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.

How to read the coming seasons by the intuition of the trees and predict the weather by the look of the moon.

With a pang of guilt, I realized it was one of those mundane things that went on, even when your world stopped spinning.

I 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.

It was a strange piece of jewelry that most closely resembled a watch. But the numbers were off-kilter, some of them missing. Ten and eleven were gone, and a zero stood in place of the twelve. The hands never moved, two of them perpetually stuck on the one, the other two pointing to nine and five. The numbers that were scratched from the mother-of-pearl surface could still be seen if I tilted it toward the light, a defect that Gran didn’t know the origin of.

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.

June Rutherford died on October 2, the exact same day of the year that Clarence Taylor discovered me in that alley.

I watch him go, absently twirling something between the tips of my fingers. I look down, as if just remembering it’s there—a perfect bluebell.

The letter was from herself

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

The morbid, superior curiosity of people who pretended to be good Christian folk was something still alive and well in Jasper.

For the first time, I can feel a tether. It stretches tight between me and this man.

I couldn’t stop thinking that where we stood was the center of something, a place that created the kind of gravity that made galaxies.

I had the distant sense that maybe I did really remember him, even before, like he was engraved on some part of me I couldn’t see.

Esther had been ahead of her time on that practice, but now I wondered how much she’d learned from the future. Had Susanna brought with her the knowledge that Margaret had learned? Had I? Which way had the wisdom traveled?

This woman was a flame. She was dangerous, too.

I didn’t know what was me and what wasn’t anymore. Was I becoming someone else, or was I just finally becoming myself? I couldn’t tell.

It was the first time since I’d come through the door that I didn’t feel like I was broken in two, and it wasn’t until that moment, the red door skipping through my mind, that I realized this was the first day since I came here that I hadn’t looked for it. No, I hadn’t thought of it. Not even once.

And I didn’t think there was any way to ever come back from that explosion of light that had birthed a universe inside of me when she said that word. Mama.

But this—this was a home I’d built with my own two hands. I’d made this. It was mine.

The woman I’d raised had then raised me. Then she’d sent me back in time to herself, and to her father. Did that make this a loop? A never-ending story destined to replay over and over again? All that time, she remembered me. She was just waiting for me to remember her.

I knew it

She was a prism that colored me and my world with a story. We were the limbs of a broken tree with poisoned roots.

it hadn’t been perfect, but it had been a life full of love.

We stood there, four generations of Farrow women, cursed to live between worlds. But in that moment, in the valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains, we existed only in one.

And then I spoke my vows into the summer wind. That I’d love him forever. That I would always, always come back. That no matter what, I would find him.