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.

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.

But that ache inside of me wasn’t just the pain of losing her. It was the relief, too, and that was something else I’d never said aloud. 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.