The Unmaking of June Farrow

by Adrienne Young

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

more and more each day, my thoughts felt like sand seeping through the floorboards.

The faint fissure in the ice of my resolve found me in the rarest of moments.

This isn’t a tear in the fabric. It’s more terrifying than that. This is a hidden seam, and the longer I am still and let it unwind, the clearer it becomes.

There was nothing that could have prepared me for a love like that, to sit and watch a dying thing grow.

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.

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