Beaux Gallier || Calder Bend

South-East Texas, near a river that floods just often enough to ruin things and never often enough to wash them clean.

Calder Bend used to be a mill and refinery town. Both shut down years apart, leaving behind rusting infrastructure and men who never learned another way to work. The town smells faintly of diesel, river water, hot asphalt, and old cigarettes. Everything is sun-faded, slightly warped, and humming with cicadas at night.

People don’t leave Calder Bend easily. They either get stuck or get buried.

The Gallier brothers were born into a house that never learned how to stay still. Their mother was eighteen when Abraham arrived, still reeling from prom night, still believing things would turn out swell. Their father moved through their early years like a draft, present in fragments, disappearing for weeks, returning with stories that never lined up and money that never lasted. Fraud, petty theft, fake names.

Beaux arrived into a family already fraying, loved loudly but inconsistently, raised amid tension he didn’t yet have words for. By the time Beaux was five, their mother vanished. No dramatic exit. Just gone. The explanation shifted depending on who was talking and how drunk they were. Their father lasted another year, maybe two, before he disappeared as well, chased by warrants, debts, or the slow realization that parenting required permanence. He left the boys with his sister, Margot, and never came back for them.

Margot tried. That’s the part everyone could agree on if asked. She took them into a small trailer already carrying its own exhaustion, worked jobs that never quite paid enough, and leaned too heavily on Abraham to keep things running. She loved them unevenly, fiercely on good days, distracted and fragile on bad ones. Addiction crept in quietly, first as relief then necessity.

Beaux absorbed the chaos directly, growing loud, impulsive, and desperate to be seen in a house where attention was a resource in short supply. School fell away differently for each of them. Beaux barely attended, spending his time drifting from one money-making scheme to the next, pulling his weight to feed himself and his brothers when Margot couldn't. By their late teen