S2E8 Semper Paratus by Alyson Hagy

A short story by Alyson Hagy. “Semper Paratus”—the Coast Guard motto, meaning “Always Ready”—follows Randall, the lone woman in a Coast Guard rescue crew stationed on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, nicknamed the graveyard of the Atlantic. The story unfolds in the aftermath of a disturbing rescue attempt, and like much of Hagy’s writing, it’s less interested in melodrama than in the complicated emotional residue left behind: guilt, endurance, rivalry, loneliness, and the strange intimacies...