The frequent patrons of Marsha’s diner will swear there’s no better stack of pancakes to be found in all of St. James than those made in Marsha’s kitchen. And the purveyors of Marsha’s will attest that they do, indeed, make a damn fine stack of pancakes—but that among those doing the griddle-flipping, there certainly isn’t a Marsha. Despite what the name on the faded wind spinner overlooking Main Street might suggest, no such person actually exists. In fact, there’s no Marsha in all of St. James—or the whole island itself, as far as anyone can tell. When pressed, islanders are unable to recall who she actually is, or was. Not even the diner’s current owners, if you can believe it. They’ll say she might have been someone’s mother’s-grandma’s-grandma or some-such, but municipal employment documents provide no clarity and, to be frank, no one really seems to care. If Marsha ever existed at all, she up and escaped the county tax records in a hurry, dropping her pancake recipe as she went.

Such is the peculiar nature of the little town of St. James—a place that seems to awaken each day and reinvent its own history from scratch. In the summertime, this is almost literally true. Memorial Day weekend arrives and with it five to six ferryloads of pasty-skinned tourists who, looking en masse to unshackle themselves from the chilly grip of Michigan springtime, hastily descend upon its shores. From then on through each weekend up to Labor Day, they bring not only much-needed patronage but also their own array of peculiar tastes and preferences. Ten years ago no one in Marsha’s kitchen could imagine a whey-protein and guava pancake, let alone make one. Today it’s the menu headliner. But hell, isn’t that the way of all tourist destinations? A few blog posts and Buzzfeed articles tell their story and, seemingly overnight, they’re headlining the New York Times travel section. If you’re a local, you either lean in or fight back. The folks of St. James appear inclined to do neither. Instead, they do what they’ve always done, and carry on as if a rapid influx of 10,000 strangers was the unremarkable happening of an otherwise average Tuesday—well, most of them, anyway. The overworked cooks at Marsha’s are often inclined to complain.

Mikey McNalley thought all of this on one such Memorial Day weekend as he watched ferrygoers disembark with their pull-behind suitcases and kiddie strollers, ambling towards the island’s sole vehicle rental service. A line formed out the front door in the unseasonably hot afternoon sun. This did no good for Mikey’s ice cream, which he had just purchased up the hill at Daddy Frank’s (owned, as it were, by an actual Frank who is in fact a father). He checked his watch and sighed; his shift at the Shamrock began in 15 minutes, and it would be a doozy. If there’s one thing he learned in his 25 years spent on this island, it’s that tourists are strange but altogether predictable. Upon completing their arduous journey to the Far North, roughly half of them make a beeline for the bar. Mikey didn’t blame them.

He took the long way to the Shamrock, up from where he stood at the public beach that straddled the harbor and around the town’s back roads, where shabby-looking split levels shored up against a thick guard of cedars and birches. It was quiet up here. The mad scramble for beachside properties left most of the satellite forest lots scantly developed. But it was only a matter of time. The standards of those moneyed few who found their way here would shift from “picturesque beachside bungalow” to “secluded forest enclave” before you could say “second mortgage.” In truth, it had already started. The COVID pandemic, forcing as it did the hand of companies to accommodate remote workers, unleashed a flurry of suddenly cash-flush 30-somethings with predilections for seclusion and “room to breathe.” Google did the rest. A few starry-eyed developers installed 5G towers in the heart of the island and, well, here we are: lakeside lots that go for a million dollars or more, and old family acreage like that of Mikey’s standing as a bulwark against the rising tide.

Whatever the future had in store, Mikey knew this much: he liked his job, and he liked the island, and he had no plans to leave. Change is inevitable, but it didn’t have to be unbearable. Anyone who believed that the scrimpy economic hub of St. James could get by on the increasingly scant retirement savings of a bunch of old timers was either kidding themselves or simply deluded. Wi-Fi and protein pancakes giveth, Wi-Fi and protein pancakes taketh away. The important thing, he thought, was to hold on to those things that really mattered. Good company, for one; a sense of community, too, and the knowledge that someone within driving distance had your back in case your pellet stove took a shit on you (like his often did). As long as those basic needs were met, in their varied incarnations, the island would be fine. Mikey thought all of this as has he lapped up the vestiges of his ice cream on the back steps of the Shamrock, steeling himself against the coming horde of thirsty ferrygoers. The sun on his face was warm and the air carried that slightly acerbic scent of the waning Spring. He felt, in that moment, distinctly optimistic about what the Summer had in store for him. He wondered how St. James would continue to invent itself tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after. In some ways it felt like his personal Eden; his own little sliver of Creation.

But sadly, as it goes, all Creation stories need a Devil. And in the summer of 2025, in the town of St. James, Michigan, where no Marshas claimed provenance, where tourists flocked to the beaches in droves, and where Mikey McNalley hedged his bets,

the Devil showed up.

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