The Unmaking of June Farrow

by Adrienne Young

In those last years, Gran had all but lived inside of her own broken mind, shut away from our world for weeks at a time. It was one thing to miss her when she was gone. It was another to miss her when she was still here, in this house with me. For the last few months, I’d found myself longing for the end as much as I’d dreaded it.

I hadn’t told her about the echo of voices that drifted in the air around me or the fact that more and more each day, my thoughts felt like sand seeping through the floorboards.

“It’s not real,” I whispered on an exhale, forcing myself to count again. But in that moment, it had been. And it wasn’t the first time I’d heard that voice, either. The deep tone was something I could pick out now, the U in my name distinct and bent in a peculiar way. I’d first heard it at the farm the day the episodes began, calling out my name again and again. Now, almost a year later, I knew it the way I knew the sounds of this house or the rush of the river. That voice was an echo across the pages of my notebook.

My world was a very small one, made up of only a few people and places, and it felt like it was shrinking by the second.

Eamon was the kind of handsome that was carved from forests and rivers. He had the look of someone who’d spent his life in the sun, hands in the dirt. Every color, curve, and angle of him was shaped with it.

Her mouth moved around words I couldn’t hear, and I found myself concentrating hard, trying to comb the sound of her voice from the wind.

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

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.