Fata Morgana

Lindsay Starck
| Fiction

 

That night he lies awake, listening to the high-pitched cries of humpback whales patrolling the black water just beyond the station. The one time he’d asked Lizzie about the last remaining polar bear, she’d claimed to have no memory of the visit. It was true that she had been five years younger than him—she still was, of course—but even so, he didn’t believe her. How could she have forgotten? It would have been easy enough to forget about the bear, he figured; the sweaty strangers, the air thick with mold or algae, the stink of fish and cleaning products. All of that might go. But how could anyone forget the sounds their father was making? His sorrow was thrumming, keening. His shoulders trembled and right before he turned away his sunburned face, Sam saw how his skin was glimmering with tears. For the first time that he could ever remember, Sam had not been afraid of him. Has he ever felt that brave again?

 

The next morning, as his tourists are slinging their bags over their shoulders and struggling into the belly of the plane that will whisk them up and away from this frozen continent, Sam is dragging his kayak through the pebbles of the Béchervaise shore. A few penguins gather to watch him, tilting their heads and twittering through their sharp black beaks.
“Hush,” he tells them, struggling with the straps of his backpack. It’s heavier than usual, and he’s forced to bend a little as he scuttles up the shore. The penguins cackle, waddling out of his way. Making room for him.

 

For a while Lizzie had worked with Sam. She was taking a graphic design course at the time, so she seemed like the most logical person to create his marketing materials. Then she started helping out with travel details, social media sites. She went with him to Suriname to see one of the last waves of leatherback tortoise hatchlings make their way into the sea. But while they stood together on the beach, the sand still warm underfoot at midnight, and watched three tiny shadows hasten toward the water, she told him that she was quitting.
“Quitting?” he’d repeated, whispering so that no one from the group could hear him. In the dark, he couldn’t read her face. “But you’ve barely started.”
“I didn’t know what it would be like, and now I do,” she hissed. “You’re a fucking profiteer, Sam. An extinction profiteer.”
Sam felt the sand shift beneath him. He shuffled his sandals, tried to regain his footing. After a pause, he said: “I didn’t cause this. If we weren’t here, there would still be only three hatchlings on this beach. What I’m doing, what they’re doing—” He waved his hand at the clump of tourists near the water’s edge and he remembered the phrase he’d heard one of them use at breakfast the day before. “We’re bearing witness.”
Lizzie had always been the passionate one, the political one. And he’d always been impressed by how much she cared about things. Even though he was older than she was, as a child he’d bent to her will because she had an opinion and he didn’t. She had the whole family eating vegan by the time she was twelve. She drew up petitions on carbon emissions and pollinator gardens and dragged Sam on her rounds to collect signatures every weekend. He didn’t like knocking on doors; he was embarrassed every time he faced one of his exasperated neighbors. But he did like working with Lizzie. Once the sun disappeared behind the houses and the sky began to grow violet, she would hand him half of an organic granola bar and sit down on the curb to count up their signatures and he’d feel as though he had accomplished something.
“God, Sam,” she said to him as the last of the tortoises toppled into a foamy black sea. Her whisper was louder, fiercer now. “Is there anything you care about?”
It was strange to realize, on that beach, that suddenly they were divided. In the early hours of the morning, they returned to the hotel in pointed silence to find an email from their mother. Their father had suffered a stroke. Might the two of them fly home, she pleaded, as soon as they were able?

 

Lindsay Starck is a writer, editor, and English professor. Her fiction has recently appeared in AGNI, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere, and her new Slenderman-inspired novel is forthcoming from Vintage/Anchor Books. She likes to stroll around the Minneapolis lakes with her husband and her very good dog, Cedar.

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