Fiction | January 13, 2026

The Feeding 

Laura Dedmon 

She did what they said never to do: she went out on the water alone.  

The house was small and close and sticky, beer cans and blankets clustered on the floor into a nest where the three of them had fallen asleep in front of true-crime documentaries. She hadn’t watched that kind of thing before. Anna and Claire were really into it, though, and slept soundly through the night. She’d watched them when she got up around three to go to the toilet and then watched them some more until the air grew too stale, and she took the old longboard that stood propped up against the dryer and went down to the beach. Their surfing vacation had been a tradition since college—every summer, their group would rent a house and spend long days out on the water. But some years had passed, and now their group was down to three. They still did not have enough money to rent a good house on the water, even if it was the start of hurricane season, so they’d had to take one a few blocks back. At this time of year the weather rolled in from the far horizon and washed the sky a weeping cobalt, until it matched the water and the horizon disappeared.  

The screen door did not slam as she left and walked barefoot over slick tarmac, past the house with the window propped open with a knife—the blade stuck straight down into the wooden frame, the handle holding up the window—and over the next street, too, to where the houses got higher and higher above ground, raised on stilts like storks. Every now and then there was a gap where a storm had swept the legs out from under one and carried it off and now the houses on the back street had a better view, and she had a shortcut to the water.  

There was no one on the beach. She crossed the tideline, felt the crackle of dried seaweed under her feet. Sand fleas jumped around her ankles. The board was heavy, so she stopped and sat down next to it to rest her arms and watch the waves. Dawn broke like spilled milk and turned the water silver and strange. The swell was small and quiet. She sat and watched; a runner passed, barefoot and ponytail swinging, and then she was alone again. 

Her eyes hurt though the light was dim. The documentary had been about the Sanderson case—Sarah Sanderson, who went missing not far from here, just up in Charleston ten years ago. Sanderson had been seen talking to a man in a white van, the narrator reported from eyewitness accounts, and she had not been seen again. Man in the van, van with the girl, and bits of her resting peacefully in the marshes. Funny how that happened. The facts of the case were well-established; cruel, then, to build hope that something might be resolved. A parade of shifty-looking suspects, each discounted back when it happened but dredged up now from the depths of records to be scrutinized again—look, did he do it?—only to be put back in their boxes. The old photos, the maps with annotations to aid in visualizing the route she was taken. But you, watching this documentary—could you see something no one else did? Something new, something overlooked, something unseen or come now to light? By the end, though, nothing really changed. Just an acknowledgement (necessary, of course, but you still felt the failure) made by the stern narrator that the case remained unsolved.