by Niamh Carmichael
Muriel’s cat McGillicuddy had rather a penchant for chasing fiddler crabs. More often than not, she’d find him with a sour look on his face and his nose bright red from a pinch. He liked fiddler crabs, but they were not so fond of him.
They lived way out in the marsh, just the two of them right on the water. It was the home Muriel had grown up in, and it looked its age. The dock was rickety and riddled with holes and seagull droppings, and the kudzu wrapped around all the trees had begun snaking its way onto her roof and walls. No matter how much she cut it back, it always returned. It was like McGillicuddy with those crabs.
Muriel didn’t mind being alone, just her and her cat. She had never been much of a talker, anyway, even when she was a girl. She had a system, and it worked for her.
Each morning, she rose early and sipped tea on her porch, watching the sun turn the water from gray to green and the marsh grass to brilliant gold. She’d refill her bird feeders for the wrens and the finches and even the blue jays, even though her grandmother always told her blue jays were bullies. She’d go on walks along the well-worn trails, always with her hiking stick. The trails weren’t especially difficult, but she liked to run her stick through the grass ahead of her. She’d had encounters with enough of South Carolina’s thirty-eight snake species; she didn’t want to add any more to the list. She used to fish on her little dock, McGillicuddy prowling the planks next to her, searching for crustaceans. Recently, though, she stopped after reading an article about overfishing. She figured her own fishing likely wasn’t causing that, but that she should do what she could.
“Every little bit counts,” she told McGillicuddy, before chasing him away from a crab burrow.
Muriel was fine on her own, until the storms came. September was the worst month for her. McGillicuddy, being a cat, wasn’t particularly helpful in boarding up windows or laying sandbags. One year in particular hit her hard. Hurricane Lena was the final straw for one of the huge old oak trees in her front yard. When Muriel walked outside to see Lena’s aftermath, she was greeted by a tangle of root systems on the wrong side of the ground, an entire chunk of the earth ripped up and exposed to the elements. The tree itself had fallen on her bench swing, crushing it.
“Well,” Muriel said, always the optimist. “At least that’s less kudzu I have to cut down.”
She rarely dared to venture far out on her dock anymore, either. With the river water rising, the lower dock was beginning to rot, and she’d had too many close calls with crumbling wood to consider it worth going out on. She tried to stop McGillicuddy as well, but when he saw a fiddler crab scuttling out there, there was nothing she could do to hold him back.
Muriel tried not to think about her flood-damaged foundation, her kudzu-strangled siding, or her bench swing lying in pieces near the water’s edge. She tried not to think about the time McGillicuddy had almost been swept away in Hurricane Kip’s flash flood, or about how her home was falling down around her. She tried not to think about how the fish were disappearing and the shore was losing more and more sand.
Instead, she sat on her front porch, drinking a cup of tea and watching McGillicuddy sniff down crab holes. She watched the oak trees and the Spanish moss sway as the sun turned the marsh grass gold.
About Niamh Carmichael
Niamh Carmichael is a junior at the Charleston County School of the Arts, where Rutledge Hammes, Danielle DeTiberus and Beth Webb Hart are her writing teachers. The daughter of Tim Carmichael and Noelle Zeiner-Carmichael, Niamh plans to attend college and graduate school, and work in academia.