When you fall asleep the ocean in your head is slick and glazed, but overnight fog rolls in. You wake to foghorns, problems announcing themselves in the muted dark. I’m here. I’m here. Steer clear. An article to unravel, data to enter, seventeen texts to answer. The warnings barely register. Today you will stub your toes on problems until your feet go numb.

Message your boss to tell her you’re working from home, even though the center of gravity is moving back to the office. Brew dark coffee, thick as engine fuel. Sometimes you need a shock, then the sky clears and you can name six species of puffin: Atlantic, tufted, horned, Dow’s, manx shearwater, rhinoceros auklet. You used to pick up facts like that effortlessly. 

When the coffee doesn’t work, push the data entry aside. Turn on the TV and watch a grief-stricken detective stroll across the misty cliffs of Shetland. This is not a retreat. It’s research. Your new job is to become a detective of fog. 

A good detective knows her suspects, so first you have to learn its moods: the difference between a fog that will smother you gently on the couch and a fog that will snap your nose off. Learn its hidden tasting notes: stone fruit, pine, mud. Today’s fog is stubborn, muscular, and tastes like salt. A fog with a long resume of shipwrecks to its name. 

The fog lives inside you. It’s a scavenger, making a nest in your neurons, and that means you get to decide what it is. So make it a suspect you can question. A teacher who stands too close to teenage girls. A nosy neighbor with a telescope. A mechanic with a handlebar mustache, a woman who collects lovers like tiny perfect pearls, an undertaker with pine-syrup breath. 

The fog will resist. It will stretch the handlebar mustache into a snake and give the woman with too many lovers too many heads. Ignore the hissing. Ignore the mirrored winks. Keep your cool. Press the teacher on where he was last Tuesday, and the weekend before, and every other day in the last five months that you’ve struggled to remember the words for chair, help, expiration date, let alone the names for distant birds. Put your evidence on the table: photographs of him at the misty bus-stop, mid-laugh, barely an inch between his pale tongue and the tip of his student’s nose. Pull out his bank statements: the standing appointment at a hotel on the other side of town. You don’t know yet how all this connects to you, but it must. In a good detective show all the strands criss-cross somehow. 

Make the undertaker tell you where all the bodies are buried. Make the woman with too many lovers reveal the address of her secret apartment. It’s above the mechanic’s shop. It’s by the bus stop where the teacher waits. It’s in clear view of the neighbor’s telescope. You have the key in your hand. 

But then the suspects turn toward you. They pull kitchen knives out of pockets and houndstooth purses. They have their own theories, and in every one, you have the starring role. They’ve tracked the unsteady times you took your antidepressant: 8:13, 9:05, 5:50, 10:47. They know about the third beer. They know about the infection you tried to muscle through. 

The fog fills your apartment. Lie down on the carpet and let it cover you. You are so tired. You can’t think of plots anymore, or satisfying endings.

The best you can do is study the fog and try to imitate it. Keep yourself close to the ground. Spread your fingers out. Cover all the available space. Be patient. Wait for the fog to recognize something kindred in you. Wait for it to turn into something you can love: a curious, clownish bird, hopping towards you on uneven ground. Wait for it to touch its Technicolor beak to yours, and retreat. 

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Pauline Holdsworth is a writer and public radio producer who grew up in central Pennsylvania and now lives in Toronto, Canada. Her fiction has appeared in Bat City Review, Orca, The Forge, and elsewhere.