The Wicked Deep: Shea Ernshaw

by Shea Ernshaw

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. —Loren Eiseley

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.

My dad used to repaint the skiff every spring, but it’s been neglected for the last three years. Sometimes I feel just like that hull: scarred and dented and left to rust since he vanished somewhere out at sea.

“Maybe this town just hated them because they were different. Because it was easier to kill them than to accept that the men in this place are thick-skulled, misogynistic assholes.”

We wait for death. We hold our breath. We know it’s coming, and still we flinch when it claws at our throats and pulls us under.

He is familiar in a way I can’t pin down. Like seeing someone you knew a long time ago, but they’ve changed in the passing years, become someone different and new.

I’m also not quite ready for this night to be over. There are things I like about him—no, that’s not right. It’s not him exactly. It’s me. I like how I feel standing beside him. Eased by his presence.

All three were born on June first, exactly one year apart. First Marguerite, then came Aurora a year later, and Hazel the year after that. They did not share the same father, yet fate would bring them into this world on precisely the same day. Their mother had said they were destined for one another, bound by the stars to be sisters.

“This town was built on revenge,” I say. “And it’s never made anything better or right.”

“Maybe we broke her hold on you,” I say, my voice feeling small. “You broke her hold on me.”

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

This thing I feel for him is working its way into my bones, like water through cracks in my surface. When it freezes, it will either shatter me into a million pieces or make me stronger.

in his eyes I see the ocean, and it draws me into him like the tide against the sand.

I once read a poem about love being fragile, as thin as glass and easily broken. But that is not the kind of love that survives in a place like this. It must be hardy and enduring. It must have grit.

He’s made of something different, his heart weathered and battered just like mine, forged of hard metals and earth. We’ve both lost things, lost people. We are broken but fighting to stay alive. Maybe that’s why I need him—he feels like I feel, wants like I want.

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.

“How did you know you were in love?” His question makes my fingertips tingle with the need to touch his face, show him the feeling bursting from my seams. “It felt like sinking,” I say. I know it might be an odd way to describe it, considering the prevailing death in this town, but it’s how it comes out. “Like you’re drowning, but it doesn’t matter, because you don’t need air anymore, you just need the other person.”

He tastes like a summer wind far away from here, like absolution, like a boy from a different life. Like we could make memories that belong only to us. Memories that have nothing to do with this place. A life, maybe. A real life.

He looks at me like I am a girl brought in with the tide, rare and scarred and broken. A girl found in the roughest waters, in the farthest reaches of a dark fairy tale. He is looking at me like he might love me.

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

The sun will be up soon. The sky made new. And maybe I’ll be made new too.

But I’m looking for something else: a way to remain, to exist above the sea indefinitely—to live. There are legends of mermaids who fall in love with sailors, their devotion granting them a human form. I read about the Irish tales of selkies shedding their sealskins, marrying a human man, and staying on land forever. Perhaps this one thing is enough—to fall in love? If love can bind something, can it also undo it?

But others, the few who had known real love, saw something else: the look of two people whose love was about to destroy them. It was not witchcraft in Hazel’s eyes; it was her heart splitting in half.

then dressed them in white gowns to purify their souls and ensure their eternal and absolute death. But absolute, their death was not.

They will return to their normal lives, their normal homes in normal towns where bad things never happen. But I live in a place where bad things surround me, where I am a bad thing.

Penance is a long, unforgiving thing. It endures, for without it, the past is forgotten.

“The windows are the same,” I say, looking back to the building. “Replicas,” she answers, her voice more somber than usual. “Everything it used to be is now gone.” “Just like us.” “Nothing that lives this long can stay the same.” “Nothing should live this long,” I point out. “But we did,” she says, as if it were an accomplishment to be proud of. “Maybe two hundred years is enough.”

“I’m not like you,” I say. “You’re exactly like me. We’re sisters. And you’re just as cold-blooded as I am.”

boys cannot be trusted. They will always do whatever they can to save themselves. They are the cruel ones, not us.”

“Owen tried to save me that day, and he lost his life. He loved me,” I tell her. “And Bo loves me now. But you wouldn’t know what that’s like because you’re incapable of love.”

We’re killers. And I can never have Bo. Not like this, in this body. The only way a Swan sister can truly keep someone is by drowning them, trapping their soul in the sea with us.

“This is your fault. You did this.” “No. You did this. You thought you could be one of them—human—but we’ve been dead for two hundred years—nothing will change that. Not even a boy you think you love.”

“This town took everything from me,” I say, blinking away the water on my lashes. “My life. The person I once loved. I was angry . . . no, I was more than angry, and I wanted them to pay for what they did to me. I took your brother into the harbor like I’ve taken so many boys over the years. I was numb. I didn’t care whose life I stole. Or how many people suffered.”

She will miss her father, but sometimes missing is better than knowing.

“I told you that love is like falling, like drowning. This will be the same. I just have to let go.” My lips quiver. “Don’t forget me.” “Never,” he answers. And his face is the last thing I see before I jump over the side and hit the water. And everything turns black.

Dark hair, wide green eyes, lost. Alone. But not really alone. I’ve known love—deep, foolish love. And that has made it all worth it.

Neither Aurora nor Marguerite Swan ever made it back into the water. Because at eleven fifty-four, their sister Hazel Swan dove into the sea and drowned herself, severing the two-centuries-long curse in a single act of sacrifice.

She watches her daughter—who is herself once again—and she knows she’s lost many things, but she didn’t lose Penny.

They have eternity. Or even if it’s just one life, one long, singular life—that’s enough.

And during harvest in early spring, when the island smells sweet and bursting with sunlight, a figure can be seen wandering the rows, examining the trees. She is still there. An apparition caught in time, the ghost of a girl who lived longer than she ever should have, who dared to fall in love. Who lingers still.

This land is hers. Damp and moss green and salt winds. She is made of these things. And they are made of her—the same sinew and string. Death cannot strip her of this place. She belongs where the land meets the sea. She belongs with him.