, or confiscates and returns stolen property, he just wants to help.

He idles slowly, looking for signs of underwater debris. The last thing he needs is his prop hung up in old nylon lines or to have this tactical vessel instantly deflated by silt-covered edges of sunken trash. This close to shore, with all the silt of North America filtering through these border islands, it’s impossible to tell what’s in the water until you are on top of it. Advanced depth finding and satellite imagery can’t protect anyone here from the trash of previous generations. He ducks low as he approaches the opening in the brush.

Birds cover the impossible island: egrets, seagulls, and even a couple of pelicans. Blackberries the size of corks dangle from their woven briars. He has just enough room to make it through with his boat. Thorns hiss as they scrape across the nylon covering the gunwales. When he spots an opening in the briar, he lets out the breath he’d only just realized he was holding. Huffing at the realization he’s spooked, he yanks a blackberry and tastes it. It’s sweeter than his childhood memories can recall. The flora tunnel has led him to a calm, sweet smelling pond. It’s a welcome ten degrees cooler in here, making him relax somewhat. There are no signs of illicit activity that he can see. The water of the pond has the appearance of blackened glass, likely from the overlay of the dense tree canopy. It’s a few moments before his eyes adjust from the grey light outside the cove to the dimness inside. He cuts the motor and notices how loud the electric hum of the idle was. Fragrance intensifies and color jumps at him to mock the dimness filtered through canopy. Because he stares at the ceiling of leaves above, remembering what it was like to lay in a grove of trees, he doesn’t see his boat drifting toward the edge of the mirrored pond.

The first sound he recognizes as the sound of his hollow inflated boat bumping against something. But the second sound is felt more than heard. His guard raises as he understands this place is more than it seems. He stares at the tree, wondering if this is all a fake menagerie; some silk and plastic construction made by an artist with a sense of humor like the guy who put a Prada store in the middle of the desert of Marfa, Texas. That would at least make sense of the species in this place. He runs his fingers over the trunk, the leaves, and the water. Bark flakes off the pine. The needles poke at his skin. When he tastes the water he is sure it is real, though he thinks it might be fresh. He leans closer to tree and its roots. He sees something white, orange, and blue beneath the undergrowth.

A new, sharp sound, slices through his curiosity and demands respect. The pump action of a shotgun is unmistakable. Arlis is pissed more than he is scared. There were no signs of people when he entered the cove, but he hadn’t done a thorough search. That’s a rookie move. His gun is behind him. In a former life he would easily turn, grab, drop, aim, and shoot. With this belly, though, the turning itself will take all that time. Even if he could, his vertigo would likely disorient him. He raises his hands instead.

“Drop the gun in the water.”

Focus is momentarily deterred by a woman’s voice. He’s heard of many women in the pirating business, using the old gender roles to get clueless residents to cough up valuables. Arlis returns to debating his odds. If she has the drop on him and is not ready to take the shot, or she’s a bad shot, he still could aim his gun. If the odds are anything like his instincts today, though, that wouldn’t end well. Why end life here when it is supposed to be beginning again, anyway? He slowly reaches down for his retirement present: a federal issue, recoil neutralizing, history-deleted assault rifle, and dips it into the pool. It disappears into the black unceremoniously without a sound.

“Leave this place.”

He searches his memory for a recollection of this voice. It’s definitely not the voice of any woman he’s helped in the Acadia Parish area. He’s marked voices of would-be mates for after he gets this little dangle problem taken care of. She’s not from here and likely doesn’t know his job is just to help. She’s probably been robbed a few times, hence the shotgun. The novelty of her accent, or maybe the unwavering resoluteness, forces his neck to turn.

“You’re getting real close to both kinds of holy.”

Stopping, he thinks about the joke in her threat, and sniffs out a laugh. She likely misses his appreciation of her humor due to his lack of expression. Nothing follows. She isn’t going to shoot, he decides. Nobody threatens twice. He needs to see who this is. He turns.

Water explodes next to him. The shot echoes five times across the mill pond. He ducks into the boat, realizing the instinct spurning him to this action didn’t assess for his rubber gunwales and how they do nothing for gunfire. Wetness gushing over his shoulder tells him he may not have to convince her. He finds the source of the gushing and sees water instead of blood. Relief of being uninjured is fleeting. The shotgun blast has the pond spewing through a large hole in the side of his boat. She’s still out there. It’s better to lay still, let her think she killed him, and go down with the boat. He can still hold his breath for three minutes. When she loses interest, he can come back up and sneak behind her somehow.

Beneath the black, glassy surface he sees the water is in fact very clear. Normally, he’d have to be sixty miles out before there could be this little silt and debris, the pieces of Louisiana drifting away into the deep. He slows his movements, blowing out some of his air to sink a bit, as he was trained to do. In his heyday he could hold his breath for five and a half minutes. He won’t need that long today. He measures time by the ache of his lungs and looks around. To his left are the roots of the pine he’d bumped into along with white, orange, and blue thing he spied earlier. The water clarity allows him to see nothing but things: bottles, jugs, tarps, tanks, and even old life jackets combining to make a giant, floating island. How any of these plants could flourish on plastic is inconceivable. A glance below shows him bottom is matted debris as well. His gun is there, but it’s too far down to get on this breath. Whether he goes for it or not, he must surface. He ventures a look back upward to see the sky only slightly darkened by the tint of this water. Clear vision upward means he must be visible as well. He waits a little longer for his lungs to shout and then kicks upward.

The water breaks gently and Arlis breathes as evenly as his stretched chest will allow. He looks for the source of the voice. His eyes land on a cottage, or maybe a shack, he had not seen when he putted in. He knows he looked in that direction, though. It’s like it appeared. The burn of inadequacy from making so many careless mistakes mixes with the acid already building in his legs from treading water. It leads him to make another oversight.

“You were real committed to playing possum,” the woman’s voice says from the place it has moved to, behind him once again.

“Yes ma’am.”

“It’s ‘yes ma’am’ now. You always so nice to people whose property you trespassing on?”

Her accent leaves her words severed at times, softly plodding by at others. He knows it, forgetting where from. “Especially the ones who have a gun to my back. Can you tell me what this place is? Who you are?”

“Is this something you own?”

“What?”

“Do you own this place? Do you own me?”

“No ma’am.”

“Then why do you think you can ask questions?”

“I’m part of the Cajun Navy. Didn’t recognize this place and thought I would check it out.”

“So, you did think you owned this place. And wanting to help gave you the deed. Now you need help. Who has your deed?”

Arlis’s arms are tired. He hasn’t tread water like this in years. And he’s sure this water is all fresh since he’s not buoyed like normal. He doesn’t know where this is going, but he is completely out of choices.

“You do.”

“Only for now.” The safety clicks. “Swim over to the house.”

As he freestyles to the plastic shore, he thinks about how this is all wrong. He’d come into this place trying to help his neighborhood. For his trouble, his life is in danger. He places his hands on roots intertwined with plastic. His white wicking tee plasters to his big belly. All of this is out of place, not him. He considers turning to look at his captor, but last time he was so bold she’d put a hole in the side of his boat. Come to think of it, he had nary a piece of shot in his skin. Seems impossible she’d fire a scatter gun at him and only hit the intended target. Or, had she hit her target? His feet echo through the underbrush of hollow plastic. The barrel presses against his back, and he pushes open the door to the shack.

Inside the air is warm bread, it’s blankets and well-preserved memory. Breathing it is remembering. It’s lit only with naked low wattage LED bulbs, but the light seems to bleed into every corner. There exists not an inch of wall space absent of crucifixes or portraits of the Virgin Mary. Each looks as if it has come from a different culture, maybe a different country. But despite changes in skin color or different shaped noses, the eyes are unmistakably the same. All bear weary compassion in their gaze. The woman moves from behind Arlis, grabbing something to his left. Still remaining out of sight, she holds a towel out in front of him.

“Sit. I’ll get you syn coffee.” The sudden change in protocol makes his feet glue to the floor. This could be a trap. “You’re a terrible listener. I tell you to leave and you stay. I tell you to sit and you stand. No wonder you need so much help. I’ll be nice and I’ll ask. Please would you sit?”

Arlis keeps his hands raised slightly above his waist so she can trust he will do as she says. The oak chair screeches across a cypress wood floor. It’s all in good condition. Seems strange none of this is rotted, sitting only inches above water that he knows must splash during the big storms. Stranger still is the coolness of it all. He hears no hums or growls of generators.

“How do you take it?”

“What?”

“The syn coffee. How do you take it?”

“Black with a teaspoon of sugar.”

“Figures.”

“What?”

She says nothing else while pouring. Finally, before him, he is able to see her. She could be his age, but he’s not sure. The lines around her eyes and mouth hint at the passage of years. Her body is lithe. The inactivity of surviving on islands in isolation hasn’t plagued her. Her eyes aren’t dulled from the monotony of waves on the horizon. They are sharp and dark, nearly black. Her hair is interwoven with many colors: black here, gray there, and seasoned with cayenne and amber. Her nose is rounded with a slight downward curl, the latter something left over from a French grandparent, he guesses. But her skin is not French. Her arms don’t have brown patches or liver spots like his does. When he allows his eyes to come up to hers, she is peering through him.

“Satisfied?” She waits for him to answer. He is embarrassed. Across from him she sips loudly, enjoying the black liquid as if there were still coffee plants producing in South America or Africa. Her bored gaze ventures out of the open door they’d entered the room through, lost in some pleasant thought. Edges of her mouth bend in amusement. It leaves Arlis questioning if all her company arrives at gunpoint. “Well?”

It had not occurred to him that she still expected an answer. He would have used the same question to show a new enlistment how stupid they were to try something their way. In boot camp, he would intentionally ask questions to make recruits wonder if they knew their asshole from their earhole. Arlis can see now how he’d missed her tone, just like everything else in this place.

“Yes.”

She lets out one hard note, a laugh of disbelief, before pointing her black eyes, infinitely more intimidating than her shotgun, at him.

“You’re like your coffee. You think a small, sweet lie can cover up a lot of bitter truth. Why’d you come here?”

“Ma’am—”

“It’s Sarah.”

“Ms. Sarah, I was passing by, just got done helping Mr. Hebert – Do you know Mr. Hebert?” Despite her pleasant smile, her black hole eyes continue to bore. “Anyway, like I said, I saw this place, didn’t recognize it. I thought I would have a look in case anyone needed anything.”

“You mean in case you needed anything. No one here asked you for help. You were curious, and you wanted to feel strong again. This is a place your memory and your technology don’t own. That must have been intolerable. Because here you are, nearly forcing your way here. You would have come in this place telling me what I need, I’m sure, had the Virgin not let me know you were on the little pond. You’d say I need to get out of this place. I need to rejoin society.” Arlis gulps his syn coffee. Looking into the cup he sees the same blackness of the pond, the shotgun, and her eyes. “Isn’t that right?”

The accent finally makes sense. This woman is Creole. Trying to place her accent and her blended heritage distract him from assessing the method and intent of her questions. Her questions don’t fit the hostage training that was re-administered every five years in the Coast Guard. His seniority allowed him to skip the last two. He tries to convince himself a decade was not enough time to forget everything. Captors had specific things they wanted to know, or at least categories for them to fall into. It was a process he trusted; a process he knew had a definite outcome. Knowing her motive would make this a whole lot simpler and him a whole lot calmer. He noticed she didn’t like his questions. She tolerated statements, especially answers. She’ll likely remind him again who is in charge if he tries another question.

“There’s a lot of plastic underneath us.”

“What’s left of an old recycling plant.”

“How did—“

She pulls a kitchen knife from underneath the table. It’s thin and razor sharp. The edge has been filed back from generations of honing. The glint of pure silver defies the humidity that attacks it, maybe even by cutting through it. That knife should be rusted through out here. Her black eyes, sharper than the knife, level on him.

“I want love,” Arlis says with nearly childlike resignation. Fear and sadness converge on his face. The confusion, the intimidation, the way she looks at him greased the truth he’d thought he buried, even from himself. His air catches in his lungs as the words hang between them. She grabs a pear from the bowl on the table and starts to cut it. Where is she getting pears? Seconds lumber by while he waits for her to laugh again, or maybe stab him. A perfect slice of fruit enters her mouth. Her lips purse with each bite. She watches him again. Her look is both bored and expectant. “I– I don’t know how to get it.”

It’s like when he was eight, telling his father he didn’t know how to launch a boat. Only Sarah’s eyes hold none of his father’s disappointment. Piece by piece the pear enters her mouth. This is silly. There’s never been a need to think about love, much less talk about it. Arlis’s little outburst couldn’t be what her interrogation is aimed at, despite how content she seems to be with his discomfort. She’s looking for something else. He doesn’t want to stick around to find out what it is.

“Ma’am, can I go now?”

“You think love belongs to you?”

“Ma’am?”

“You think love’s something to make your own. Like you thought about my home.” She slips another slice of pear into her mouth, chewing slowly and thoughtfully. “You can leave at any time. But how are you going to do that with your boat at the bottom of the pond?” The black glass in her eyes soften and a smile lights her face. “You’re one hell of a last patient. What’s your name?”

“Arlis.”

“Arlis I’m a traiteuse. A faith healer. The last one, I’d guess. I’d given it up. It’s been three years since I treated. I was done. But last night Jesus and the Virgin visited me. They told me I had one patient left, and he would be here today.”

“You knew I’d be here? Then why did you shoot at me?”

“Jesus said I would know you by your tête dur, your hard head. The gun seemed the surest way to figure out how stubborn you are. I don’t want you here. But Jesus and Mary apparently do.”

Arlis debates again if she really is that good of a shot. Putting that next to her method of interrogation elicits respect from him. Whether it be auditory hallucinations, or Jesus Himself, Arlis loosens with her lack of intent kill him. She’s softening, too. He can tell. He gambles one last time with a question mixed with humor.

“Faith-healer? You heal people’s faith?”

Sarah smiles even wider. Having lost the threat of death, Arlis can now admit she is beautiful. She lets out her single syllable laugh. “Yeah. That happens, too. But mostly I heal bodies.”

Ambiguity and non sequiturs led them to talking about bodies. The burn of inadequacy he’d felt out in the pond engulfs his chest and moves outward toward his extremities. The career he’d left taught him to ignore his body and push past it’s false limits of pain and fatigue. He isn’t ready to open up about his physical health to a lady floating on a trash island and suffering from a mental health issue. It scares him how he’s already said too much. Never has he felt like he could completely connect with people. It doesn’t matter if she’s beautiful or if her questions are genuine. The comfort sneaking up on him is not trustworthy. Oscillating poles, conversation and silence, comfort and violence, shake the foundation he’s built for himself, leaving his knees hurting and his head swimming. He rises from his chair, and the dark wells of her eyes follow him. Her jaw continues to work on the pear, never breaking its rhythm. Watching its motion reminds him of the sea and his vertigo returns. His hands smack the table as he steadies himself. The bottom of his belly pressing against the top of the table helps. He’s not leaving, not anytime soon. It’s not because of the sunken boat either. It’s not because of a long swim to an empty house with an unbelievable story. Land sickness is only an excuse. His body’s response confirms he can’t leave, because he’d be walking away from the most interest any one has ever shown him.

“I can’t get hard.”

His ears hear it before he realizes it’s him that said it. The “d” echoes around the tiny impossible shack the same way her gunshot echoed around the pond. The vertigo intensifies and sends him to his chair. It disappears when his butt is back in the seat, as if this could be the only place the world is not trying to wash out from underneath him. Replacing the shifting in his head is the lava of inadequacy bubbling up through his chest and face. The reality of his tired pecker out where the world can know it leaves him unsure of how he’ll continue living with this soul-splitting honesty in the air.

“Or maybe you been hard for too long, and God decided he’d teach you how to be soft, starting at your body.” He assumes this means something to her since she is looking at him as if it should mean something. He is supposed to be hard. That was his job, after all. He stood hard against the storms, hard against the intruders of the country, and hard against the orders he wouldn’t follow. The last fact meant staying in a hard place on a boat well after lesser men and women with less time in were promoted. It was hard to do the right thing but never has the right thing happened to him. So hard is what he had to be.

“Here.” From beneath the pile of pears in the bowl at the center of her table, she pulls an oversized onion. “Take this and rub it on your privates. Plant it next to a young oak on an island. If in two months the oak starts to lose its leaves, you’ll know its youth transferred to the onion. Dig it back up. It doesn’t matter if it started to grow or not. Cut it up in your bathtub and run hot water. Take a bath for the time it takes you to say three rosaries. You know how to say the rosary?”

Arlis can’t answer. Of course, he doesn’t know the rosary. But that’s the least impossible part of his treatment plan. Second place goes to taking a bath with an onion. The smell would take a week to come off him. How would that get him any closer to finding someone? If a session of self-love with an onion wasn’t enough, there’s the burying by a young oak part. Not only did he think this whole thing would unravel when the young tree didn’t lose a leaf, but to find a young, thriving tree in this sparse, soggy land would be impossible.

A cackle catches him by surprise, and he jumps backward in his chair, nearly toppling himself.

“You should see your face!” She continues to cackle and nearly chokes on her pear, her cheeks and neck turning raspberry. Arlis rises to help, but both the vertigo and the look coming from over the closed fist covering her mouth tell him to sit back down. She catches her breath and clears her throat. “Arlis, I don’t know how to help you. I’ve never treated someone with that problem. My grandmother, she never passed that down.” A breath escapes Arlis, another he didn’t know he was holding. Against the backdrop of his shame, he hadn’t noticed the hope growing. Sarah allowed him to think about his body, about touch, about a life he could live. But she cannot help him. His dashed hope leaves him angry, but not with her and her joke at his expense. It was foolish to think the hardness of life, ironically manifested in softness where it isn’t wanted, could be reversed by this sad, lonely woman in a fairytale shack. He can’t be angry at someone who wants to help him, unlike the sea, or the federal government, or his Coast Guard crew. Besides, she was able to tease an expression onto his face when the testing of the world could not. He looks at her hands, sporting wrinkles and strength, and wonders what it is like to help and have people feel it.

“Grandmother?” he asks, trying to move quickly past his disappointment. She doesn’t seem annoyed by his questions anymore.

“Yeah. My grandmother taught me how to treat when I was around nine. I thought we were playing a silly doctor game with all my dolls. I didn’t put it together until I was thirty-one. I had my calling in a dream. When I woke up, all I could think about was my grandmother and those doctor games. I remembered every one. But she never worked on the privates of my boy dolls. I can fix that dizziness for you, though.”

“How’d you know about that?” In this strange conversation, it feels like they have been talking for years instead of minutes. Maybe the gunfire made things real, quickly. She’s suspended the rules. It has to do with the black glass of her eyes softening as they talk. To look at them now, he sees the same weary compassion of the icons on her walls.

“I can help you,” she offers.

“No,” he says resolutely. Her eyebrows fly up. He came here to help, not to be helped. All he knows is she looks tired.

“You’re my last patient.”

“No,” he says again.

Her quizzical look remains affixed to him while they sit in silence. A familiar piece of a hostage situation appears. Sarah wants to wait Arlis out, break his resolve. But Arlis knows it’s not what she needs. After years of watching weary, pleading eyes he’s become attuned to when someone needs something even if they can’t say it. Reaching across the table, his fingers find her hand. He gently releases her grip from her cup and goes to the pot of reheated syn coffee on the wood stove in the corner. This stove is out of place in this world, but exactly where it should be. He pours without spilling a drop. Doing so shows him the vertigo hasn’t returned. He somehow knows how she takes her coffee: honest, with no cream, no sugar. The cup returns to her hand, and he finds his place across from her again.

“Now. What can I help you with?” Arlis stares deep into her eyes, diving in headlong with not a flinch.

“What?” she says, her brow furrowing.

“What?” Arlis asks, not able to look away from her black pools anymore.

“This…isn’t how it goes.”

“I said the same thing,” Arlis remembers as he locks his eyes on hers, “when I realized what the Coast Guard really is. I went in thinking I would be saving lives and helping people. I’d be part of something greater. Many I couldn’t save, people and things I couldn’t protect. One day my job became bigger than me and bigger than the reasons I started doing it. Helping is really a matter of opinion. The people who need the most help rarely get to decide what’d be helpful.” His head shakes with the last phrase, as if all the memories of incorrect helping are droplets still clinging to his wet head. Sun peeks through the clouds and races through the windows, meeting Sarah’s eyes. Brown appears at the edges of her irises, something Arlis is sure had not been there before. The brown intensifies, as if something old and buried in deep soil is rising to the surface. “What help do you need?” he asks.

Arlis can almost see the memories coming the surface of her eyes. He watches her life play out there, waiting for her to tell him what she did not get, could not be, or was not able to let go of. Instead, her eyes harden again as she switches back to her role as a waiting healer. He softens his gaze to a smile, something he has not felt on his face in uncountable years. Her face softens as well before she speaks.

“I was married once. In my twenties. It was a bad idea. At least we could both admit it. But it took seven years. Seems we spend our twenties reconciling the outside to our inside, trying to make everyone else see what only we can see. In my thirties, I decided I needed to reconcile the inside to the outside. What had been on my inside was confusing. Life made things real. I didn’t. That’s when the calling happened. I gave my life over to God and to treating. It was easy. It meant no more being confused. I had my job – my mission. But three years ago, I got sick. I tried using treatments on myself, but they weren’t working. I didn’t have anything left for me. I’d given it all away. So, I asked Jesus to take a break. And when he and the Virgin didn’t say anything, I figured they thought it was ok. The sickness got better for a while, but it’s back lately. I can’t ever seem to eat. That pear was the first thing I’ve been hungry for in weeks.” The brown in her eyes lighten. A cryptic smile spreads on her face. After a moment he deciphers the look, knowing it only as the one he, too, has coveted: relief.

“Arlis? Are you crying?”

With little practice having expressions, his face twists in pain, then in joy, as tears saunter down his cheeks. Sarah’s smile widens before standing and straightening herself. He swears he’s looking at another, younger woman. She looks taller, like the years of burden have been pulled from her shoulders. Only a trace of weariness is left in her eyes now. As the normally absent sun streams through the window to find her full figure, she glows and says “You’ve paid me with a listening ear. I’m going to treat your dizziness now.”

Arlis doesn’t protest anymore. His wonders how long he could remain in her company. The thought of being her helper, however that works for her, soothes him in a way all the thank you meals from the marsh mamas never could. She moves behind him, standing above his seated body, and places a hand on each side of his head as if about to gently cradle it, but keeps her hands several inches from his ears.

“Close your eyes and breathe deep.” Had he not seen her walk behind him he’d swear she was speaking from just in front of his face. He does as he’s told. As his eyes close, he feels her hands enter his ears and squeeze. She mutters her prayer and her hands travel deeper within his body, past the places of the vertigo, through his neck and chest. He feels life sprout through every place her fingers travel. As her hands pass his pelvis to reach for his feet, he feels something stir between his legs.