Red
by Scott Ortolano
Something was wrong. The close of the truck door echoed much too loudly in the still Florida afternoon, reverberating hollowly against the flaking patchwork of slash pine trunks. But before he could call out, Amory and Zander, his two young nephews, were off at a sprint, fishing poles in hand, laughing wildly as tiny fiddler crabs sluggishly clambered to the safety of their mud burrows.
Then, Rupp inhaled, breathing in a burning, acrid odor. His eyes reflexively watered and the inside of his throat crawled with an unrelenting itch. He coughed until he was down on one knee, clutching at the doorframe for support.
Around the corner, Amory screamed.
Still oxygen deprived, Rupp was up and running in a moment. His panic and desperation growing as he crashed through dense mangrove roots.
The children, in the thrall of their unwary enthusiasm, were already knee deep in the tannin-stained water, frozen in horror. About them floated countless pilchards, their tiny white bodies scattering the surface like discarded medallions, rolling one upon another. Interspersed with these were the remains of the old ones: snook, redfish, trout, large beyond measure, eyes hollowed and already beset by swarms of blow flies.
His nephews’ horrified stares, however, were not out but down. Looking, he now saw movement by their feet as they emitted brief, muffled cries. Smaller gamefish, too large to have succumbed to immediate shock and too small to have yet suffocated, crowded the shoreline, desperately gulping air from the surface and looking up with pleading, doomed eyes.
Rupp splashed in, feet churning brown water. Grabbing his nephews’ outstretched arms, he carried their shaking bodies to the shore as they cried uncontrollably and buried their heads in his chest. Setting them on the wet sand and making sure they hadn’t swallowed any water or stumbled into the bright green death colonies matting the surface, he—ever so carefully—removed the Zephyrhills water bottles from their cooler and began rinsing off the already-red, irritated skin.
When they were back at the truck, Zander, the older of the two, leveled a stare and demanded, “What happened to them? Why were they like that?” tears leaving trails beneath his pale blue eyes.
Rupp began to frame a calming response, the sort of feel-good nonsense adults always say to children—and half believe themselves. But then he stopped… and recalled the lush, manicured lawns of the new Bella Lakes housing development just down the road and how eager his landscaping company had been to sell them sod and fertilizer and sprinkler heads months before. “What those snowbirds won’t pay for lawns that look like what they’ve fled in Michigan,” the well-worn joke ran.
In the end, Rupp said nothing. Then, as he cast his gaze downward, he noticed a dead blue crab flipped over on the sand. Its claws were outstretched, reaching toward the sky.
Scott Ortolano is an English professor at Florida SouthWestern State College. His poetry and prose have recently appeared in Ponder Review, Across The Margin, Hawai`i Pacific Review, Rathalla Review, and Apocalypse Confidential. He has spent his life in Southwest Florida, and his writing is driven by a deep sense of love and concern for a world and region undergoing great waves of change. More of his work is available at www.SOrtolano.com