Summer of Salt

by Katrina Leno

Moods like tides, temper like a hungry shark.

“What’s it like being so popular? Like just the most popular little flower in the whole world?” “It’s really nice,” she said seriously.

In the graveyard, it always seemed to be late autumn. The perfect season for graveyards.

When I was twelve, the year my grandmother died, I sat by her deathbed as she spun hay into gold and told me to put it toward my college fund.

And because she had crossed all of that distance, because she had come so close, I thought I could at least be the one to do the rest of the work, and so I kissed her. Lightly. Like how I imagined a bird would kiss another bird. And she kissed me back. Like how a bird might ask for more.

“It’s never been quite this strange,” I said. “You missed many, many years of no floods and boring birdwatching and movie nights on the town green and uneventful summer solstices where hardly anyone even got naked.”

Islands were like that. Always listening. Never replying.

The dead loved promises; the living loved promising.