Ten-Cent Man – Hailey Vivers

May 20, 2026

Charlie used his money from dishwashing to rent us a lake house upstate for a few days. It was mid-August. Everything was thick and steaming, and we wanted to swim.
        The house came with two kayaks, a fire pit, and a small private beach full of lake plants—those homely wheat colored flocks. When we flipped the kayaks over, ants and spiders rained out of their damp cavities. Big, lake spiders that writhed on the dirty beach. I didn’t want to kayak after that.
        I spent the days tanning and watching Charlie paddle across the winking lake, surveying its shores, shielding his eyes to squint out at the world. He looked like an eager child in his red diamond of plastic, sitting with that upright kayaking posture.
        After his first day of rowing, the sun had singed a cherry halo around his shoulders, like a fat red necklace. I had to drive into town to buy aloe vera. The town had one restaurant and one general store, which sold camping gear and Davy Crockett hats and bear spray and huge drums of cheese balls. I bought what he needed and one of the hats for me.
        I drove back along the circuit of tree line surrounding the lake and caught the end of a full-throated sunset clamping down on the water. I pictured Charlie on our little beach, watching it too, but when I got home, he was just lying on the couch under a blanket, drinking gin and waiting for me.
        We stood in the kitchen. I was wearing the raccoon hat and feeling like a frontier woman, barefoot and heavy-eyed from the day’s sun. I spread the cool, thick gel on his burns. I did it gently. He was sensitive.

We were going to break up soon, and both knew it. We fought and drank and tried to change one another. All that stuff. We’d become tired and confused people, but we were happy at that lake. He buttoned up my sundresses like I was his wife. We swam all day and ate scrambled eggs for dinner.
        On the last day, he paddled over to the neighbor’s private beach and came back all shaken. It was a dead deer, he said. He said it looked like it’d slipped on the slimy lake rocks and broken its neck. It lay there to the right of us, beyond the fir trees, its organic body fashioned into jutting angles, come to rest half submerged in the water. There was nothing to do but put it out of our minds.

He’d wanted to get his dollar’s worth by leaving at night. As we packed the car, a thunderstorm hit. The Northeastern skies bunched up and started dumping raindrops of real consequence down on us. Lightning exposed the world around us, then closed it up again, like a flasher’s coat. We’d been off since the deer, but the sudden muscle of a summer storm wiped our minds of past and future thoughts. The insects and earthworms came wriggling to life. We grabbed each other’s sopping shoulders, ran, lunged at one another like ecstatic boxers. Rain pounded the earth, the lake, pounded the necrotic body of the deer, lying a football field away from our jubilant, cowboy dance.
        We went back inside, changed into dry clothes, and left the lake house. It was a three-hour drive to the city. We were going down the highway, our hair wet and glossed over, two laminated heads. The storm diminished in the rearview. There was the blue quality of 8:00 p.m, the sky adance with earth’s electricity behind us. We drove through the night, cutting through the heart of it all.