Summer of Salt

by Katrina Leno

“Are you happy at all?” she asked tentatively. “Of course I’m happy. Why wouldn’t I be happy?” “Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes you just find reasons not to be.”

The sound of crashing waves—never really absent on By-the-Sea but only sometimes, for a few minutes, faded enough into the background that you didn’t really notice them—swelled up and momentarily overwhelmed the night. I ate the cake. Prue took another cookie. Mary could fly. I wished I could stop time.

“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.

Vira didn’t pay much attention to gossip like that, especially when it came to romantic stuff (she was, as she’d once put it, “as aroace as they come”),

“What more could I want?” I said. But I think we both knew the answer to that question was: Lots lots lots lots lots.

“Kissing is gross,” Mary said. “Think of all the germs.” Two things I didn’t really want to think about: mouth germs and the fact that Annabella still wasn’t here.

“Georgina, come on!” Prue said. She’d dragged her toes into the grass to stop herself, and she was currently waiting impatiently for me to join her. There was not enough room for us both to sit, and so I climbed carefully to the top of the swing, standing straight up on the tire with my hands wrapped around the rope for balance. And the sun blinked its final glow, and Prue reached a hand up and touched my left ankle briefly, and this, too, must be what flying felt like: stomach-dropping, indeed.

It felt like a very specific sort of miracle, this hand holding. It felt good and necessary and gentle and real.

We sat on the bench we’d sat on the night of the inn party; the first time we’d really spoken. And Prue still held my hand and the ocean had never looked so beautiful and the smell of salt had never seemed so warm and good and I thought: possibly this is the best night of my life.

My mother inclined her head slightly toward me. “Are you okay, Georgina?” “I don’t know. I don’t know what I am,” I said.

Henrietta was a tall, thin woman, a reed of a woman. She’d celebrated her seventieth birthday last year, and Aggie had made her a cake in the shape of an airplane, for her late husband, who’d been a pilot. She was quiet, gray-haired, aloof. She generally stayed to herself, and I don’t think she needed much sleep anymore; I’d caught her in the living room at three in the morning, reading books about ornithological case studies in the near dark. Whenever I tried to turn on a light for her, she’d said there was no need: she knew the books by heart. “Then why hold them at all?” I’d ask. “They’re a comfort. Plus, it’d be a little weird sitting alone in the dark without a book.”

this is the best method of “show don’t tell” in character description, and also the best character description ever

“She was just an ordinary girl,” my mother said, as if that meant anything at all. In a family full of girls, you realize quickly that no girls are ordinary. Whether or not they turn into birds, girls could fly and make magic all their own.

“Can you come down?” “I kind of like it up here.” “You told Harrison you were going to jump.” “I don’t think I’m ready to jump quite yet.” “You know I don’t love heights.” “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.” But alas, the rules of sisterhood: if your sister took residence in the boughs of a tree, you were obligated to go and visit.

I felt my mother lay her hand on my wrist. Call it a Fernweh thing or a daughter thing; I knew my mother’s hand even with bandages wrapped so thickly around my eyes that the light couldn’t even peek around the edges.

We hadn’t said the word yet. Words had power. Just like the words— Slut. Magic. Fernweh. They had power. So did the word— Rape.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to his empty tomb. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered to all the women who had come before me. And then I left them alone and promised I’d return one day. The dead loved promises; the living loved promising.

“You’ll be great, Georgina. You’ve always been great. Since the minute you were born, sending floods after your enemies.”

And I thought— In a million years, if some archaeologists unearthed the remains of By-the-Sea from the bottom of the seafloor (an Atlantis for a distant generation!), and found this rock with these words guarding these tiny, fragile bird bones, they would have no fucking idea what to make of us. And that was fine with me.

To Sandra Bullock’s and Nicole Kidman’s hair in Practical Magic. This book would frankly not have been written without it.

i love gay women