Dayton
AJ Strosahl
No one notices the first miracle. It happens to a boy on the JV football team who, at practice on an unseasonably warm February day, becomes dimly aware that his sweat seems to smell of citrus. Jason Barnwell hopes that maybe the darkest, dampest stretch of puberty is now mostly behind him but doesn’t think much else of it. He wonders, briefly, at how he doesn’t need to open his windows on the way home, just to let his own stink out of the car. Coach Cunningham was especially demanding that afternoon; Jason left every bit of himself on the field, and still he is heading home smelling absolutely fresh.
The next miracles come in quick succession, and they are unmistakable. The Samuels wake one morning to find a marine iguana—the kind only found in scrappy tropical island chains across the world, not here, in the Midwest—lounging by their pond. The whole neighborhood comes over to observe him, sunning himself on one of the wide, flat rocks. The Samuels’ koi, already sluggish, don’t seem to notice the interloper. Everyone agrees that the iguana—who is found frozen to death two days later, half burrowed into the rocky soil beneath their hedge—is beautiful, if in a prehistoric and vaguely menacing way.
After her water aerobics class, Sally DeRooy is showering in the locker room at the YMCA and notices that her C-section scar is gone, completely gone! It looks like she never gave birth at all. Jerry Martin’s old Labrador, Noodles, wakes up a puppy one morning. Noodles is still dopey and slow, but the bristly white hairs have vanished from her snout. She jumps up on Jerry’s bed that morning with such shocking swiftness that Jerry shrieks. A mango tree grows on Linwood Avenue and the green fruit it bears is sweet and soft. A hill surges up under a swath of homes on Aspen Drive; their foundations curve and flex around the new topography. The residents feel tilted and blessed. They stumble around their own homes like drunks, the view from every window slightly warped and misaligned. Houses are freshly repainted in the night, rooms change shape, and Francesca Allen’s cellulite vanishes like a passing storm.
Long Lake, in the center of town, transforms into an oasis; the water is hot and salty and so clear you can see all the way to the bottom. Joey Carson and Ellie Ramos strip down to their underwear and wade in, holding hands, their breath and bodies steaming in the late winter air. A blanket of wispy vapor moves across the surface of the water, agitating tiny currents that swirl and drift. Joey and Ellie ease themselves into the water slowly; they are surprisingly buoyant as they paddle idly out toward the center of the lake.
Long Lake is popular in the summer—lifeguards with zinc-ed noses and little kiosks selling Icees and miniature tubes of sunscreen, families piling three kids to a broken plastic lounge chair. If Joey and Ellie look down through the water, they can see the lake’s silty bottom and all the detritus time and use have left, the excavated skeleton of summers past. There are lost flip-flops poking out of the mud, Doritos bags, loose schools of beige fish with bulging eyes, lengths of rebar, cinder blocks, a drifting flowered bikini bottom, an old milk crate. They fling their arms wide and float on their backs, staring up at the sky.
Mrs. Carvel, who is old and cruel, comes home from her afternoon volunteering at the library and finds the armoire her mother gave her returned to its former glory. Its wood gleams with an oil whose scent she can’t place, every joint and corner squared up and polished, as if lovingly restored by a craftsman whose high standards had long ago fallen out of fashion. She drops to her knees before it like an altar and weeps. All over town, the lucky ones join her.
There is a compounding of miracles in those first weeks; every successive magical incident seems to render the ones that preceded it more sublime. In aggregate, what is happening is astounding to the point of excess. Their ears ring constantly with marvel; their eyes are ever-dazzled and aching. They live in a state of perpetual expectation, their bodies tensed and always prepared for their next brush with the phenomenal.
Theirs is a minor city, with a minor city’s collective insecurity about its national and regional significance. Miracles are happening here, they tell relatives and friends in hushed tones, pressing their phones to their ears, not Philadelphia or Singapore or Florence or New York or Athens. Here. They are eager to claim this unexpected distribution of magic, as if it is intended to close the gap between what they have and what they deserve.
The miracles are numerous and varied, and some are questionable. The middle school science teacher, Morris Reaves, tells everyone that he left his classroom a wreck one Thursday afternoon and arrived early Friday morning to find it spotless. It turns out to have been the work of the thorough and zealous janitor, Neil Elias, who’d arrived to school even earlier.
Lori Osting wakes up one morning and finds that she has quit smoking.
“I didn’t even have to try!” she crows. “I just woke up and didn’t want to smoke!” Her husband agrees it must be a miracle, but everyone else is dubious. A few weeks later, Craig Moretti-Bryant tells everyone that he’s caught Lori several times at the empty lot by the lake, smoking cigarette after cigarette, where she thought no one would see.
Gina Monahan, a lifelong spinster now on the dark side of forty, finds love online. Her new boyfriend is kind and handsome and from some larger eastern city, and the whole thing seems almost miraculous, maybe. There’s a rush on the dating apps and the local singles bars, just in case. Everyone wants to see if their own lonely heart is worthy of divine intervention.
Alice Elliot is the most transformed in this regard. Five weeks after the first miracle, she finds that she has become attractive. Something has happened to her face that she cannot put her finger on, a subtle reordering of her coarse features. Each has turned into a slightly more refined version of itself. Her eyes are bright, her skin luminously poreless, her nose straight and proud. Alice is almost sure that she now has, unaccountably, the best legs in town. She is thirty-three and long ago came to understand her own plainness as a kind of homely internal bedrock, upon which all else rests. She spends the first day of her new life sitting on her back porch, brushing her hair until it shines, letting the thin winter sunlight find her.
Alice says yes to the five handsomest men who ask her for dates, after she posts her online profile. They all take her out to the same Italian restaurant downtown, and when they look at her, awed, she thinks: yes, finally, yes. She waits to feel her own power eddying inside her in the way she always imagined it might, had she been granted a different aesthetic lot in life. Alice waits and waits. She looks at these men anxiously, unvindicated; she feels nothing, having received their approval. She keeps waiting.
Couples who meet during the first wave of miracles are ecstatic. They turn heads as they walk the streets loose-limbed, bodies draped together in ostentatious affection, trailing the oily stink of love in their wake. They are smug; no one can say for certain that their love has not been orchestrated by the gods.
But, as winter wears on, doubt creeps in. It stops being easy for Liza Thompson to ignore the way her new girlfriend, Izzy Strine, bites her fingernails with undisguised relish; is this really who has been chosen for me? she thinks, grimacing, as Izzy goes to town on her index finger one night. Liza and the rest of them start to wonder if it might have been easier to meet someone when there was no chance that they’d been selected by a divine hand.
Some in town haven’t had anything miraculous happen to them, and as this enchanted season goes on, it becomes more difficult for them to feel happy for their neighbors. Unofficial support groups spring up: loose klatches of bitter-faced people choking back tears as they drink coffee in kitchens and on doorsteps, talking about their neighbor’s home whose roof was reshingled and resealed overnight. About their cousin who woke up one morning to find a perfectly round in-ground pool in the yard, iced over and glistening. About the zit-faced Barnwell boy, who walked around inflated now, absolutely brimming with absurd confidence, smelling like Florida.
It’s worst when it’s someone close. Lawrence Safretti’s wife, Jeannie, is a nervous wreck these days, convinced Lawrence will stray. He’s had his fair share of indiscretions but held up against the scope of their thirty-seven-year marriage, his occasional lapses have always seemed mostly inconsequential, certainly forgivable. It’s been easier for Jeannie the last few years, because Lawrence finally started to lose the hair he’d been so proud of in their youth. It was glorious back then, she’ll admit: thick, boot-black, soft as a rabbit pelt. When he started to lose it ten years ago, a pale moon of scalp slowly becoming visible at the top of his head, Jeannie had breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe, she’d hoped, Lawrence’s encroaching baldness would free them from the specter of infidelity and other existential marital threats. Surely, her husband’s opportunities for philandering would decrease in direct proportion with his hair loss.
When Jeannie wakes up one morning with his head pressed into the nape of her neck, she immediately understands that his baldness—and her perverse good fortune—has come to an abrupt end. She can feel the hair, suddenly abundant and silken, pressing against her bare skin. She has, somehow, summoned a strapping young version of her own husband back to her, along with all his old faults. His lined face and liver-spotted hands only draw attention to it, his lustrous crowning glory, reinstated by the gods.
Jeannie tries to be happy for him. She holds his hand as he cries quietly, joyously, looking up with streaming eyes to pore over his own reflection in the nearest mirror. He makes love to her so tenderly and unexpectedly that morning that, overcome, she wonders if perhaps this time, the hair is just for her. But after they’re done, he showers for longer than usual, splashes his cheeks with grapefruity aftershave, and combs his hair back the way he used to, so it looks like a rooster’s comb. When they go to the pharmacy to pick up his Monopril prescription, Lawrence winks at the pretty redheaded pharmacist in a way that is almost predatory but not quite, and Jeannie knows she must up her vigilance. She tightens her hand around Lawrence’s, her fingernails digging in, and leads him away. Why couldn’t it have been me? she thinks miserably, and it agonizes her doubly: that she should begrudge the love of her life this curious windfall and, even worse, that she wants it for herself.
The unlucky grit their teeth through this grubby sense of guilt and loss. They can’t understand it, not one goddamn bit. Why are their own homes still poorly insulated, still drafty and drab-cornered? Why do their feet and armpits still stink? Why are they not worthy of some incremental godly reward that makes their lives a little bit easier, or at least a little bit easier to bear? What have they done to offend the author of all this? It feels purgatorial, bearing witness to dozens of private lotteries won, right before their eyes.
They also begin to worry that the citizens on the needier side of town are getting better miracles. They don’t know anyone who lives in that neck of the woods and they can’t imagine how terribly exhausting it would be to live somewhere where you had to worry about walking to your car at night…but in the interest of fairness, they are concerned. They hear that two families sharing a single two-bedroom apartment awoke one morning to find every can of soup in their cupboard replaced with a bar of solid gold. They hear that another’s garden became overrun with white truffles; now, that family makes truffled goat cheese and truffle salt and all manner of delicacies, and their little business has turned into a real going concern.
No one wants to be the first person to mention that in light of this, the miracles happening on their side of town seem almost pointedly mundane. Yes, their lawns are slightly greener than seems seasonally appropriate (and in one case, as orange as a May sunset), and their water sometimes tastes sweeter and clearer than they’d imagined possible, and they save a buck on home improvement on occasion. But none of them has ever found a gold bar in their pantry. None of them has launched a growing business off the back of something they’d dug from the dirt.
Many in town are actively afraid. They spend time in churches and on their knees at night, asking whatever god they pray to how to make sense of this town, now untethered fully from the realities of the world they’ve come to know. They are certain that there will be a toll to be paid for the supernatural dividends their friends and neighbors gobble up without a thought. Nothing in life comes free. They try to turn their eyes away from the wedge of yellow sky above the Janettys’ house, from their friends and neighbors who wake up with slightly straightened noses or perkier breasts or hair growing in a new texture or color, from the bright red cauliflower and onion-sized grapes now on display at the market.
Their fear is unshowy, deep-set. Carla Dillon’s apartment duplicates itself; a door appears in her bedroom that leads into a second apartment, a mirror image of the first. She opens the door and sees the room she’s standing in, reversed. The second apartment is completely empty but otherwise looks exactly the way the first did on the day she moved in: scuffed cedar floors, bare walls scabbed with peeling paint, a slightly moldy, waterlogged smell.
Carla has some girlfriends over for drinks that night and gives them a tour of her miracle. They ooh and ah a little before one rubs her goose-fleshed arms, saying, “Carl, it’s super cold in here.” Her voice echoes in the empty space. They go back into Carla’s real living room, which is untidy and smells of her cat Ollie, but is warm and known. They drink over-sweetened mojitos and play Hearts.
After her friends leave, Carla closes the door to the second apartment and decides to just ignore her increased square footage until she can afford some new furniture, find a roommate, or make any sense whatsoever of what is happening. But that night and many thereafter, Carla can’t sleep. She has an unshakeable sense that she is being burgled or plundered in some way. She can feel the conjoined apartment there behind the closed door, silent and empty and newly born.
Joey Carson dies on May Day. His parents, Anne and John, call Sheriff Elling when Joey misses curfew that night. The sheriff finds Joey’s car a couple miles outside of town, wrapped around one of the trees in an apple orchard. Joey is halfway through the windshield, like a breeching whale. His skull is split nearly in half, and he is unquestionably dead. Sheriff Elling lays his jacket over the boy’s body. There are no other cars around, and walking up to the highway, he can see the black hashmarks where Joey braked hard, then lost control of the car. Joey had not been wearing his seat belt, and might have come upon a deer or some other animal darting across the road.
Sherriff Elling calls for the coroner and the cleanup crew. He’s known this boy, who’d recently turned eighteen, since the day Joey was born. He’s trying to get his nausea under control, as he decides whether he should call Joey’s parents immediately or go in person, when he notices that the orchard is strangely lit. He turns off his flashlight. At once, he sees it: the apples are emitting a weak, kaleidoscopic light, not quite glowing, but acutely visible in the darkness. They are almost translucent, thin-skinned, and shimmering, and he can see the knobby brown cores within each one. Joey would not have needed to be distracted by an animal. Sheriff Elling leans over and vomits into the grass, his whole body fevered and trembling in impotent rage. He is sick with the wastefulness of it; the orchard and its useless glow, the boy’s strong young body sundered and stilled.
Everyone shows up to the funeral, and it is agony. Joey was well-liked, the kind of boy who had never been in any trouble to speak of and who was unfailingly polite to his elders. Anne and John can barely stand. They are limp in the white wooden folding chairs at the front of the chapel; their bodies seem boneless and wrung out. They, and Sheriff Elling, don’t mention Joey’s unlatched seat belt; they have told everyone that Joey’s accident was the result of the mutated orchard, which must have surprised him into fatal distraction.
They all sit there as the pastor delivers the eulogy and Joey’s girlfriend, Ellie, reads “The Peace of Wild Things” unintelligibly, sobbing. Their collective anger swells; their faces redden, eyebrows knit together. They would give anything to have Joey back; they’d never wish for another miracle again. Now that they’ve seen what’s possible, now that the universe has cracked open like a walnut shell and allowed this strange magic to leak out and infiltrate their lives, it seems insulting, infuriating, that whatever is causing this isn’t giving them something more useful. What earthly utility could they possibly have for opalescent apples or a lake as warm as bathwater, when one of their own lies in a pine box, unspared in his hour of greatest need?
After the funeral, the value of the miracle falls. The prior excitement over palm trees sprouting up from fallow, icy fields seem frivolous and laughable now, a clear product of inflation. Lainey Okani’s Camaro—a gift from her father when she got her license last year—appears in the school parking lot painted a gleaming, lurid purple. It had been black and sleek and pretty badass before, she thought, and she’d liked it. When asked, Lainey just rolls her eyes and says: “Couldn’t have taken ten pounds off my caboose instead, hmm? And ugh, purple. Like I’m driving a giant dick.”
The other kids text her eggplant emojis en masse, but the teasing is gentler than it could be. Miracles might still come to them, more substantial ones than a tacky new paint job; Lainey’s share of the miraculous has been blown on something useless, even embarrassing.
Burt Isler bowls three perfect games in a row one Saturday in early June, and no one even gets it up to debate whether this feat was magical in nature, or just Burt having a hot hand. Shirley Allen—who’d wept at Joey’s funeral until her throat was raw and her eyes were nearly gummed shut—spends the better part of a beautiful Saturday ripping out her garden at the roots. One morning a few weeks prior, she’d found the heads of her fine floribundas and bourbon roses wobbling atop spined stems as thin as strands of hair. It had started to nag at her; the blossoms appeared to be floating, unsupported, above an insubstantial green blur, and looking at them gives her a headache. She finds them surprisingly hard to pull up from the soil, but Shirley puts her back into it, and drags them out in wispy handfuls.
No one knows if the string of miracles will continue or will one day cease. Sometimes, they all agree, they just want the world to follow a known system of logic. They’re exhausted and they’d like to be fully unsurprised, even just for a day. They can’t muster enthusiasm for it any longer; the supply exceeds the demand.
Jason Barnwell discovers that he actually smells terrible if he doesn’t shower immediately after a workout. One Wednesday after a morning training session, he doesn’t have time to bathe before class. By the end of fourth period, the citrusy freshness of his sweat has turned a corner; now he reeks of compost, of bright peels pocked with mold. His classmates lean away from him in their chairs and give him a wide berth in the hallways. Jason cuts his last two classes to go home and stand under a shower that’s almost too hot to bear.
Lori Osting quits smoking again, this time using nicotine patches the size and color of large Band-Aids. She applies them to her shoulders dutifully, even though they make her feel jittery and unsated. Lori hopes her abstinence will stick this time but seems to understand that, barring otherworldly assistance, victory is unlikely.
Long Lake is steaming and empty, a soured womb; as the weather has improved, it’s grown unpleasant to swim in the hot water. There are brownish algae slopped up on the banks and a muddled, sulfurous odor in the air. Everyone avoids the lake now; whatever rot has taken hold of it might be catching.
The last miracle happens an hour before a dinner party, and it is less than an inconvenience, just a blip on the radar of the hostess, Lenore Pierce. She’s created an elaborate centerpiece for the table—a work of art, really. There are pine branches and ribbon and chiffon laid across the linen runner, which bisects the long oak table neatly, right down the middle. The nucleus of the arrangement is an oblong ceramic dish of bright yellow lemons, the best ones she’s seen at the greengrocer’s so far this year.
After arranging her centerpiece and laying the table, Lenore goes upstairs to reapply her mascara, which has smeared a bit in the mid-July mugginess. When she returns to the dining room, powdered and dressed, she sees that all twelve lemons in the ceramic dish have turned a sickly mauve, like the inside of an overcooked steak. They are still firm to the touch, not rotted, and their purplish skins shine with health as she holds two of them, one in each hand. They still smell as they should—tropical, bitter—but they’re unsightly.
She’s irritated, but, being a prudent person, Lenore has purchased extras. She plucks the ruined lemons from the dish and replaces them with her spares. She doesn’t have quite as many extras as she needs, and she frowns briefly at the less abundant display, before remembering she has some of those little clementines in a string bag in the kitchen. She’ll use those. Lenore goes to toss the discolored lemons into the garbage under the sink, then thinks better of it, taking them all the way out to the can in the garage, before the first guest arrives.
