The Green Dark, Chapter 1. (Patreon)

My mother took two cinder blocks from the garden, carried them by hand down the middle of our one long road toward the point. There was no moon that night. She carried the cinder blocks down the drive, past the rusted sign, past the stacks of lobster traps in the brittle living sand grass. She set each block on the edge of the pier and began to undress.

She left behind two notes back at the house, (For Sunday. For Simon.) knocked onto the floor somehow by the time we found them. She left her computers, stacked neatly. She left the car in the driveway. I can't list everything she left. 

It must have been hard standing out there. There must have been cold wind coming in off the water while she took her clothes off. Her ring. There must have been voices in her head. Voices like the ones Simon and I heard in the church, and later in our grandmother’s kitchen. Stage whispers. 

"How could she." 

"Selfish." 

"Cowardly." 

"How could she."

How? She folded her clothes neatly. She padlocked herself around the waist out in that cold night air. She pushed the chained cinder blocks off the side of the pier, and she fell. The Atlantic Ocean is green dark off that pier at night. Her pain went away.

Cowardly. On the floor of the kitchen the word made me crazy. Another stranger's voice. "And with such young children. Cowardly." Some old man. I held Simon's hand more tightly.

She chose herself. Had that old man ever done anything so brave? 

She chose herself. 

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