Holden Henry cursed the moment he opened his eyes and found nothing had changed. He’d retired from the helm the previous night after guiding his tug into a sloop he could not see. Though he knew his eyes were open, and his hands held up before him, like the night before at the wheel, he could not see them. The thick cloak of fog obscured everything. That was the first day behind the veil.
One hundred fifty years later, the only change was that he no longer needed his eyes to navigate the river. Every new day, like the thousands before, he cursed as soon as his eyes opened. Having managed to survive the Civil War, he rationalized that he should be able to break free from the alternate reality, or, who was he kidding, the hell, that he was living in. Then again, he’d realized a long time ago that he wasn’t really living anymore either. That too had changed he had to acknowledge, and there was no magic he knew, or had ever found, that could change it back.
The first days had been excruciating. He’d tried every channel and current he could feel through the wheel to navigate back the way he had come, thinking that perhaps there was a way to reverse the events. There wasn’t. Days bled to months with no progress, and never a thinner patch. There was also never a return call when he screamed into the thick, gray oblivion. His skeleton crew, like the rest of the world he knew, had vanished into the fog.
The early years had been the hardest. Unlike the first days after the war ended, he couldn’t go home. He wanted desperately to know if his family was still out there somewhere. Eventually, he acquiesced to the only logical conclusion he could come up with, that if they had not been taken into the mist, they were out there somewhere, just without him. That truth buckled his knees and left him vacant for years.
Decades in, having tried repeatedly to end his suffering to no avail, he finally came to terms with the situation. Or, some semblance of rational acceptance anyway. Then again, who comes to terms with, or accepts, that they are dead, or a ghost, or don’t exist anymore, simply because they drifted through the thickest cloud of dense condensation they had ever seen? Somehow it was an easier truth than the alternative, which was that he had lost his mind.
It had taken time, but eventually Holden had come to realize that he hadn’t actually lost everything. He still had his tug. It was an odd sensation to run the river with no barge to tow, but the notion of sitting in the sloop, or disembarking to stand in the mist were not on his list of plans.
He had actually lowered the gain way once and left the deck, but only for a moment. Stepping off the end, it wasn’t dock planking that he felt under his feet, nor was it the soft, silty soil of the Savannah shore. The line of goose flesh that had marched up his spine forced his retreat immediately. For all of his near misses through the war with different parties trying to acquire his ship, those fears paled in comparison to the unsettled angst in the pit of his stomach as he set one foot down. He would be glad to never experience that again, and he called that memory and sensation to mind any time he considered leaving the tug. It was an adjustment, but not a difficult one.
Like his shipmates, the rations on board had disappeared. He was moderately glad to have learned he didn’t need them anymore. Still, there was something to be said for a meal. There was a lot to be said for companionship though, specifically, the female variety. What he wouldn’t give for a soft, willing woman to help him worry away the hours. He had called himself hoarse beckoning into the mist for someone, anyone, to respond, all the while hoping it would be a female who finally answered his summons. It was yet another thing he didn’t get to have.