In the morning, the sheriff found Leo on the Bay’s edge again, but this time he was dressed in dry clothes, sitting on a cooler, sipping a coffee from the gas station. He wasn’t talking to the shopping cart. He was just looking at the water, calm as a stone.
That was the third time.
The term had a genealogy. First came the fishermen who lived too long on the brackish edge, their hands stained with eel slime, their stories looping like the tides. Then the widows who talked to gulls. Then the veterans who built forts from driftwood and declared war on Canada. But Leo was different. Leo was young, thirty-two, with the hollowed-out look of someone who had once been brilliant—an engineer, a husband, a father—before the ammonia leak at the chicken processing plant erased his sense of smell and, piece by piece, everything else. bay crazy
“Leo,” the sheriff said. “You okay?” In the morning, the sheriff found Leo on