October...
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 "October Homecoming" (Copyright Wylddane Productions, LLC)
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The Last Map of Oakhaven...
"A Brother Waiting" (Image and Text Copyright Wylddane Productions, LLC)
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The first thing the island lost was a bench.
It stood above the eastern shore, where people sat to watch the mainland lights appear beyond Lake Superior. At eleven fifty-nine on the last night of September, it was still there.
At midnight, it was gone.
So were the birches behind it, the footpath, and ten paces of earth.
Nothing fell. There was no splash.
Where the shoreline had been, a flat grey emptiness remained. A lantern held toward it cast no light.
By morning, someone had fetched a measuring tape.
By afternoon, someone had sent for Benjamin Vale.
Ben arrived from Bayfield on the third day of October with a leather case of instruments and the firm conviction that anything possessing a boundary could be mapped.
Oakhaven occupied a small island near the Apostle Islands. It had a bakery, a village square, a white lighthouse, and thirty-seven houses, most of which leaned slightly in weather that had given them ample reason.
It was also where Ben had been born.
He had not returned in twenty years.
At the dock, Ruth Bell took his hand.
“You look like your mother.”
“I have considerably less hair.”
“She would have mentioned that.”
Ruth had taught him arithmetic. Now she chaired the village council, a position she described as mostly locating people who had promised to do things.
“We need a map,” she said. “While there’s something left to put on it.”
That night, Ben watched from a safe distance as the keeper’s abandoned shed disappeared.
One moment it stood beneath the lighthouse beam. The next, the beam passed across an absence.
He checked his watch.
Midnight precisely.
The following morning, he measured the loss.
Ten paces.
He wrote the figure down twice.
Each day, Ben walked the remaining perimeter. Each evening, he transferred his measurements to parchment.
The villagers packed crockery, photographs, winter coats. Boats carried them to the mainland. A man took apart his garden gate and laid it carefully across two suitcases.
“Made it with my father,” he explained.
Ben marked the gate’s location, though the gate itself was already halfway to Bayfield.
At the bakery, Ada Mercer continued making bread.
“People fleeing supernatural calamities still need breakfast,” she said.
She gave him a cinnamon roll and asked whether he could put something unusual on the map.
“The back step,” she said. “Could you mark it?”
Ben looked up.
“My sister sat there the morning she left. We’d argued. I stayed inside until I heard her car.”
He waited.
“I don’t need you to write all that down. Just the step.”
That night, the bakery’s back garden vanished.
The step went with it.
On his parchment, Ben drew a small square.
By the sixth evening, he had begun keeping a second notebook.
It contained no measurements.
At the eastern bench, Ruth had once waited for a man she never married.
In the keeper’s shed, a father had hidden a letter from his son, then spent eleven years wishing he had answered it.
The garden gate belonged to a man who had meant to tell his father that their Saturdays together were the happiest part of his childhood.
Ben listened. He recorded what people permitted him to record.
Still, the disappearance offered no tidy explanation. It took the chapel where Ruth had been married happily for forty-three years. It took the vegetable beds of a woman who said she regretted very little except planting zucchini.
There were unfinished things everywhere. Ben could find no way to separate them from the ordinary business of being alive.
But on the seventh night, something happened at Ada’s back step.
He was standing near the new boundary when he heard a car door close.
Then a woman called, very faintly, “Ada?”
He turned toward the sound.
For an instant, beyond the grey, he saw a yellow kitchen door standing open.
Then there was nothing.
The council asked him to finish before the final evacuation.
The town square would go next. His measurements left no doubt.
Beyond it stood his family’s house.
Ruth found him studying the building from across the street.
“Your mother kept it much as you left it,” she said.
“I know.”
“She hoped you’d come.”
Ben put his notebook away.
He had written. He had telephoned. He had paid for repairs after a storm and arranged everything efficiently when she died.
Returning had always been something he would do later.
“Will you come over on the last boat?” Ruth asked.
“After I finish.”
She looked toward the house but said nothing.
Inside, the air smelled of cedar, cold plaster, and the faint lavender his mother had tucked among her linens.
Her piano stood beside the living room window.
There was a shallow mark on the floor where his brother Daniel had once dragged a chair too close to the stove. On the doorframe were their pencilled heights.
Daniel’s last mark stood an inch above Ben’s.
He had been intolerable about that inch.
Ben touched it with his thumb.
Twenty years earlier, Daniel had come home for Christmas and told their father that the man waiting for him on the mainland was someone he loved.
Their father ordered him out.
Their mother sat down at the piano without playing it.
Ben followed Daniel upstairs and watched him pack.
At dawn, they took the ferry together. Daniel had bought two train tickets for the journey south.
“Come for a while,” he said on the platform. “You can figure things out there.”
Ben wanted to go. He had packed a bag.
But he could already imagine the silence at home, his father’s anger, his mother looking toward the door.
“You can’t expect me to throw everything away because you’ve decided to make a scene.”
Daniel stood very still.
Then he said, “Is that what you think I’m doing?”
Ben could have answered differently.
Instead, he picked up his bag and walked back toward the ferry.
Afterward, there were years of brief letters, then Christmas cards, then addresses Ben no longer knew were current.
He had drafted an apology once.
It remained among his papers, corrected in three places.
On the last afternoon, Ben completed the map.
He inked the lighthouse, the bakery, the thirty-seven houses. He marked the garden gate and Ada’s back step. Beside the eastern shore he drew the missing bench.
Around these he traced the island’s original boundary, using the old survey he had brought from the mainland.
Then he added the streets he remembered.
Above the scale, in his careful lettering, he wrote:
Oakhaven, as its people knew it.
He carried the map to the dock and placed it in the waterproof chart case aboard the evacuation boat.
Ruth waited beside the gangway.
“You’re coming?”
“One more thing.”
“The house?”
“The piano.”
She studied him.
“Eleven forty-five,” she said. “We cannot wait beyond that.”
“I understand.”
He watched her fasten the chart case beneath a seat.
Then he went home.
At eleven thirty, he was still drawing.
He had the shape of the piano, the worn pedals, the vase that had always stood on top. But the little chip in the ivory of middle C eluded him.
His mother’s hands had moved over that key thousands of times.
He sharpened his pencil.
From the harbour came the boat’s horn.
He stood, gathering his instruments.
Then he heard another sound.
A station clock.
He knew its uneven tick. As a boy, he had counted it while waiting for mainland trains.
Ben looked toward the living room wall.
The wallpaper trembled.
Somewhere beyond it, a porter called a destination.
He set his instruments down.
At eleven fifty-nine, the harbour horn sounded again, farther away now. The final boat had left.
Ben sat at the piano and pressed middle C.
The note was thin, slightly out of tune.
He let it fade.
At midnight, the wall disappeared.
Beyond it lay a railway platform beneath a winter sky.
Steam drifted past a green signal lamp. A newspaper moved along the boards in a small wind.
Near a luggage trolley stood a young man in a brown wool coat.
Daniel.
His brother turned toward him.
“Ben? We haven’t much time.”
Ben remained beside the piano.
He could see the platform clearly. He could smell coal smoke and the bitter coffee they had bought that morning.
At his feet, where the living room floor met the station boards, stood his old travelling bag.
The brass clasp was broken. He had forgotten that.
Behind him, the cottage was quiet.
He thought of Ruth aboard the boat, of Ada carrying her bread tins, of the map travelling safely toward the mainland. There would be people to unfold it. They would point to their houses. Someone would remember the bench.
Daniel glanced toward the train.
“You don’t have to stay,” he said.
Ben had spent twenty years remembering the wrong words. Now he heard these again and understood how long his brother must have rehearsed them.
He reached for the bag.
It was heavier than he expected.
Crossing onto the platform, he felt the cold through the soles of his shoes. Daniel took one step toward him, searching his face.
“I’m sorry,” Ben said.
His brother’s expression changed.
“For what?”
Ben tightened his hand around the worn leather handle.
“For making you leave alone.”
The train waited beside them, its doors still open.
Daniel reached for his shoulder.
“Well,” he said softly. “Come on, then.”
And this time, Ben went with him.
~Wylddane
It stood above the eastern shore, where people sat to watch the mainland lights appear beyond Lake Superior. At eleven fifty-nine on the last night of September, it was still there.
At midnight, it was gone.
So were the birches behind it, the footpath, and ten paces of earth.
Nothing fell. There was no splash.
Where the shoreline had been, a flat grey emptiness remained. A lantern held toward it cast no light.
By morning, someone had fetched a measuring tape.
By afternoon, someone had sent for Benjamin Vale.
Ben arrived from Bayfield on the third day of October with a leather case of instruments and the firm conviction that anything possessing a boundary could be mapped.
Oakhaven occupied a small island near the Apostle Islands. It had a bakery, a village square, a white lighthouse, and thirty-seven houses, most of which leaned slightly in weather that had given them ample reason.
It was also where Ben had been born.
He had not returned in twenty years.
At the dock, Ruth Bell took his hand.
“You look like your mother.”
“I have considerably less hair.”
“She would have mentioned that.”
Ruth had taught him arithmetic. Now she chaired the village council, a position she described as mostly locating people who had promised to do things.
“We need a map,” she said. “While there’s something left to put on it.”
That night, Ben watched from a safe distance as the keeper’s abandoned shed disappeared.
One moment it stood beneath the lighthouse beam. The next, the beam passed across an absence.
He checked his watch.
Midnight precisely.
The following morning, he measured the loss.
Ten paces.
He wrote the figure down twice.
Each day, Ben walked the remaining perimeter. Each evening, he transferred his measurements to parchment.
The villagers packed crockery, photographs, winter coats. Boats carried them to the mainland. A man took apart his garden gate and laid it carefully across two suitcases.
“Made it with my father,” he explained.
Ben marked the gate’s location, though the gate itself was already halfway to Bayfield.
At the bakery, Ada Mercer continued making bread.
“People fleeing supernatural calamities still need breakfast,” she said.
She gave him a cinnamon roll and asked whether he could put something unusual on the map.
“The back step,” she said. “Could you mark it?”
Ben looked up.
“My sister sat there the morning she left. We’d argued. I stayed inside until I heard her car.”
He waited.
“I don’t need you to write all that down. Just the step.”
That night, the bakery’s back garden vanished.
The step went with it.
On his parchment, Ben drew a small square.
By the sixth evening, he had begun keeping a second notebook.
It contained no measurements.
At the eastern bench, Ruth had once waited for a man she never married.
In the keeper’s shed, a father had hidden a letter from his son, then spent eleven years wishing he had answered it.
The garden gate belonged to a man who had meant to tell his father that their Saturdays together were the happiest part of his childhood.
Ben listened. He recorded what people permitted him to record.
Still, the disappearance offered no tidy explanation. It took the chapel where Ruth had been married happily for forty-three years. It took the vegetable beds of a woman who said she regretted very little except planting zucchini.
There were unfinished things everywhere. Ben could find no way to separate them from the ordinary business of being alive.
But on the seventh night, something happened at Ada’s back step.
He was standing near the new boundary when he heard a car door close.
Then a woman called, very faintly, “Ada?”
He turned toward the sound.
For an instant, beyond the grey, he saw a yellow kitchen door standing open.
Then there was nothing.
The council asked him to finish before the final evacuation.
The town square would go next. His measurements left no doubt.
Beyond it stood his family’s house.
Ruth found him studying the building from across the street.
“Your mother kept it much as you left it,” she said.
“I know.”
“She hoped you’d come.”
Ben put his notebook away.
He had written. He had telephoned. He had paid for repairs after a storm and arranged everything efficiently when she died.
Returning had always been something he would do later.
“Will you come over on the last boat?” Ruth asked.
“After I finish.”
She looked toward the house but said nothing.
Inside, the air smelled of cedar, cold plaster, and the faint lavender his mother had tucked among her linens.
Her piano stood beside the living room window.
There was a shallow mark on the floor where his brother Daniel had once dragged a chair too close to the stove. On the doorframe were their pencilled heights.
Daniel’s last mark stood an inch above Ben’s.
He had been intolerable about that inch.
Ben touched it with his thumb.
Twenty years earlier, Daniel had come home for Christmas and told their father that the man waiting for him on the mainland was someone he loved.
Their father ordered him out.
Their mother sat down at the piano without playing it.
Ben followed Daniel upstairs and watched him pack.
At dawn, they took the ferry together. Daniel had bought two train tickets for the journey south.
“Come for a while,” he said on the platform. “You can figure things out there.”
Ben wanted to go. He had packed a bag.
But he could already imagine the silence at home, his father’s anger, his mother looking toward the door.
“You can’t expect me to throw everything away because you’ve decided to make a scene.”
Daniel stood very still.
Then he said, “Is that what you think I’m doing?”
Ben could have answered differently.
Instead, he picked up his bag and walked back toward the ferry.
Afterward, there were years of brief letters, then Christmas cards, then addresses Ben no longer knew were current.
He had drafted an apology once.
It remained among his papers, corrected in three places.
On the last afternoon, Ben completed the map.
He inked the lighthouse, the bakery, the thirty-seven houses. He marked the garden gate and Ada’s back step. Beside the eastern shore he drew the missing bench.
Around these he traced the island’s original boundary, using the old survey he had brought from the mainland.
Then he added the streets he remembered.
Above the scale, in his careful lettering, he wrote:
Oakhaven, as its people knew it.
He carried the map to the dock and placed it in the waterproof chart case aboard the evacuation boat.
Ruth waited beside the gangway.
“You’re coming?”
“One more thing.”
“The house?”
“The piano.”
She studied him.
“Eleven forty-five,” she said. “We cannot wait beyond that.”
“I understand.”
He watched her fasten the chart case beneath a seat.
Then he went home.
At eleven thirty, he was still drawing.
He had the shape of the piano, the worn pedals, the vase that had always stood on top. But the little chip in the ivory of middle C eluded him.
His mother’s hands had moved over that key thousands of times.
He sharpened his pencil.
From the harbour came the boat’s horn.
He stood, gathering his instruments.
Then he heard another sound.
A station clock.
He knew its uneven tick. As a boy, he had counted it while waiting for mainland trains.
Ben looked toward the living room wall.
The wallpaper trembled.
Somewhere beyond it, a porter called a destination.
He set his instruments down.
At eleven fifty-nine, the harbour horn sounded again, farther away now. The final boat had left.
Ben sat at the piano and pressed middle C.
The note was thin, slightly out of tune.
He let it fade.
At midnight, the wall disappeared.
Beyond it lay a railway platform beneath a winter sky.
Steam drifted past a green signal lamp. A newspaper moved along the boards in a small wind.
Near a luggage trolley stood a young man in a brown wool coat.
Daniel.
His brother turned toward him.
“Ben? We haven’t much time.”
Ben remained beside the piano.
He could see the platform clearly. He could smell coal smoke and the bitter coffee they had bought that morning.
At his feet, where the living room floor met the station boards, stood his old travelling bag.
The brass clasp was broken. He had forgotten that.
Behind him, the cottage was quiet.
He thought of Ruth aboard the boat, of Ada carrying her bread tins, of the map travelling safely toward the mainland. There would be people to unfold it. They would point to their houses. Someone would remember the bench.
Daniel glanced toward the train.
“You don’t have to stay,” he said.
Ben had spent twenty years remembering the wrong words. Now he heard these again and understood how long his brother must have rehearsed them.
He reached for the bag.
It was heavier than he expected.
Crossing onto the platform, he felt the cold through the soles of his shoes. Daniel took one step toward him, searching his face.
“I’m sorry,” Ben said.
His brother’s expression changed.
“For what?”
Ben tightened his hand around the worn leather handle.
“For making you leave alone.”
The train waited beside them, its doors still open.
Daniel reached for his shoulder.
“Well,” he said softly. “Come on, then.”
And this time, Ben went with him.
~Wylddane