Somewhere To Sleep at Night

Caitlin hasn't been back to the island in four years. She left under circumstances she's explained differently to different people, and her plan for the visit is simple: deal with the house her aunt left her, make some decisions, leave. Two days, maybe three.

The man in the house complicates this.

He's been living there for months. He's made small improvements — the gate that was broken, the window that wouldn't seal. He's polite, unhurried, and completely without obvious explanation. He has nowhere else to go, he says. He found the door open. He was just trying to sleep somewhere dry.

Somewhere To Sleep at Night is the story of what happens in the days that follow: the negotiation between two people with very different relationships to the concept of home, on an island that is simultaneously the place Caitlin ran from and the only place she's ever felt she belonged. The drifter is not a threat. He is something more unsettling than that — a mirror, held at an angle she wasn't expecting.

The story ends without resolving everything it raises. The ambiguity is earned, not lazy. What it leaves behind is the feeling of a story that knew exactly where it was going and chose not to take you all the way there.