Spells for Forgetting

by Adrienne Young

Sometimes the signs were subtle, like a fleeting shadow or an echo in the trees. Other times, the island wasn’t gentle with her words.

It was deep magic that ran through the blood of every woman on the island. It seeped into the earth of the orchard, its leaves unfurling every spring, falling to rot every autumn before turning back into the ground.

I loved her long before that. I don’t really remember a time that I didn’t love her. But that summer was different.

It had never mattered what was said, because we always returned to each other. Like gravity.

I closed my eyes, letting his scent wrap around me. I breathed it in, like it was the first breath I could remember taking.

For fourteen years, it felt like I’d been counting down the minutes, the seconds, to a moment that I thought would never come. He was an ache inside of me that would never be soothed. And it was a pain I didn’t even want to be freed from.

I’d been in love with August Salt since before I knew what the words meant. I don’t know when it happened—the narrow space between seconds, when a spark like the birth of a hundred stars found a home in my blood. Since then, every day had been colored with the glittering light of it dragging me in its wake, pulling me beneath its surface. And I didn’t care. If this was what it was like to drown, then for the rest of my life, I didn’t want to take another sip of air.

I’d known the moment I saw her standing in the road after I arrived on the island. I’d known it the first time I kissed her. The first time I’d told her that I loved her. I couldn’t be anyone else’s because I was hers. I’d always be hers. If she wasn’t going to say it, then I would.

But there in the kitchen, almost three hundred miles away, I could hear my grandmother’s time-worn voice recounting the oldest of Saoirse’s legends: That if you left the island, it would always call you back.