The setting: Anastasia Island, St. Augustine, Florida. Beginning in the bungalow where I was still living six years after graduating from Flagler College. The start of October, the night of a house meeting to settle the issue of the dishes.

The cast: Declan, who strummed his acoustic guitar as he paced the house, stuck in the writing phase of his surf-slasher concept EP for eighteen months now. Loblolly, who had moved her boyfriend Cowboy into the bungalow roughly a week after they met. Trevor, the only still-enrolled student among us, who had called the house meeting in the persnickety manner befitting all stage management majors. And me. My beach friends call me Shakespeare, for reasons you may be able to infer.

An hour after the meeting was supposed to start, Cowboy wasn’t home yet. This, a symptom of the St. Augustine pace. I hit the bong.

“Alright!” Trevor clapped his hands. “We will consider Loblolly and Cowboy’s vote in tandem. We need to fix this.” He pointed at the pile overflowing from the sink.

“I just wanna say,” Declan said, “I wash dishes all fuckin’ day, dude.”

“Wash dishes,” Trevor scoff-hollered.  “You work at a wine bar!”

“And are there not wine glasses?”

“So you rinse a couple glasses sometimes, so what!”

The argument carried on as you might imagine an argument like this would, until it was generally agreed upon that whatever should be done about the dishes would done in fact be. (The dishes, presumably.)

Then Cowboy pulled up.

Spotlit by the streetlamp, he paced the yard and raged upon his cell phone. He was in a distress undeniable, gesturing wildly, looking in all directions, until he stopped and looked through the window and we made eye contact.

He came in. Beyond the smoky haze I thought I could detect raised red scratches down the side of his neck. But I’d reached the tipping point of my stonedom and since nobody else said anything I figured I must be mistaken.

Declan said, “I think I got it. You guys know ‘Cheeseburger in Paradise?’” He strummed the Jimmy Buffett chords and sang, Just murdered a pair of guys / Relished in every stab slash and slice / Blood on my hands never felt so nice / ‘Cause I just murdered a pair of guys.

This was great to hear. It meant a new breakthrough on the EP. I broke out into applause, assuming everyone would join in. They didn’t. Cowboy, with sunken eyes and jaw agape, absorbed the lyrics with the numinous shock of a soul exposed.

“So, about the dishes,” Trevor started, but Cowboy shook his head and waved his arms as if the words were wasps attacking him. He rushed to his room. Loblolly followed.

I reached the depth of the bongwater where words escaped me.

And for some reason, through the haze, I saw you.

It was a night after Macbeth, our junior year. Opening weekend, second night. You remember that, of course. After the show I went flying down Granada still coated in my stage makeup and suddenly there you were, still coated in yours, Lady Macbeth staring down Macduff’s Dodge Dart with one foot in the crosswalk. I slammed on the brakes. The look on your face gripped me guts and spine. The fear of that moment elevated both of our performances for the rest of the run. This past summer I sold the Dart to make rent, and as I did, I recalled your post-near-accident performance with awe. I felt even more awestruck sitting on the living room floor at the start of this October. Bleed, bleed, poor country! You echoed resplendent through the bungalow bong gurgles.

Cowboy stomped his way out of the back bedroom wearing a backpack and carrying a duffel bag and left without a word. He rushed across the lawn.

“Everything okay?” Declan called to Loblolly.

“Uh, yeah. No, I mean. I don’t know.” She came out of their room and held her hands up in the air. “He said he’s going out to the ranch for a while.”

“Oh.” Declan held the second-longest tenure in the bungalow (after yours truly), and from that one sound I could read his subtext: Does that mean he’ll pay rent?

We’d been burned before, burned enough times to eat up all of the landlord’s good graces. Earlier that day, around lunch I think (before it, or after maybe [sometime when the sun was still shining at least]) he had stopped by to remind us that the rent was five days past due. He didn’t even laugh when I said, “Thank you, five.”

Further: Cowboy had all the trademarks of a rent dodger. For one thing, we barely knew him. For another, his vibe was always off-putting and paranoid. I was aware that he sold acid and shrooms, on account of my having purchased them, but all his other comings and goings he kept secret. And for a third point, if he was just temporarily heading inland, why did he get his surfboard out of the garage and strap it onto his Bronco’s roof rack?

The sound of the V8 engine roared away into the night.

We didn’t hear about the two people found dead until the morning.

♤

It’s not common to have news in our little Augustinian village. The shooting at the rest stop came not as a trickle of quiet gossip, but a veritable explosion of attention. Everyone was talking about it. Even the oystermen.

The wine bar Declan worked at served fresh oysters daily and had been short staffed since the sommelier left for his off-season job in Vail. That’s how I got hooked up with my courier gig. I picked up the oysters every morning as they came off the boat and delivered them to the shop by the Yeti-load. I drove Declan’s beat-up old Land Cruiser to manage this task. With all its dents and cracks and peeling paint, it looked like the lineage of Florida Men who owned it since it rolled off the line had committed single-mindedly to beating it to death.

After the bar was stocked and the Land Cruiser hot boxed, I sat and listened to the other day drinkers gossip on the bar stools.

“Drugs,” said one regular. “It’s gotta be drugs.”

“Nah, the victims were a man and a woman and they were at the rest stop,” said another. “That’s a crime of passion. Met up, was havin’ an affair. Husband tracked ‘em down.”

A third added, “Serial killer. Like how Zodiac killed those two kids at Make-Out Point.”

Mr. War on Drugs reiterated his fears. “They weren’t necking, the news said they came outta Miami! Cuban-Chinese. This is Cartel-Triad.”

“More like MSG-13,” I offered. Everybody in the bar turned and looked at me. Nobody said anything. I fled. I went down to the beach and laid down and fell through the grains of sand into a deep stupor of sleep.

Despite how it may seem, I really hadn’t thought about you much over the last few years. Not to sound like a total asshole. I mean we never dated, and everybody in the theatre department dated each other. We even dated the same people. So why not us? I found you waiting among the sand and beachgrass of my dreamland and watched you walk away into the tide. I followed you into the brine. You led me to a Denmark of the deep, an anemone Elsinore, a place where mysteries and memories drive men to madness in equal measure.

It was a decade on from our first day together in Acting 1. Ten years spent assuming that I would stay in Auggie forever. You had gone off, gotten your MFA, and went to work in various Chicago playhouses. Some of our other classmates went to New York or Los Angeles, and most of them had returned to their hometowns by now. Not me. There had been no moving back home, nor moving on up. My career plan, as such, was to one day awake to the fame and fortune of a successful career I had never actually pursued.

You told me to follow the current out. Follow it out of here, to any regional theatre or MFA audition or anything. Anything. Out.

I didn’t necessarily like that idea. The impulse made me feel like Zarathustra coming down the mountain - or riding out of the barrel of a breaking wave. Either way, emerging.

Awake, awake! Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit, And look on death itself. You bade me back to the surface. I awoke, coughing and sputtering at the seagull bouncing around my feet.

♤

Usually after he got off work, Declan and I were able to artistically commune in some degree, but we were both blocked by the weight of circumstance. Two people were shot at the rest stop and Cowboy had ran away into the night: like any good desperado, gone with the dust. How could we think about anything else? We sat in troubled silence on the couch together. Then I heard Declan mumble under his breath. I realized his airpods were in. He pressed the back button on his phone, which was playing “Cheeseburger in Paradise - Karaoke Version.” Could not engage in my murderous habit / Hadn’t now for seventy days / The shore’s been closed, all the tourists gone home / This homicide hiatus is drivin’ me insane… Hmm… Uhh…

So I was the only one not visited by the muse in the wake of murder. I scrolled a text of Hamlet on my phone and wondered why Elsinore was the place you had taken me.

Then Trevor came through the door, back from class. He took off his messenger bag and sat on the coffee table facing us. Our knees touching in the huddle made the scene feel conspiratorially close. He said, “It was Cowboy, right?”

Declan and I looked at each other.

“Did you hear they released the security footage?” Trevor asked. “It was a Bronco that left the scene. Verified.”

“Holy shit,” I said.

“Holy fucking shit,” Declan agreed.

“So what do we do?” I asked.

Declan’s expression made it look like he was confused. “What do you mean ‘What do we do?’”

Loblolly stepped out of the dark of the back bedroom. “What do we think Cowboy did?”

“All of the signs,” Trevor said, speaking slowly, over-enunciation out of an abundance of caution. “Point to him having… Been involved in this.”

“He’s not a murderer!” she shouted, startling me with such escalation that it made me drop my phone. “He’s a goofy country boy that rides bulls and surfs. That’s how I know him. And nobody in this house knows Cowboy better than me.”

“Oh, yeah, by the way.” I picked my phone up. “What’s his Venmo? We gotta figure out rent for October.” Whenever he sold to me he’d always insisted on cash, which was a crazy inconvenience.

Loblolly said, “I don’t know.”

“Okay, well what’s his real name?”

“His first name’s pretty generic. Like ‘Sam’ or ‘Scott.’”

I set my phone down.

Trevor yelled, “You moved someone into our house without knowing his real name!”

“Do you know my ‘real’ name, motherfucker?”

He hesitated. He looked to us for help, which made me realize I didn’t know either. I didn’t know the names of half my roommates. What might be worse is that I did know the names of the other half of my roommates, which so boxed up their existence in the word of the name that I had forgotten we were all reflections of one another, existences which cannot be reduced to the prison of syllables, inseparable from the infinite ocean slime from which we all came. “Oh wait, I know,” I said. “You’re Jewish.”

She looked at me, her face flat with exhaustion. “You know what I’m talking about, Shakes. People are themselves in Auggie. People are real. Cowboy is as real as they come.”

I looked at her Grateful Dead t-shirt. I had another question that seemed pertinent: “What do you guys have for sale right now?”

“Uh. We’re low on acid so we’re charging thirty per. And we’re out of everything else.”

“You’re out of everything?”

“Half the cooks left and half the kooks left. They cleaned us out before they scrammed.”

I didn’t know what all they sold besides psychedelics, but any Florida dealer worth their salt would have to sling meth and coke. Ostensibly. I really didn’t want the wine bar War on Drugs guy to be right though. I bought half a sheet of acid gels, in case this was my last chance at a hookup for a while.

♤

The next morning the harbor was clear. I walked out onto the pier to meet the oystermen, no mist in the eye or clouds in the sky. The boat captain grumbled beneath his beard and said “I’d rather have fog in the harbor than the storm that’s blowin’ it away.”

I shook a shaka of agreement even though I thought he was full of shit. Blue skies stretched all the way to the horizon, and you could see the lines of soft white foam rolling gently across the sea surface. Not a stormcloud in sight.

“Supposed to be the last ‘cane to land on Florida this season,” he continued. One day after the shooting and already the placid terms of conversation had returned to the weather.

I humored him. “A bad one?”

“Based on the birds, I’d say yes.”

Based on the birds. Fucking whatever.

I stayed sober after I delivered the oysters. I stayed sober all morning, in fact, guzzling coffee to keep my wits about me. Me and Trevor made a plan to take our evidence to the police station. As much as we all hated cops, we couldn’t figure out what else to do about this.

We had an issue, though, in that our “evidence” was mostly based around the phrase think about it, man. The detective said, “Okay, you’re mad at your roommate for skipping on rent, is that it? And he’s subleasing? Of course he is.” He fumbled around his desk, pushing his keyboard one way and his coffee mug the other, and shook papers out of pads and loose piles until he eventually found a single blank sticky note. He repeated the search process until he found a pen. “Well, we’ll look into it. What’s this guy’s name?”

I didn’t have the guts to say it.

Trevor leaned forward and said, “Cowboy.”

The detective looked up.

“That’s an alias. We don’t know his real name,” Trevor said.

“Yeah, and that part’s true,” I said.

Trevor looked at me.

Why did I phrase it like that?

“Get the hell out of here, you fucking pot heads.”

I couldn’t believe the indignation. To be called a “pot head” on this, the very morning I had stayed sober, was unbearable. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d stayed sober all morning, and that was how we were treated?

Trevor headed to class and I hitched a ride for some reason. No idea why. Nothing remained for me on campus, truly. Especially not the theatre building.

But then there I was. I gawked at the backdrops in the scene shop. There were first-years in the acting lab shouting about round mounds of sound and their voices, vis-à-vis having loud and powerful ones. And down the faculty hallway, Dr. Liz walked out of her office. She stopped and pointed at me and said “You’re here too?”

“I guess I am.”

“Why are you back in town, is it for Hangmen?”

Back in town? “You’re doing Hangmen?”

“So that’s a no. We were always too lame for Mr. Brilliant, I get it. Mr. Only Does Classical Theatre. I get it.” It had been a while and I’d forgotten how jarring it was to be around Liz’s energy.

“As in Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen?”

I heard the cacophony of a power drill ripping through plywood outside. I looked through her office and saw the grounds crew were boarding up the windows.

She asked, “Where are you at these days, anyway?”

The fact that she assumed I had moved on with the rest of everyone who graduated really threw me. “Ah, yeah, I’m back in town.”

“Came back just for the storm, great timing. Are you doing any acting these days?”

“Yeah, uh, I’m actually working on MFA audition material.” I am?

“Yes! What! Yes! Oh, so you want me to write a letter of rec. That’s why you’re here.”

“Uh. Yeah, it is.”

“Are you doing Temple? I’ll write a custom one for Temple, of course. What are you preparing?”

“I’m thinking Hamlet.” Fuck, too obvious. “The Ghost, from Hamlet.”

She did that Liz Look of Judgment, you know the one, where she squints her eyes and purses her lips and even her ears flex at you.

I did my best recitation from what I hadn’t studied. “If ever thy dear father didst thou love, revenge his foul and most unnatural murder!”

“Mhm. What are you now, twenty-six?”

“Twenty-eight. You disapprove?”

She raspberried. “Not necessarily, I just - - Why not Macduff? You were a great Macduff.” Which she’d never said during rehearsals. Or during the run, for that matter.

“Okay. I’ll think about that.”

She studied me but I couldn’t tell what she gleaned.

“I might look at Hangmen for my contemporary. I can’t believe you’re putting it on.”

“You know who’s directing, right?” And when she told me that you were back as the guest director, a visiting artist, I was flooded by a feeling of epiphany that sent me stumbling and running down Granada, sprinting down the stretch I used to drive after rehearsals and shows, utterly assailed by the serendipity of life. That’s why you broke through the bongwater haze! That’s why you returned in my dream! The universe is all one! It’s all one! That was the sign I could do it, I could really do it!

I caught the Sunshine Bus back to the Island and dove headlong into my laptop. The internet’s many annals flew past me. I found the shooting victims on Facebook and Instagram. Their names had been released by the news. I triangulated positions across social media and stacked press releases and mutual friends until I found a tagged photograph and finally had it. Cowboy’s real name was Steve Simpson. We’ll have thee as our rarer monsters are, Painted on a pole and underwrit: Here May You See The Tyrant!

He was tagged in a few posts from random Atlantic beaches, and some Gulf ones as well, and quite a few times on a ranch outside of Palatka, an hour’s drive inland. The Buckin’ Mother Ranch. They specialized in “brahman,” evidently meaning a breed of cattle and not the ultimate Vedic reality which causes all change but itself never changes. Or maybe that's what reality is: bull.

I grabbed Declan’s keys off the kitchen counter, ignored the pile of filthy dishes in the sink and the calendar above it that bore my name, rushed to the Land Rover, and drove to Palatka.

♤

Through the towering pines and palms I spied the Buckin’ Mother Ranch from the road, a house in a clearing surrounded by corrals and barns. There were project cars tossed all around, cast aside and rusting, missing doors, hoods, and tires. A bull scratched its neck on a hollowed-out pickup frame. I saw no dogs, but somewhere I heard them bark.

“Where in the cousin-fucking Florida hell am I?”

Then I saw it, tucked into the trees. A storage container with windows and a door. A Ford Bronco parked out front. Surfboard on its roof rack.

He was here.

A grand question then loomed and weighed upon me: so what?

I’ve never been good at making decisions sober. Clearly. I knew I had to put myself under the influence posthaste. I scoured the crevices and clutter of the Land Cruiser for any stashed or forgotten weed but found nary a nug. “How can this be?” I asked the nothing. In the end, I found only the half-sheet of acid still in my pocket. I studied the sunshine orange gels. I had no other course of action. I ate them all. I waited for their wisdom, and in due time they brought Macduff back to me. Then I went to confront Cowboy Steve Simpson.

Turn, hellhound, turn!

“Shakespeare?”

He squinted against the wind as he descended the steps from his container.

His aura was horrible. Straight-up grotesque. I’ve always been color-blind at aura reading so all I could tell was that his had turned terribly wretched, not whether it was a boiling rage or a freezing guilt which weighed upon his spirit.

We stared at one another from across the patch of gravel.

He spoke again. “What are you doing here?”

“It was easy to find you.”

“Good to know. What are you doing here?”

“...What?”

“What are you doing here? ”

Wow. What an incredible question. What was I doing there? Enacting justice? For these people I did not know, of a situation I had no knowledge? What justice would that be? Macduff’s mission included restoring the right thing - This avarice Sticks deeper, grows with more pernicious root Than summer-seeming lust. But what could I restore? The lives of two people I never knew?

Fuck Macduff after all! This wasn’t Macbeth, it was Hamlet. This was - was it? - revenge.

And what did revenge do for Hamlet? You appeared to me then, splicing into my mind’s monologue. I remembered our study groups for Theatre History, the playwriting workshops, all of our shared scenes. And you told me, Hamlet begins as a renaissance man but is corrupted by Denmark’s martial culture. It’s joining the fight that ends him. He isn’t even the first to see his father’s ghost, narratively we meet the ghost before we meet Hamlet. Sometimes, other people see what we’re going through before we realize it. Our auras ripple out into the world and the world reacts. (Aura - auroch - ancestor to the cow. I wonder if the words are related? The cow evolved from the auroch the same way we evolve from auras, physical beings emergent from the spiritual plane, individual manifestations of collective expression. A cow mooed then, which was a joyous occasion! [Mooed - mood - another linguistic coincidence. {And what is coincidence but the universe doing the work for us?}])

I realized I had been quiet for a very long time. “Are you going to pay October rent?”

“No.”

And since he had killed two people that ended that discussion. (Imagine if he killed me! That would be, dare I say, Shakespearean. [Wait, but he really could. Nobody knows I’m out here. What’s the difference? ‘Knowledge’ is merely construction within the mind. Yeah, but he shot two people. That we know of.])

My heart pounded shockwaves through blood plasma. “What happened, man?”

He stared at me, and you called out from the stage in my mind, Out, damned spot: out, I say. Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier and afeared? until he heaved a sigh. “It’s the worst thing that’s happened to me.” Which isn’t what you expect a killer to say.

I repeated my line with a change of tactic. “What happened, man?”

He walked over to the corral and leaned one arm on a panel and hiked a boot up on a lower rung. He shook his head. “The same thing that happened with another feller in our outfit, got stopped and bumrushed drivin’ a load. They stabbed the hell out of him, but he lived. They dumped him on the asphalt, robbed all the molly, blow, everything he just picked up. So I got a shoulder holster for my .45. Said if they came for me I’d be ready. And, uh.” He put his hands over his eyes. Evidently with a name like Cowboy he couldn’t be seen crying. “I was ready for ‘em. I just wasn’t ready for me.”

I put a hand on his shoulder.

He laughed through his tears and pleaded to the aether, “How do I get outta this one?”

I thought on what you said about Hamlet’s fall. From you I said, “The only way forward is with forward action. Repeating past action keeps us in the past. The future doesn’t want to arrive because it dies as soon as it becomes the present. That’s why it hides from Hamlet.”

“Ham what?”

“From us, I mean. The past and the future circle us and cast us down their whirlpool.” I felt my mind capsize at the mention of the whirlpool. I strained against the tide. Yaaaaaa! “Action, real action, only happens in the present. That’s all we have.” Though I couldn’t describe it then, from somewhere beyond the pale of words I felt like that was advice not for him but for myself. Still, it was all I had, so I hoped he could take it.

He wiped his eyes and nodded. “Sure gonna miss yer funny way of talkin’.”

“Well, man.” I shrugged and nodded and bobbled my hands. Kaleidoscope rainbows began to ebb out of Cowboy’s damp eyes. I was already tired of the trip and it had barely begun. The cows looked like they were breathing. “I’m on acid. I did too much. I’m, like, hella frying. Can I crash here? Just until the whirlpools pass?”

He gazed into the middle distance. “Sorry. Me and you got one thing in common, Shakespeare. We been havin’ too much fun for much too long. I gotta make some changes. And this is not a part of my story.” He headed back to his storage container. He called over his shoulder as he made his final exit, “You will weather this storm.”

As the door closed behind him, I swear I felt the first drop of rain.

♤

February 7, 2026