#d.a.d

By late August, Dustwood had the kind of heat that made everything feel faintly used.

It settled into the town before noon and stayed there, heavy in the pines and caught in the damp seams of people’s clothes. It lay over the roofs and the church steeple and the parking lot at Haven’s Diner. It rose off the hood of Dallas Reyes’s car in soft, trembling waves and turned the inside of the windshield greasy with light.

The whole town smelled baked through. Hot asphalt. Pine sap. Mud drying at the roadside. Lake water sitting black and still beyond the trees. Somebody’s washing powder drifting from an open vent. Fry oil from the diner. A dead patch of grass in front of the post office giving off that bitter, dusty smell green things had when they had lost the argument with summer.

Dustwood was not tiny, not really. There were about two thousand three hundred people in it, according to the welcome sign on the highway, though the sign had been shot at enough times that the number changed depending on the angle. It had a school, a church, a diner, a store, a paper, a bar, a few roads that mattered, and more roads that did not but would still take pieces off your suspension if you got careless. It had enough people for everybody to know everybody else twice over. Once by name. Once by rumours.

Ricky had grown up inside that kind of knowing. It trailed after him even now, even at nineteen, even when half his life happened under LED lights with a headset on and a camera angled to miss the worst bit of peeling paint behind his desk. People in Dustwood knew his face before they knew where from. Some knew him because he was Dallas Reyes’s little brother. Some because his mother had sung alto at St. Jude’s until she died. Some because he had once thrown up in the parking lot behind Dustwood School after the eighth-grade funfair ride spun too long. Some because he streamed online most nights to an audience large enough to feel faintly absurd in a town where the Gazette still printed birth announcements and engagement notices beside a photograph of the junior archery team.

Dustwood liked to pretend the internet had not found it properly. That was one of its little vanities. The teenagers stood outside the Dustwood Store and checked each other’s posts while older people complained about screens ruining attention spans. Young adults huddled in cars and carparks to vape and swap videos. The school asked for online forms and still sent paper slips home in backpacks. Men at the Rusty Spur spoke with real contempt about content creators and then watched hunting videos on their phones with the sound all the way up.

The town had cell service in all the places people could point to on a map and lost it without apology on half the roads that actually mattered. Go far enough toward the lake or the forest and your bars dropped out one by one, neat and orderly, until you were left with your own breathing and the sound of cicadas, which felt less modern.

The houses on the older streets leaned into their foundations as if listening. Porch steps held the shape of generations of boots. Chain-link fences stitched together dog runs, vegetable patches, and half-hearted flower beds. Main Street tried its best under the burden of weather and habit. There were old signs still hanging where there were no longer shops. There were church notices curling at the edges beneath sheets of plexiglass clouded with age. The courthouse lawn no longer had a courthouse on it, just a veterans’ memorial, two live oaks, and a community board crowded with missing pets, bake sales, sports try-outs, trail warnings, and one furious handwritten note about people throwing beer cans in the drainage ditch off Pine Ridge Road.

The town proper was where people performed being normal. The ranch edge was where the lots widened and the fences began and every gate screamed when opened. The lake side was where the roads narrowed, the trees pressed closer, and locals said practical things in voices that sounded less practical than they meant to.

Don’t go up there after dark.

Watch your footing by the old dock.

If you hear laughing from across the water late at night, leave it well enough alone.

Ricky had heard all of it since he was old enough to sit in the truck and swing his legs. Adults always made it sound half like a joke and half like a warning issued on behalf of forces they did not wish to discuss in public.

Dustwood was full of little contradictions like that. It had prayer circles and horseshoes over doors. It had women who quoted scripture while dropping bits of bread at the waterline when somebody was ill. It had men who said there was no such thing as a haunting and still would not drive Manor Road after midnight unless there was company in the truck with them.

Ricky liked that about Dustwood even when he hated everything else. It embarrassed itself with sincerity. It had no idea how it looked from the outside.

He knew every version of Dustwood, or thought he did. The bright one. The petty one. The ridiculous one. The one that sat under fluorescent lights and argued about football rankings and who had backed into whose mailbox. The one that watched from dark windows. The one that rose damp off Wraith Lake after midnight and made the road home feel longer than it ought to.

From the outside, in the gold hour of evening, the place could look almost tender. Strangers could coo and say ‘quaint’, not seeing the shadows that grew much darker than the honeyed sun would cast.