#slowburn

Honestly when I mention this to people, no one else seems to remember this. I’m not sure why this seems to linger in my mind every night. When I mention the riots in 95 they talk about the riots in LA. They don’t remember the sirens screaming all night. They don’t remember the men in gas masks knocking on every door, telling us to leave. The shortages, the fear, the paranoia, the evacuations of entire cities, almost the whole state.

[Originally posted to a paranormal forum in March 2023, split across four posts because of the character limit. Reproduced here in full, with the poster's section headings.] My counsellor thinks I should write this down. Not to post, necessarily. Just to get it out of my head and onto something that isn't my head. I'm posting it because if I only write it down, it's just me and the page again, and I've spent five years being the only person who knows the whole of it.

In June this year, my son came up in one of my lobster pots. He'd been dead nearly seven years. I'll explain that. But I wanted you to have it first, the way I had it, on the deck of my boat at half five on a Sunday morning in June, with the tide going slack in the Narrows and the gulls screaming and the pot coming up over the gunwale dripping, and something in it that wasn't a lobster. Once you know the rest, you'll not hear it the same.