edited by Ziv Wities
The sun’s almost down over the boardwalk, that time of day when everything’s dark but the sky’s still lit up, when townies drive past the lake on their way to Gary and say gosh it’s pretty out here by the battervilles, I don’t know what all the fuss is about.
The air’s thick with marina noise and mosquitoes eating up my shirtless chest. I’m pouring my jug of fresh-caught batter into the shuddering funnel of the change machine, even though I know in my heart there’s not enough to buy Ecker the smallest size of honey-glazed crispies. The line for the chicko joint is starting to wind down the boardwalk. Everyone’s yelling, a bunch of sunburned lake-slick battermags pissed I’m taking too long during the dinner rush. But I can’t let it go, not tonight. Ecker is leaving tomorrow to go back to vocational school, and he’s standing at the order window with his hands in his pockets like he’s embarrassed.
“How much left?” I shout. The metal of the machine groans, empty, impatient.
Ecker checks the little grease-smeared screen that’s converting my batter catch into chicko credits. “Thirty-two to go.”
“How much now?” I smack the bottom of my jug. A pathetic thunk of batter hits the funnel.
“Thirty-one.”
“Fuck outta here,” someone calls out from the back of the line. “That thing’s empty.”
“It’s not empty!”
“Did you scrape down the spout?” Ecker’s voice is a wince. He knows how weird the question is when four months ago he was right here with me, hoisting the jug and chanting big money big money while we watched the decimals turn over.
“Yeah, I fuckin’ scraped it down already.” I wipe my forehead against the crook of my elbow.
“Come on,” Ecker says. “Just let me get this with my stipend credits.”
Ecker with townie money, real money. There was a time he would’ve jumped over the counter, grabbed a chicko bucket and dashed. I remember one night specifically he ripped off his shirt before he did it, just to make everyone laugh, or because we were high. He was screaming like the seals in Penguin Slide and his torso was caked with black batter and ferrofluid and I don’t know if that’s the moment I knew I loved him but I think of it a lot, especially at night when there’s no one in the prefab but me and Skeeball, curled up with his little gecko fingers over my collarbone.
“I told you I got it. Just wait a minute, let me think.”
There’s a layer of batter stuck to my arm hairs. Some behind my ears, the oily black sludge of it gone tacky. It’s been a while since I scraped the cracked ridges of my sandals. The crowd hates that one. A wall of boos and groans as the dried-up sprinkling earns me one tenth of a cent.
“Next in line!” The guy at the chicko window’s had enough. He hovers his finger over the button that’ll recall the batter deposit and cancel my order.
“Look I’m so close, please, can you just round up.” I’m tapping the number on the conversion screen with both hands like a crazy person and there’s sweat dripping down my temple and everyone is yelling and I’ve seen the guy round up for everyone in this town including me but for some reason today he won’t because, I find myself screaming, he’s on a power trip in his stupid light-up hat.
He smacks the return button. The change machine vomits back exactly 5.73 credits worth of batter at my feet. The crowd cheers.
***
“It’ll just take a sec,” I tell Ecker. “I’ll take the boat out shallow, get some batter, and come right back.”
The boardwalk’s blinking with lights, boat crews pulling in and unloading their catch, divers stained with ferrofluid, some of them still scraping the batter off their magsuits. They call out to Ecker as we pass: hey big man, how’s school, how’s Illinois, you gonna come fix my septic tank, I got a hell of a block for ya. He responds with banter and a smile. He knows they’re only ribbing him because they’re proud. A battermag that tested good enough to pass the basic modules and go vocational, to a real brick-and-mortar school over the state line.
“I don’t know why you wouldn’t let me come out with you this morning.” Ecker almost trips over the tiny light-up bugs some kids are racing over the planks. “I could’ve helped.”
“What, with those soft little hands you got now?”
The joke drops awkward between us. It’s been like that all weekend. Our whole lives we’ve been giving each other shit, but Ecker came back from school with some kind of armor up. I keep catching him with a weird look on his face, like now, when he’s watching the little group of bug-racing kids. Marina brats, bare feet full of splinters, just like we used to be.
“Alright,” I tell him, voice softer than I mean. “You wanted to come out? We’re going out.”
I gather up Dough-girl from their usual spot, hanging out in front of the kluski joint with a bunch of other teens. The picnic tables are a wreck—red baskets with dumplings and butter pooled in the wax paper, kids crammed along the benches with their module helmets on, tapping their left ears to skim-skim-skim through the lessons. Five years ago it would’ve been me and Ecker here tracing bored lines in the ketchup, blue light flashing over the balled-up napkins. Dough-girl’s in the middle, chewing on a fry through the bottom of their visor.
“Hey.” I knock on Dough-girl’s helmet. “You know you’re supposed to listen to those.”
Dough-girl looks up. I can see Ecker and me reflected in the helmet’s visor, a funhouse mirror of boardwalk neon and the pizza shack behind us.
“You sound like my dad.” Dough-girl’s voice is garbled by the math lesson squeaking from the tinny speakers. “What’s the point?”
“I dunno, learn shit or something.”
“So what, like I’m gonna test out?”
“Christ, Dough-girl, you ever tried to get on a bus? Go on, go to the depot and ask to pay for a ticket with your batterville credits. Might as well be a carmdot punch card.”
Dough-girl rants back but it’s muffled by some kind of science unit about capillaries. I can feel Ecker shift his feet beside me, the discomfort wafting off him.
“Whatever,” I say. “Do what you want. We’re going out again. Fuckin’ chicko guy wouldn’t round up.”
Dough-girl pulls off their helmet. “But it’s dark and we’re out of b-powder. It wasn’t even glowing last time under the blacklight. It’s too cut down.”
“Fine, we’ll get some more. Where’s Brill?”
“Probably sleeping in the boat, right?” Ecker says. He meets my eyes for the first time all night, and it’s then that I realize his hair is curling around his ears even though he doesn’t like it to get so long, that in the four months he was gone he never got it trimmed, that the haircut I’m seeing is the one I gave him in his boxers on the concrete of my front steps.
***
All the unloading stragglers shake their heads when they see us approach their boats, pleading, hopeful, primed to beg. The only one who doesn’t shout us away is Izzie, the last of the olds from back in the day when the cleanup boom first happened, when this town was nothing but deep woods and dead fish rotting on the shore, their bellies swollen with plastic.
Izzie just stands there on the boat deck with the bag of yellow powder, sucking her teeth. A softie. When me and Ecker were little she used to let us crush up the vitamin pills for her. We’d get to swipe a fingerful of batter from her catch tub as a reward.
“I’ll pay you back,” I say.
“You owe us like a pound of b already.”
“Hey!” Dough-girl points over at Izzie’s partner by the net. He’s sifting out white plastic pellets from the lake weeds and trash. “They caught pearl.”
Only a fistful, but it’s enough for two months’ rent. I’ve always been told that the battervilles started as a settlement; a bunch of tents and prefabs full of people who got demerited out of the big warehouse jobs. Back then Lake Michigan was dying, but not yet dead. The government paid good money to clean up microplastics from the lake, turn it into batter you could collect and slop into a cooler. I saw one of those old commercials once: a tattooed guy and an old lady smiling in this cute painted rowboat, dumping in their dainty bottles of ferrofluid and swishing the water with those tiny magnetic wands that could only catch the world’s saddest clump of batter. It didn’t take long for people to start getting smart, strapping head to toe in duct tape and all the magnets they could find, but it was pearl that made the town boom. Some kind of lawsuit found out that a specific company had spent decades dumping little plastic pellets into lakebound drains, and made them pay big money for every little pearl you could catch. I don’t remember much from my modules, just a picture of a fish, figure A or B or something, spliced open. The white pellets were packed in along the twisty pink of the intestines like the fish had been born with them there, a weird little row of gut teeth.
“You think that’s a trove?” Izzie waves off the handful of pearl like it pains her. “You should’ve seen us thirty years ago. We used to come back with buckets full of the stuff. That’s why they brought in the change machines. We were pulling it out of the water so fast they had to automate.”
“Yeah and you guys sucked it all up,” Dough-girl says. “Now all that’s left is batter you can’t buy shit with.”
“What, you want us to leave it there to end up in the fish bellies? You don’t want the lake to come back?”
“Lake’s never gonna come back,” I say. “It’s a fuckin’ batter bowl. All we can do now is make the money we can. See, you owe us the b-powder at least, come on.”
“Fine, but I swear t—”
“Where’d you find the pearl?” Ecker’s voice cuts through.
His hands are in his pockets again but he sounds like the kid I used to know, the one that won our shitty motorboat in a diving bet and stood with his arms crossed in the doorway of my prefab when my mom finally showed up to claim it five years after she disappeared.
No one bothers fishing for pearl anymore. You might find one or two free floaters, but the only clumps left are in pockets on the lakebed, trapped in the weeds and algae muck. It’s more of a legend at this point, and I don’t know why Ecker cares. He’s only here for the weekend until he goes back to his plumbing program with the nice little dorms he sent me a picture of: tables where you can eat outside in a subdivision with green astroturf instead of dead baked grass.
“We were up by Michigan City then we cut west. Don’t waste your time, kids. It was a fluke.”
“Michigan City. Got it.” Ecker turns to me. “You ready?”
I don’t like the look in his eye.
Growing up, me and Ecker always dreamed of hitting it big. Even pearl credits don’t mean shit outside the battervilles, but we didn’t care. We’d be kings of the boardwalk, buy a big prefab tricked out with a tactile lounge for Penguin Slide and a backyard full of ATVs. Even if we never got the big house, I always thought we’d end up living together. Fantasized about making him dinner, with like 30% meat burgers or something nice, and he’d look over at me and smile like when we were little, floating on our backs in the lake and laughing because we were so close to sinking. I’m not stupid. I’ve always known the rest of the fantasy would never happen. Ecker likes smart guys, the ones that make him talk nervous, biting into all his consonants. Not me, the dumb easy one that smears him with a lazy smile like cornoil butter on bread.
Ecker didn’t tell me he got into vocational school until two days before he was supposed to leave. All the crews got together to throw him a party and he avoided me the whole time, already packing his fists into his pockets like a stranger. But at two a.m. when everyone was drunk and setting off fireworks in the backyard he pushed me into the murphy laundry of Izzie’s prefab and held my face in his hands and kissed me like we’d never been two separate pieces, only one whole.
***
We’re speeding out on the black, just the four of us. All the boats have already come in. Ecker shouts over the wind and motor to tease me about my steering, the way I still whip the rudder with a little flourish of my hand like I’m on some kind of stage. It feels like it used to, before we even took on Dough-girl and Brill, when we were just a crew of two, laying down in the boat between dives and talking about the dumbest stuff.
Just past Michigan City we drop anchor in one spot, then another. Me and Ecker dive together. The bottom of the lake is barren, a tangle of weeds and sunken boats and not a single pearl. When I was little it sucked the air out of my lungs to be down on the lakebed, the feeling that you’re not touching the weeds and grimed up junk so much as it’s got you in its own fingers. People say it’s the kind of darkness that crushes you, but it doesn’t bother me. Not anymore.
At our fifth or sixth spot we give Brill and Dough-girl a turn to dive. Me and Ecker sit in the midnight quiet, sniffling lakewater snot and listening to the chop against the boat.
“We’re not gonna find shit out here, Eck.”
“Maybe not the way you shake the weeds.”
“Oh and your little barrel roll is gonna do the trick.” I tease him back, imitating the twist that he does with his eyes closed, graceful as a dancer, though I’d never admit that I don’t think it’s funny at all but beautiful.
“Even if we found pearl it’d be wasted on you anyway,” he laughs. “I know you’d just blow it on your damn lizard.”
“Skeeball’s a fuckin’ gecko, first of all, and the specialty waxworms help with his digestion issues.”
“Right, right, the digestion issues.”
Ecker looks at me the way he used to. Like the time I got the idea in my head that we were gonna save up all of our kluski wrappers to wallpaper my bedroom with the little thumbs-up noodle mascot. Like it’s the dumbest thing he’s ever heard and he loves me for it and every goddamn time it makes my head go fuzzy.
Ecker rubs the water from his face with both hands, and when he’s done he stares at the bottom of the boat, the smile gone from his eyes.
“On the bus ride in I saw one of those big prefabs for sale, you know the ones we used to talk about, with the heated floors and the tactile hookup.”
“Yeah?”
“I was just thinking, like, if we could just find a little pearl, then maybe I don’t have to go back to school.”
“What, you don’t like it there?”
“No, I mean, it’s fine. It’s a bunch of townie kids that flunked their modules, couldn’t get into college even though their parents paid for all the tutoring add-ons. I’m the only battermag there. Sometimes I just want to be back home. With the people that know me. You know?”
Ecker stretches his feet out the way he’s done a hundred times in this boat, but this time he nestles his foot between mine, the way I imagine people do when they’re curled up in bed together, twined into the close spaces, breathing each other’s air. It makes me shiver to imagine that small amount of body heat spread out heavy on top of me and at the same time I can’t stop thinking of Ecker at the bottom of the lake, twirling with his fists crossed over his chest. Smiling, under the weight of all that black water.
Dough-girl and Brill surface with a splash, cussing into the night.
“There’s no pearl down here,” they say. “This is stupid. Let’s get some batter and go home.”
Ecker sits up, his foot no longer touching mine. I feel the ghost of it on my skin, like a handful of empty water.
***
The magsuit’s heavy and sticks to the edge of the boat, cause we only had enough money to anti-mag the bottom and sides. Some parts of the fabric are still damp from this morning, itchy cold against my skin. I tap the velcro pockets along my arms, belly, shins, smushing in the fraying duct-taped corners to make sure the magnets hold. Dough-girl ties me to the floater tube that’ll keep me just a few yards below surface, so the weight of the suit doesn’t pull me to the lakebed. I tell them to give me more slack. I like to move around.
When we’re ready to go, Ecker pours Izzie’s little ziploc bag of b-powder into the old milk jug stained grayish with ferrofluid, then Brill clicks on the industrial blacklight. It lights up her gapped teeth, makes the ferro glow like the prairie moon.
“Fifteen count, alright?” Eck hands me the glowing jug. “On yours.”
“Got it,” I say. “One.”
He shoves me into the water.
Two, three. I squeeze out the ferrofluid, give its oil molecules a chance to find their tiny plastic cousins swirling around the water.
Seven, eight. The magic starts. A slash of hi-vis yellow in the dark.
Microplastic binds to oil, then magnetite, then boom. Lightning in a bottle. It all shrinks together into little glowing clumps of muck like something that’s alive. I hold out my magnetic arm, watch the batter fireflies gather along my elbow and stomach and all the way down to my toes.
Thirteen. There’s a tickle of weeds. My foot hits mushy bottom. Shit. I reach for the rope to the flotation tube and where it should be there’s only water. Shit, shit.
Nineteen. Forty. I lose count.
The suit’s so heavy it presses me to the lakebed. When I thrash I just churn up the mud, deeper and deeper. I clench my jaw to keep from sucking water but I can’t hold it anymore, I can’t, cause it feels like we’re somewhere between a hundred and thousand.
A tug.
A yank in my guts.
Air.
Ecker, treading next to me in the water. His face under the blacklight, all twisted up and heaving, then suddenly he’s looking behind me, and I see it behind him, too.
Hundreds of them, glowing UV-bright. Riding on the surface of the waves like it’s not made of water but pearl.
***
We scoop up the pellets, pack them in the mesh net at the back of the boat. There are so many fistfuls we lose count. Brill cracks open a beer and passes it around to celebrate, and I have to stop Dough-girl from chucking their module helmet into the lake saying now none of it matters.
Ecker skins off my magsuit, wraps me in a towel while he scrapes the last bit of batter from the inside of my elbow. He tells me he’s not going to take his bus tomorrow. He looks happier than I’ve ever seen him. I try not to cry.
We crank the boat up to high speed and soon enough I can see the batterville lights again, the little stretch of boardwalk where Eck and I grew up and will die together if I let him. Feels like I should be flying, but I’m just shivering.
In the net behind me is our future together in the big prefab, all the weed and Penguin Slide we could ever want. Ecker pressed up behind me in the morning, kissing my neck. Six ATVs in the backyard and fireworks and the both of us shirtless, smiles receding as the ash cools on the cement. In ten years we’ll be like the handful of others who struck it big with pearl, the ones buying out rounds at the boardwalk bar, wrinkled and wasted, telling stories everyone’s already heard. He’ll grow tired of my easy jokes, my yellowing teeth. He’ll wish he never came home.
Ecker smiles at me over his shoulder, and in the dark I hope the one I give back to him looks real.
I wait until he’s turned around again, until I can only see the windblown rooster of his hair. The net latch’s not hard to open. I do it with one hand.
I’ll take it, this little moment. When the pearls are leaking out onto the waves around us and no one can see them, not even me.
© 2024 by Steph Kwiatkowski
3574 words
Author’s Note: This story has a few real-life roots. The first is a documentary I watched about a company that’s been dumping millions of plastic byproduct pellets into Lavaca Bay in Texas. The imagery was so alien—this egg-like debris washed up in the weeds along the water’s edge, with people gathering them in nets and grimy handfuls like the day’s catch. I started thinking about monetized recycling efforts, and the story grew from there. While researching, I came across a very cool method of ferrofluid-based microplastic extraction proposed by a young Irish inventor named Fionn Ferreira. In the video I watched, it was just a little beaker and a clump of black goo, and I couldn’t stop thinking about what that would look like on a larger scale. Oh and lastly: B vitamins really do glow under black light. What a world.
Steph Kwiatkowski is a writer and preschool teacher from suburban Illinois. She is a graduate of Clarion West 2022 and her stories have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Nightmare, and Uncanny.
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