Cold Wake — Fexingo Horror

September fog rolls thick over the Gulf of Maine, and Luna is alone on the deck of the trawler when she hears a voice—her own name, spoken from the water. Leaning over the rail, she sees a woman's face floating just...

Luna recalls a night in late October, 2019, on the deck of the Cynthia Marie, thirty miles off Grayhook Bank. The trawler's net snagged something heavy — not a rock, not a wreck, not a whale. The captain, a woman named...

Luna sits on the deck of the North Atlantic trawler *Persephone* at two in the morning, a half-mile off the coast of a town called Stillwater Bend. She tells the story of a woman she met there six years ago—a woman...

Off Grayhook Bank, November 2009, the trawler Mary Ellen picked up a sonar return that looked like a church spire rising from the mud. The skipper, a man named Harlan Corbitt, spent three hours circling that patch of...

In the winter of 1998, on the frozen pier of Little Rest, Maine, Luna heard a story from a woman named Elara who kept a trawl net in her cellar. The net was old, its twine black with age, and it seemed to catch things...

On a dead-calm night in October of 2019, Luna sat in a diner outside the town of Stillwater, Minnesota, waiting out a storm that never came. A man named Harlan walked in smelling of wet wool and diesel, and told her...

It was late October in Port Rennie, a fishing town on the Maine coast that doesn't bother with tourists after Labor Day. Luna's neighbor, an old lobsterman named Caleb Tarr, started hauling traps that came up wrong —...

On a still September night in 1987, on the tidal flats of Fiddler's Reach, Maine, a woman named Hilda Oakes watched a rope rise from the mud. Not driftwood. Not a mooring line. A new, dry rope, coiled as if placed by a...

September 1998, just north of Grayling, Michigan, on a narrow two-lane bridge over Salt Run Creek. Luna’s cousin Ellie was the one who found the knots—fisherman’s bends tied in orange nylon rope, looped around the...

October 2023. A woman named Etta takes a seasonal job at a derelict lighthouse on a narrow spit of sand off the Virginia coast. The lantern hasn't been lit in forty years. Her only company is a silent keeper named...

When Luna's trawler pulls into Scarwater Cove for repairs, an old fisherman named Kellner tells her about the rope he found tangled in his propeller last winter — a rope that was still warm, still wet, and still tied to...

September 2023, on a long beach south of Astoria, Oregon, where the waves pull back to reveal a rope that wasn't there the day before. A retired crabber named Ellis Copley spends six nights walking the same stretch...

Luna tells the story of a late October night in 1993 on the coast of Maine, where a retired fisherman named Ellis Carver saw a light moving across the water long after the last boat had come in. The light did not blink...

Luna recounts a night in late October 1997, when she walked the tide line at Dunmore Beach, Rhode Island, and met a woman who was not supposed to be there. The woman wore a blue dress soaked through, and she pointed at...

January stretches on past endurance in the town of Kettle Hole, a rutted road and a boarded-up diner at the edge of a frozen bog. The cold sits so deep the ground cracks. Luna's friend Ellie, a wildlife photographer...