Chapter 2 (Part I): Discovery

When Josie follows Bitter Creek downstream, she finds more than just a broken landscape. Something’s poisoning the land—and the people responsible may be closer than she thinks.

🌀 Previously, in Watershed

Author’s note: Writing fiction is a creative (and sometimes chaotic) process—so thanks for bearing with me as the story evolves. If you’ve already read earlier drafts, you’ll notice some changes. If you haven’t read them yet, or don’t want to re-read, here’s what you missed:

🪶 Prologue (New Version):

The novel now opens with a dreamlike memory—Josie underwater, disoriented and gasping for breath. It’s a visceral flashback to her traumatic accident during her Army service, steeped in sensory detail and emotional fragmentation. This moment lays the groundwork for her PTSD and her complicated relationship with water—both of which ripple through the rest of the story.

🌾 Chapter 1: The Return (Updated):

We meet Josie as she crosses back into Oklahoma after eight years away. She’s returning to the family ranch—older, injured, and unsure if home even exists anymore. Along the way, she finds a wary stray cattle dog she names Dolly, a quiet but symbolic gesture of reconnection. At the ranch, she reunites with Pete, the loyal caretaker who’s been holding things together in her absence. The house is crumbling, the land is tired, and something feels off. By the end of the chapter, Josie is alone on the porch, wrapped in her father’s coat, watching the stars and wondering what kind of mess she’s walked back into.

Thanks for following along! If you’ve got questions or feedback (especially typos or plot inconsistencies), I’m all ears.

Paid subscribers can leave a comment at the end, but free subscribers are welcome to send me a message.

---

Chapter 2: Discovery

Dawn bled through the old lace curtains, throwing ghost-light across the worn rug. Josie lay still for a moment, her body aching from old injuries. Dolly paced just outside the door frame—low whine in her throat, tail stiff. Alert, unsettled.

Something was wrong.

She pulled on yesterday’s jeans and her father’s old coat, the film canister still in the pocket, tapping against her hip like a memory trying to get her attention.

Downstairs, the percolator groaned to life. She poured the coffee into her grandfather’s favorite black mug, its handle chipped smooth by decades of calloused hands. The smell helped—cutting through the exhaustion that still clung to her senses. So did the air outside: cold and clean, sharp in her lungs after months of administrative AC.

Through the kitchen window, she studied the farmyard. She couldn’t get over how smaller everything looked. Not just from distance or disrepair, but from time. What had once been the whole world—red barn, creek bed, pastures stretching toward the rise—now seemed fragile, temporary. What had been sturdy and permanent when she was eighteen now showed the wear of eight years without enough hands to maintain it.

She headed past the horse barn first, its red paint faded to rust-colored streaks. Through the gaps in the boards she could see her old barrel horse's stall, empty now except for spider webs and the ghost of hay.

The equipment barn was worse. Her father's pride—the John Deere tractor he'd restored himself, the tiller that had been her grandfather's—sat under canvas tarps that had been chewed by mice and flapped in the breeze like prayer flags. Everything was rust and decay, the relentless Oklahoma wind stripping paint and hope in equal measure.

She found what she was looking for in the tractor barn. Her father had converted the back corner into a darkroom when she was twelve, teaching her to develop film on winter afternoons when the cattle work was light. The red bulb still hung from the ceiling. The chemical trays sat where they always had, dust-covered but waiting.

“I can still hear him,” she said, watching Dolly nose the doorframe. “Said the camera never lied.” She stepped closer to the counter, ran a finger through the dust.

“If you wanted to see the truth about a place, you had to wait for it. Let it come to you.”

In the yard behind the house, the old swing set still stood in what had been the play area, though the swings themselves had long since fallen away. Just the metal frame now, orange with rust, creaking in the wind like a song she couldn't quite name.

She'd played here while her father worked cattle, while her mother made phone calls to county commissioners and agricultural committees, building the political network that would eventually take her to Washington. Even then, Josie had sensed the tension between her parents—her father's roots growing deeper while her mother's ambitions pulled her toward something else entirely.

Josie whistled for Dolly and headed down toward Bitter Creek, boots brushing through grass tall enough to soak her jeans. The path was half memory, half muscle—she’d carried fishing poles this way as a kid, a coffee can full of worms banging against her knee.

Water had always been complicated for her family. Her father's death eight years ago—drunk, alone, his truck found upside down in the Arkansas River. The state patrol said he'd been drinking at a bar, probably fell asleep at the wheel. But Josie knew it wasn't that simple. The drinking had gotten worse as the ranch struggled financially, worse when her mother's political career took off and she was gone more than she was home.

Now Josie was home, wearing his jacket, walking the same creek where he'd taught her to fish. But something was wrong with the water.

Up ahead, Dolly stopped cold. "What is it, girl?"

Just then the smell hit her—sweet decay mixed with ammonia, it made her stomach turn. She rounded the bend where the creek curved through a stand of cottonwoods and stopped short.

Three cattle lay scattered along the bank like discarded toys, their bloated bodies dark against the pale grass. Josie's stomach lurched before her training kicked in: Observe. Document. Analyze.

She approached the nearest carcass, a young heifer that couldn't have been more than two years old. No obvious wounds, no signs of struggle. The animal had simply laid down and died, probably sometime in the past day or so based on the lack of decomposition. But something about the positioning bothered her—the way the cattle had died close to the water but not quite at it, as if they'd been trying to reach something they needed but couldn't quite make it.

Dolly kept her distance, hackles raised, nose working overtime. Smart dog.

Josie pulled out her phone and started taking pictures, the same methodical documentation she'd used for incident reports in the Army. Wide shots to establish context, close-ups to capture details. The creek itself looked wrong too—algae thick as paint along the edges, an oily sheen that caught the morning light in rainbow patterns.

She knelt by the water's edge and immediately jerked back. Another smell hit her like a thrown punch—not just decay, but something chemical underneath, sharp and synthetic. Not unlike the fuel that had coated everything after the accident.

Her hands started shaking.

Not now. She breathed through her mouth, counted backwards from ten, focused on the immediate task. This wasn't Lithuania. This was Oklahoma, dry land, safe ground. But the smell...

She forced herself to look closer at the water. What she'd taken for algae was something else—a thick, greenish scum that moved wrong, too viscous for natural plant matter. She’d have to come back later to collect samples, because whatever this was, it wasn't natural.

She followed the creek upstream for a few hundred yards, Dolly tracking alongside but maintaining her careful distance from the water. Where the creek curved around a bend, the landscape changed. What should have been pasture was torn up and rutted, churned into mud that had dried in deep furrows. Industrial tire tracks, the kind made by heavy equipment.

And the smell got worse.

At once she found the source. A section of grassland maybe two acres wide had been scraped down to bare earth and covered with something that looked like chocolate frosting but smelled like death. It was thick, dark sludge with the ammonia burn of concentrated livestock waste. Even from fifty yards away, the stench made her eyes water.

"Jesus Christ."

She took a few more pictures, then turned back toward the farm buildings. Whatever this was, she needed to understand what was going on. And she would need help.