The Wicked Deep

by Shea Ernshaw

Something far stranger happened to him three years ago. One day he was here. The next he wasn’t.

Hmmm...

The eve before the start of Swan season has always felt burdensome to me. It’s like a dark cloud I can’t shake. The knowing of what’s coming, the death that creeps up over the town like fate clawing at the door of every shop and home. I can feel it in the air, in the spray of the sea, in the hollow spaces between raindrops. The sisters are coming.

It's giving Hocus Pocus vibes.

as if to mimic the embodiment of a Swam sister.

Not the only mistake I've found...this needs better editing.

Perhaps we all have some oddity, some strangeness we keep hidden along our edges, things we see that we can’t explain, things we wish for, things we run from.

Love is an enchantress—devious and wild. It sneaks up behind you, soft and gentle and quiet, just before it slits your throat.

I might love him. And it has tilted my universe off center, the frayed edges of my life starting to unravel. Loving someone is dangerous. It gives you something to lose.

It can be.

Perhaps this one thing is enough—to fall in love? If love can bind something, can it also undo it?

And, here we have Practical Magic...

In the evenings, Penny reads tea leaves at the kitchen table, blinking down at her future and her past, recalling something she once saw in their smudged remains: a boy blowing in from the sea. And she thinks that maybe her life has been predestined from the start.

I thought so!