Danny O'Connell was thirty-one and he lived in a third-floor apartment in Youngstown, Ohio, above a laundromat that ran twenty-four hours and smelled permanently of lint and bleach. His father died last winter—lung cancer, smoked for forty years, that's what the doctor said, like that explained anything. His mother left when he was twelve—went to a mechanic in Indianapolis, didn't come back. He had a sister, Kelly, who worked the register at Walmart in Cleveland, sent him a birthday card every year, usually with five dollars folded inside. Danny worked at an auto parts factory for eight years. Last month they laid him off. They called it "efficiency optimization." What it meant was nobody was buying cars, so nobody needed parts, so nobody needed Danny. Youngstown was like that—factories closed, stores closed, whole blocks of storefronts empty with graffiti on the windows and broken glass in the doorways. Rent was six hundred a month. He could afford it. For now. He had unemployment insurance. Six months. After that, he didn't know.

His ex-girlfriend Rachel took their son, Danny Jr., to Indiana. Rachel said, "Danny, I can't let him grow up in a place like this." He understood. He didn't fully understand, but he understood.

Danny liked to fish. Not seriously—he didn't have a proper rod or line or tackle box. He had a secondhand rod from Goodwill, five dollars. Fishing line from the supermarket on sale. Worms he dug out of the ground. He went to Lake Erie, which was close enough to walk to if you didn't mind the industrial rust stretching for miles in every direction. Most times he caught nothing. Sometimes a small bass or a bluegill. He didn't keep them—he threw them back. He didn't fish to eat. He fished to sit by the water and think about nothing, or about everything, or about the fact that he was thirty-one and didn't know what to do with the rest of his life.

One day he caught a dead fish—a big bass, belly up, eyes cloudy. Something was in its mouth. A metal piece, thumb-sized, hexagonal, about two millimeters thick. Not aluminum. Not copper. Not any metal Danny recognized. It was light but hard. Danny picked it out of the fish's mouth with his thumb and forefinger and dropped it into his pocket. He kept fishing. Caught two small bluegill, threw them back. Went home with the dead bass, intending to fry it the next day. But he forgot. The bass went bad on the kitchen counter. He threw it out, took the metal piece out of his pocket, and put it on the kitchen table.

Strange things started happening. Not the kind of strange where you get superpowers. The kind of strange where you go, hmm, that's odd. The coffee mug he put on the left side of the table was on the right side the next morning. He thought he'd misremembered. Then he cut his finger and the wound healed faster than usual. Not overnight—just two days instead of three. He planted some tomato seedlings on the balcony—he'd picked up dirt from a dumpster and used seeds from the discount bin at the grocery store—and one morning they were knee-high. Not metaphorically. Literally. He went to the bathroom in the middle of the night and they were there, green and flowering, taller than he expected. He wasn't sure what to think. Maybe the weather was good. Maybe there was fertilizer in the dirt. Maybe he was dreaming. He was thirty-one. He started misremembering things.

He took some tomatoes to the farmer's market in Youngstown. He wasn't the first vendor—he was the last. His stall was small: a secondhand tablecloth from Home Depot, two baskets of tomatoes. An old black man named Joe, who'd been selling vegetables there for twenty years, looked at Danny's tomatoes and picked one up and smelled it. "These tomatoes," Joe said. "They grow too..." Joe couldn't find the word. "Too what?" Danny asked. "Too bright," Joe said. "Color too bright. And—they smell different." A middle-aged woman came over and bought a pound. "How much?" "Three dollars a pound." "Regular is two." "But these are different." The woman hesitated, then bought them. She came back the next day. "These tomatoes—they're the best I ever tasted." Danny hung up the phone, looked at the metal piece on his kitchen table. It was glowing in the morning light—a faint, golden glow, like a firefly but steady.

Danny kept fishing. Kept looking for work. Found a job at a distribution center, packing boxes. Eight hours a day, thirteen dollars an hour. Not much, but enough for rent. Rachel called. Danny Jr. was learning to write, could write his name now. Danny said, "That's good." Rachel said, "When you gonna come visit?" Danny said, "Maybe." He knew he wouldn't. Not because he didn't want to. Because when he got there, he wouldn't know what to say.

The metal piece was still on the kitchen table. Sometimes it glowed—a faint golden light. Sometimes it didn't. Danny didn't think about it much. He kept working. Kept fishing. Kept calling Rachel. Sometimes late at night, Danny would see light from the bedroom window coming from the kitchen—the metal piece glowing. He'd get up, walk over, look at it. He didn't know what it was. He wasn't going to find out. Finding out took time and money, and he had neither. He'd turn off the kitchen light, go back to bed.

This is how life works. Sometimes you get something you can't explain. Sometimes you don't. Danny chose not to think about it. He kept working, kept fishing, kept calling Rachel. The metal piece sat on the kitchen table. Sometimes it glowed, sometimes it didn't. Danny sometimes looked at it late at night, wondered what it was. Then he turned off the light, went to sleep. The next morning, he got up, went to the distribution center, packed boxes. Life went on.

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