Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Short Fiction
How Foolish To Worry
I was flying to Louisville to see a man named Evan who had, in his youth, ridden an inner tube at full speed smack into the side of an anchored sailboat on Little Fitts Pond in Holden, Maine. By the time we got to him, he was barely alive, holding onto the side of the anchored boat with the arm that wasn’t broken, the water around him reddening. He wouldn’t look at us. Even as we hauled him out of the pond, his wide, wet eyes remained fixed on the horizon where a purple sunset flamed over the pines. As we motored to shore he asked if someone would take a picture of the sky. Somebody get a picture, he pleaded, referencing the clouds with bloody hands while Mr. Lehan, father of our friend, and owner of the lake house we were visiting, applied pressure to the largest of his wounds. Now, before it changes, somebody get a picture!
We were young then, eleven and eight respectively. He’s twenty eight now, and doesn’t look it. Maybe it’s because when I look at him, all I can see is the eleven year old face he wore when the inner tube took a bad skip, his freckled cheeks red in the dying light, jeweled with a thousand flecks of water, mouth spread in a gap-toothed look of astonishment.
Evan is my older brother. He likes 4am jogs and paintings by a Russian painter named Fyodor Vasilyev and those little Gatorade energy chews. In 2016, when he was a senior in high school, he voted for a woman and told our Dad he voted for the other guy to avoid making a scene. The day after the election, he cried on the drive to school and once again on the way home. Then, while we waited at a red light, he brokenly explained to me that he’d overheard a kid from his trig class, emboldened like so many others, refer to him using a slur.
The next day, I found said kid outside the cafeteria. He was standing with a group of buddies, their conversation low. I watched them for a time, feeling a strange tingle in the pads of my fingers. You hurt my brother. I imagined my knuckles unzipping the boy’s lower lip, heard the grainy snap on contact, saw the thread of blood slip down the center of his chin as he stumbled back. Later, when I told Evan that I had considered fighting the boy, he told me that he was glad I hadn’t. That violence wasn’t what he wanted. I asked what he wanted. He got quiet.
My brother wanted to be a painter. He wanted the strawberries that grew in our backyard. He wanted to be loved too. When he was seven he told me he wanted to marry Sam Milton, a boy with long brown hair who lived at the end of our street. We shared a bus stop, right across from the cemetery. Afternoons, the two of them would walk home together while I toddled behind, kicking twigs, crunching leaves, interjecting at times, watching the way Evan and Sam’s fingers almost touched.
Art school was out of the question – a useless suggestion, really. He didn’t cry when our parents shot the idea down – I’ve only seen him cry once – and he certainly wasn’t going to cry in front of Mom and Dad.
After studying electrical engineering at Eastern Maine Community College for two years, Evan worked for Versant Power out of Bangor. He fixed things. He was one of the people they call in March when the ice storms come and drop a few dozen trees on power lines throughout the county. He was a hero in that sense.
You know the feeling when the power goes out, and all of a sudden your own house seems strange and unfamiliar? You stumble around in the dark, stubbing your toes purple, flicking light switches that you know are dead. It’s muscle memory, and vain hope, and that lonely click, like two plastic army figures killing each other. You light candles, trying not to look down the hallway at the top of the stairs, or at the shadows at your window, as you wonder if this was how our early ancestors felt when night descended on the mouth of the cave. Afraid that the light might never come back.
And just when it can’t get any worse – boom – the lights come back on, suddenly, and all at once, like a beautiful thought.
How foolish you’d been, to worry. You move through the house like a child, turning on every light, plugging devices into every outlet, submerging yourself in the hum of appliances. This is mine, you think, these are my things, and this is my life. I know this because I can see my things whenever I want, even in the dark of night, I can see. I am warm when it’s cold and I see when it’s dark, I am a god, and how dare the world try to take that away? How dare the world try to make me feel less than what I am? These thoughts last a while, and then are quickly replaced by more sensible ones like: What’s for dinner? Are you ready for tomorrow’s meeting? Is your homework done? Soon everybody slumps back into their chairs, absentmindedly swiping through their freshly charged phones.
Street by street, our lives are restored. Miracle by miracle.
Despite all the everyday dangers associated with being an electrician, he still tells me the riskiest thing he ever did was uproot and move to Louisville, where blizzards are rare, and blow ups with our parents are rarer, and where he and a man named Ryan have an apartment with enough room for Evan to set up an easel. I visit him a few times a year, bringing homemade strawberry jam and a picture book for their three-year old, Lyla. She has his eyes. Blue like the light off a pond. He often paints her, emphasizing this feature.
The stewardess comes by and asks if I or the old man sitting in the window seat next to me want a snack or a beverage. I accept a coke. When she leaves, I ask the old man if he wouldn’t mind lifting the blind so I can see the view. He does, somewhat begrudgingly, and then goes back to his magazine.
The sky takes my breath away.
Outside, beneath the silent wing of the plane, orange and lavender clouds coalesce in glowing layers along the horizon. I put my diet coke between my legs, preparing to find my phone. But it’s too beautiful, and I can’t look away. I don’t take any pictures of that sky, even though later, when he hears me describe it, Evan will smile and wish that I had.
George Smith is an artist living and working in Worcester, Massachusetts. Originally from Maine, he studied Illustration and Art History at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA. His work has appeared in Artists Magazine, online exhibitions, and in gallery spaces in Maine and Massachusetts.
Drawing by George Smith
Flying to Louisville, Graphite on paper, 5″x7″, 2026