The 100 Year Miracle by Ashley Ream

eating?”
    “I told you I’m going out.”
    “You didn’t tell me that.”
    Tilda and the kids had learned not to talk to Harry while he was working. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be interrupted; although he didn’t. And it wasn’t that he was in a foul mood when interrupted; although he was. It was that he remembered nothing of any conversation. He became a temporary amnesiac on every topic that was not the composition at hand. When he was thirteen, Juno had once interrupted Harry to tell him he needed to be picked up at the airport the following Tuesday. He was flying to Georgia to visit Tilda’s parents, his first time on a plane by himself. Tilda would be away on state business when he returned, so Harry needed to take the ferry to Seattle, drive to the airport, and pick him up. Harry promised he would. Juno sat alone in the terminal for four hours before a concessions worker got concerned and called security, who called Tilda in Olympia. It had not been her task to pick him up, but Tilda had been mortified, and it had taken a long time to forgive Harry.
    “I did say I was going out. I said it less than two minutes ago. You weren’t listening.”
    Harry either ignored the criticism or didn’t hear it. “Out isn’t very specific. Where out are you going?”
    “I’m going to a restaurant. I don’t expect to be late.”
    “You’re going by yourself?”
    “I’m meeting someone.”
    “Who?”
    “The neighbor.” Tilda gestured in the appropriate direction.
    “Why the hell would you have dinner with that jerk?”
    “Because he asked me to, and it was the polite thing to do. He said he hoped to improve relations with us.”
    “Well, he can go suck a lemon.” Harry had taken off his reading glasses and now put them back on. “He doesn’t even have a real name.”
    “His name is Tip.”
    “Like I said.”
    Tilda wasn’t in the mood to concede the point and, having imparted the information she needed to impart, turned to go.
    “You’re dressed up,” Harry said to her back.
    Tilda looked down at herself. She’d changed clothes three times and had only settled on the black cigarette pants and ivory ribbed turtleneck because putting on something else seemed even more absurd than what she was wearing. She wasn’t at all sure ivory was her color.
    “It’s a dressy restaurant,” she said.
    “Tell me this is not some ridiculous date.”
    “Of course it’s not,” Tilda said and felt herself flush. It was not a date. She had already had that argument with herself, and having had the argument proved that she had entertained the merest notion that Tip might have been suggesting such a thing when he’d asked her. She had told herself that was ridiculous, but she didn’t appreciate Harry saying it. When Harry said it, it sounded mean. It sounded like she was being silly.
    “Some of us are simply capable of making friends,” she said and walked out of the room.
    On the way to the front door, Tilda stopped at the thermostat and turned it down. It was getting far too warm in the house.

 
    12.
    According to the missionaries, the glowing green ribbon that appeared around the island once every one hundred years represented to the Olloo’et either a path from the ancestral world to this one or the other way around, depending on how it was translated. So those who drank of the bay’s waters would either receive spectral visitors—a sort of personal haunting—or their souls would be transported to a spectral plane, which is an entirely different kind of thing.
    One of the missionaries recorded in his diary that several members of the Olloo’et tribe confessed to him that they feared being transported and never being able to return to their bodies—that the spirits were, in fact, actively working against their return—and, if they did manage to come back, the men feared they would be cursed for their impertinence. It was not the sort of thing Rachel had given serious thought to. A native