Summer of Salt

by Katrina Leno

“I think a person can be a home, sometimes, just as much as a place or a house can.

Momma

Except there weren’t any princes on By-the-Sea. We didn’t need princes; we saved ourselves.

I knew that he would use that gun, because that is what small, scared men did: they used things more powerful than themselves to make up the difference. They hid behind weapons of mass destruction: big guns and bigger bombs. They were small, small, small— Peter was small,

His defense—she deserved it because she had already had sex with so many people—made the judge, the Honorable Eleanora Avery, laugh the fuck out loud. As if out of a fairy tale, nobody asked: What was my sister wearing the night she was raped? How much had my sister had to drink the night she was raped? How many guys had my sister previously had sex with? Because—again, out of a fairy tale—they realized that none of those things mattered. Because there was nothing in a girl’s history that might negate her right to choose what happens to her body.

The dead loved promises; the living loved promising.

We loved with a love that was more than love.

On the island of By-the-Sea you could always smell two things: salt and magic.