Summer of Salt

by Katrina Leno

I was going to a small college just far enough from the ocean that for the first time in my life I wouldn’t be able to smell salt.

there are bound to be more girls who like girls over there than there are here.

“I think it’s weirder that you’re methodically making your way through every boy on this very small island.”

(she could zap herself to anywhere on the island, but she couldn’t zap her clothes, so it ended up being a very risqué gift)

If you actually called her Elvira, she was known to mix crushed-up sleeping pills into your milkshake at Ice Cream Parlor, where she worked. When you woke up, you had Sharpied penises on your cheeks.

“Wuthering Heights is a terrible book,”

“Right, and who doesn’t love a good Bell Jar?” “You have to stop picking Sylvia Plath. It’s making everyone cry.”

I felt hands around my waist and knew it was my sister by the dark smell of impossibility.

Mary skipped it altogether, probably because the last time she’d smoked weed she’d drifted lazily upward and almost decapitated herself on a ceiling fan.

Nobody ever saw my father again. His boat went down in the storm; the small crew was lost.

here I was, stuck washing silver by hand.

“Wait—why wouldn’t you have given this to me at seven in the morning?” I whined. “I thought I should make you suffer a little. You did drink the rest of my good cinnamon whiskey. Do you know how long I’d been infusing that?”

(If Aggie’s coffee was weak, her Bloody Marys were the opposite.)

My mother was anything but absentminded, but it seemed like a good excuse; she did occasionally bury non-rose things in the rose garden.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh shi-i-it,” Mary whispered. “What time is it, Georgie?” “I’m not saying.” “Georgieeeee.” “I’m not saying it.” “Georgie, what time is it?” “Cute o’clock,” I relented. “It’s cute o’clock, okay, you psychopath.”

(and the, like, four inn guests who weren’t birdheads but who were very confused and kept looking around like they had gotten off at the wrong island).

“Yeah, that makes sense. She’s definitely your type. She looks like she belongs on a picnic blanket under the Eiffel Tower, eating a baguette or something.”

It’s hard to leave the place you grew up.”

Mary could fly. I wished I could stop time.

I wanted to grab the nearest hairbrush and beat her over the head with it, but I settled for brushing my teeth so hard my gums turned bright red.

“The first Georgina. She never got powers, but her sister Annabella did. Her twin. There haven’t been twins in our family since.”

“It’s been three days, and I haven’t made out with Harrison Birdface yet,”

so customers had a choice between Dutch Chocolate, Vanilla, Strawberry, Pistachio, and Broken Hearts of Lovers (one of her recent creations, which was basically just raspberry and cream and an unexpected dash of cardamom).

because I didn’t know a ton about flirting, but I knew terrifying someone in the middle of a graveyard probably wasn’t the best approach.

Never shut up, never leave my sight, let’s move into the graveyard together, some of the mausoleums could actually be pretty homey with the right amount of sprucing.

But I’ve done weird things too! I traveled across the ocean to help my brother chase after a bird. So we’ve both done weird things.”

When I was eight I’d had to untangle my sister’s hair from the branches of the tree she’d floated into.

“I all but took my clothes off in the dining room and climbed up on his table to perform a jig,” Mary said. Then, raising a hand to her chin: “Do you think that would work?” “I think that would accomplish many things, yes, including Mom banishing you from the island and burning your name off our family tree.” “But at least I’d have a date,” Mary said, like she wasn’t ruling it out.

Up to their eyeballs in feathers.

My mom,

overjoyed at Mary’s immediate displays of

power, became increasingly underjoyed when she realized I was just sitting there ...

enough. She was already dragging stepladders around the house to pry Mary off ceiling fans and light fixtures; it was nice that I g...

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

I wanted a hundred million things, but I knew how to ask for zero of them.

“There are enough ways to die on this Earth,” my great-grandmother had famously declared, “let ‘distracted reading’ be one less thing to worry about.”

(was my mom obsessed with polishing silver? I would have to look into this later).

contacts washed right out of her eyes.

“Either way, I’m glad I came here. Bird or no bird,” Prue said.

“Because I met you,” she continued. “Oh.”

We kept walking. We kept walking WHILE HOLDING HANDS.

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.

“Annabella,” Mary said. “They found her, and she’s dead.”

Once a Fernweh, always a Fernweh, no matter how far you flew.

“When she dies—in, like, eighteen years—I think I’ll have Mom turn her into a lamp.”

Wtf

“Nope. Because you want to solve a murder and you know the best way to start—” “Oh no.” “—is by contacting the spirit world and giving them a quick hello, how do you do?”

“Of course it’s a fucking man. Men are always killing things.

I felt that icy trickle of horror when you are home alone and hear a sound too loud to be just the house

settling, or when you are walking at night and suddenly hear footsteps following too closely behind you.