In Short – Issue 3 (Spring 2025)

May 31, 2025

“Call of the Wild” by Claudia Tong

Erasure

By Timothy C. Smith

For Annie

She had a name. 

A sultry July afternoon, the grass slowly turning from jade green to dried hay. Cicadas buzzing in the trees. A year-and-a-half old, she had toddled unsteadily across her backyard toward the Portage River, drawn by the water’s sparkle and movement. 

The river would have swallowed her gently. A shock of surprise, a breath heavy with water. Then carried her silently along downstream. Two teenaged boys manned a canoe and recovered her body, their dreams forever haunted.

Once, when visiting my aunt and uncle, her parents, and their five other children, I found a closet jam-packed with empty vodka and gin bottles. I don’t know if the bottles were emptied before or after their daughter entered the water. 

A year later, a flotilla of them, bobbing and refracting sunlight, made its way down the Portage, gasping for air as they sank to the bottom. The police arrived at my aunt and uncle’s house to ask who might have dumped that many bottles into the river. 

Maybe they hoped the river would carry away their agony in clear glass. 

My uncle suffered a stroke in his late 40s. Afterward, he seemed to understand what people said but could only speak a jumble of unintelligible sounds. He’d babble along in conversation with us when we’d gather for holidays, his face florid and expressive. We’d nod as if we understood.

I’d like to think this little girl has rested in the arms of God for the past 75 years, but though I sometimes wish I did, I don’t believe in God. Only in people with hope and regrets, memories and broken hearts. Carrying on as their days flow by.  

I recently read an online genealogy of my aunt and uncle’s family. Their five children are listed. The toddler is not. Some ghosts are so painful we can’t bear to name them.

Sometimes I am speechless when I gaze at water coursing down a river, wondering what secrets lie beneath its restless skin.

Timothy C. Smith (he/him) is a writer based on the southwest coast of Michigan, and is the author of Crashproof Your Kids: Make Your Teen a Safer, Smarter Driver. His stories, articles, and essays have appeared in a variety of publications. Excerpts from his memoir-in-progress will appear in forthcoming issues of Passages North, The Brussels Review, and Chicago Story Press.