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.

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.

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.

But the human brain was like the uncharted depths of the oceans. Science was still wading around in the shallows.

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