The cherrywood accent table stood, snuggled, in the far corner of the room. It’s fading polished top adorned by a cluster of snow globes that although colorful, shiny and bright were each capped by a drift of dust; as that is what snow globes do in addition to their intended purpose of literally capturing a memory, a place, an experience. The keepsakes formed a circle atop the table. Mickey and friends smiled, waved and waited for eternally frozen Tinkerbell to sprinkle fairy dust. Bigfoot looked back across the room from a clearing in a snowcapped pine forest. Gridlock traffic filled the street before Macy’s Christmas window display. The Eiffel tower watched over Paris in anticipation of the evening’s fireworks. In the circle’s center a family of pandas marched along the great wall of China amidst a sea of bamboo. From another corner the AC handler shrugged on and coughed forth a stream of air through dusty vents.
The Carpenter House always had a crowd on Thursday night. Half price draft beers, light and dark, $2 raw oysters, $5 bowls of steamed clams and top-notch hand cut french fries. Every seat at the bar was taken by 7pm, the booths filled up next, lastly the smattering of rickety tables caught in the middle got picked over by the hungry and desperate. Carleen Carpenter, who took over for her father Johnny 10 years back, drunkenly pledged during an after-hours poker game to never vanquish the weekly tradition. As of this day she’d not gone back on it either. From their booth Jack watched Wendy walk back from the ladies’ room, head down in thought, hands stuffed into the pockets of her oversized yellow raincoat. No rain this evening, just a bit of chill on a stiff breeze ran against them on the walk over to the pub. As Wendy sat opposite Jack, she pulled a worn envelope from one pocket. Inside was a letter from a man she had only ever met a handful of times, her father. According to Wendy the last time being somewhere around 6 years ago, which would have been a year before Jack met her. After putting on her raincoat Wendy checked the mailbox outside their apartment and finding only that letter, she slipped it inside her coat pocket and off to Carpenters the two went.
Summer heat gave the black top a swimmy and chasmic appearance even through the apartment window. The lot started but steps from the front door and extended out maybe 50 yards. Jack could not remember seeing such a mirage or fata-morgana this close before. Distant shimmering phantasms on the horizon during drives across the interior of Florida came to mind. Across alligator alley on Jack and Wendy’s trip through the Everglades. Souvenir shops at the few and far between gas station and rest stop sold oranges, taxidermized alligator heads and always snow globes of Florida thematic sorts. They bought one with a couple of alligators lounging on beach chairs, tails in the surf, sunglasses and smiles gazing up toward a small orange ball affixed to the glass. On the drive to the motel the snow globe had torn the paper bag and when Wendy picked it up the globe fell through and crashed against the asphalt parking lot. The happy gator couple splintered into pieces as the spilt glittery water shimmered in the light and the tiny orange sun rolled away.
Jack could see the envelope was torn open now as it lay between them on the table. Wendy pulled her hand from the other pocket and placed one, two, three, four, five $100 bills next to the envelope. Although the writing faced away, he could make out the sender’s address, written in bold black marker print.
“Bodega Bay. California?”
“It’s definitely from my father. So is the money.”
Jack whistled.
“I opened it in the toilet and almost dropped the bills between my legs when I saw them.
“What did he say?”
“Not a lot. I’m not sure if it’s nonsense or something is actually happening. He claims this is the last of his money, that he doesn’t need it anymore, not where he’s going.”
“Those bills look old too. Not the new designs.” Jack’s finger went to the stack to feel the soft texture of the well traveled bills. “Is he in Bodega Bay or leaving there?”
“That’s just it. He says the Caravan is leaving that town, leaving the coast completely and heading into the desert. That there’s something wrong with the water, that the ocean has spoiled and that we should be watchful.”
“Spoiled is a strange word to use.
Shirley the waitress announced her presence: “Hey guys, you two ready to order…?”
The A/C unit whirred on still but gave forth only warm unforgiving air from an overly labored motor and corroding coils. Across the room a bath towel, cloud grey and rat tailed from use, was draped over the snow globes, covering the table to the floor. The air in the room was not quite thick with dampness but on its way there. Several of the wood laminate floorboards bowed away from the wall, warping upward. Scales of paint flaked and peeled leaving a mess like bits of egg shell. Jack sat on the couch, facing the wall mounted television and the screen that silently cycled through news images. He sat shirtless, broad chested, slightly pot bellied and sweating. On his right shoulder a tattoo of an orange blossom and bumble bee. On his left a blowfly tattoo. The right shoulder was inked colorfully with cartoonish flares to the images while the left was outlined and detailed in heavy black lines giving the fly a bulging grotesque distinction. Before him on the cloud-colored coffee table sat 3 items in a row: the envelope, the letter, that stack of bills. All had yellowed. He looked to the window by the front door and although the blinds were pulled shut he knew it was very dark outside.
The heat induced mirage glimmered on, the translucent black top sea roiled and he missed Wendy. She’d left at dawn, driven their jeep right across that parking lot, in hopes of making it to the marina and back no later than noon. His eyes swimmy with mesmerized remembrance, he could see the broken snow globe and the wet asphalt, he could practically smell it. The two walked with luggage in hand to the motel lobby, explained to the clerk about the mess and went to their room. He remembered how cold the air inside felt on his sweaty skin and how the springs creaked as Wendy fell onto the mattress. Jack checked his watch; quarter to five in the afternoon. He turned away from the window, the sun boiled blacktop, to look for his cell phone. It sat on the coffee table next to the envelope.
After ordering the two sat in silence, the money and the envelope sat between them like a weight upon their tongues and minds. Jack turned to the crowded bar and watched Shirley speak to Carleen, who then pulled two glasses to pour draft beers, she laughed while doing so and carried on a conversation with a couple barstool raconteurs. All about Jack and Wendy the sounds, the smells, the scenery of people and lights populating the space brought comfort and familiarity. Everything seemed to be exactly Thursday night at Carpenters except that weight between he and Wendy that felt like an anchor pulling and plunging the nourishing tableau to the depthless black of the seas.

The late August sun slipped beyond the horizon abandoning Jack to a darkening sky hued in belladonna and wolfsbane. He needn’t check his watch having already noted sunset at half past seven. He pulled the blinds down and drew them shut but instead of turning away to check his phone for a message his hand, perhaps impelled by escapism, went to the doorknob. The door swung shut behind him as he stepped out onto the asphalt and stood beneath that beautiful poison sky. He readied himself against sinking into the swampy tarred blacktop but the ground held firm as did his footing. Tension eased from his body for the first moment in what felt like days. His face turned skyward, he pulled his lungs full of air, held it deep within him and slowly exhaled. Tears swelled briefly before his eyes blinked them away and he lowered his chin to survey the evening. On that distant horizon a stack of clouds, black angered thunderheads, were mounting upon themselves and the surrounding deadly shaded purple and blue sky darkened. The clouds now towered and hulked over the Florida town cowering beneath them. Jack looked over the expanse of land and city that stretched outward, reaching and shrinking toward the horizon. He turned to go back inside.
“Everything about this letter…hell everything about my father is strange but for some…whatever reason there is a note of truth here. I don’t know why I feel it.”
“But you do?”
“Yes.” Wendy gulped at her beer, looked down into the amber colored ale and then swallowed more. With the back of her hand she wiped aggressively at the remnants on her lips.
“He doesn’t give anymore details or where exactly the Caravan’s headed or which desert he means???”
“Nothing more specific but that’s not unusual. He was never specific about anything. About any of the reasons he ‘had’ to leave. I know my father’s nut fuck crazy and probably always has been. A person doesn’t leave their family to join a traveling cult then change their mind a decade later only to abandon his daughter all over again and rejoin their ‘mission’ if there aren’t deep seeded issues.”
Jack finished drinking half the pint of dark lager in one bend of his elbow and set the glass gently back on the waterlogged coaster. “When did he write this or send it?”
“He dated it exactly one month ago today.” Her finger ran along the pint glass lip, completing the circle. “Synchronicity is all around us, I feel it. I read that letter and felt it even more so. Does that make me crazy Jack?”
His hands ran along the seam of the window frame, his fingers searching for air leaks or a crack or split that might lead to seepage. The blinds were drawn shut and Jack had used heavy duct tape, he found in the back of Wendy’s utility drawer, to secure them to the sill. The same duct tape he lined the frame and jamb of the front door as well as the blinds and sills of the other two windows in the bedroom and bathroom. On the other side, the outside, a still distant vibration beckoned Jack’s attention to the blinds…to peek, only once and quickly, at what was happening. But he did not because he could not. He did not want to know how dark, how black; the sky was becoming. Instead, he sat back on the couch and continued watching the cycle of news images and itching his shoulders. The broadcast sequenced into the hourly rotation of marina surveillance footage. Although blurred by a constant haze or fog the feed came through clear enough for comprehension. The camera panned across the docks and clippped to the harbor then clipped to the dock masters building and finally to the parking lot. Wendy and Jack’s drab green jeep sat in the same spot unchanged as it had every hour for the last month. His right-hand tensed, his chewy nails dig into the skin drawing blood that runs into the crescent of a fingertip and speckles around the black lined fly.
The air in the room has turned muggy and stagnant but the shrouded display of snow globes and table remain unchanged. The sound of silence fills the small apartment uninterrupted with one exception: faint crinkling of delicate paper. Jack unfolds the letter, again, wheeling it between fingertips to examine the details, the generalities, all its qualities. Droplets of sweat stream from brow to cheek from chin to chest and well up in the gully of his scruff covered belly button. His breath holds still, tight, burning in his lungs as the letter’s words silently spill forth in his mind.
The first black fly lands on the cloaking towel, flitting insectile appendages and probing the grey cloth. An almost imperceptible tear is discovered, the fly disappears below to inspect the concealed treasures. It buzzes and tastes the glass dome encapsulating the panda family. Its body and wings dwarf the great wall below. The fly tongues at the glass from its probiscis seeking a way into that imprisoned forbidden world. The next fly lands, only moments later, on the television screen and is quickly joined by a third, fourth and fifth. The screen once more sequences the marina surveillance footage. The silence of the room is broken, not by distant detached vibrations but by consuming insectile chittering. A glittering rain of black flies spew forth from the lifeless air vent showering and filling the apartment into a tar-soaked miasma.