The End of Cold Wolf Trail

Fiction

Bruneteau Shores wasn’t a town that was overrun by tourists and development.

They were a town that expanded a marina and hired a marketing company when the copper mines ran dry. Any charm lost wasn’t a shame, it was a plan.

Walt Aiken wasn’t privy to all that, because Walt Aiken was what people in small towns called slow, though he was smart enough to know he was considered slow.

They weren’t mean to him in school in Bruneteau Shores, because he was Tolly Aiken’s boy, but they didn’t invite him to parties and he didn’t like football games because they wouldn’t let him play.

Walt had spent most of his life in the house on County Line Road and Cold Wolf Trail, and the little shop attached to the house, built in 1872 and the county’s first-ever dark room.

Tolly Aiken was smart enough to apply for and be easily granted historic status to his little five-acre lot, mostly so his sweet, slow boy Walt could live out his days in the home he grew up in, where he was comfortable, without some downstate developer shoving his boy aside for a condo or an UltraBurger.

Every night since Walt’s momma had died, Tolly and his boy would walk out to the edge of the property, to the crabapple tree, and take a picture of the sunset. The first time they did it, the night of the funeral, Walt was 14 and they used a Polaroid Impulse Walt’s momma had given him for Christmas. The sunset, Tolly told him, was his momma kissing him goodnight.