Spells for Forgetting

by Adrienne Young

I’d lived enough years now to know that there were some ghosts that haunted you forever.

Nearly six weeks late, and with no warning at all, every tree on Saoirse had turned in a single night. I knew better than to dismiss such things. We all did. It was the time of year when the veil between worlds was thin, and in that moment, I could feel the tingle of the Otherworld tiptoeing lightly up my spine.

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.

That feeling that had climbed between my bones when I stepped off the ferry wasn’t just the island or the orchard or the night that everything changed. It was Emery Blackwood.

It had been fourteen years since August left, but he’d never been gone. Not really.

It wasn’t just his voice. It was the feel of him that lingered in the air. Like the ghost that had haunted me for so long was finally flesh before me.

The women had always been the ones pulling the strings on this island.

That starling had been more than an omen. Something dead had woken.

It felt like before. When angry words between us had been like the waves that crashed around the island. It had never mattered what was said, because we always returned to each other. Like gravity.

“There are spells for breaking and spells for mending. But there are no spells for forgetting,” I warned her.

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.

“My life is in Portland. But I’ll make a new one anywhere with you.”

I hadn’t thought for even a second when I got off the ferry that I would be standing here. But it was also all I’d ever wanted.

There were some things that were a part of you, no matter how badly they hurt.

It was a Morgan who’d planted the first seeds of the orchard and it was a Salt who’d pried it from her family’s white-knuckled fingers.

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.