The Unmaking of June Farrow

by Adrienne Young

My future had never been a mystery. I’d known since I was very young what lay ahead, my own end always so sharply visible in the distance. That was why I’d never fall in love. Why I’d never have a child. Why I’d never seen any point in the dreams that lit the eyes of everyone else around me. I had only one ambition in my simply built life, and that was to be sure the Farrow curse would end with me.

Gran had never been one for doctors, but Dr. Jennings had made his calls anyway, insisting that what was happening to her followed no textbooks or standards of practice that he’d ever seen. She thought that he looked at her as some kind of science experiment, but I found the doctor to be more like a man with a chessboard than anything else. He wanted to be the first to solve the riddle of the Farrow women.

Her words swirled inside my head, making me feel like everything was upside down. I’d chosen the wrong rabbit hole, I thought.

It was the most insane thought I’d ever had. So why didn’t I feel crazy?

When I followed that line of thinking, it led to only one place. One question that felt like the tip of a needle. If I touched it, it would prick me.

I could see it in his eyes. He’d shifted gears to damage control, and I wasn’t entirely sure I didn’t need it. I wasn’t going to be the one to tell him that there was nothing he could do to make this okay. He was a man who needed to feel like he was fixing things. Always finding the loose knots in people and tightening them up before they could unravel. I wasn’t going to take that away from him.

Mason shrugged. “Maybe one day. That’s not what I want now, though.”

I stared into the bathroom mirror with the faucet running, the shadows beneath my eyes making me look like a hollow thing.

Susanna. My Susanna, I thought. But what did that even mean? There was never a time when my mother had truly been mine.

“You’re starting to remember.” She searched my eyes. “Right?” Remember. I stared at her, my mind twisting. My jaw clenched, biting back an answer. That was the wrong word for this.

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.

He was a field of buried land mines.

The inside of my head was a maze, one I couldn’t find my way out of. And the more I tried to escape, the more lost I was becoming.

when I felt the soft whisper of someone’s gaze on me.

He held me closely as we began to move in a kind of dance I didn’t know. But somehow, my feet were following his, and slowly, the people around us seemed to forget we were there. Their conversations grew louder as the song drew on, and 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.