The 100 Year Miracle by Ashley Ream

worn her hair in a ponytail that night. It was the obvious thing to do, keeping her long hair out of her face and her work, especially in the wind that blew constantly off the water. But wearing her hair up exposed her neck and the upper portion of her scars. Her jacket collar covered it. The house could have been 112 degrees, and she would have left it on.
    “Are you hungry?” Harry asked.
    “Yes,” Rachel said, “but I can’t stay. I have to get back. We’re very busy.”
    “Of course,” Harry said. “I’ll make you something to go.” He started off toward the fridge. “Who was that other man, the one with the tattoo?”
    “John,” Rachel said. “An ecologist.” She was running both hands over Shooby’s ears, and he was leaning into it.
    Harry took out the plate Tilda had left him. He hadn’t eaten yet. He’d been too worked up to eat. Now he was giving his dinner to her. He limped and shuffled around the kitchen gathering tinfoil and plastic baggies and a handled sack from his last trip to the pharmacy. Leaning against the counter for support, he wrapped up the sandwich and stuffed a handful of chips and too many cookies into baggies. The last time Harry had done something like this it had been for his kids, and Tilda had complained that he gave them too much food.
    “They’re schoolchildren not longshoremen,” she’d said and took the lunch-packing duties away from him, which was what she did when things weren’t done how she would have done them.
    He put it all in the sack. “Do you want a bottle of water?” he asked.
    “We have sodas back at the tents.”
    “Okay then.” He handed her the meal.
    “Was it a stroke?”
    “Pardon?” Harry asked.
    “You have reduced mobility on your right side, including slackening in your facial muscles.”
    “No, neurodegenerative.”
    She nodded. “Well, thanks for the food,” she said. “I’m getting pretty tired of eating out of the communal cooler.”
    “I can imagine,” he said. Although he hadn’t really. She was getting up to leave, and he didn’t want her to go. “It must be interesting, the work you do.”
    Rachel shrugged. “Most other people don’t think so, but I like it.”
    “You get to see a miracle up close.”
    “The water glows due to the preponderance of bioluminescent arthropods. Lots of other animals do it. Some deepwater fish, a squid off the coast of Japan—which makes the water look a lot like this but more blue—certain kinds of bacteria. Fireflies. Everyone knows fireflies. You’ve been here a long time?”
    Harry’s brain lurched at the change of topic. It was like someone dumping the linguistic clutch. “We’re not one of the original island families, if that’s what you mean. We came with the first wave of gentrifiers.”
    “What happened to the original families?”
    “A lot of them are still around, but it’s getting harder to hang on. There aren’t a lot of ways to make a living on the island, so when some of the larger land holdings got parceled up and developed, the only people who moved in were people who already had money. The cost of living went up. Most of the original folks—the Kalers, the Wests, the Abernathys—have jobs in town and small places away from the water. My pharmacist is an Abernathy.”
    Rachel thought about that for a moment. “So you’re an invasive species,” she said.
    Harry smiled. “Don’t say that to Tilda. She likes to think of the newer people as the problem.”
    “Who’s Tilda?”
    “My ex-wife. She’s staying here for a while.”
    Rachel nodded, as though having one’s ex-wife move in was nothing that needed further questioning. She might have been being polite, but Harry was beginning to suspect there were things in which Rachel took an interest and things in which she didn’t, and those were not always the things other people would choose.
    “Where are you staying?” Harry asked, still trying to keep her in the kitchen a little longer.
    “At the