The Mutant Season

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It snowed yesterday, three inches. Today a cruel wind comes ripping off the ocean, kicking up the snowdrifts. This is the dead of winter, the low point of the year. This is the season when the mutants arrive. They showed up ten years ago, the same six families as always, renting all the beach houses on the north side of Dune Crest Road. They like to come here in winter when the vacationers are gone and the beaches are empty. I guess they don’t enjoy having a lot of normals around. In winter here there’s just the little hard core of year-round residents like us. And we don’t mind the mutants so long as they don’t bother us.

I can see them now, frolicking along the shore, kids and grownups. The cold doesn’t seem to affect them at all. It would affect me plenty, being outside in this weather, but they don’t even trouble themselves with wearing overcoats. Just light windbreakers and pullovers. They have thicker skins than we do, I guess—leathery-looking, shiny, apple-green—and maybe a different metabolism. They could almost be people from some other planet, but no, they’re all natives of the USA, just like you and me. Mutants, that’s all. Freaks is what we used to call them. But of course you mustn’t call them that now.

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