Spotlight: Flat Water by Jeremy Broyles
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On a road trip to Flat Water, the home he fled years before, Monty Marinnis must confront the complex and painful loss that drove him away and now demands his family.
Called back to California for his sister’s wedding, Monty’s journey from the Midwest to the California Coast is also a journey through memory, one complicated by the presence of his adoring, but increasingly frustrated wife Charlotte, from whom Monty has concealed the horrifying details of his family’s fracture and how he remains haunted by what he witnessed as a teenager. The Marinnis family lost their eldest son in a shocking attack, while Monty watched, helpless. Since that day, he has been obsessed with finding an answer to a question that has why do bad things happen to some people but not others? Why were they selected to suffer?
In Flat Water, Monty will be confronted by brutal truths that rise like sharks from the depths. Faced with such realities, Monty will have to choose between acceptance and self-destruction.
Excerpt
From Flat Water by Jeremy Broyles (Mint Hill Books, 2023)
Tiger
The gagging stink of the beached carcass blows inland on the choking easterly wind carrying the scent of briny, turned meat. The sagging gray whale, all thirty tons of her, leaks fathoms of viscera and uncoiling intestines from the belly splitting under her own crushing, grounded weight. Her kind had left the land eons ago, and their design meant they could never come back; the cradling water supported what the witless sand could not. She must have died during the night and come to shore with the tide where she waited for Max and Monty to find her and look after her as the ebbing water left her in their care. But what could they, clever apes though they were, do for a dead whale dumped on their beach? They did the only thing that seemed prudent. They went and got their mother.
“Goddamnit,” she says, hands on hips, hair a deep brown of old-growth woods blustering in the wind and the awful particulate matter lifted from the great melting body and sown into the land and those who walked it. “This is the third one this month. What the hell is going on?” She asks the question of no one; her stare, squinted but unflinching, holds fast to the whale and not her three children at her side. “No wounds on her. She wasn’t preyed upon. Not that there’s anything in the ocean that would have dared try. Look at her. I’ll bet entire pods of orcas gave her all the room she wanted. But here she is dead all the same.”
Maggie cries like the beginning of rain—so silent you could miss it if not for the touch of water. She sweeps her eyes dry with the backs of her hands and snorts a sharp, unenviable breath through her nose that undoubtedly fills her head with the smell of juiced blubber. And merciless god what a smell it is. Cheesy and fetid, yolky and uncooked. Monty believes it is the last smell he will ever know as it seasons his soft palate, his sinuses, salting the earth as it goes so no scent can bloom again. It is a smell he will smell in dreams through the ethers of sleep and the throes of rapid eye movement.
“They’re saying it’s probably a strain of morbillivirus that got into a host and then got passed around the pod,” Max says. “At least that’s what happened a bit further north around Big Sur.” He stands nearest their mother while Monty holds his little sister with his right arm over her shoulders. She tilts her head into him.
“Who is saying that?” There is no accusation in his mother’s voice; she seeks only further clarification for the situation none of them understand.
“Marine biologist types,” Max says with placating palms up and out, gesturing to the godly sixty thousand pounds of dead cetacean flesh going to liquid beneath the decaying sun.
“What if it’s us?” Maggie says from underneath Monty’s arm. “All the plastic we put in the ocean. All the chemicals. What if we’re making them sick?”
“Of course it’s us,” their mother says. Her hounded voice crumbles with the words. “It’s always us.” Her hand flashes open, reaching with a spasm of desperation like the gore-soaked sand has gone to quick under her feet and nothing but the solidity of someone else, anyone else, will save her.
Max is there.
He misses nothing, and the fingers on his mother’s hand can only just finish their fearful flexing before he takes them all into his own so that the touch between mother and firstborn re-anchors all that has come untethered and set adrift into this new alkaline, poisoned sea. The two of them forge a primal, clutching power that searches like tentacles and cocoons the family entire. This Marinnis ward, built of saltwater and swimming lessons and coloring books and the memory of an umbilical cord daring to strangle her very first baby blue so that she had to scream her throat to a pulpy mess to be the breath for him, courses through Monty like charge through a conduit, and he pushes it from himself and into his sister who takes it up and spins it free again to coil loop after loop around the four of them standing at the grace of something wondrous and rare to the point of impossibility that should still be swimming and singing songs. Not here. Not dead on the beach like this.
“Come on,” says Mother. She has rebuilt her crumbling self into a seawall capable of dashing frothing waves to spray. “Let’s go make some calls.”
The four of them turn from the Pacific and the gray whale it left behind. They walk together with the same fluid stride shared in their genetics. The magic unwinds, but it does not dissolve. Monty hears it speaking to them. You are not all right, it says. You will be.
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About the Author
Jeremy Broyles is an Arizona native, originally from the Cottonwood-Jerome-Sedona high desert. He is a professor with nearly twenty years of experience teaching in higher education, and he currently serves as the creative writing program director at Mesa Community College where he has taught since 2017. His stories have appeared in The MacGuffin, Santa Clara Review, Pigeon Review, Pembroke Magazine, Suburbia Journal, and Reckon Review amongst many others. His novella, What Becomes of Ours, was published in 2014 by ELJ Publications. He is an aging rider of bicycles, a talentless surfer of waves, and a happily mediocre player of guitars.
