Debi Orton's Pick: "Tells its tale with subtlety and grace."
When the river ice broke in early May and the Yukon started flowing again, Mary put the last of the dried salmon, some coffee grounds, and a plastic bag of oatmeal in the old pack and walked downriver to the fish camp. The snows had come early, at the end of September, so the junk around the fish camp had been covered all winter.
"You have left me a hell of a mess," she said, poking at the soggy debris. The boat's outboard motor was beached, with seven small parts carefully arranged next to it on folded newspaper. There were three empty oil cans, from that high-mileage oil that cost a fortune, and the sinew netting was torn off one of the paddles on the fish wheel.
She threw her arms wide. "And what do you expect me to do now? I can't hunt the moose and get the sinew, not alone. I can't butcher and pack. I'm an old woman! And if the fish wheel sits in the dust broken I won't be drying salmon for the winter, will I? You have left me here to starve, husband."
She poked her walking stick into the flat tire of a great-granddaughter's abandoned bike, the pink handlebars and pom-poms crusted with mud. No one was interested in the fish camp now. The children strong enough to run had run. They were off in Fairbanks or Seattle, drinking Starbucks and going to the movies. The children and grandchildren left to her were drunk in the woods, using the broken pieces of a whiskey bottle to carve words of hate into their skin.
Mary could not have explained, but the first link had been broken, and he had left her here alone.
She would have to hurry. The ice was moving fast this year, or maybe she was moving slowly. She had been thirteen that first year, when he had taken her and they had walked downriver and started building the fish camp. She thought she was eighty-three now, but really she had stopped counting. The link had never broken before, not in all that time.
She left the outboard motor and the parts alone, raked trash into a pile and set it on fire. It was a good fire, ate their old reed drying racks and the pieces of the broken fish wheel. When the flames died down she could see that the fish camp looked good, not perfect, but good enough.
Mary left the coffee and oatmeal, took the last piece of salmon they had dried together. Then she stepped out on the river, onto a piece of ice the size of their marriage bed, when he had finally bought her a bed. The river was cold and swift and strong.
Sarah Black has published flash fiction in Word Riot, flashquake, Slow Trains, and the Rio Grande Review. She is the author of the novels The Lincoln County Wars and Border Roads, from Loose ID, and has novellas forthcoming in several anthologies from MLR Press.