In the office room of the mill, where a handful of women spent their days separating invoices, filing copies, pressing stamps onto envelopes with a thump of the fist, there was uneasy talk for a while. Rumor had it the government had even sent people to investigate.

And there were other things too: Further up the river crops weren’t right-pole beans were small, shriveled on the vine, carrots stopped growing when they were no bigger than the fingers of a child and two UFOs had apparently been sighted in the north of the state. What people minded that summer was how the sky was never blue, how it seemed instead that a dirty gauze bandage had been wrapped over the town, squeezing out whatever bright sunlight might have filtered down, blocking out whatever it was that gave things their color, and leaving a vague flat quality to hang in the air-this is what got to people that summer, made them uneasy after a while. But the people who lived in Shirley Falls were used to it, and even in the awful heat it was only noticeable when you first woke up no, they didn’t particularly mind the smell. Strangers driving by on the turnpike rolled up their windows at the gagging, sulfurous smell and wondered how anyone could live with that kind of stench coming from the river and the mill. Just a dead brown snake of a thing lying flat through the center of town, dirty yellow foam collecting at its edge. Robertson left town, and for a long while the river seemed dead.

Strout amy and isabelle