The Daughters of Block Island

by Christa Carmen

I’m a fly who’s placed one thin leg onto a strand of spiderweb, and the house, the weaver, felt the vibrations, heard my thoughts.

Blake knows she’s in a gothic horror novel the moment she steps off the rain-slicked ferry.

The wind picks up, and the walls of the mansion groan. I know you’re hungry, she tells the house. So what are you waiting for? Part the floorboards and swallow me.

deep down, she knows hitting Walton is why she’s sober in the first place. The accident was akin to her letter from a mysterious baron, her invitation to a strange castle in a foreign land, the inciting incident for the narrative that—even now—is unfolding.

Maybe she has been lugging around the weight of her childhood, her mother’s issues, since she was eighteen, but doesn’t this prove her strength, not her instability?

Still, when things happen over which one has no control, it’s convenient, almost comforting, to feel as if you’re a cog in a narrative in medias res.