Almost Completely
Copyright© 2026 by Komiko Yakamura
Chapter 1: The Sighting
The salmon came in heavy that Tuesday, which meant Eli Stillwater was going to be on his feet until dark.
That was fine. He didn’t mind the work. What he minded was his father’s running inventory of everything Eli was doing slightly wrong — the angle of the rack, the distribution of the fillets, the way he was feeding the alder chips into the firebox with what his father called impatience and Eli called efficiency. Seventeen years of this and they still hadn’t agreed on the vocabulary.
“You’re crowding them,” his father said, not looking up from the brine tank.
“They’re fine.”
“They’ll steam instead of smoke if you crowd them.”
Eli adjusted the rack without comment. Outside, a gull complained about something. The smokehouse smelled the way it always smelled — wood and salt and the deep specific darkness of fish transforming into something that would last — and usually that smell was a comfort to him, a thing that meant home in the most animal part of his brain. Today it just meant he’d been here since six in the morning and his shoulders ached.
He stepped outside to get the next flat of fillets from the ice chest and that’s when the truck pulled up.
It was a big rental, white and mud-splashed, and it groaned to a stop in front of the empty storefront two doors down — the one that used to be Halverson’s Hardware before Mr. Halverson’s knees gave out and the whole operation folded overnight. The storefront had been vacant eight months. Eli had stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing a missing tooth.
And a girl jumped down.
Eli stopped. She was drop dead gorgeous!
She was small — five feet of her, maybe, slight and fine-boned, and the gray morning light of Quinault Harbor did nothing to dim whatever she was carrying. She was light-skinned in the way that catches light differently than you expect, and she was wearing a yellow sweatshirt that was too big for her, sleeves pushed to the elbows, and she looked up at the sky the moment her feet hit the ground.
It was not a look of wonder. It was the look of someone taking inventory of a disappointment.
The sky, for its part, was doing nothing to help — low and white and featureless, the kind of sky this town produced from October through June like a factory running one shift. Eli had long since stopped seeing it. The girl saw it clearly. Her expression said: so this is what I traded.
Her mother said something and she looked over and said something back and then she was moving, reaching back into the cab for a bag, turning to carry a box, just working, just a girl helping her family unload on a cold Tuesday morning, and Eli stood with a flat of salmon going cold in his hands and could not make himself go back inside.
She never looked his direction once.
“Eli.”
He went inside.
His father had heard about the new family — everybody had, this was Quinault Harbor, population 2,300 and declining, and a new business was the kind of thing people discussed at the gas station and the post office and the diner on Front Street until something else happened, which in this town could take a while. West African grocery, someone had said. His father had nodded slowly at that, the way he nodded at most things, processing.
“Might be good for the town,” he said, which was as close to enthusiasm as his father got about civic developments.
Eli had agreed without paying much attention. That was last week.
This week he found himself inventorying what he knew about the storefront next door — the dimensions of the front window, the distance from their door to the new family’s door, whether there was a reasonable excuse for a person to be standing outside at any given time that wouldn’t look like what it was.
What it was, he wasn’t naming yet. He was seventeen and he knew better than to name a thing after thirty seconds.
But she’d looked at the sky like that, and he kept seeing it.
The next morning he came in at six and she was there.
Not inside — outside. Standing in front of the new storefront in the same oversized sweatshirt, this time with coffee, holding the cup in both hands and looking at the street with the patient expression of someone waiting for something to interest them.
Nothing on Front Street at six in the morning was going to interest anyone. Eli knew this firsthand.
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