The Unmaking of June Farrow

by Adrienne Young

The easiest and most widely accepted explanation for my mother’s strange disappearance was madness—the same affliction to befall every woman in my family for as far back as anyone could remember. We were cursed—the Farrow women.

suspected that the ache of missing her would mostly come from those little things. The holes that were left behind, empty places I’d stumble upon now that she was gone.

I had only one ambition in my simply built life, and that was to be sure the Farrow curse would end with me.

It was as good a place as any to end a story. I wasn’t the first Farrow, but I would be the last.

The question nagged at me, like a finger picking the same string on an out-of-tune guitar over and over until it just became one head-splitting sound. I

The thought made me feel weak. Fragile. Those two words had never been familiar to me before, but now they felt intimate. So close that there wasn’t air to breathe around them.

This was the field that I had planted. With my very own hands. And then I’d left it all to rot.

That smell was warmth. It pooled inside of me, filling the narrowest of spaces, and I closed my eyes. It hurt, unleashing a physical ache that reached through my entire body. It was alive, that feeling. A trapped thing trying to get out.