Frank Harell coughed into the spittoon. The phlegm was black, as always. He watched it settle at the bottom next to the others, a small black island in a sea of black. The bar was called The Rusty Nail, which was appropriate, because everything in this town was rusty and nothing worked the way it was supposed to.

It was Tuesday, which meant the bar was half-empty. Old Joe was behind the counter, polishing a glass with a rag that was dirtier than the glass. Two miners sat at a table in the corner, drinking beer and not talking. Mining town silence. The kind of silence that means everyone is thinking about the same thing but nobody wants to say it out loud.

Frank sat at the bar and ordered a whiskey. Old Joe poured it, no ice, no nothing. Just whiskey in a chipped glass. Frank drank it in three sips and set the glass down hard.

"Got something for you," Old Joe said.

Frank looked at him. "What is it?"

"New customer. Came in yesterday. From Pittsburgh. Heard you're the guy who tells things."

Frank didn't respond. He picked up the whiskey bottle and poured another finger for himself.

"He's got five dollars," Old Joe said. "Says he wants to know what Jimmy Lee wanted to eat last."

Frank's hand stopped halfway to the glass. He looked at Old Joe. "Who told him about Jimmy Lee?"

"Nobody told him anything. He just... knew. Said his name is Danny. Danny something. Last name he wouldn't give."

Frank set the bottle down. He didn't want to do this. Every time he told someone, it got heavier. The memories weren't his, but carrying them was. Like coal dust in his lungs—small particles, each one insignificant, but together they made it hard to breathe.

"Tell him to come back tomorrow," Frank said.

"He already paid."

Frank looked at the five-dollar bill on the counter. It was crisp, not like the bills that circulated in town, which were soft and stained and smelled like sweat and coal. This bill was from Pittsburgh, or somewhere else, somewhere that wasn't here.

"Alright," Frank said. "But not here. Meet me at the bench outside the post office. Ten o'clock."

Danny showed up at ten. He was young, maybe twenty-five, wearing a suit that was too clean for this part of West Virginia. He stood by the bench with his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the ground.

"Sit down," Frank said. He sat on the bench. The wood was cold and damp.

Danny sat. He didn't say anything.

"Five dollars," Frank said. "You get one memory. Pick who."

"Jimmy Lee," Danny said.

Frank closed his eyes. He reached inside, past the coal dust and the cough and the tiredness, to the place where the memories lived. They were there, seventeen of them, embedded in his mind like splinters. He found Jimmy Lee's—small, sharp, specific.

He opened his eyes and spoke.

"Jimmy Lee wanted an apple pie. The one from Miller's Bakery on Main Street. He told his wife he was going to pick it up on his way home from the shift on the twenty-third. He didn't get home. He didn't get the pie."

Danny was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "Thank you." He put another five dollars on the bench and walked away.

Frank sat on the bench and watched him go. The sky was gray. The mountains were gray. The town was gray. Everything in this part of the world was gray, except the phlegm, which was black.

Over the next month, Frank told more memories. He told them to strangers who found out about him through word of mouth, through the same network that spread news about which mine was safe and which one wasn't. He told them in the bar, on the bench, in the parking lot of the grocery store. Five dollars each. Sometimes ten, if the person was desperate.

He told them about Bill, who wanted to see his daughter before he died and didn't, because she was at school and he was in the mine and the mine collapsed and the school was three miles away and nobody could make it in time. He told them about Tommy Ross, who had written a letter to his mother the night before the disaster and never got to mail it. He told them about Eddie May, who was humming a song when the ground started shaking, a song his grandmother used to sing, and he kept humming it until the darkness took him.

Each memory was a weight. Each memory made the air harder to breathe. But Frank kept telling them, because the people who came to him needed to know, and because telling was the only thing that made the memories feel less like they were eating him from the inside out.

Then came the day when a memory came that didn't belong to any of the dead.

Frank was in the bar, sitting at his usual spot, when a man walked in. He was older than Frank, maybe fifty, with thinning hair and a face that was plain in the way that faces are plain when you've never paid attention to them. He wore a suit that was clean but not expensive, and he carried a briefcase.

He sat at the bar, two stools down from Frank, and ordered a beer.

Frank didn't think anything of it. Men came and went from the bar. But then the man turned, and Frank saw his face, and something moved inside him like a fish in dark water.

He knew this man.

Not from life. Not from any memory he recognized as his own. But from the mine. From the memories of the dead. This man was in one of them.

Frank felt the memory surface before he could stop it. It came like a bubble rising through black water, breaking the surface with a pop that sent shockwaves through his chest.

He was in the mine. Not as a worker—he had never worked this section. He was watching. The man in the suit was there, in the mine, at 3 PM on the day of the disaster. He was carrying a tool bag. He was walking toward the support pillars. He was looking over his shoulder, like someone who didn't want to be seen.

He stopped at pillar 14. He opened his tool bag and took out a charge of explosives. He placed it at the base of the pillar. He set the timer. He walked away.

The explosion came forty seconds later. Pillar 14 collapsed. The collapse triggered a chain reaction. Pillars 13, 12, 11, 10—all gone in sequence. The roof came down. Seventeen men underground. Seventeen men who would never see their families again.

Frank opened his eyes. He was in the bar. The man in the suit was drinking his beer. He was looking at the television above the counter, which was showing a baseball game neither of them cared about.

Frank's hands were shaking. He set them flat on the bar to stop it.

"Excuse me," he said. His voice was rough, like gravel.

The man turned. "Yeah?"

"You live in town?"

"Always have. Always will."

"Work where?"

"I'm retired. Used to work for the mine company. Safety inspection. Retired five years ago."

Frank felt the memory rising again, stronger this time, pushing against the inside of his skull like a hand trying to break through glass. He could feel the man's presence in his mind, the memory of him in the mine, placing the charge, setting the timer, walking away.

And he could feel something else. Something the memory hadn't shown him before.

The man wasn't alone in the mine that day. Someone had been with him. Someone who had watched him place the explosives and said nothing. Someone who had helped him set the timer.

Frank didn't know who that someone was. But he knew one thing: the man in the suit wasn't working alone. And whoever had helped him was still in town. Still walking past Frank every day. Still breathing the same coal-dusted air.

"Nice to meet you," the man said. He finished his beer, put a dollar on the counter, and walked out.

Frank sat on the stool and stared at the dollar. It was the same crisp bill as before, from somewhere that wasn't here.

He didn't go home that night. He went to the bench outside the post office and sat down and waited. He didn't know what for. He only knew he couldn't go home and sit in his kitchen and watch Mary cough into a handkerchief and pretend he didn't feel the memories pressing against his skull like a vice.

The bench was cold. The sky was gray. The mountains were gray. The town was gray.

Frank closed his eyes and reached inside, past the coal dust and the cough and the tiredness, to the place where the memories lived. He found the man's memory—the one where he placed the explosives—and he held it there, in the dark, where he could look at it without flinching.

Someone helped him. Someone was still in town.

Frank opened his eyes. He was still on the bench. The sky was still gray. The air was still hard to breathe. And the memories were still there, seventeen dead men and one living liar, all of them inside him, all of them waiting.

He stood up. His knees cracked. His lungs burned. He walked home through the gray streets, past the row houses with their peeling paint and their overgrown yards, past the church with the cracked steeple, past the grocery store where Mary bought the cheap vegetables she called fresh.

He opened the door. Mary was in the kitchen, sitting at the table with a cup of tea that had gone cold. She looked up when he entered, and her face did that thing it always did—just a slight tightening around the eyes, a small movement that meant she was worried but wasn't going to say it.

"Hey," Frank said.

"Hey," Mary said.

He sat down across from her. He looked at her face, at the lines around her eyes, at the way her hands rested on the table, steady and still. He thought about telling her. About the memory. About the man in the suit. About the explosives. About the seventeen men.

But he didn't. He never told Mary things. Things were heavy, and Mary carried enough without adding coal dust and dead men and living liars to her load.

"How you feeling?" Mary asked.

"Same as always," Frank said.

He picked up his tea. It was cold. He drank it anyway.

--- OTMES Code: OTMES-v2-ZXS-05-4B7F38-E0950-M5-T023-9D4A E_total: 9.50 Dominant Mode: M5 Variant: V-05 Dirty Realism