The Glacier
Issue Two
Winter 2023

Spotted

Two cyclopses of light, adult tall and child short, move down the road cathedraled in night and pine. It’s long past the child’s bedtime, and this is the first weekend visit. A trial. But she wanted to see the salamanders. Blue-Spotted Salamanders. They’ve been studying them in school. She brought him the picture she drew.
“They migrate from the forest,” she said. “To the bog to have their babies. But they go at night 'cause they’re scared of the day.”
He stuck her drawing on the fridge with the Pomp’s Tire Service magnet left by the previous tenant.
The road through the park is closed at night for six weeks each spring during the migration. This is something special they can do together, a new memory they can make, a way to mark their fresh start.
Her hand in his is like the needle. But better.
“It’s still too tight!” she says, suddenly on the verge of panic, and pulls at her headlamp.
“Okay, Donkey, I’ll get it.”
She’s caught her hair in the straps and clasps.
“Daddy!”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s too bright.” She scrunches her eyes under his beam as he works.
“Cover your eyes, my Donkey,” he says playfully. He pinches each caught strand of her hair near the scalp so they won’t pull and hurt as he works each tangle loose.
“Hurry!”
His hands don’t shake. He works smoothly and quickly. Though he can feel his heart jump around.
“There.” He frees the headlamp. “You can hold it in your hand, like a flashlight.”
“No. I want to wear it.”
“Okay.” He loosens the strap a bit more.
“Try it now.”
It flops a little as they walk, sending her beam bouncing and quivering, but she doesn’t seem to mind.
No salamanders.
“Be careful you don’t step on them,” she warns.
“Got it.” He scans in front of their feet. “Sweet Donkey?”
“Yes, Daddy?”
“I need you to do something for me. Miss Stacey says you’ve been poking yourself in the arm. With pencils and straws and stuff.”
She doesn’t say anything. Sweeps the pavement with her light.
“That’s not something you should do. It worries people.”
“Okay. But do you think we’ll see the salamanders?”
“I hope so.” He sweeps his beam over the road like hers. Searchlights.
“You know Daddy doesn’t do that anymore. It was a bad, bad mistake.”
“Okay.”

When they reach the beach parking lot past the forest and bog they turn around. She walks slower. They sweep their beams farther to each side of the road.
“Look, Daddy!”
She aims her beam ahead. He stops and grips her hand a little tighter.
“It’s skunks, Donkey!” he whispers.
“Skunks? It is?”
“Three babies and a mama!”
“Or a daddy,” she whispers. “If the mom’s gone, the daddy takes over by himself.”
“He does.”
They watch the family cross and disappear back into the tall grass and forest, down the little hill toward the bog.
“Do you see any salamanders yet?”
“Not yet, Donkey.”
“Me neither.”
“That’s okay.”
“I want to see them.”
“But we saw the skunk family. That’s really special.”
“Yeah,” she says.

You think this won’t last. You think you know how this will end. The misery to come. And you’re probably right.
But the end is not the point. Stick around long enough and every story ends sad. Even yours.
Meanwhile, as they scan the road ahead their beams flash on little silver flakes in the pavement.
“See all those tiny reflections in the road?” he asks. “It’s like camera flashes. Hundreds of camera flashes for us. Like we’re rock stars on stage. You and me.”
“Yeah,” she says.

JONATHAN JOHNSON‘s poems have been anthologized in Best American Poetry, published in recent issues of Ploughshares, Southern Review, Witness, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, New Ohio Review, Missouri Review and Gettysburg Review, and read on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac. “Spotted” is from his collection-in-progress of stories set in Marquette, Michigan, The Little Lights of Town, other stories from which appear in recent issues of Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and Bellevue Literary Review. His books include the poetry collections Mastodon, 80% Complete (Carnegie Mellon, 2001), In the Land We Imagined Ourselves (Carnegie Mellon 2010), and May Is an Island (Carnegie Mellon 2018); and the memoirs, Hannah and the Mountain (Nebraska, 2005) and The Desk on the Sea (Wayne State, 2019). Johnson migrates between the Northwest; his hometown of Marquette; and his ancestral village of Glenelg in the Scottish Highland where his cousins are still crofters.

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