The Wicked Deep

by Shea Ernshaw

I have this sense that someday we won’t even remember why we were friends in the first place. She will float away like a brightly colored bird living in the wrong part of the world, and I will stay behind, gray-feathered and sodden and wingless.

“Once a Swan sister has whispered into your ear, promised the touch of her skin, you can’t resist her. She will lure you into the water then pull you under until the life spills out of you.”

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.

“There’re always reasons to stay,” he says. “You just need to find one reason to leave.”

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.

Sometimes I think this island is a magnet for bad things, the center of it all. Like a black hole pulling us toward a fate we can’t prevent. And other times I think this island is the only thing keeping me sane, the only familiar thing I have left. Or maybe it’s me that’s the black hole. And everyone around me can’t help but be swallowed up, drowned and trapped in my orbit. But I also know that there’s nothing I can do to change it. The island and I are the same.

But magic was not always so linear. It was born from odium. From love. From revenge.

If only love were so easily conjured, there wouldn’t be so many broken hearts,