The Wicked Deep

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Loving someone is dangerous. It gives you something to lose.

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

No thinking, just doing. When you think about things too long, you just talk yourself out of them.

We’re all just passing ships; no point forming friendships that won’t last.

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.

The sunlight catches his eyes, making the dark green seem like pieces of emerald glass, an entire world contained within them.

But how do you let yourself unravel in front of someone, knowing your armor is the only thing keeping you safe?

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

The sisters have all found bodies.” The words seem pulled from my throat. The quiet settles between each of my ribs, it expands my lungs, it reminds me of what’s to come. “They’ve all returned.” I close my eyes, focusing on the silence. It’s the fastest it’s ever happened before. Now the drowning will begin.

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

And late at night when he folds her in his arms beside the crackling fire and kisses the space just behind her ear, she knows he's falling in love with her. And maybe he's loved her long before this, long before he pulled her from the water on the night of the summer solstice—the night that is a blur in her memory. But she doesn't ask. She doesn't want to know about the before. Because she loves him now, with the wind seeping through the cracks in the cottage windows...the world stretched out before them. They have eternity. Or even if it's just one life, one long, singular life—that's enough.

There's always reasons to stay. You just need one reason to leave.

It starts as a low croon that rolls in with the tide, a sound so faint it might just be the wind blowing through the clapboard shutters, through the portholes of docked fishing boats, and into narrow cracks along sagging doorways. But after the first night, the harmony of voices become undeniable. An enchanting hymn sailing over the water’s surface, cool and soft and alluring. The Swan sisters have awakened.

I recognize in her a part of myself: the sadness that darkens her eyes, the heartbreak that has unraveled the loose threads woven inside her mind. I could be her. I could slip into madness and let it overtake me just like she has. Turn into a shadow. She and I are the same. We've both lost people we love. Both crushed by this town. Both know that the ocean takes more than it gives.

Forcing a girl to do anything she doesn’t want to is reason enough to kick your ass,

Tonight’s party is the start of a season that will bring more than just tourist dollars—it will bring folklore and speculation and doubt about the town’s history. But always, every year without fail or falter, it also brings death.

Magic is not always formed from words, from cauldrons brewing spices or black cats strolling down dark alleys. Some curses are manifested from desire or injustice.

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.

I’ll stay on the island, reading fortunes from the smeared remains of tea leaves in white porcelain cups just like my mom used to before Dad vanished and never came back.

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.

I’m not leaving here without you. Even if it means I have to wait. I’ll wait. I’ll wait in this miserable place for as long as it takes. And if you want me to stay, then I’ll stay. I’ll fucking stay here forever if you ask me to.

It’s hard not to feel drawn in by a legend that repeats itself without falter or fail each season.

Perhaps we all have oddity, some strangeness we keep hidden along our edges, things we see that we can explain things we wish for thing we run from.