Secondary Effects – David Gladfelter

September 25, 2026

They call that Secondary Effects. He pointed up at bass boats torn like bread scattered across live oaks, fiberglass twisted apart all down hanging the moss, whipping silver white slivers in and out of sunlight, bobbing, shivering. Get it?

The off-ramp gave beneath her and she was forced sprinting, crashed through the thrush and got a leg off hopping and carved out wide to balance then was off again. Couldnt make back that way now. It wouldnt change anything and she ran herself harder because of it. Three more impacts from behind, cars churned to the interstate below.

Last night, before he let the generator run the last dry, she used the gps to mark the road atlas again. Thirteen miles she would reroute to twenty-three. And then back. Its useless. Tides, what about tides. I told you. You dont listen. Sometimes I swear…in the chair that he wont move but could move. Youre just stupid sometimes with this babe. It wasnt even for him. It didnt matter if it worked. If it didnt well at least she did it. He saw her with the old navy revolver and blew out air but when she looked at him – scorn – he knew not even to laugh. And what if youre gone. What if you dont came back. What if Im alone.

Bit lip, the corner, the rest flush with it. It figures and now she didnt know what to do, go around she guessed, but where. Copse was peeling orange and black, bark sliding down to crash up molten splinters. It didnt make sense to her that she could feel that much heat from it from so far, the hilltop she stood at least a thousand yards off. Never been this close to such a fire. Inside the woods a campground stove caught and an explosion pushed the flaming tree tip tops to swing and weave and breathe just the one way : out. Wave of pitch black coals kicked in ruby sabots skid across crabgrass catching. She let the lip go and started off the hill and made to go around.

She shut him up, slammed the door. He started still going after, muffle squeezing in aperture, back to it, not worth listening to. Morning, days first moisture hanging, skin cold from it, dark. She took the headlamp out her back jeans pocket and let the l.e.d burn for just a second to see the sheds latch and grab it before killing the light again. She thought about whether she should count how long she had it on, when she had it on. That it would make her more careful. Is that something you can count down.

V-neck collar that she pinches up the chevron to use as mask. Can hitch higher over her eyes when theres something too horrible and unimportant to need to see. Men spread open charred to mermaid purses, cindered til most weightless. Unimportant horrible things she need not see. A burned adult shrinks up, fetal over itself, stretched closed, until its the shape of a child and you might think it was a child until you do see a burned child. A burned child was even smaller. Careful he didnt see, she had marked the map with playgrounds, schoolyards, marked to be avoided. Everything to be avoided. Places she cannot go to. Roads useless with wrecks anyway but still. She would go off the mountain to the campgrounds and follow treeline until the dockyard, keep to fields and lots, office parks, nowhere near where she had marked. She would not see another dead child by her own will again. Never.

Even if he hadnt killed the grid (again), she wouldnt have needed the light. She knew the shed by feel because nothing was in there that she didnt place there. Ducking she runs her hands over mason jars on lower shelves, all suspect for sepsis, seal discs gently dome, saved for last. Coffee tins of sorted casings, most improper caliber even if she found a press, let alone got it up the mountain. She pushes back to heel and straightens. In front of her are four bags of dried northern beans. She knows this in the dark because yesterday there were five bags and tomorrow there will be three. Beside it, buttoned in a flannel for protection, the bow she didnt know how to shoot – hed said but never did teach her. Clothesline, almost gone, used to mend (poorly) catchments off the roof and back porch awning. Thinking and standing and then just standing, smelling saw dust, 2 stroke fuel, unoiled iron, potting soil. Then she tests herself, like before, like always. Her hand hovers the bassinet she knows is there but cannot see. She knows inside is a tote full of tiny clothing. The hand hovers the bassinet but it does not descend.

A service trail, dirt and walked of gravel, ran outside the campgrounds until reaching the highway with paths tucking into the forest that she could not take – chaparral lined jagged blazing like blood brands across dots of blackened skeletal camps – and even walking twenty so yards from the trail cherried red exposed skin, burn radiating from subdermal layers. The fire started siponing out to fescue and ryegrass. She hadnt planned a different way back and soon the field – then fields, the hill then the hills, then maybe even the mountain, soon flames might take all that too. She followed drenched worried her sweat couldnt keep up, wood popping louder than her footsteps or breathing. Ahead a scene : fire engines, ambulances and police cruisers empty, doors all open, solitary on the tract. She went back up the slope a bit for vantage and relief from the fire. She couldnt see anyone. That was the most important thing to see if it is there to see – someone else.

‘USNS Bethesda. That means the Mercy.’ The Comfort. ‘You said its with them. Its still there, I bet. National Guard couldnt get it out before, well.’ Not the Guard. Medical vessels are Navy. USNS. Navy. ‘Fuck does it matter, what is wrong with you. Im trying to’ – I know what youre trying to do. ‘And it dont matter.’ Everyones dead. ‘Youre not dead.’ He gives her the look. ‘Im not dead.’

She came on them from behind, walking up along the hill and coming down. Tires most melted to the rims but besides they were untouched. Peering through the open back of one of the two, she saw the ambulance hadnt even been looted. What to make of it. She leaned to stare to the other and the interior was red as if a person had exploded within, streaked the way blood does, with yawning patches of surgical white curled off in riptide smears from thrashing. Otherwise, no bodies. Nothing placed out. Not trash even. Like all of them just ran away.

She used to like that about him, that fun with darkness. But too much had taken. Too much been taken. It wasnt funny anymore. It wasnt cute. It wasnt deep. And now she realized it was never wise, either.

The highway was clear of vehicles and that scared her. When she spotted the first pile, twice her stacked, she thought maybe they were dirty clothes. A great big pile of dirty clothes. Then up twenty yards another, then another, staggered like bales from harvest, on for a half mile. Limp heaps of bodies like wet dirty t-shirts. She walked the shoulder, collar over the one brow. The one that would see.

He got lazy with the headlamp and the beam slid off his forearm casting dark her fingers suddenly froze with needle poised : ‘Stop. Cmon.’ He swallowed a scoff and snap the light back. ‘We cant fuck this one up.’ We. ‘Hold it right.’ We. You. ‘I wont have this one fucked up. Hold the light.’ She tensed and was still, then at once had the needle free the catheter like, she thought almost tender, like the stem from honeysuckle. ‘Up.’ The beam cast up the stand and she ran the tubing by feel from the ground and hung the orange IV bag from the hook. ‘Alright.’ He put the light on her chest. They looked at each other, her unable to see how he looked back at her because of the light. ‘Alright.’

She couldnt take the highway anymore. It was gone. Removed. Like an enormous hand had scooped it out and threw it some place else. A moment of pure awe guilts her before horror. Peering, downward, from the vacancy to the slope, utility networks ripped into scribbled rebar balled up and run through with cables like wrist-gauged worms writhing some rust slaked wadded organ, wiggling above gutters abyssal, strange, bleak, slicing golden blinks in black as wind howls off it whole like a canyon. Systems of roots tore pulpy and appearing like of brass, dull and almost milky. Semi trucks pulled in half and buried, buildings pulled in half and buried.  Dead, of course, slung like laundry as from tenement balconies. She imagined all their blood drained for days down into there, rolling down slate and gravel and loam, pig iron bloomed out struts and grating gaping, dripping the slats and slots, pooling down there. Black black water so dark that you would think it just void for not a greasy evil-shot shimmer tensioned on its surface. Big Hole. Big Doom. The Interior. She sat back to it and marked the road atlas. She sucked on her bottom lip, absent and thinking, accounting, marking. Death like blown pollen, she thought. She made her marks and closed the book and stood. Cant choose some seedlings, she thought. Glance caught while turning, charred trees toothpick looking tumbled through in the ruin so appear like structures of bled bonewhite coral, dead pale starfish tiered in threaded knots in some blank knotted hierarchy, still very tiny and fine and far far away. Far far down there. She plucked careful steps ticking around the edge then cut east through weeds and wild wheat bleached to stems.

‘Your fucking hands work. Your arms fucking work. Draw it. Mark it. Enough. Please.’ – ‘Please’ – No. The notebook shook in her hand and she didnt want him to see it shake but she couldnt stop it. Sketches of sterns, cross sections and bulk heads, question marks within outlines of unknown rooms, fine elegant lady bug penwork graceful gliding smooth like around a clocks face, she with the notebook hours and comforted with her pretty thing. I wont. ‘You said we could get down through’ – You. ‘You said I could get down – will you just fucking help me.’ She tries to force the marker into his loose hand and he flicks it away skittering off the linoleum floor. ‘You know what this means. Its more time.’ He gives her the look. ‘Time with me.’ He looked from her. He wanted her to watch him look away. ‘So now you wont lecture, now youre not a fucking genius, now theres something you dont know. Fucking worm. Coward. Now you cant tell me what I dont know. Poor you. Disgusting. Just sickening. Fuck you. Not a man. Always just a child. A pouting fucking child.’ He was so pleased at her frustration. He showed her he was pleased – A child? A baby boy? She thought to choke him. She let it go. When she had, the time she did choke him, just the once, she had to force herself to stop because he was smiling like he was smiling now. Showing her how pleased he was. He couldnt help himself.

You took from me too. I didnt do all the taking. Thats all you do now. Thats how you see it. And you dont see. Like you even wanted it. Him. What now? Him, not it. Him. Oh. I see. Now we’re so with god arent we? Am I wrong? No. But it was Him.

She kept the Igloo in the shed to keep the bags as cold as possible. She pulled it down off the top shelf and set it like fragile onto the floor. Warm pride in her as she sat over it, legs folded beneath, and she slid the lid to the side. Nine IV bags. She thought of how many months, first in the future then, slowly, in the past. She began removing the bags and placing them on her bare thighs. Orange sloshing. She had gathered them for him. She reached the third bag and lifted it and beneath the fourth bulged in violet and green mold. She froze. The ones under that had burst through the plastic seams with mold. She quickly ran her fingers across the bags and felt on each, one by one, a small pinprick. She closed her eyes for a long time. Sitting. She realized what that took. To wait. To come off the chair. To ease down the stairs – their stairs – and pull body across lawn all the way to the shed door, to climb up to that top shelf with just arms, to puncture those bags – just those bags, buried at the bottom, to hide it so it grows – and then to just put it all back, to just go back, like its nothing. So many days and days hunting them, so many marked places, so much of the world forced into her, for nothing. When she could bring herself to, she brought the bags to him. And automatic, first thing at the sight of them, he smiled so pleased. Do you understand. ‘No.’ Yes. ‘Dont you know what that means.’

She marched through northern swamp beds baked to dusty puckers collapsing into flakes under her boots. Light porcelain ringing tine tones of shells crumbling, dull stone sounds from bizarre crustacean hulls shattered in saltburns stuck outshot beige muck, tan slime concentrating to wet cements of algae and bilge, clay and broken bottle glass, kaolin husks stirred and strung and strewn among hundreds and hundreds of diapers shiny like shellac and bloated. All the water was gone. All of it. Mire bleached out to tiles, evaporated off into the world, scrubbed into the air and into the sky. What if she found a boat that ran at the shipyard. A working boat. She thought about if there was a working boat whether or not she would just take it. She caught herself. The waters no better. And theyll be another shore. No ridding of it. Cant. As she walked, she became paler and paler, the breaking shells chalking, running ghost dust down her whole life.

So its called Secondary Effects. The stuff after. Fires, floods, the car crashes, riots. The unrest. The breakdown. Muscle tone shone up her bare arms, gentle pretty curve arching, shiny in light and peach fuzz white he touched to lead her gestures. Taught her to solder. To strip wires clean and to twine them neatly from the inverter. Thats funny to me. Ironic. That all those things are considered secondary. Real big things considered secondary. She got strong carrying car batteries up the mountain. She got patient when he got too sick to write out how to take apart her Ford for parts for the grid. She got lean, again and again. And diligent. Then persistent. Then – Annoying. Stop it with it. Then – Naive. So naive, or no. No. Not naive. Intentionally dull. Obtuse. Selfish with fancy. Then he would change, he would plan, want for safety and to reach, and she was rich with him again. But she didnt feel the thing, something delicate she should feel and treasure and want after. What was for her, she could wonder. What was for him. He didnt say Us anymore. He didnt say We. Again another new day where neither one of them uttered a word. What a waste.

The lake at the golf course was a basin of blood. She could make out in the turf where theyd dragged them, greens scraped back bald by how many they must of dragged out into the water, it now slushy black skimming velvet dark foams and chemicals chunking with scabbing froth drifts. She could see all the different kinds of parts of people floating out there. Cartilage bobbing like styrofoam. Cartridge casings catch light along the banks. Tallow candles burned down in a sand trap, rounded rusty red sprayed across it. Bunch of burned bodies piled in the clubhouse parking lot, that much she could see from where she was at and neednt go closer and didnt. The private road to the auxiliary to the artery. Country changing quickly where she walked. Parking lots and parking lots and the massacres in them, seen in passing, of no note. She had enough with them and she gave them no more scrutiny. Thought, yes. Of course. But she felt there was nothing more left there for her to scrutinize.

When she first started going out, when she would kneel and he would pray with her : it was understood between them. If she didnt go, they would both die. Before dawn every morning he would give her lists of where what might be, amending the atlas with her for utility entrances, ways to shunt dead fob locks, diagrams of gas station pumps with instructions, but then once he saw a place she had marked with an X. He asked her what it meant and he suspected her answer that he ‘really REALLY dont need to know.’ He wanted to see the atlas but now she wouldnt show him. She said he needed to trust her and he did not ever trust her and he did not see a reason to do so now. Especially now. He didnt want her to go out anymore. He hid her jackets. He hid her boots. Camelback slashed. Whole box of ruined MREs. Batteries found thrown in the woods all around the property, rain rotted and exploded. Then he burned all the backpacks and her clothes. But then once, he removed and hid the firing pin of the navy revolver. And he was ashamed when she brought it to him.  I didnt think youd check. ‘And what if I didnt.’ I didnt think – ‘God, what if I didnt. What if I didnt.’ Ashamed and a blink of pride and then, after a beat, snide. She sobbed in front of him and even in that he felt she outsmarted him. He spent so long telling her what she didnt know that he missed what she did, how she was now. How careful. She knew things about the world that she dare not share with him. Every marked place is a dead zone. A place executed. Utter elimination. There was nothing to be gained there any longer – the route is gone. Once you see something, you will see it the rest of your life. You will see it forever. Shes the one that would see. More and more places marked in the atlas, more of the world inside of her and that soured inside of him. Fighting again before she was off, the last time : You said we would die here. Together. ‘Not like this.’ Like you could choose. ‘You can. And you know that.’ I tried. Remember. ‘I remember. That wasnt trying.’ Always waiting on someone or you feel them waiting on you, waiting on you for something you dont know, expecting something from you, like a debt. Or a dare.

Into some township, outskirts of borough stakes, more concrete, more roads. There was a bike path that would take her to a parkette overlooking the naval officeparks and she took it. An urban planned stand of forest just thick enough to pocket it away. She heard bugs that were not writhing black flies for the first time since before. Mulch and fern and soil. Soil – not dust or dirt or ash or mud. Pleasantly moist soil. Up top were flowerbeds, sitting awaiting flowers but without flowers. She felt she was being lead to comfort and her alarm at this warmed, smeared, like honey in a balm, so she could only act out the motions of caution but not feel the thing itself. She did not want to feel it. She wanted to feel this other thing instead. Slow, careful of leaves and sticks, she moved the crest, hand on flowerbed frame, to a bench and a sight of the flat tops of office buildings. She sat on the ground in front of the bench, the bench hiding her but her able to see through the planks. She closes her eyes and she breathes. Again. Then again. She took out the road atlas and set it under the bench, with care, as if sealing a letter with wax. And thats when she saw the MRE. Leaned on the benchs leg and wrapped closed by elastic hair tie. She touches it and it is almost but not yet cold. She cannot move. Frozen with terror now, revealed, a great eyelid opened on her. Someone is here. She can now only hear her own heartbeat which distorts to footsteps behind her running and breathing surrounding her head and then back to heartbeat and then back again. She begins to shake. Beside the meal is a buck knife with a beaded friendship bracelet wound around the grip. The beads are aged yellow white. The beads say ‘<3 DENTON <3’. There is a scream below her and without feeling she is on her knees as if praying over the bench, looking through the planks down to below. A man was dragging another by his jaw across the pavement and the dragged man screamed still with fingers crammed into his mouth. He was pulled to the center of the parking lot. Huge all around bellowing out and out he plead and he plead. He made promises and oaths. He screamed PLEASE and then last he screamed HELP ME and the man standing over him opened his throat into one black gash. The man pulsed on the ground with his heart. The other kneels and seemed to say a thing to the man. Blood pooled wider under them. He stood and watched the man pulse. Then he produced a handgun and shot the man in the head. It ripped open like a yawning mouth. Then he was with book, standing, reading without mouth moving over the killed man. He lit him with flask and lighter and watched him burn until done. An hour, two, how many. Chilled and puke pale and looking down at the parking lot. In her body. Inside of her body. Every single second. The killed man went curled and wet looking and still the man stood over him. Then, she thought but couldnt tell, she felt and knew so deeply but couldnt tell, that the man had been looking at her. For hours. Over the body and staring up at her. Seeing her. She saw for the first time on the bench before her a small figure cut smooth from soapstone, placed atop a carving on the seat. PAUL – X. Marked like a checklist or a ledger. She looked up and of course the man was gone. The killed still there killed and burned but the man gone. Panic ripped through her and so her composure at last gone. How could she be so fucking stupid. Now, she thought, she might die. She pulled the revolver and scolded herself for not already having pulled it. Why did she look away. He could be anywhere. He could be coming for her right now. He could be waiting for her. Waiting. And waiting. If she moved and he was out there waiting, she knew she would die. If she moves before he moves, he will kill her. She knew she would not be able to kill him before he killed her. That she could not. Still and searching, moving her eyes over everything she could see, seeing all of it in hours of frozen moments, moments so slow you must live inside of them and know every single point of them, the whole horror cataloged, lived in forever, then next. The next second. Hours waiting and searching until she realized the sun hadnt moved. Not at all. When last did it move. Waiting there above. Waiting. And waiting.

She sat in her truck when she decided to kill her child. It was their child, then Him, then It, then nothing and then, eventually, she understood and accepted and forgave and desired so, then it was at last her child. She sat in her truck and took the pills when she finally understood that the cancer was going to kill him. She did it mechanically. She was careful. Deliberate. In arguments After – whichever After you meant – she would say how could she bring a life into such a world but that was not why she killed her child. Who was being selfish. She did not want to have her child without him. How long already was she without him. The world is not the world without another. It is some other worse thing. But though, when a thing is gone, its gone. Everything is singular. It cannot be replaced.

She stood over the killed man with blood puddle scorched to pitch, him down there swallowed in tars, him down there just a thing done. The winds picked up and she smelled salt on them but not sea salt. She walked a path from the maze, surrounded by empty buildings filled with empty rooms. Drone netting swept atop every sill and ledge, these squares overlayed onto squares like a sheet of gnats snarling as coastal winds go and go and rip through the alleyways of the buildings. The smell of salt but, she realized, not sea salt. A plaza in the naval office park complex where there was a shaft going only down she teeters along, sure of what belongs in there and who it belongs to. Narrowing ahead gracefully short of throttling and then she arrived to stand and stare out on the dock. It was there, the Mercy or the Comfort, whichever. She could not tell. As easy as hair brushed off a face, all the ships tipped over and shoved as far as something could reach, on top of landfill, out and out and out, on top of trash bags and tires and bodies and shells, slid all to the side in one great motion and the ocean all pulled away, retched from it, taken back and recoiling. There is no mystery in the deep but you dont know it until all the waters gone. Every ship is wrecked without water. She walked out a bit for more to see, hand on a patrol boat – boat cleaved and thrown to shore – and under her fingers felt carved along the hull : ‘LIDDY + KEFFER’ inside a nazi skull all within a heart. Twisted up to look at the sky but there wasnt anything to see, just clouds, tan, staticky with toxins and frequency, thickened. Sun behind. Everyone alive now can see it. Everyone can feel it. What a great conclusion. There it is set out before us all, everyone now, look at what is set out to see. Here on the day that will never end. The sun will never set and yet you will never see it. The sky will never clear. What a grand collection. What a sum. In totality to squirm and squirm. The high wire cut but still in thin air suspended. Salterns overtaken as flinty altars for nothing but elimination, slaking and slaking, to tire and to tire, filtering and taking, empty vessels never ever to fill again except with saline pushed into eye sockets and the collections of every other wound ordered and barked and executed flawless without question. The process of Capture. Endless the process of Capture. Looking on into an endless shore of only trash. There was comfort in it, to see all of it like that. She felt enormous joy looking out onto what a world amounted to. Her there on a day that will never end. Finally. Everyone understands.