Back to Winter 2025

Water Fed

Zoe Jones Young Writers | Fiction, Winter 2025

The air conditioning was broken and the heat came in bad in the summer on Saint Maria, muggy and seeping through the rusted cracks of the warehouse walls. Ted worked with one handkerchief wrapped around his forehead and another wrapped over his nose and mouth, to block the sweat from falling on the nuts, his fingers blistered from the handheld sheller. Most companies that bag nuts have a machine for this, a processor that churns out two hundred nuts a minute, but Saint Maria was a tiny island off the coast of Florida, with old wooden houses that lined half flooded roads, their main export being almonds, and they couldn’t be bothered to get anything better than manpower, apparently. 

Saint Maria—Home of the Almond! Lightly Roasted and Salted.

Technically the home of the almond is somewhere in Asia, but nobody is taking much time to check. Despite his aching hands and his almost certainly developing carpal tunnel, Ted supposed he should be grateful that they hadn’t chosen to invest in a processor—if they had, then he would be out of a job. He wasn’t paid much for shelling, it was hardly considered grunt work, but it was good enough to fund the housework that needed to be done, nail down the peeling up wood floorboards, and to keep the ricky, paint-peeling house that he grew up in from sinking into the mud. 

Sweat dribbled down his face. He licked his upper lip, under the bandana, and tasted the sweat, salty and warm as the air. The crack of almonds, the sound of the shell being dropped in one bin and the nut in the other echoed down the assembly line, which ran all the way down the long skinny wearhouse and disappeared out of his sight into a corporate horizon. 

____________

The first time Ted was ever on a plane was three years ago, for college. He was alone— he moved himself in, being the youngest of the brothers. Bill and Charles were already off to their own corners of the world, Charles in his last year of school at UPenn, and Bill settled in South Dakota, a dentist with a wife and a child, landlocked and all grown up. 

“Dry,” he’d tell Ted, every time he asked how it was. “Very dry.” He never said it like it was a bad thing.

And Ted’s mother, despite living on Saint Maria for her whole life, going to the same strip of stores and beachside drive-in movies, waited a while to have kids, and by the time Ted was eighteen she was old enough to be weary at the thought of travel, especially the cross-country trek he would be asking her to do, from Saint Maria to Washington state. So, he said goodbye to her on their front porch, staring blankly through the torn hole in the screen over her shoulder as they hugged.

He fit his dorm bed with navy sheets and a gray comforter, hoping these colors were normal for all the inlanders. He had discovered in his brief moments of interaction with people, in the airport on the way over and in the taxi taking him to the campus, that Saint Maria had an incredible bubble around it: islanders speaking in their own tongue, dressing properly to be crabbing off docks or hopping in a golf cart. He was no longer fully sure of what was human and what was Marian, where the overlap was or if there was any at all. His roommate was nice enough about it all at least, aside from a few long looks at his wicker baskets and homemade bars of soap. Despite his mild alienation, Ted loved college, his hyper specific classes and the expansive library which he spent most of his time in. In its three stories, there were more books than Ted had ever seen, more than what existed in all of Saint Maria, including any cookbook or children's book too. He had a favorite chair, on the ground level in the back corner. It was old and puffy, and after classes he would go straight to that library and read books about travel and history and all the places in the world he didn’t know existed. 

In his third month of freshman year, he was walking down a row of houses right off campus, filled with upperclassmen, and found a trash heap on the curb. A broken bed frame, a shelf that had cigarette scent buried deep in the wood, and resting sideways on it a globe with a chipped base, which Ted swiped and brought back to the dorm with him. He sat crisscrossed on his bed with a red pen and made little marks of places he had passed through on his way to the college, or places he now knew existed because of his reading. All days after that, he would come home from the library, scratching off new capitals and states and provinces, making mental notes of his favorites, planning future visits. 

____________

On his first day at the factory he learned that almond tree roots grow to double the size of the tree, often piercing through the ground. That’s why the almonds came in from far away on trucks, instead of the factory being right next to the grove—the fear that the roots might unearth the foundation of the building. And so, he became accustomed to hearing the trucks bumble into the loading dock, a regular, telltale sign that his day was going to get a little longer. Now, after a day of deshelling almonds, every day except Sunday, Ted went back to the house he grew up in, shaking out any stray nuts that clung to his clothes as he passed through the yard. He never got used to climbing the front stairs again, having to push the front door extra hard because the wood was soggy and inflated like a sponge from the humidity that had worked itself deep in the grain. He had been back for nearly the whole summer now, but he still felt like an intruder; like he didn’t deserve to reinhabit the place he had left for college. A college that still sent him flyers and emails, wondering why he chose to “terminate his enrollment.” The ever-rubbing salt in the wound. The death of his mother hadn’t ruined his life, as many of his professors and friends had interpreted when he broke the news that he wouldn’t be returning for the fall. They all patted his shoulder, smiled fondly, told him she was in a better place. His mother’s death, as tragic as it was, had not drowned him in grief. He had been raised around frogs fried to death on concrete, his mother chopping the heads off of fish fresh out of the water for dinner. Death, he thought, came as easy as the tide, rhythmic and necessary, the low before the high. No, his mother’s death was not what undid him. The knowledge that he would have to return to the island to care for the house, a house he and his brothers had run from at their first chance and never returned to—that did it.

/ In the wake of her death, the boys know the house would have to be dealt with. It was of decent size, splintering at the edges, but charming. Ted’s brothers wanted to sell it, split the cash, and move on.

“It’ll never sell like this,” Ted had protested months before. “There’s holes in the screen. The door locks don’t work. And look at the yard.” The house, an island house, built to sustain hurricanes and tidal waves, was cursed with a horrible foundation of mud. His brothers had told him if he cared so much, then he could stay and fix it up. And so here he was: in his old spot on the living room couch, tugging his handkerchief off of his face to drink a beer, just like he would have drunk a glass of coke after a long day of play when he was younger, like he was a boy again.

____________

The house used to have a real yard, a luscious green lawn made of clovers and marsh grass that had fiddler crabs on the stocks and coming out the cracks in the porch steps. But when Ted was twelve, September came, as it usually does, with another hurricane. Not the worst he had seen on the island, not by far, but definitely the most rain. Saint Maria was like a bowl in the ocean: it flooded like it was being filled, and the water wouldn’t leave until the sun dried it all up. The hurricane that came when he was twelve left the town drowning in four feet of water, the world's biggest baby bath. His house was built on concrete pillars, so no damage was done, but the yard had been torn up and lost to the storm. At some point the rain had stopped, and the sun beat down, turning Saint Maria into soup, soaking them all like cast-iron skillets. On the fourth day of playing Uno and climbing on the porch furniture, his mother had had enough. They pulled out the kayaks and the paddleboards, and the four of them adventured through the drowned city. The sun warmed Ted’s back as he paddled, and illuminated the green water. They followed the lines of where the road would be and saw the neighborhood kids, out on boogie boards, or snorkeling through their front yards, or sitting in tube floats, tied to each other with a jump rope. Ted thought of the city of Atlantis, a mystical, drowned city. He imagined to himself that if the rain had not stopped, and hadn’t stopped until the water had covered the steeple of the town hall, Saint Maria wouldn’t have stopped moving. Everyone would have continued on, going to school and work and coming home and feeding the dogs, untouched by the surface world. His mother splashed him with her paddle, making him giggle and lose the thought.

When the rain finally dried up, weeks later, everything was the same, as it always was. Everything except the yard—the biodiverse, overgrown, fairy-tended yard, which had been stripped away and left with mud. Surely, he thought, the mud would dry up too. Surely it would become soil again, and the yard would regrow. The hermit crabs, the snails and the beetles reinhabited, but the mud stayed, a new staple of Saint Maria. Over the years Ted tried to convince his mother to replant the yard, get it back to how it used to be, but she just left it. Slowly, it seemed, the mud began to cling to the house, the foundation sinking down lower and lower, rooting in.

____________

Ted was now unsure how to pick the house back up. He had changed a few floorboards, oiled door hinges here and there, even hosed down the layers of pollen and sand off the porch, but he was just a man, and he couldn't fathom any contraption or lever or pulley system that could restore the house to its natural height. At this point, nearly a whole cinder block of the foundation had disappeared into the earth—he knew because the final inch of it was still visible. Ted had every intention, every desire of restoring the house to its former glory, 

One sweet Saturday, after work, he came home slowly. The sky was cloudless and blended primaries where the sun was setting, a low spot on the horizon. He reached the house, soles dragging, thinking back on when it was full of laughter, hosting block parties and family board game nights around the dining table. On nights when the neighbors came over, his mother would cut up bread and lay out little glass bowls of olive oil, and they'd stand around the island, picking away and talking for hours before remembering that there was a chair in the house. And now he gazed upon that place like a tomb, a black silhouette on the rainbow sky lined by black trees, and made his way down the walkway alone. The porch light flickered on with his movement, dousing the yard in a yellow glow. Out of the corner of his eye he caught something, like a monster or a ghost—a break in the mud. He moved towards it, near the base of the house, his shoes sinking into the earth. But still he moved, and as he neared the interruption, he lowered himself to his knees, dirtying himself, the hands that steadied him. Out of the ground, the age old muck, there was a furling green almond sprig bursting through, shaded and bathed in the floodlight, delicate and passionate. A telltale result of Ted shaking away his work on the way home, and that Sunday would come restful in the morning.

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Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?

“While this piece is fiction, so much of it is pulled from my own life. The island that this story is set on is inspired by Fripp Island, where I would vacation every summer with my family. I grew up around golf carts and boardwalks to the beach lined with shrubbery, and that part of me is what started this whole piece. Similar to the story, I think it’s important to remember what we grew up with and appreciate who we used to be, even as we might grow out of it.”

Zoe Jones is a senior at Charleston School of the Arts, where she studies in the creative writing department. A regional and national award winner of the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, Jones is working on a book set to be published in April 2025.