Bay Crazy |link| -

The sheriff squinted. The jacket could have washed up. The book could have drifted. But he didn’t say that. He’d seen too much to believe in nothing.

He said he was waiting for the tide to bring back his daughter’s laugh. He said it was trapped in a conch shell somewhere out in the channel, but the conch had been stolen by a crayfish the size of a Labrador. The crayfish had a name—Mr. Pinch—and a wife who made him sleep on the couch because he never helped with the eggs. bay crazy

Nobody laughed when Leo told these stories anymore. Not because they weren’t funny, but because the line between his delusion and the town’s reality had become a suggestion, not a border. Old Mrs. Halvorson started leaving out saucers of milk for the ghost of her cat, which was fair because the ghost of her cat still left dead mice on the porch. Jimmy Dufresne, who ran the bait shop, began wearing a tinfoil crown because he said the herring were transmitting secrets about the school board budget. The herring, he insisted, had a PAC. The sheriff squinted

The term had a genealogy. First came the fishermen who lived too long on the brackish edge, their hands stained with eel slime, their stories looping like the tides. Then the widows who talked to gulls. Then the veterans who built forts from driftwood and declared war on Canada. But Leo was different. Leo was young, thirty-two, with the hollowed-out look of someone who had once been brilliant—an engineer, a husband, a father—before the ammonia leak at the chicken processing plant erased his sense of smell and, piece by piece, everything else. But he didn’t say that