Excerpted from ‘Night of the Living Rez’ by Morgan Talty

In the evening, after Frick fed the spirits—there by the shallow stream, under the
gray-blue sky, mumbling a prayer he’d never let me hear—Frick’s truck wouldn’t start,
and so we left it there with the locked-up camp and drove back in Mom’s car, Mom
driving, Frick in the passenger seat. I leaned my head against the cold window.
“I don’t need to know why,” Frick said to Mom. He watched the trees go by as we drove
down the dirt road.
“But you do,” Mom said. “I’ll show you tomorrow.”
“Show me what?” Frick asked.
But Mom said, “Tomorrow.” She drove with both hands on the steering wheel, and she
went slow, and rightfully so. When we hit Route 1, I realized no one was going to speak,
just sit and ride, and I wondered what Mom would show us. I wondered about tomorrow.
When we were almost home, riding over the bridge to the Island, I sensed that even
though their problems were their own, there was no escaping how those problems
shaped us all, no escaping the end, like the way the ice melts in the river each spring,
overflowing and creeping up the grassy banks and over lawns, reaching farther and
farther toward the houses until finally the water touched stone, a gentleness before the
river converged on the foundation, seeping inside and flooding basements, insulation
swelling, drying only when the water has receded. What remained was a smell, a
reminder that the water had come and risen up and would rise again, in time. I would
never forget that car ride or that night at home: because we all found that smell, literally,
and it was not subtle.
“What is that?” Mom said. We smelled it before we got indoors, and when we were
indoors, the stench was so terrible that we were laughing as we stood in the house. “Oh
my God, what is that?”
Frick walked around the house in his boots, looking for the smell. “Holy Jesus,” he said.
“Smells like chagook,” Mom said, and she looked in the garbage, took a big whiff, and
shook her head. “David,” she said. “Did the house smell this morning?”
“Not really,” I said, covering my nose. “It smelled like it always does.”
“Christ,” Frick said, and he looked at us in the kitchen. Then he squatted, put his nose to
the floor, and smelled.
I laughed, and so did Mom.
“What’s funny?” Frick said. He smelled another part of the floor, following something.
“You’re smelling the floor,” Mom said. She had her hand over her nose.
“And?” Frick said.
“And you look ridiculous,” Mom said.
Frick wasn’t laughing. He was smelling the floor, and Mom and I watched him crawl up
the hallway on all fours, sniffing like a dog. He made it down the hall and sniffed the
closet. Then he opened the door and kept sniffing, stuck his head between hanging
clothes.
Mom was cracking up, and in between laughs she started to gag, and when she gagged
I gagged and then Frick said, “Don’t,” and he started gagging. He got up off the floor
and dry-heaved in the bathroom.
“The hell’s a matter with you two?” he said. We were still laughing, and for a second he
looked to smile, but then he gagged again.
He took a deep breath. “I’ll be back,” he said. He grabbed a flashlight from under the
sink, and he went out the door and around back of the house.
Mom and I stopped laughing when we heard him under the house, crawling about,
cursing. When he stopped moving, we listened, and the silence was broken by one
giant gag, and Mom and I started up again, banging our hands on the table.
“Listen to him!” Mom said.
I was laughing hard, but not at Frick: Mom was hysterical, tears coming down her face,
and she was hyperventilating, trying to catch her breath, and her laughter made me
laugh.
“And to think—” Mom laughed so hard she wasn’t making noise, was shaking in the
chair. The phone rang and she hung it up. “And to think I clean this place every day!
What’s the point! Shit just creeps right in! Tend a nice house, my mother always said.
What does she know! Oh God, it stinks.” She stood. “It stinks so bad.”
The phone rang again, and Mom let it go to voice mail.
“Shh, shh,” Mom said, a finger to her mouth, stifling her laughter. We listened as the
voice mail spoke the caller’s message. “Yeah, it would be nice if someone WOULD
CALL ME BACK!” Click.
“Your poor father!” Mom said, and she exploded with laughter. “If only he could smell it!”
Mom rose from the table and went outside, and I followed, wiping tears from my eyes,
and in the silent cold we stood in the driveway, waiting for Frick.
Mom started up again. A slow laugh at first, then it built and climbed up higher and
higher—she couldn’t stop. I didn’t find it funny anymore—she looked like she was about
to collapse.
Frick came from out back and stepped into the porch light. He held out and away from
him something large and oval like a saucer sled. It dripped, and the smell came right at
us again, stronger than in the house.
“Found it,” Frick said.
“What is it?” I asked.
“A snapping turtle,” Frick said. It was decomposing, rotting from inside its shell. “Must’ve
crawled up there and died. How it got in, don’t know.”
“It died in our house!” Mom said. She was breaking—it was that kind of laughter. “The
house killed it!”
“You all right?” Frick said, and he brought the turtle to the side of the shed and dropped
it into the hard snow.
I looked at Mom: she leaned on the car and shook and shielded her eyes with her hand
like a light somewhere was blinding her. And then the laughter turned to tears and she
cried hard, the kind of hard tears you laughed at after.
“What’s a matter?” Frick said. He moved closer.
“It’s dead,” Mom said.
“Way dead,” Frick said, and he nodded at me to go inside. He pulled Mom from the
hood of the car, and followed after me into the house, where he guided Mom down the
hallway and into her room and put her to bed.
The house still smelled. Not a little—a lot. It reeked, but it smelled better than standing
outside while Frick held the rotting turtle in front of us.
Frick took a shower, and when he came out I smelled the sweet shampoo.
“Good night, David,” he said from the hallway, and I heard Mom’s door click shut. In the
quiet, I looked at the clock, but I couldn’t see the time. I spread out on the couch,
wondering how deep we’d all rest, wondering, again, about tomorrow.

Excerpted from ‘Night of the Living Rez’ by Morgan Talty. Published with permission
from Tin House. First published in Narrative Magazine in 2020. Copyright (c) 2022 by
Morgan Talty.