Smoke by Grace Tessier Culhane

I remember the stretch of Sauvie Island with the dark gray sand. We chose the nude
beach, easier to get parking. I would lie in the sun while old men au naturel traipsed up and down through shallow water. There was a pattern to their movements: they slowed down when passing a group of swimmers or women lounging on beach towels, then stretched their arms and pretended to be lost in thought while slowly turning to reveal themselves. Once they knew they’d been seen, they kept walking.

“Was it Lacan who had the theory about flashing?” I said to Chris.

I told him it was something to do with castration anxiety. The reaction of the third
party—the shock and fear in the eyes of the flashee—reaffirmed to the exhibitionist that his body
was still intact.

“Huh,” said Chris.

We arrived late in the day, after driving through cornfields and raspberry bushes and
flower farms that sold lavender by weight. It was August, and the beach didn’t clear out until
nighttime. When the light faded, it left a nacreous blue cast over the sand and the river and
Chris’s features, and when he pulled the crotch of my swimsuit to the side and fucked me under
the sandy beach towel, I was very patient and observant. I knew I had to save every detail, so that
one day I could be old and demented and my own children a stranger to me, and I’d still feel that
phantom weight of his body pressing down on me; of choking on my own tongue in the warm sand; of staring out at the green brush of sandbar in the distance and the blue light fading all
around us.

When it was over, we drove home in the dark. I remember the embers we passed in the brush, the ground still smoking from wildfires. Chris braked hard. A townie was barefoot in the middle of the road. Chris rolled down his window to talk, but the man just shrugged when Chris asked about the smoke. I don’t recall what was said, only that Chris was out of the driver’s seat in an instant, out of the car, kicking dirt over the orange pricks of light. He sent me back to the beach with an empty beer bottle. I filled it up with river water.

His tall, thin frame, lit only by the amber glow of the bushes. How meticulous he was, combing through the brush, scanning the ground for the source of danger and rooting it out
bit by bit.

There were birthdays, restaurants we tried, movies we watched in his basement. But the
more time you spend with a memory, the more it curdles like film exposed to light. The pressure
of wanting it whole only distorts the very thing you sought to preserve in the floodlight of your
attention. And the greatest irony: that the ones you don’t touch are not wilting from your
absence. They are healthy and clear-eyed, waiting only for the refrain of a certain Prince song,
the smell of burning leaves, sandalwood cologne, and that memory will return as hard and
unblemished as his fist on your cheek.

Grace Tessier Culhane is writer and visual artist based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Vice, The Journal: A Literary Magazine, Willamette Week, and elsewhere. She was a Truman Capote Fellow and recipient of the Himan Brown Short Fiction Award at Brooklyn College. Her fiction has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a fellowship from The Ohio State University. She teaches literature at the City University of New York.

19 June 2026