The Thing Under the Building

The lake had no name that Eddie Brooks used. It was thirty minutes outside of DFW on a county road that turned to caliche a mile before the water, and he'd found it years ago on a drive he couldn't have retraced, which was half the reason he kept coming back. You can't share a place you can't find twice. It becomes, by accident, yours.

He got there just before seven, the Cybertruck parked at the grass edge, and he sat at the end of the dock with his feet not quite touching the water and his coffee thermos doing the work the lake was supposed to do, which was the work of making the noise stop. The surface was perfectly flat. June mornings out here had a stillness that felt less like peace than like held breath - everything waiting for the heat that was already building on the horizon, the decision having been made hours ago, the consequences still arriving.

He'd been carrying a thing for most of the year and had not said it to anyone. Not because he was ashamed of it, exactly, but because saying it out loud to the wrong person would have made it smaller - would have reduced it to the size it sounded like rather than the size it felt like, and those two sizes were very different, and the distance between them was where he lived most mornings.

Raven's truck pulled up at 7:15. He hadn't told her to come. He also hadn't told her not to, which meant she'd read the invite the same way she read most things - as an opening rather than a close. The two of them had a quality of collision that didn't have a name for it yet; they kept ending up in the same places without having planned to, their trucks in the parking lot of the coffee shop, their chairs at the same corner of the fire pit, and now this.

She didn't say anything when she got to the dock. She just sat down beside him, thermos in hand, feet at the same angle over the water.

They watched the lake for a while.

"There's a thing," Eddie said finally.

Raven didn't ask what thing. She waited.

"About three years ago. Client went sideways in a way I couldn't fix and I - the way I handled it wasn't right." He stopped. The lake held still. "Nobody knew except me and one other person and that person is gone now. But I've been building on top of it ever since and I can feel the thing underneath the building."

Raven was quiet for a moment. Then: "Is it going to come up?"

"I don't know. Might. The way this season's going, there are people paying more attention than usual to how things were done before."

"Clark."

Eddie looked at her. "You see that too."

"Hard to miss."

They sat with it. The lake stayed flat and uninterested in either of them, which was what Eddie came for - the indifference. The thing he was carrying did not get smaller when he said it out loud, which was what he'd been afraid of, which meant he'd been wrong about the fear, which meant the fear was not about the size of the thing but about something else.

"What do you want to do about it," Raven said. Not a question, exactly. The tone of a person who already knows the answer and is offering you the chance to get there yourself.

"I want to be the one who says it first," Eddie said. "If it's going to come up, I want to be standing in front of it."

Raven nodded. Slow, the way she nodded things that mattered. "Okay."

That was the whole conversation. They finished their coffees and drove back on the same county road, separately, in the same direction. The thing was still there when Eddie got to the office. But it had changed shape slightly, the way things change shape when they've been spoken to another person who did not flinch. Still heavy. Lighter at one edge.

This entry is part of The Marfa Mavericks, a daily fiction podcast from The Marfa Strategy.

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