Ash on the Water

"The smell came first.

Not smoke—at least not yet—but something sharper, dry and uneasy, carried on the afternoon air drifting inland from the river. Samuel Rowe noticed it as he closed the shutters of his storefront, hands rough with sawdust and ink. The St. Johns lay just beyond the street, wide and deceptively calm, its surface broken only by slow-moving barges and the long shadows of dock pilings."

A short historical fiction story set in late-1800s Jacksonville, Florida. Inspired by real places and conditions that shaped the city before the Great Fire of 1901.

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