What Dies in Summer by Tom Wright

standing on the porch holding a dish towel, her mouth open and her eyes blinking as she looked around at all the fish. “Lord, Lord,” she said.
    A blue jay slanted down from a tree overhanging the street, lit on the wet sidewalk and cocked his eye at one of the fish. Then he grabbed it in his beak and flapped back up into the tree. Next
door, Mrs. McReady’s cat Beth stuck her head out from under the porch.
    “Pharaoh, let my people go!” Gram said.
    Jazzy looked out from behind her ankles on one side, then the other. The sky was getting lighter by the minute, the clouds beginning to thin and break up. Gram walked across the yard with her
arms held out at her sides, laughing and shaking her head. Jazzy followed her closely.
    “Minnows from heaven!” Gram said.
    Several nuns had gathered in front of St. Mary’s and were whispering to each other and crossing themselves, and all along Harlandale people were coming out of their houses, resting their
hands on their hips, looking up into the trees and turning their faces to the clearing sky. There was a faint smell of iodine in the air.
    Gram stopped beside L.A. and reached for the jar with a puzzled expression. “Why, I know what these are,” she said. “I saw fish like these out in Carolina when I was a girl.
They’re alewives. They come from the sea.” She held the jar up for a better look.
    By this time you could tell there was something wrong with the fish. They seemed to be swimming desperately but barely getting anywhere in the water. As we watched, one of them rotated slowly
over onto its back and floated to the top of the jar.
    “Hey,” said L.A. She peered into the jar and shook it once. Another fish floated up, and in a few minutes they were all belly-up at the surface of the water. She reached into the jar
to poke at the fish with her finger, but they were dead.
    “They can’t survive in fresh water,” said Gram.
    Jazzy transferred from Gram to L.A., who was taking another turn around the yard. They seemed to be trying to inspect each fish individually.
    I was through examining the blasted sycamore and was looking at Beth as she crouched on the edge of Mrs. McReady’s driveway, eating the small fish. She took each one by the head with her
teeth, shook it, growled, then chewed and smacked at it until finally the tail disappeared into her mouth, the whole time watching me with her yellow eyes. As if a million years had disappeared and
I was suddenly back in a time where humans didn’t belong.
    Taking another look around, I decided to take all this as a sign. I made up my mind to go over to Mom’s house and tell her about the fishfall, which would give me a chance to find out what
she knew about L.A. I went inside and tore off a strip of tinfoil from the box in the cupboard, wrapped two of the fish in it and put them in my pocket.
    I didn’t have a regular driver’s license yet, but that wouldn’t have made any difference. Gram would never have let me take the car for what I was planning to do even if I had
had ten licenses.
    Which left my bicycle. I went around to the garage to get it, expecting bad news, since in my experience anytime you took your eyes off a bicycle for ten seconds disintegration set
in—tires went flat, spokes came loose, the chain jumped the sprocket or whatever. But it turned out the bike’s tires were hard and everything else about it seemed to be in working
order.
    I may even have gotten the demented idea this was my lucky day.
    As I pushed the bike out of the garage under the dripping trees, Gram said, “Where to, dear?”
    “Mom’s,” I said. The blue jay screamed its thin power-saw call.
    L.A. frowned and found a sprig of grass that needed stomping.
    Gram smoothed the front of her dress, looked down at the ground for a second and said, “All right. You be careful crossing Lancaster, James.”
    Last year some kid riding a bicycle, a kid quite a bit younger than me, had somehow managed to get himself torn